Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers,
Building church and university,
Deceiving the people continually.
– Bob Marley, Babylon
System
Abstract: At the beginning it is creativity, living labour. At the beginning, it is
the free play of human beings transforming the life-world of nature through the
productive power of their minds and of their bodies. Through his own actions the
worker “develops the potentialities slumbering within nature” and “subjects” the
play of its forces to his own sovereign power.” At the end, it is capital: “dead
labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the
more, the more labour it sucks.” Capital furtively rises among the living and, from
then on, “sucks up the worker’s value creating power” “transforming the worker
into a crippled monstrosity.” But how can a dead body rise up and live off the
living, how can “le mort saisit le vif”? This is for us the fundamental question of
Capital. This is also the juncture through which it will be possible to bridge
discussions of political economy, subjectivity/subjectification and commodity
fetishism into one gothic metastructure.
Key Words: Marx, vampire, fetish, primitive accumulation, mutilation, carnival
In the preface to the first German edition of Capital Marx states: “Perseus wore a
magic cap so that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic
cap down over our own eyes and ears so to deny that there are any monsters.”1 The
sentence, which comes halfway through the preface, is left suspended by Marx and is not
qualified or commented upon further. And yet, the whole of Capital could be read under
the ethereal light left behind by this gothic-mythological metaphor. As Marx himself
comments on the preface to the third French edition, Capital should be understood as an
attempt to construct a scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production. “There is
no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep
paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”2 Throughout his analysis of the
capitalist mode of production, Marx aims his analytic razor at piercing the “magic cap”
which prevents us from seeing and hearing; we must interpret the world, in order to
change it.3 These two moments – critical theory and revolutionary practice – cannot be
separated, because behind the comfortable darkness of our induced blindness, there dwell
the monsters. And these are, we will see, real monsters, which cannot be dispelled by
reason alone. In the “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world” of Capital the Feurbachian
spectre has finally found a body.4
Alchemists and hobgoblins, werewolves and dancing tables, the abundance of
gothic metaphors in Marx’s writings have not passed unnoticed by past commentators of
Capital. Especially after the publication of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, there has been a
growing interest on the role of the ghostly and the spectral within the general structure of
Marxian thought.5 This essay tries to set itself apart from the stream of works, which, in
form of comment or criticism, gravitate around Derrida’s deconstructive reading. I intend
to do this in two ways. First of all, I focus on the use of a gothic metaphor, the vampire
metaphor, which has been largely overlooked by past commentators. I take the vampire as a central metaphor in Marxian writings and I try to show how it might be used to
bridge discussions of political economy, subjectivity/subjectification and commodity
fetishism. The article aims first of all at uncovering the existence of a significant gothic
thread passing through much of Marx’s writings. Following this thread, punctuated by the
recurrence of vampiric metaphors, I hope we will be allowed to open up the Marxian text
to productive readings, in particular concerning the relation between dead and living
labour. So far as previous discussions of the ghostly and the spectral have limited
themselves to the nature of alienation and fetishism, this might be a valuable
contribution.6 Moreover, in the following section, I try to locate Marxian vampires in a
general reading of the significance of magic in Marx’s understanding of history.
Monsters, Sorcerers and Life Out of Balance
Certainly monsters are terrifying, misshapen creatures which personify our
innermost fears and radically destabilize our symbolic order.7 But monsters are also
warnings, disquieting omens of a looming catastrophe. What else is the Latin monstum if
not the one which monet, literally the one which “warns”? Abnormal or prodigious
animals continue to be regarded, in many folkloric traditions, as signs of some impending
calamity.8 The same is true for Marx. As shown by the work of Parinetto, if we look at
the insistent use of magical metaphors employed in Marxian texts in order to evoke
capital, “capital as vampire, or as maison hantée, is a figure which imposes itself side by
side with the one of catastrophe, [. . .] a catastrophe that the nature of magic imposes.”9
To understand the “warning” that the Marxian monster howls to the world it is then necessary to take a step back and look at how Marx reflects on the nature of magic within
capitalism.
Although at this point it is not possible to discuss at length the Marxian notion of
commodity fetishism, and its relationship with the alchemic nature of the sphere of
exchange – circulation as the “alchemistical social retort” “into which everything is
thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal”10 – it is maybe sufficient to signal the
distance that this concept opens up between the Marxian reading of history and the ideas
of classic Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire or early sociologists such as Max
Weber. If Weber, indeed, argued that the birth of a distinct capitalistic reason brought to
fulfilment “the great historical-religious process of disenchantment of the world,”11 Marx,
through the concept of commodity fetishism, intends to demonstrate the opposite. Not
only the world of capital is not a world freed from its magical element, it is, even more
radically, a world where magic, in the form of fetishism, remains an integral part of the
totality of the social relations of production. This does not mean that Marx misrecognized
the revolution sparked by the advent of capital: the eulogy that we find in the Manifesto
shows the point at which he perceived the radical transformations brought forward by the
bourgeois class.12 What we must recognize is that the Marxian eulogy is a dialectic
eulogy, the other side of which is precisely the reading of the movement of capital as a
process of enchantment. Only in this spirit we can understand why Marx gazes with awe
at “all the mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the
products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities.”13 The process of
transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production, then, resolves itself in a
transition not from religion to reason, but from religion to magic. It was the “strange
God” of capital – and not the reason of the Enlightenment – who “perched himself side
by side with the old Gods of Europe on the altar, and one fine day threw them all
overboard with a shove and a kick.”14 For Marx, then, we are still fully within that
“nonsensical pre-history of human society”15 which finds its foundation in the alienation
of man from his “social powers.”16
The “nonsensical pre-history of human society” continues today and takes new
forms under the God of capital. The Enlightenment has not brought the “rule of reason”;
it is capital instead which rules as “a lord, at once aristocratic and barbarous.”17 But what
is most important, for Marx and for us, is that capital is a lord; dead labour which rules
over the living, which cannot have reason. And it cannot have reason because, as Marx
wants to uncover, capital is nothing else but a “blind and measureless drive,” “insatiable
appetite for surplus labour, which oversteps not only the moral but even the merely
physical limits” imposed by nature. Vampire-like, capital is condemned to chase
endlessly his apocalyptic drive “shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a
greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.”18 It is
life itself that is destroyed by the necrophiliac unfolding of capital; as famine, misery and
the destruction of Nature disappear from sight, capital finally proclaims “the making of
profit as the ultimate and the sole purpose of mankind.”19
This is the nature of the crisis we live in, this is the omen which the monster of
capital screams everyday in our ears. This is also the reason that Marx, in the Manifesto,
implicitly rewrites the text of the celebrated Goethian ballad Der Zauberlehrling (The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice).20 The distance between the Goethian version, and the Marxian
version signals a definite divergence between the reason of the Enlightenment and the
ratio of capital, which Marx wants to uncover and criticize. The content of the ballad is
renowned: the sorcerer’s apprentice, desiring to emulate the Hexenmeister (the Master
Sorcerer), spells magic formulas which he does not master, therefore leading to the
unfolding of a disaster. In the ballad emerges, then, that within the culture of the
Enlightenment the irrationality of magic, caused by the ignorance of the people, can
certainly lead to disaster but can also be dispelled by the light of scientific knowledge.
The same is not true for Marx. What is striking about the reference to Goethe in the
Manifesto is that the sorcerer’s apprentice has disappeared from the story and it is now
the Hexenmeister “who is no longer able to control the powers whom he has called up by
his spells.”21 The variation introduced by Marx has an evident motivation: the world of
capital is a world out of balance, governed by blind drives and not by reason. If in Goethe
we still find the confidence that the unleashing of irrational forces can be dominated by
the good reason of the master, in Marx, the boundless drives of the vampire/capital have
spun forever out of control. “His action,” as Bram Stoker says of his Dracula, “is based
on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose, and that purpose is remorseless.”22
That is to say, capital’s egotistical drive for self-valorization offers no space for rationaltechnical
mediation. The magic world cannot be governed anymore, as it used to be in
Goethe, within its own categories, simply by the skilful mastery of its own logic. The
Hexenmeister is finally hopeless. As readers, we are confronted by the necessity to accept
the catastrophe or endure a break, a radical discontinuity.23 The bourgeois class has
recalled a force at once subterranean (unteriridischen) and violent (Gewalten), which
now it must faithfully serve: this is the vampire of capital which “will not let go while
there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited.”24
Vampiric Metaphors and the Political Economy of the Dead
Gothic and magical metaphors serve, in Marx’s writing, as a rhetorical mirror.
Through the Marxian looking glass the comforting, mystifying world described by
classical political economy is turned swiftly upside down. If Adam Smith, then, describes
capital as the “life-blood of society,” soothing blood, whose circulation revitalises all
aspects of production, Marx shows exactly the opposite: that capital is not blood, that
capital is a monster, a vampire that lives on blood. Behind the putative vitality of
capitalist production, comes into view “the sickening consumption of the parasite.”25 This
inversion suggests an affinity between Marxian social analysis and gothic literary
creations. Both “negate, deny, bury in shadow that which had been brightly lit, and brings
into light that which has been repressed.”26 Both “show the darkness hiding in the light,
to pursue a form of social criticism through cultural re-presentation.”27 As Bourdieu
suggested, gothic literature – as well as Marxian metaphors – “unveils the world by
veiling it.”28 The vampire of Capital rises to unsettle the sanitized categories of bourgeois
thought; but the soil on which the monster grows is much more disturbing, much more
profound and much more unheimlich than that.29 To understand the nature of the vampire
we must then, as argued convincingly by Mark Neocleous, situate its body in Marx’s
critique of political economy; we must enter the sphere of production to see how the
vampire metaphor can be put to work.30
At the beginning it is creativity, living labour. At the beginning, it is the free play
of human beings transforming the life-world of nature through the productive power of
their minds and of their bodies. Through his own actions the worker “develops the
potentialities slumbering within nature” and “subject the play of its forces to his own
sovereign power.”31 At the end, it is capital: “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only
by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Capital furtively
rises among the living and, from then on, “sucks up the worker’s value creating power.”32
But how can a dead body rise up and live off the living, how can “le mort saisit le vif”?
This is for us the fundamental question of Capital. Let us then sketch a brief summary of
its unfolding; we must leave behind the vampire for a moment; he will be the one to
come back to us, “dripping with blood” under the name of capital.
First of all, we must recognize that the commodity is dead labour; its value is
nothing else than accumulated labour, past labour congealed in the commodity form.33
The means of subsistence – agricultural products, housing, clothes; the means of
production – manual tools, mechanical machines, digital computers; all of human
production enters in the market in the form of abstract social labour embodied in the
commodity form. This means that, for Marx, products can be exchanged only on the basis
of a common feature: being the product of human labour of some sort. Only the abstract
socially necessary labour-time that every commodity embodies makes it quantitatively
commensurable with other commodities in the market. But this reification of the doing
into the done not only makes commerce as quantitative exchange possible, it also forms
the basis of the first accumulation of capital and, subsequently, of that “Fetishism which
attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities.”34
The relationship between commerce, commodity fetishism and capital is a highly
complex and contested issue. Nevertheless, at the risk of oversimplifying, we may follow
Marx’s suggestion and therefore posit “external trade” as the origin of the historical
process that turned social activity into a production taking place “only in connection with
circulation, a production which posited exchange values as its exclusive content.”35 The
gradual commodification of social activity, then, which can reach full extent only under
capitalist production, not only “converts every product into a social hieroglyphic”; it also
requires “the guardians” of the commodities exchanged “to place themselves in relation
to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects.”36 This means that the
movement towards the establishment of exchange value is also the movement towards the
establishment of the world of the fetish where the products of men’s hands and brains
“appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one
another and the human race.”37 The world of the fetish, to be clear, is not yet the world of
the “strange God of” capital. This is not where the vampire dwells. And yet we may
glimpse with unease its shadow if we remember the lesson of anthropology: “a fetish is a
god under process of construction.”38
We must follow the shadow of the commodity-fetish, as it turns and dances within
the market, to locate whence its corpse metamorphosed, transformed and took the form of
the capitalist monster. In the widely popular 19th century serial Varney the Vampire, one
of the most probable sources of Marx’s own metaphor, vampirism is a punishment for
earthly sins like the murder of one’s wife or sons.39 In Capital, equally, the vampire rises
as a result of the original sin of primitive accumulation; it is the direct result of the
violent separation of the worker from the common means of production and subsistence.
Only after this original expropriation is the worker reduced to the condition of proletarian
and the process of capitalist exploitation can start. “Precisely from the fact that labour
depends on nature, it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his
labour power must [. . .] be the slave of other men who have made themselves owners of
the material conditions of labour.”40 Primitive accumulation, as the original sin, at once
reduces the worker to a crippled being – always already dependent on his expropriator to
reproduce himself – and the capitalist into an empty mask possessed by the vampiric
drives of capital. Hence “the rule of the capitalist over the worker is nothing but the rule
of the independent conditions of labour over the worker [. . .] the rule of things over man,
of dead labour over living.”41 In other words, it is with the violent process of
expropriation of the commons that the capital-relation is established and dead labour is
transformed into capital. After this original sin, the dead body of the commodity not only
rises up and dances but it turns towards its own creator to feed itself on his living flesh.42
Marx was at pains to show that it is only the social relation of dominion of the
dead over the living that stamps the commodity with the character of capital. As he points
out, “capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a means for
new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated labour as the means of
preserving and multiplying its exchange value.”43 The monstrous metabolism of the
vampire necessitates the subordination of living labour to the power of the dead. This is a
necessary feature of capitalist production since commodities, be they bibles or
mechanical machines, cannot produce new value. Commodities, as dead bodies, remain
silent, motionless, utterly incapable of (re-)generation. Without the creative power of
living labour, then, “iron rusts, wood rots. Yarn with which we neither weave nor knit is
cotton wasted. Living labour must seize on these things and change them from merely
possible into real and effective use-values”; it must “awaken them from the dead.”44
The process of production, the expenditure of labour-power, is always a process
of value (re-)production. This means that the worker throughout the working day both
reproduces past labour objectified in the means of production – that otherwise would
decompose and gradually disappear – and adds new value through the expenditure of its
own labour-power. So the worker is both a reproducer of past, already-embodied value
and a producer of new value, surplus value, equally embodied in the commodity form. In
the first sense, “living labour appears merely as a means to realize objectified, dead
labour, to penetrate it with an animating soul while losing its own soul to it.”45 But as
value-creating power living labour is also the creator of surplus value, which, once
realized into the market in the form of money, allows the progressive accumulation of
capital: “the working class creates by the surplus labour of one year the capital destined
to employ additional labour in the following year. This is what is called creating capital
out of capital.”46 It is living labour to extend the dominion of the vampire through its own
blood tribute, but this is labour reduced to its bare state of wage-labourer dependent on
the capitalist for access to his means of subsistence. The impersonality of the
expropriated worker is here shown in all its internality to the monstrous vampiric
metabolism of capital.47
The immortality of the vampire is, then, ultimately founded on a constant process
of regeneration via living labour. The surplus value extracted by the blood of the workers
exits the factory in the form of commodities; then it is realized into the market and takes
the form of money; and finally it reappears as capital in the process of production
metamorphosed into a surplus of constant capital and variable capital: more machines,
more raw material, more workers. In other words, capital “posits the permanence of
value by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the
same time changing them just as constantly. Permanence is posited as the only thing it
can be, a passing passage – process – life.”48 The lesson may be, as hinted by Walter
Benjamin, “that capital will not die a natural death.”49 After all, Marx himself has
suggested that “the immortality which money strove to achieve by setting itself
negatively against circulation, by withdrawing from it, is achieved by capital, which
preserves itself precisely by abandoning itself to circulation.”50 But capital obtains this
diabolic miracle only by sucking the marrow of life out of the workers’ bones, extending
at every cycle the dominion of death over life. “Past unpaid labour is the sole condition
for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale.”51 The
lesson, then, is not only that the vampire will not age and die in peace; it is rather that the
world will not be allowed to age and die in peace confronted by an immortality that can
exist only in the form of viral growth. This is the way Stoker’s Dracula “cannot die, but
must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world. . . .
And so the circle goes on, ever widening, like the ripples from a stone thrown in the
water.”52 Like capital, Dracula is cursed into an eternal striving for new victims, for new
fresh blood, bones and muscles to agglomerate into its burgeoning metabolic activity.
This is the only way it can live. Dracula travels to London, relocates its drives, batters
down all Chinese walls; his vampire thirst only slightly quenched by each new
acquisition. The vampire, “in one word, creates a world after its own image.”53
Living in a Spelled Carnival: Vampiric Possessions and Monstrous Subjectivities
In the previous section we have covered a limited part of Marxian political
economy, showing how it might be read through the lenses of the vampire metaphor. As
we have seen, Marx’s vampire image relates to the circular process through which
surplus value arises out of capital, and more capital arises out of surplus value. First of
all, it portrays how, throughout the process of capitalist production, dead labour is
regenerated while surplus value is created anew. Surplus value therefore emerges through
a sucking process, which also fills with new life dead labour otherwise destined to a
natural process of decomposition. But the vampire metaphor is also a metaphor hinting at
the creation of capital out of surplus-labour. This is the power of the vampire to multiply
itself, transforming everything that is still outside his realm into new capital: nature and
technology, which become constant capital, and human beings, which are reduced to the
zombie-like condition of variable capital. In this section then we must continue our
analysis of the process of capitalist production, looking at how the vampire cripples the
human life it has been feeding on, reducing proletarians and capitalists into inhuman
fragments of a monstrous mechanic metabolism.
As we have already seen in the previous section, the process of primitive
accumulation is always also a moment of original violence, constituting the wagelabourer
as an incomplete and ultimately dependent subject. The original violence that
gives form to the capital-relation, then, is nothing else than an act of mutilation: “for the
second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced
off.”54 Capital, like the deleuzoguattarian state apparatus, “needs, at its summit and at its
base, predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the stillborn, the congenitally infirm, the
one-eyed and one-armed.” This horror of amputated limbs is a necessary feature of the
origin of capital, it is the necessary bases on which the vampire moves his first steps. So
long as the immediate producer can produce for himself, “capitalist accumulation and the
capitalist mode of production are impossible.”55 Primitive mutilation – as the separation
of the worker from the conditions of his own labour – is a violence that must “posits itself
as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated every day. This is the place to say it, if
ever there was one: the mutilation is always prior, preestablished.”56
The original mutilation, in its quality of violent act of severance, is only
apparently left behind, at the margin of the capitalist realm. In fact, as soon as capitalist
production “stands on its own feet, it not only maintains this separation, it also
reproduces it on a constantly increasing scale.”57 Mutilation, in other words, although
always preestablished, reflects itself on the whole movement of capitalist accumulation,
giving it a specific gothic character. The separation of the doers from the conditions of
doing leaves behind bodies severed from their vital organs, but it is the whole process of
capital production that reproduces and radicalizes this separation. Capitalist production is
always a process of zombiefication. This is why Deleuze and Guattari have talked of the
zombie as a work myth, not a war myth. The appearance of the zombie signals the
horizon of a world fully inhuman, i.e., a world where the human subject himself is made
by and for the capital-vampire. The mutilation of the working class – its increasing
condition of dependence – is a process unfolding side by side with the continuous
radicalization of the despotic power of the abstract over the concrete, of the dead over the
living. After the capital-relation is firmly established, it is no longer the living who
employ the dead, but the dead who employ the living. The means of production, “instead
of being consumed by the worker as material elements of his productive activity,
consume him as the ferment necessary to their own life-process.”58
The first technology utilized by capital in order to squeeze more relative surplus
value from the workers was the simple division of labour. This particular form of
cooperation found its maximum expression in the development of the English
manufacturing industry in the early 18th century, and yet specialization and parcelling of
labour remains a central characteristic of capitalist production, even today. What interests
us here is that, for Marx, the social division of labour in industry, as any technology
caught up within the capitalist mode of production, is not only a means to maximize
relative surplus-labour; “it also does this by crippling the individual worker, thus
producing new conditions for the domination of capital over labour.”59 The capitalvampire,
hence, with the same kiss, both feeds itself on the blood of the workers and
reduces it to an appendage of its necrotic metabolism. “While simple cooperation leaves
the mode of the individual’s labour for the most part unchanged, manufacture” – as a
capitalist practice of production based on a systematic division of labour – “truly
revolutionize[s] it and seizes labour-power by its roots. It converts the worker into a
crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house, through the
suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations.”60 Labour, under
capital, does not make men free – as some signs in Auschwitz once used to say; labour, to
the contrary, transforms the independent worker into a natural slave of capital. Freed of
his “knowledge, judgement and will,” “unfitted by nature to make anything
independently,” the manufacturing worker is more and more forced by the process of
individuation prompted by capital to abandon him/herself to the mortal embrace of the
vampire. If, in the first place, “the worker sold his labour power to capital because he
lacked the material means of producing a commodity, now his own individual labourpower
withholds its services unless it has been sold to capital.”61
For Nietzsche, as for Marx, the subjectivities emerging from the new processes of
production appear like “inverse cripples”: “men who lack everything except one thing, of
which they have too much – men [. . .] as fragments and limbs of men.”62 Like in the
absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa the workers now cannot live without the mediation of
their master-vampire, who offers them only a “life sick with inhuman clockworks and
mechanisms, with the impersonality of the worker, with the false economy of the division
of labour.”63 The introduction of the factory system, centred on systems of machinery
aimed at maximizing the extraction of surplus value, only radicalizes this deskilling and
crippling of the worker, thus completing the manufacture of a subject perfected for
capitalist exploitation. “The most powerful means of shortening the working time needed
to produce a commodity becomes, as a repository of capital,” “the most powerful means
of enslaving, exploiting and impoverishing the worker,” “a martyrology for the
producer.”64 Technology, under the power of the dead, suffers a true dialectical inversion.
Instead of bursting asunder the chains of physical need, freeing up time for the open
development of human creativity, it becomes the ultimate instrument serving capital in its
drive to ever more efficient means of exploitation of the dead over the living. This means
that the rule of the dead over the living finally takes a motorized form, as if the vampire
in its endless metamorphoses had taken the appearance of a “mechanical monster” with
“gigantic members” and “demonic powers.” While in manufacture “the workers are the
parts of a living organism – the collective worker; in the factory we have a lifeless
mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living
appendages.” Here the “automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely
conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and
together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force.”65 Capitalist mutilation
first acquires a technical and palpable reality, revealing itself as a total process of
“physical deterioration,” “moral degradation,” and “intellectual degeneration” of the
human species, a process through which the individual is finally made into a zombie,
inert food for vampires.66
For Marx, then, the worker, caught up in the necrotic metabolism of capital, is a
false subject, a void filled up with the desire of the vampire to conserve and valorise
itself. “As something which creates value, as something involved in the process of
objectifying labour, the worker’s labour becomes one of the modes of existence of
capital, it is incorporated into capital as soon as it enters the production process.”67 This
inversion is not only important to understand the relationship between capital and the
subjectivity of the worker. It reflects itself in the ideology of the capitalist class and
invests the capitalist subject with a consciousness and a will that are external to him and
heterodirects his actions. Indeed, “the functions fulfilled by the capitalist are no more that
the functions of capital – viz. the valorisation of value by absorbing living labour –
executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist functions only as personified capital,
capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified.”68 Marx is very
clear that if we assume the eyes of classical political economics, which represents in its
purest form the point of view of the vampire-capital, “the proletarian is merely a machine
for the production of surplus-value, but the capitalist too is merely a machine for the
transformation of this surplus-value into surplus capital.”69 What Marx is trying to show
is that – although the capitalist always appears as a miser “fanatically intent on the
valorization of value,” and although, with his “ability to supervise and enforce discipline
over the workers,” he “forces the human race to produce for production’s sake” – his
actions are not the effect of the mania of a vicious individuality but “the effect of a social
mechanism in which the capitalist is merely a cog.”70
This all-powerful social mechanism is simply the reality of market competition,
which, as a fractal panopticon, regulates all social relationships between people. “By its
means, what corresponds to the nature of capital is posited as external necessity for the
individual capitalist,” in other words “competition subordinates every individual
capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws.”71
As noted by numerous critics, from Voltaire to Cortázar, capitalists have always behaved
like vampires.72 But this is ultimately the effect of the law of competition, which reduces
the capitalist into nothing more than a mask, a puppet or a false subject. Market
competition, for Marx, acts as a spelled mirror continuously reflecting the nature of
capital upon the body of the capitalist. Capital is the only true vampire “the capitalist is
just as enslaved by the relationship of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit
in a quite different manner.”73 This means that the subject in capitalist society can not be
the capitalist, and not even the capitalist class; the real subject can only be value, capital,
accumulated labour, dead labour. When seen through the lenses of Marxian analysis, the
capitalist is nothing but a human mask behind which the monstrous appearance of capital
is kept concealed with all its obscene, excessive drives, with its necrophilia and selfdestructive
desire. Behind the human, Marx shows the vampire. Behind the ascetic
protestant ethic of abstinence, the obscene Dionysian drive to consume, devour, spoil all
that is life.
As we may expect, the original sin of primitive accumulation is also the source of
the enslavement of the capitalist to the power of the vampire. On this point Marx, already
in the Jewish Question, noticed that: “the right of man to private property [. . .] makes
every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it.”
The right to enclosure, then, not only constitutes the true foundation of capital; it also
prefigures the alienated form of the capitalist subject, upon whom the vampiric nature of
capital is immediately reflected: “man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.”74
As Parinetto has convincingly argued, the paradox is that exactly when the ruling class
poses a set of barriers that segregates the workers from property – and one property from
the other, thus establishing the framework for competition – it also creates another
subject who has the power to control the social relationships of each individual property
owner; a subject which, therefore, speaks through the person of the capitalist – and of the
worker since “the competition among workers is only another form of the competition
imposed among capitals” – precisely as a theatre actor speaks behind a mask.75
The social world created by capitalism could then be compared to a spelled
carnival in which dwell not men but masks of men. “Here the persons exist for one
another merely as representatives and hence owners, of commodities [. . .] the characters
who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations.”76
If in the traditional carnival, represented for example by the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin,
we find monstrous masks behind which really live human subjects,77 within the capitalist
carnival we find human masks behind which really live monstrous beings: vampires and
zombies.78 The idea of a capitalist carnival and the notion of possessed bodies – as they
emerge from an analysis of Capital particularly concerned with the use of gothic
metaphors – represent in a different form Marx’s understanding of history as
“nonsensical prehistory.” As we have seen in the first section, Marx saw capitalism as the
last in a long series of social formations collectively characterized by the rule of
economic imperatives over human will and desire. Capitalism, then, reproduces a world
where man is really a character-mask, a facade behind which dwell objective economic
categories that govern and rule his life. When we talk of vampires, zombies and
possessed bodies we do it because for Marx, as long as we are within capitalism, as long
as we don’t project ourselves beyond the nonsense of prehistory, men are inevitably to be
governed by another subject. The vampire of capital is the inhuman subject of capitalist
prehistory; men are only its conscious organs. Today, as in the days of its first preface,
we must read Capital to break through our Perseus’ cap; we must read it to see that it is
not man who uses capital to make his own history; it is the vampire that uses man to
make “a world after its own image.”
Conclusion
This essay has been a long scream of horror. We have glimpsed at the vampire that
Marx described in full light throughout Capital. We have tried to describe its movements in
relationship with the magic of fetishism, the political economy of the dead and the processes
of individuation which give shape to the masks of the capitalist and the proletarian. We have
looked at the capitalist mode of production as a spelled carnival. We have tried to break
through Perseus’ cap and to look at the monster in the eyes in order to comprehend the
meaning of its omen.
As we have seen, where the monster reigns, there is danger in the gravest sense.
“But where danger is, grows the saving power also.” 79 After all, capital never ceases to
depend on living labour to continue its monstrous life, to complete the endless process of its
valorisation. The vampire, despite all its powers, “is a real illusion, a real process in which
the done never ceases to depend on the doing.”80 As shown by Marx, if the workers stop
the production process not only is profit endangered; capital itself enfeebles and dies away.
Chapter X, when the vampire metaphor first comes to the forefront of Capital, is exactly the
loci where we are shown at once the most horrific, outraging tendencies of capital and its
very real weakness. It is exactly when the worker seems to be exposed naked as the
humblest slave of capital – bare life to be exploited, fermenting blood to be sucked – that we
see his power against capital, the possibility of his liberation from capital. Our scream is
then at once a scream of horror and hope. To go beyond the gothic realm of the monstrous
it will be necessary to overcome the false subjectivities that mirror the capital-vampire. It will
be necessary for the proletarian to recognize the inhuman identity that capital has imposed
upon him, to become other from himself escaping the constriction to identity. “If the slave
understands the artificiality of his condition in the consciousness of being person, the
proletarian understands his alienation in the consciousness of being thing, that is to say in
understanding his reification. When he stops recognizing himself in his identity, the
proletarian, at least at the level of consciousness, opens the possibility of becoming finally
human.”81The central subject of Capital is of course the exploitation of labour, the
extraction of surplus-labour from the living body of the worker, but it also contains a radical
critique of capital as a process of subjectification by which the worker himself is produced
as a commodity, the human commodity (Menschenware). There is no naturally
revolutionary class and there never has been. Emancipation will require much less and much
more than any party; much less and much more than the working class itself. There is no
revolutionary subject without a place and a time in which revolutionary processes of
subjectification can rest. And yet, as Raoul Vaneigem wrote, “the same people who are
murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing,
drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new
poetry.” 82 Outside capital there is a world. It is only there, in the everyday life – in that
different space fed by the commons that we create, we defend, we struggle for – that new
subjectivities may emerge, open a new space and grow. It will be necessary first of all to
undo the original sin that gave birth to the diabolic inversion, reinvent the commons and reappropriate
a time to live, to think, to become other from what we are. And yet this is only
the beginning. If we are interested in re-appropriating the wealth produced by the General
Intellect – our brains, our hearts, our bodies in communication – it is not in order to survive
a little better, and get the full value of our working hours. More than ever, we need the space
and the time of the commons in order to have a place in which to invent a new way of life,
where labour would become (again) like art – that which is the free expression of human
creativity.83 “The supersession of private property is therefore,” as the young Marx once
dared to say, “the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this
emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become human,
subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has
become a social, human object, made by man for man.” 84
1 Marx, K. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Penguin Classics, 1990: 91.
2 Ibidem: 103.
3 “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Marx, K.
Theses on Feurbach in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume One. Progress Publishers, 1999: 15.
4 Marx, K. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume III. Penguin Classics, 1992: 809; for a
discussion of the relationship between Marx and Feurbach see Avineri, S. The Social and Political Thought
of Karl Marx. Cambridge University Press, 1968: 8-30.
5 Derrida, J. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.
Routledge, 1994. See also: Sprinker, M., and J. Derrida. Ghostly Demarcations. Verso, 1999.
6 The literature on the ghostly/spectral is now too numerous to list. For an introduction see: Carver, T. The
Postmodern Marx. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. For an alternative reading of the vampire
metaphor, focused exclusively on political economy see: Neocleous, M. “The political economy of the
dead: Marx's Vampires.” History of Political Thought 24, no. 4 (2003).
7 For a psychoanalytic account of the monstrous see: Schneider, S. J. Horror Film and Psychoanalysis:
Freud's Worst Nightmare. Cambridge University Press, 2004. More specifically on vampires see: Gelder,
K. Reading the Vampire. Routledge, 1994: 42-65.
8 In Homer, teras – from which teratology, the study of monsters – takes first of all the meaning of “sign.”
Equally the Latin grammarian Sextus Pompeius Festus in his De verborum significatione defines monstum
as “quod monstrat futuram et moneat voluntatem deorum” (122, 8). This understanding of monstrosity as
omen is common to many folkloric tradition as shown extensively in: Gilmore, D. Monsters: Evil Beings,
Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
9 Parinetto, L. La rivolta del diavolo. Muntzer, Lutero e la rivolta dei contadini in Germania. Rusconi,
Milano, 1999: 189 (my translation).
10 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 208 and 229.
11 Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958:
105; similarly Voltaire notices in his entry for “Vampires” in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764): “The
result of all this is that a great part of Europe has been infested with vampires for five or six years, and that
there are now no more; that we have had Convulsionaries in France for twenty years, and that we have
them no longer; that we have had demoniacs for seventeen hundred years, but have them no longer; that the
dead have been raised ever since the days of Hippolytus, but that they are raised no longer.”
12 Marx, K., and F. Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics, 2002.
13 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 169.
14 Ibidem: 918. This change of religion is also reflected in the penal code: “At the same time England
ceased burning witches, she began hunging the forgers of banknotes.” Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 920.
15 Marx, K. and F. Engels, The German Ideology in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume V,
Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.
16 “Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man [. . .] in his everyday life, in
his work, in his relationships, has become a species-being; and when he has recognised and organised his
own powers as social powers” Marx, K. On the Jewish Question, in T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early
Writings, Penguin Editions, 1963: 24-25.
17 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 344.
18 Ibidem: 375.
19 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 918.
20 Goethe, J.W. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Appelbaum, S. 103 Great Poems: A Dual-language Book.
Dover Publications Inc., 1999: 127.
21 Marx, K., and F. Engels. The Communist Manifesto.
22 Stoker, B. Dracula. New York, Signet, 1992: 342. Here the parallelism with Marx’s description of
capital is almost striking: “capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorise itself, to create surplusvalue,
to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus
labour.” Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 342.
23 “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles, a fight that each time ended
either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Marx, K., and F. Engels. The Communist Manifesto: 52. Taking at the centre of his analysis this quote from
the Communist Manifesto, Parinetto has convincingly argued for the open ended character of the Marxian
philosophy of history. See Parinetto, L. La rivolta del Diavolo: 189. For a summary genealogy of the
Marxist idea of history as an open-ended process of class-struggle see also: Policante, A. “War against
Biopower: Timely Reflections on an Historicist Foucault,” Theory & Event, 13.1 March 2010.
24 Engels, F. “The English Ten Hours’ Bill”; as cited in Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 416.
25 Parker, M. “Organisational Gothic.” Culture and Organization 11, no. 3 (2005): 159.
26 McGrath, P. “Transgression and Decay” in Grunenberg, C. Gothic. Transmutations of Horror in Late
Twentieth Century Art. Cambridge, 1997: 156.
27 Parker, M. “Organisational Gothic”: 158.
28 Smith, A. “Reading Wealth in Nigeria: Occult Capitalism and Marx's Vampires.” Historical Materialism
9, no. 1 (2001): 44.
29 Haraway, D.J. Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_Onco Mouse™, London, 1997.
30 Neocleous, M. “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx's Vampires”: 679.
31 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 284.
32 Ibidem: 342 and 716.
33 “The communal substance of all commodities, i.e. their substance not as material stuff, as physical
character, but their communal substance as commodities and hence exchange values, is this, that they are
objectified labour.” Marx, K. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Penguin,
1973: 263.
34 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 165. In the previous page see also: “Whence, then, arises the enigmatical
character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form
itself.”
35 Marx, K. Grundrisse: 256.
36 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 167.
37 Ibidem.
38 Graeber, D. “Fetishism as Social Creativity” in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire,
AK Press, 2007: 138. It is as commodity fetish that the “strange-god of capital” perched himself for the
first time “side by side with the old Gods of Europe on the altar.” It is as capital that threw them all
overboard with the violence of a shove and a kick . . . and of primitive accumulation.
39 Auerbach, N. Our Vampires, Ourselves. University Of Chicago Press, 1995: 32.
40 Marx, K. Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeitpartei, Berlin, 1922: 22. As quoted in
Benjamin, W. The Arcades Project, Harvad University Press, 2002: 658.
41 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 342, 989-90.
42 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 932-933.
43 Marx, K. Wage Labour and Capital in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume V, Lawrence and
Wishart, 1979. Marx signals this diabolic inversion also in the form of writing through the use of
antimetabole and chiasmus as recurrent figures of speech.
44 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 289.
45 Marx, K. Grundrisse: 460.
46 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 729.
47 Ibidem: 451. For a theory stressing the peculiar political position of the working class, “at once within
and against capitalism,” see: Tronti, M. Operai e capitale, Einaudi, 1971: 1-40.
48 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 638.
49 Benjamin, W. The Arcades Project: 659.
50 Marx, K. Grundrisse: 261.
51 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 729
52 Stoker, B. Dracula: 214.
53 Marx, K., and F. Engels. The Communist Manifesto: 6.
54 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 896.
55 Ibidem: 933.
56 Deleuze G. and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, The Athlone Press, 1988: 470 and 494.
57 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 874.
58 Ibidem: 425.
59 Ibidem: 486.
60 Ibidem: 481.
61 Ibidem: 482.
62 Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Classics, 2003: 160. To avoid misunderstandings it is
maybe better to underline that, although the “images of the modern worker” presented by Marx and
Nietzsche share certain common characteristic, they are also based on a very different understanding of
“what is dangerous, what gnaws and poison life in our way of carrying on” (Nietzsche, 1992: 54).
63 Nietzsche, F. Ecce Homo, Penguin Classics, 1992: 54. Marx was very fond of the Roman fable of
Menenius Agrippa, which he cites several times throughout his work. The fable shows, through a holistic
metaphor, how the Roman plebs were incapable of survival without the apparent idle class of the patricians.
For Marx, though, it is only with the rise of capital that “the individual himself is made the automatic motor
of a fractional operation, and the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of
his own body, becomes realised.” Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 481.
64 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 526 and 638.
65 Ibidem: 503; 548 and 544.
66 Ibidem: 517-523.
67 Marx, K. “Results of the immediate process of production,” published as an appendix to Marx, K.
Capital, Volume I: 988.
68 Ibidem: 989.
69 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 742.
70 Ibidem: 739.
71 Marx, K. Grundrisse: 650; and Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 381. For a view of market competition as a
fractal panopticon regulating social relationships between people see De Angelis, M. The Beginning of
History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. Pluto Press, 2007.
72 Voltaire, F. “Vampire” in Dictionnaire Philosophique, Classiques Garnier, 1935: 386; Cortázar, J
Fantomas contra los vampiros multinacionales, Excelsior, 1975.
73 Marx, K. “Results of the immediate process of production”: 990.
74 Marx, K. On the Jewish Question: 22.
75 Parinetto, L. La rivolta del Diavolo: 187-218. The citation on that form of capitalist competition, which
tends to force proletarians to act socially as isolated monads, is from Marx, K. Grundrisse: 650.
76 Marx, K. Capital, Volume I: 178-179.
77 Bakhtin, M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1968.
78 “If I characterise man as an ‘exchange value,’ this expression already implies that social conditions have
transformed him into a ‘thing.’ If I treat him as a ‘productive force,’ I am putting in the place of the real
subject a different subject, I am substituting another person for him, and he now exists only as a cause of
wealth. The whole of human society becomes merely a machine for the creation of wealth.” Marx, K.
“Draft of an Article on Friedrich List's Book Das nationale System der politischen Oekonemie” in Marx
and Engels Collected Works, Volume IV, Lawrence and Wishart, 1979: 285.
79 Heidegger, M. “The Question Concerning Technology” in Lovitt, W. The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, Harper&Row, 1977: 34.
80 Holloway, J. Change the world without taking power, Pluto Press, 2002: 125.
81 Parinetto, L. Corpo e Rivoluzione in Marx, Contemporanea Moizzi, 1977: 380-381 (my translation).
82 Vaneigem, R. The Revolution of Everyday Life, Rebel Press, 2003: 24.
83 Marx, following Fourier, opposes the de-humanizing process of subjectification that takes the name of
labour under capital to what he calls travail attractif, i.e., truly free activiry, labour that is the selfrealization
of the individual. In the Grundisse he suggests that technical progress, when not employed for
the self-expansion of capital, may drastically reduce the time of necessary labour – the labour required to
satisfy the basic reproductive needs of the individual. Most of the daily time would therefore be left for free
activity and self-activity as a process of conscious self-improvement, collective subjectification and care of
the self. See also Marx, K. and F. Engels, The German Ideology: 242.
84 Marx, K. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings,
Penguin Editions, 1963: 155.
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