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Mittwoch, 31. Oktober 2018

The Zombies of Karl Marx: Horror in Capitalism’s Wake / Tyler Malone. In: Lit Hub Daily October 31, 2018

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” claimed Karl Marx in Capital, his multi-volume magnum opus. Elsewhere in Capital, he wrote of “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor” and explained that “the vampire will not lose its hold . . . so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” Marx’s partner-in-crime, Friedrich Engels—equally enamored with this hemovoric horror metaphor—referred to “the vampire property-holding class” in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England.
With these allusions to vampire folklore already swimming through the bloodstream of Marxist theory, it’s not difficult to imagine a reading of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula or Tod Browning’s 1931 Universal adaptation of Stoker’s tale as a parable of the perils of capitalism. Count Dracula’s bloodlust mirrors that of capitalism, where eros and thanatos commingle. The vampire’s continual need for possession and consumption resembles the ravenous thirst of capital, and the thirst it conjures up in those under its spell. Count Dracula, like a capitalist, grows in strength through his predation—a strength increasing in inverse proportion to his bite-victim’s weakening. Similarly, Marx pointed out, “the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labor and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out labor-power from others, and compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life.” There is also the self-replication of capitalist consumerism, consuming consumers who must continue the pattern of consumption, and the enslavement through this replication, which is there in Dracula too. “We become as him,” according to Mina Harker’s journal in the novel, “we henceforward become foul things of the night like him—without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best.” For the vampire does not merely drain his bite-victim of his or her blood, the transaction is reciprocal—though not equivocal—with the victim receiving the vampire’s blood in exchange. “My blood now flows through her veins,” the Count gloats to Van Helsing. Through this exchange of blood, the bite-victim also receives the vampire’s curse, becoming a vampire, a bloodsucker, a consumer—Nosferatu.
While it is true that vampirism was a common metaphor for Marx when discussing capitalism, it was not his only use of occult imagery to describe the conditions of the worker and the problems of capital. Writer Christopher Frayling explained, “Karl Marx enjoyed reading the horror tales of Hoffman and Dumas père for relaxation at bedtime. When he was seeking a compelling image to characterize the attributes of capital . . . he chose a whole series of fantasy images, whose unifying theme was blood.” Marx notably utilized the imagery of anthropophagism and lycanthropy, proferring phrases like “the cannibalism of counter-revolution” and “the werewolf’s hunger for surplus labor.” Had he lived in a later period, it is not difficult to imagine Marx using a different metaphor for capital that could have superseded all three of these iconic images—a metaphor that could incorporate the undead lifeforce-draining bloodlust of the vampire, the ouroboric consumption of the cannibal, and the monstrously inhuman marked nature of the werewolf—and that metaphor would be what we now call the living dead, the walking dead, the zombie.
The zombie, as a concept, wasn’t much known outside of Haiti before the 20th century. A colonial import, the Haitian zombie prototype, of the dead being controlled through witchcraft as a form of slave labor, began to infect the American imagination during the U.S. occupation of Haiti, from 1915-1934. William Seabrook’s 1929 Haiti travelogue, The Magic Island, was the first milestone in the zombie’s inevitable permeation of American popular culture. Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, the first known feature-length zombie film, was released in 1932, on the heels of both Seabrook’s book and a play by Kenneth Webb produced on Broadway earlier in the year, which had likewise been influenced by The Magic Island. White Zombie starred Bela Lugosi as Murder Legendre, a white Haitian voodoo priest with a corps of zombified corpses under his control. Early on in the film, a black coachman describes the zombies he and his white passengers have just seen: “They are not men, they are dead bodies . . . zombies, the living dead, corpses taken from their graves and made to work in the sugar mills and fields at night.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-zombies-of-karl-marx-horror-in-capitalisms-wake/

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