From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Fri Apr 21 2006 - 21:18:16 EDT
There is a lot in this piece about capital as undead. Wasn't
there some discussion on this list about that? I haven't
read Neocleous' book on the topic of the undead.
>The trick of fetishism is thus that it is the
>inorganic realm of the dead which nonetheless
>makes the dead appear alive. The vampire motif
>is thus particularly apt in this context for the
>vampire is dead and yet not dead: s/he is
>⤗undead⤁ in the sense that s/he is a
>⤗dead⤁ person who manages to live thanks to
>the sensuousness of the living. In being brought
>back to life in this way the vampire (that is,
>capital) comes to rule.
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Institute for Advanced Studies in
Social and Management Sciences
University of Lancaster
Cultural Political Economy
Working Paper Series
Working Paper No. 5
Bloody Capital and Dead Labour
Cultural Studies or the Critique of Political Economy?
By
Mark Neocleous
This paper may be circulated in electronic and
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without express permission of the author.
Bloody Capital and Dead Labour
Cultural Studies or the Critique of Political Economy?
Mark Neocleous
Politics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH
mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk
* the vipers, the bloodsuckers, the
middlemen - that⤁s what needs to be
rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. That⤁s what
makes our kind of country click (Bruce Gelb, Head
of the US Information Agency, 1990).
In the chapter on money in the Grundrisse Marx
makes a comment in parenthesis that runs as
follows: ⤗To compare money with blood - the
term circulation gave occasion for this - is
about as correct as Menenius Agrippa⤁s
comparison between the patricians and the
stomach⤁. He seems to have here two targets.
First, the absurd tradition in political thought
which compared various ⤗parts⤁ of society to
various ⤗parts⤁ of the body politic. And,
second, the established analogy between capital
and blood: the way both capital and blood are
said to ⤗circulate⤁, as he points out. This
second target is important because its underlying
assumption is that capital is somehow the
⤗lifeblood⤁ of society. Adam Smith, for
example, comments that ⤗blood, of which the
circulation is stopt in some of the smaller
vessels, easily disgorges itself into the
greater, without occasioning any dangerous
disorder; but, when it is stopt in any of the
greater vessels, convulsions, apoplexy, or death,
are the immediate and unavoidable
consequences⤁, and goes on to present the
problems of monopoly in the colonies as ⤗a
small stop in that great blood-vessel⤁.
This assumption that capital is the lifeblood
of any economic system permeates both
intellectual discourse and ⤗common sense⤁ to
this day. I want to use this idea of some kind of
relationship between capital and blood " or
better still, capital as blood - to explore the
tensions and possible parameters of a cultural
political economy. Bob Jessop has suggested that
one of the defining characteristics of cultural
political economy (CPE) is that it combines
concepts and tools from critical semiotics with
concepts and tools from the critique of political
economy. This is to be welcomed, the claim goes,
because critical political economy can only
benefit from taking on board the cultural
dimensions of social and economic life " from
⤗softening⤁ a little the otherwise ⤗hard⤁
economic analysis that permeates the critique of
political economy. In this sense, CPE might be
positioned within a much wider ⤗cultural
turn⤁ within the social sciences generally.
I have no reason to disagree with this
reasoning, and welcome it myself, not least
because in using tools from critical semiotics it
is an approach which plays on the important ways
in which we come to imagine political and social
forms and therefore ties in with some of my own
work.5 I want to suggest, however, that there is
a danger in this of which we need to be aware
from the outset. Through the idea of ⤗bloody
capital⤁ I aim to explore some of the
differences between cultural studies on the one
hand and the critique of political economy on the
other. These differences, I suggest, draw to our
attention a fundamental tension and real danger
at the heart of CPE. For the different ideas and
claims about ⤗bloody capital⤁ in cultural
studies and the critique of political economy
illustrate a critical distance between vast
chunks of cultural analysis and Marx⤁s work,
such that the potentially positive developments
brought about by linking the cultural to
political economy run the real danger of falling
into the purely cultural, in the worst sense of
the term. I thus propose that if CPE is to be
anything then it must retain at its core the
political motivation of the critique that was
always at the heart of the original Marxist
encounter with political economy, an encounter
which was also intensely imaginative and made
wide use of cultural reference points. Failing to
do so would create the possibility of CPE
becoming merely a sub-grouping within cultural
studies. To put this another way, I aim to
suggest that there is something essentially
unpolitical (or even anti-political) about
cultural studies, and that if CPE is to have a
genuinely critical and political edge then it
will have to recognize that this edge will come
more from the original critique of political
economy than from mainstream cultural analysis.
Wallachian boyars and cultural ⤗others⤁
The reason Marx thinks that the idea that capital
is somehow the lifeblood of the system is
ideological nonsense of the highest order is
because it is the very opposite of the truth: far
from being like blood, capital lives on the
blood, and thus the lives, of the working class.
It is for this reason that Marx so frequently
describes capital as sucking the blood of the
workers. ⤗If money comes into the world with a
congenital blood-stain on one cheek,⤁ he says,
then ⤗capital comes dripping from head to toe,
from every pore, with blood.⤁ Lace-making
institutions exploiting children are described as
⤗blood-sucking⤁, while US capital is said to
be financed by the ⤗capitalized blood of
children⤁. The appropriation of labour is
described as the ⤗life-blood of capitalism⤁,
while the state is said to have here and there
interposed ⤗as a barrier to the transformation
of children⤁s blood into capital⤁. In this
sense, far from being the life-blood of the
system, capital lives off the real blood of the
workers. Capital, in other words, is like a
vampire.
I have elsewhere shown the extent to which the
vampire motif runs through Marx⤁s work. For the
sake of clarity, let me run through the main
examples and points. In Capital Marx comments
that ⤗capital is dead labour which,
vampire-like, lives only by sucking living
labour⤁. He also comments that the prolongation
of the working day ⤗only slightly quenches the
vampire thirst for the living blood of labour⤁,
and that ⤗the vampire will not let go while
there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of
blood to be exploited⤁. But a little more
searching throws up more interesting connections.
For example, in comparing the factory system with
other forms of domination such as feudalism, Marx
notes that the legal mechanisms through which
peasants performed forced labour on behalf of
landowners during the corvée could be stretched
well beyond the stated number of days. Giving the
example of Wallachian peasants performing forced
labour on behalf of the Wallachian boyars, Marx
cites one of the boyars: ⤗⤦The 12 corvée
days of the Règlement organique,? cried a
boyar, drunk with victory, ⤦amount to 365 days
in the year.?⤁ The source Marx provides for
this quote is Ô. Regnault⤁s Histoire politique
et sociale des principautés danubiennes (1855).
The ⤗Wallachian boyar⤁ in this text turns out
to be none other than Vlad the Impaler: Vlad
Dracula.
We could go on in this vein. As Marx was
putting the finishing touches to volume 1 of
Capital, he writes to Engels about the industries
being ⤗called to order⤁ by the Children⤁s
Employment Commission: ⤗The fellows who were to
be called to order, among them the big metal
manufacturers, and especially the vampires of
⤦domestic industry?, maintained a cowardly
silence.⤁ In the Grundrisse capital is
described as ⤗constantly sucking in living
labour as its soul, vampire-like⤁. In the
⤗Inaugural Address of the International Working
Men⤁s Association⤁ Marx describes British
industry as ⤗vampire-like⤁, which ⤗could
but live by sucking blood, and children⤁s blood
too⤁. In The Class Struggles in France he
compares the National Assembly to ⤗a vampire
living off the blood of the June insurgents⤁.
In The Civil War in France he refers to agents of
the French state, such as ⤗the notary,
advocate, executor, and other judicial
vampires⤁. In the Eighteenth Brumaire he
comments that ⤗the bourgeois order...has become
a vampire that sucks out its [the smallholding
peasant⤁s] blood and brains and throws them
into the alchemist⤁s cauldron⤁. In an essay
on the Prussian Constitution of 1849 Marx
comments on ⤗the Christian-Germanic sovereign
and his accomplices, the whole host of
lay-abouts, parasites and vampires sucking the
blood of the people⤁. The Wallachian boyar also
makes a reappearance in both the Eighteenth
Brumaire and The Civil War in France. And in The
Holy Family he and Engels comment about a
character of Eugene Sue⤁s that ⤗he cannot
possibly lead that kind of life without sucking
the blood out of his little principality in
Germany to the last drop like a vampire⤁. So
important was this idea to Marx that his early
plans to develop a fully-fledged political
argument as ⤗The Correspondent from the
Mosel⤁ included five sections, the fourth of
which was to be on ⤗The Vampires of the Mosel
Region⤁.
How are we to make sense of this joint
metaphor - of a blood-sucking and vampiric
capital? In speaking of capital in this way Marx
was obviously using an imaginative cultural
metaphor, playing on the role of blood-sucking in
the literature of the time. We know that Marx
loved reading horror stories, and that major
works such as James Malcolm Ryner⤁s Varney the
Vampire, serialized in 1847, had wide readership.
So in that sense we might want to take a cultural
turn, and try and make sense of Marx⤁s comments
through cultural studies. The theme of blood in
general and the vampire in particular have for
some time been prevalent topics in cultural and
literary interpretation. Either through analyses
of popular fiction, film and television, or
through a wider focus on the culture of the
Gothic, cultural studies has developed and
sustained an interest in the semiotics of the
vampire. While on the one hand interpretations of
the vampire⤁s meaning have been fairly diverse,
on the other hand there has also been a common
approach which interprets the vampire as
connected, in some way, with capital. Because of
this latter interpretation, Marx⤁s comments on
the vampire have a tendency to be mentioned
within cultural studies: either invoked in
support of the link or simply flagged up as
indicative of the extent of the Gothic motif in
the nineteenth century. Either way, the link is
useful from the point of view of a cultural
political economy, since it would seem to draw
together the most trenchant critique of political
economy ever with one of the most important and
prevalent themes within cultural and semiotic
analysis. Surely here, if anywhere, one could
find a productive combination of the imaginative
concepts and tools from critical semiotics and
those of critical political economy? Let us take
a brief look, then, at cultural analyses of the
semiotics of the vampire.
Space does not allow a full discussion of each
of the variety of interpretations the vampire has
within cultural studies, but the common feature
is that they more or less all participate in what
Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall call the
⤗anxiety model⤁ of Gothic criticism. Such
anxiety is said to be generated by the
vampire⤁s alien features - its ⤗Otherness⤁
or ⤗difference⤁ in the lingua franca of
contemporary theory. Like the monster in general,
the vampire is said to be the ⤗harbinger of
category crisis⤁, refusing easy categorization
in the ⤗order of things⤁. Donna Haraway, for
example, writes that ⤗defined by their
categorical ambiguity and troubling mobility,
vampires do not rest easy (or easily) in the
boxes labeled good and bad. Always transported
and shifting, the vampire⤁s native soil is more
nutritious, and more unheimlich, than that⤁. As
a form of monster the vampire disrupts the usual
rules of interaction, occupying an essentially
fluid site where despite its otherness it cannot
be entirely separated from nature and man. As
simultaneously inside and outside the monster
disrupts the politics of identity and the
security of borders. The vampire is in part a
harbinger of category crisis because like the
monster in general, s/he represents a form of
difference. Within cultural studies many writers
have connected this ⤗difference⤁ and/or
⤗Otherness⤁ with the scapegoat and thus
oppressed and marginalised groups. The vampire
has been interpreted as the figure of the Jew, as
transgressive sexuality either in general or in a
particular form such as the homosexual or
sexually predatory female - the vamp.
It is with this range of readings that
problems begin to emerge. It is clear that,
historically, Gothic culture has always contained
⤗a very intense, if displaced, engagement with
political and social problems⤁. But, in terms
of cultural interpretations of the vampire, the
precise nature of the problems, the displacement,
and the engagement is so blurred and undefined
that rather than identifying the vampire with one
particular group, an attempt is made to have it
all ways by identifying the vampire with lots of
groups. Judith Halberstam writes that Dracula
⤗can be read as aristocrat [and yet] a symbol
of the masses; he is predator and yet feminine,
he is consumer and producer, he is parasite and
host, he is homosexual and heterosexual, he is
even a lesbian⤁. For Burton Hatlen, as a
marauding and sexually perverse aristocrat
Dracula is a threat and yet, because of his smell
and colour, he is representative of the working
class. Thus the vampire ⤗represents both the
repressed masses of workers and a decaying
aristocracy⤁. The point, it seems, is that
rather than this or that ⤗other⤁, the vampire
is all other(s): ⤗otherness itself⤁, as more
than one cultural analysis has put it. The
vampire is a ⤗composite of otherness⤁ and
thus a ⤗highly overdetermined threat⤁. As
Hatlen comments in a mode of argument aiming at
developing a Freudian-Marxist account of the
vampire and yet typical of cultural studies of
the vampire:
* Count Dracula represents the
physically ⤗other⤁: the ⤗dark⤁
unconscious, the sexuality that Victorian England
denied, more specifically a sado-masochistic
sexuality that recognizes no limits and that no
structured order can accept. He is also
culturally ⤗other⤁: a revenant from the ages
of superstition when people believed that the
communion wafer was the flesh of Christ. But more
specifically of all he is the socially other: the
embodiment of all the social forces that lurked
just beyond the frontiers of Victorian middle
class consciousness: the psychically repressed
and the socially oppressed.
The vampire is thus ⤗other⤁ in every sense of
the word - sexually, socially, politically,
culturally, psychically, economically. On this
account the myriad and often contradictory
interpretations of precisely which ⤗other⤁
group the vampire is a metaphor for - the
perverse heterosexual and yet gay-lesbian, the
proletarian and yet aristocratic foreigner from
within - appear perfectly reasonable, since ⤗it
is ⤦otherness? itself, not some particular
social group, that the vampire represents; and,
for the bourgeoisie, the modes of otherness are
infinite⤁.
This tendency to treat the vampire as a
metaphor for the repressed, oppressed and
outlawed has created a parallel tendency within
cultural studies to treat the vampire as a
subversive and thus liberating figure, on the
rather simple (and simplistic) grounds that its
very ⤗otherness⤁ makes the vampire a threat
to bourgeois order. As the oppressed, repressed
and outlawed the vampire is simultaneously an
⤗antibourgeois⤁ ⤗symbol of injustice⤁.
S/he thus ⤗threatens the tight, tidy world of
upper middle class England⤁. As such, the
vampire⤁s subversiveness is taken as read. Far
from being undermined by what might appear to the
uninitiated as essentially conflicting and thus
mutually exclusive interpretations of the vampire
- is its meaning racial, sexual, political,
social? What on earth does a lesbian male look
like? Just what is an aristocratic symbol of the
masses? - the purported subversiveness is said to
be enhanced by these conflicts. This is why
cultural studies of the vampire fit so neatly
into Baldick and Mighall⤁s ⤗anxiety model⤁
account of Gothic criticism. As they explain, the
model employs an account of ⤗culture and
history premised on fear, experienced by...a
caricature of a bourgeoisie trembling in their
frock coats at each and every deviation from a
rigid, but largely mythical, stable middle-class
consensus. Anything that deviates from this
standard is hailed as ⤦subversive?, with [the
vampire] standing as the eternal principle of
subversion - Otherness itself, to be fashioned
according to the desires and agendas of the
critic⤁.
At the same time, however, and despite its
supposed association with otherness and thus
subversiveness, there is also within cultural
studies a tendency to connect the vampire with
the ruling bourgeois class and thus capital.
Despite the fact that many writers insist that
vampires are always aristocrats, a far more
dominant interpretation holds that the vampire is
in fact more representative of capital and the
bourgeois class than land and the aristocracy.
This view is most closely associated with Franco
Moretti⤁s essay on the dialectic of fear.
Situating his account in the context of Bram
Stoker⤁s Dracula, Moretti disregards the
conventional account of the vampire as an
aristocrat. Dracula lacks the aristocrat⤁s
conspicuous consumption in the form of food,
clothing, stately homes, hunting, theatre-going,
and so on. Moreover, the count disregards the
usual aristocratic practice of employing servants
- he drives the carriage, cooks the meals, makes
the beds and cleans the castle himself. Far from
being representative of the aristocratic class,
Dracula⤁s desire for blood is read by Moretti
as a metaphor for capital⤁s desire for
accumulation. The more he gets the stronger he
becomes, and the weaker the living on whom he
feeds become. A constant hunger for blood means
he is never satisfied and thus always seeking new
victims. ⤗Like capital, Dracula is impelled
towards a continuous growth, an unlimited
expansion of his domain: accumulation is inherent
in his nature⤁. This vampire is thus ⤗capital
that is not ashamed of itself⤁.
Within cultural studies this argument has been
hugely influential in developing a reading of the
vampire as capital and thus capital as vampire.
Haraway comments that ⤗the vampire is...the
marauding figure of unnaturally breeding capital,
which penetrates every whole being and sucks it
dry in the lusty production and vastly unequal
accumulation of wealth⤁, while Nicholas Rance
notes that in many vampire novels ⤗the Gothic
metaphor...turns out to be merely a projection of
the ruling capitalist economy⤁. Other writers
make the same connection. Gelder, for example,
comments that ⤗the representation of capital or
the capitalist as vampire was, then, common
to...popular fiction in the nineteenth century.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this
representation mobilised vampire fiction at this
time, to produce a striking figure defined by
excess and unrestrained appetite⤁. Halberstam
comments that capitalism is rather Gothic in that
⤗like the vampire [it] functions through many
different, even contradictory, technologies⤁.
As David Skal sums it up in his cultural history
of horror: the vampire is ⤗a sanguinary
capitalist⤁.
It is with this reading that Marx and cultural
studies meet around the vampire. Moretti⤁s
argument oscillates between Stoker⤁s Dracula,
general comments on the vampire and Marx⤁s
references to the vampire in Capital. His general
claim that like capital the vampire is impelled
towards a continuous growth is sustained in part
by his reading of Dracula but also in part by
invoking Marx on capital. Thus the implication is
that Marx⤁s use of the metaphor is entirely
consistent with the reading presented in the
essay. Rance⤁s comments concerning the vampire
novel includes the idea that this is used in
precisely the same sense as in Marx, while
Gelder⤁s suggestion is that ⤗the
representation of capital or the capitalist as
vampire was, then, common to both Marx and to
popular fiction in the nineteenth century⤁.
Halberstam simply notes that Marx mentions the
vampire a couple of times to describe an economic
system which is ⤗positively Gothic⤁. In
general, then, what happens in cultural studies
of the vampire is that the link between the
vampire and capital is drawn, Marx then becomes
an obvious reference point, his comments on the
vampire are noted, and thus the link reiterated.
This of course has the added advantage of
strengthening the cultural reading of the
vampire⤁s subversiveness - for what could be
more subversive than Marxism? Unperturbed by the
fact that the vampire can hardly be a subversive
⤗other⤁ creating fears and anxieties for the
bourgeois class if it is simultaneously capital
itself, cultural studies happily co-opts Marx
into its reading of the vampire.
Now, this might appear to be a useful example
of the ways in which the cultural might be
brought to bear on the critique of political. But
I⤁m going to suggest that it in fact brings
together the critique of political economy and
the analysis of the cultural in a fashion that is
way too easy, or even downright deceptive. Worse,
possibly politically damaging. I want to show
that there is in fact a dimension to Marx⤁s
comments on bloodsucking and vampiric capital
that cannot be assimilated into the mainstream
cultural interpretation connecting the vampire
and capital. This dimension is rooted in the very
thing that separates Marx from mainstream
cultural studies, namely his critique of
political economy. The fact that Marx, in his
critique of political economy, has used the
imaginative trope of a bloodsucking vampire has
encouraged cultural studies to try and assimilate
Marx into its disciplinary mainstream, making
Marx seem far more familiar to cultural theorists
than he really is. It is symptomatic of cultural
studies⤁ unwillingness or inability to deal
with the dimension in question that Marx has a
tendency to simply pop up in these texts and then
just as quickly disappear. Rarely does one find
any sustained treatment of Marx⤁s use of the
vampire metaphor; a brief comment here or a quick
reference there are all one ever finds. The
reason for this is no doubt partly intellectual -
Marx⤁s coherence jars with the absurd
contradictions which cultural studies gleefully
parades. But it is also deeply political - Marx
has a very clear political point to be made, the
communist implications of which are both obvious
and enormous. In terms of CPE, however, the point
is as follows: in treating the vampire in the
ways that it does, cultural analyses appear to
fulfil some of the five research injunctions that
Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop suggest50 lie within
the ⤗cultural turn⤁ in political economy:
dealing with rhetorical devices, examining the
role of discourse and systems of meaning,
treating seriously the remaking of
subjectivities, and examining questions of
identity. I want to suggest, however, that the
cultural analyses in question also have a
tendency to subsume real economic practices under
broad generalizations about cultural and social
life and, in this sense, run a serious risk of
depoliticizing the purpose of the critique of
political economy. From the standpoint of
cultural studies my argument will no doubt appear
as too much like ⤗hard orthodox economics⤁ or
⤗economistic⤁ - that bogeyman that has
haunted cultural studies since its incorporation
into the academy. But my aim is to show that Marx
has a very clear and coherent reason for using
the vampire in the ways that he does, which is
rooted in his critique of political economy and
not his adoption of some supposedly culturally
universal image. Part of my intention is thus to
argue that in missing what is truly distinctive
about Marx⤁s position, cultural studies has
missed one of the defining characteristics of
capital itself. This, I then suggest, generates a
strong suspicion that cultural studies may not be
as subversive or radical as it sometimes likes to
think. It also points to an important tension
within CPE, which can perhaps only be resolved
through a political decision.
Capital and death
In the Preface to the first edition of Capital,
Marx comments that ⤗we suffer not only from the
living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le
vif!⤁. His references seem to be to the archaic
and outmoded modes of production with their
accompanying anachronistic social and political
relations which threaten to restrain the
revolutionary impulse and forward motion of
revolutionary change. But it also suggests that
one way to understand the vampire motif might be
through the place of the dead in Marx⤁s
critique of political economy.
Dismissing the view that capital is something
distinct from labour - a value-producing entity
in its own right, for example - Marx argues that
capital is nothing but accumulated labour. His
distinction is thus between accumulated labour
and labour per se or, as he often puts it,
accumulated labour versus ⤗living labour⤁.
⤗What is the growth of accumulated capital?
Growth of the power of accumulated labour over
living labour⤁. Capital ⤗consists in living
labour serving accumulated labour as a means for
maintaining and multiplying the exchange value of
the latter⤁. But if the distinction is between
accumulated and living labour, then it makes
perfect sense to treat the former, capital, as
⤗dead labour⤁. Marx had toyed with this idea
in the 1844 Manuscripts, combining the idea of
capital as ⤗stored-up labour⤁ with the idea
of ⤗dead capital⤁ or ⤗dead mammon⤁. But
through the Grundrisse and by the fully fledged
critique of political economy in Capital, capital
gets thought through as dead labour as distinct
from living labour, a distinction which then
becomes a cornerstone of Marx⤁s critique of
political economy. ⤗Owing to its conversion
into an automaton, the instrument of labour
confronts the worker during the labour process in
the shape of capital, dead labour, which
dominates and soaks up living labour-power⤁.
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⤁.
But a fundamental part of the topsy-turvy
world of capital that Marx is at pains to
illustrate is that the rule of dead labour over
living labour is brought about by the fact that
living labour is forced to work on dead labour.
Inactive machinery is useless - dead - without
the active force of living labour: ⤗Iron rusts;
wood rots...Living labour must seize on these
things [and] change them from merely possible
into real and effective use-values⤁. Labour,
Marx comments, must ⤗awaken them from the
dead⤁, or ⤗resurrect them from the dead⤁.
It is this awakening or resurrecting of dead
labour under the rule of private property that
helps turn capital into a highly active social
agent: ⤗capital-in-process, creative capital,
sucking its living soul out of labour⤁. Through
this power capital appears to have the power of
resurrecting and animating the dead. ⤗By
incorporating living labour into their lifeless
objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously
transforms value, i.e. past labour in its
objectified and lifeless form, into capital...an
animated monster⤁. The world of capital is a
world in which ⤗living labour appears as a mere
means to realize objectified, dead labour, to
penetrate it with an animating soul while losing
its own soul to it⤁.
It is because of this that Marx makes a great
deal of the way that within mechanised factory
production living labour is ⤗subsumed under the
total process of the machinery itself, as itself
only a link of the system, whose unit exists not
in the living workers, but rather in the living
(active) machinery, which confronts his
individual, insignificant doings as a mighty
organism⤁. ⤗The objective conditions of
labour [i.e. capital] assume an ever more
colossal independence, represented by its very
extent, opposite living labour, and that social
wealth confronts labour in more portions as an
alien and dominant power⤁. Capital is of course
a social relation of domination and exploitation.
But it is a relation of domination and
exploitation in which the product of labour comes
to appear as a living and thus alien thing.
⤗The product of labour appears as an alien
property, as a mode of existence confronting
living labour as independent...; the product of
labour, objectified labour, has been endowed by
living labour with a soul of its own, and
establishes itself opposite living labour as an
alien power⤁. Living labour ⤗repulses this
realization from itself as an alien reality⤁,
and hence posits itself as a form of
⤗not-being⤁ compared to the being of this
alien power. But since this alien power is so
powerful, labour posits itself ⤗as the being of
its not-being⤁. Thus the trouble with dead
labour is that it under the rule of capital it
refuses to stay dead: like the vampire, it
returns to thrive off and control the living.
Capital thus appears as dead labour turned into a
form of life which in turn destroys the workers.
Capital in this sense is both dead (labour) and
living (power). It is a ⤗mechanical monster⤁,
or ⤗animated monster⤁, a ⤗monstrous
objective power⤁. It is, in Gothic terminology,
undead.
It is this distinction between living labour
and the dead labour embodied in capital on the
one hand, and the fact of capital as a living
exploitative and alien undead power on the other,
that provides the initial aptness of the vampire
image. But once the aptness of Marx⤁s image is
recognized a host of connected readings follow.
Because the production of surplus value relies on
living labour working on dead labour, the length
of the working day is of crucial political
importance, since without any controls on the
working day capital can literally work the
proletariat to death. ⤗By extending the working
day, therefore, capitalist production...not only
produces a deterioration of human labour-power by
robbing it of its normal moral and physical
conditions of development and activity, but also
produces the premature exhaustion and death of
this labour-power itself⤁. Thus the struggle
for legal limits on the working day is nothing
less than a struggle through which workers can be
saved ⤗from selling themselves and their
families into slavery and death⤁. Given the
political importance attached to the length of
the working day, it is unsurprising to find that
the three times that Marx uses the vampire
explicitly in Capital all occur in the chapter on
the working day; it is also in this chapter that
the Wallachian Boyar makes his appearance.
This argument also sheds a little more light
on the question of alienation from Marx⤁s
earlier work. For the sake of brevity, we can
identify two aspects of Marx⤁s arguments
concerning alienation. On the one hand, Marx⤁s
argument is that under the rule of capital human
beings are alienated from the activity of labour,
from the product and from other human beings and
thereby also from themselves. This argument
relies in part on Marx⤁s related argument
concerning the sensuous creature. In damaging
human beings capital damages them as sensuous
creatures - feeling, experiencing, sensing
creatures. To bring this point home Marx reverses
Max Stirner⤁s comments on sensuousness. Marx
cites Stirner as conceiving of sensuousness as a
vampire: ⤗sensuousness, like a vampire, sucks
all the marrow and blood from the life of man⤁.
But for Marx the reverse is true: sensuousness is
the foundation of our species-being; it is the
vampire-like capital that is the death of true
sensuousness. Thus only with the supersession of
private property will human sensuousness be able
to come into its own. Only under communism will
the human senses be able to be realized in the
fullest sense, and man once more be able to feel
like a genuinely living creature, as opposed to
one ruled by the dead (capital). Only vampires
find anything sensuous in the dead.
On the other hand, Marx⤁s also points out
that although sensuous powers are alienated under
the rule of capital, the capitalist is able to
recuperate the estranged sensuality through the
power of capital itself. Everything which capital
takes from us in terms of life and humanity is
restored to the capitalist in the form of money
and wealth. Thus everything which we are unable
to do, money can do for us: ⤗it can eat, drink,
go dancing, go to the theatre, it can appropriate
art, learning, historical curiosities, political
power, it can travel, it is capable of doing all
these things for you⤁. Capital here becomes an
alien body, a monster which participates in
pleasures beyond the reach of the bulk of the
population. And the more the capitalist forswears
any sensuous delights, the more fulfilment he may
reap second-hand, so to speak. Once more capital
becomes an image of the living dead. This
argument is developed in Capital into an account
of commodity fetishism. While many writers have
highlighted the ⤗metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties⤁ that run through Marx⤁s
discussion in the section on the fetishism of the
commodity and its secret, what is relevant here
is that the fetish in question concerns something
Marx is describing as dead. Because capital is
dead labour, the desire to live one⤁s life
through commodities is the desire to live one⤁s
life through the dead. What Marx is doing here is
identifying nothing less than the ⤗necromancy
that surrounds the products of labour⤁ (a
necromancy, note, that ⤗vanishes as soon as we
come to other forms of production⤁). The
⤗horror⤁ of fetishism is of course that it
conjures up ⤗fantastic⤁ - because
⤗transcendent⤁ and ⤗mysterious⤁ - beings.
But the horror also lies in the fact that these
beings are conjured up out of the dead. On this
basis we might say that the ⤗secret⤁ of
commodity fetishism is that it allows the
commodity fetish to partake of the realm of the
dead. The trick of fetishism is thus that it is
the inorganic realm of the dead which nonetheless
makes the dead appear alive. The vampire motif is
thus particularly apt in this context for the
vampire is dead and yet not dead: s/he is
⤗undead⤁ in the sense that s/he is a
⤗dead⤁ person who manages to live thanks to
the sensuousness of the living. In being brought
back to life in this way the vampire (that is,
capital) comes to rule.
Marx, contra cultural studies
Let us finish by getting back to the question of
CPE. In one sense when Marx was using the vampire
he was employing an imaginative and rhetorical
literary device, one gleaned not from ⤗classic
literature⤁ as many of his allusions are, nor
from any of the ⤗great thinkers⤁ he so often
refers to either directly or elliptically, but
one which plays on a common belief within popular
culture. But this was not simply a rhetorical
device; nor was it simply an imaginative
narrative mode. For Marx uses it to illustrate
one of the central dynamics of capitalist
production: its tendency to suck the very life
out of the working class.
Marx⤁s use of the metaphor is thus far more
sophisticated than that suggested by many
cultural analyses. Marx is not just suggesting
that capital and the vampire are somehow alike in
constantly sucking or consuming the life and
activity of their victims, but is making
suggestive comments about the connection between
capital and death. Writing for readers reared on
and steeped in the central motifs of popular
literature, Marx thus invoked one of its most
powerful cultural metaphors to force upon his
readers a sense of the appalling nature of
capital: its blood-sucking tendency and thus its
affinity with death. It⤁s a cultural reference
with which his readers would have been familiar
and about which there could be no ambiguity. It
is neither a clever reference to ⤗otherness⤁
nor a cheeky hint about sexuality (this is Marx,
after all, not Engels), but a straightforward and
deeply political point about how year in and year
out capital systematically destroys the lives of
countless human beings. The implication of this
is that the approach to the vampire which simply
says the vampire ⤗represents⤁ capital and
that this is why Marx uses the notion, have
missed the point, assimilating Marx⤁s position
to those of a thousand others. In so doing
cultural studies has given us yet another flavour
of Marx-lite. Marx becomes detached from the
critique of political economy and presented
instead as a cultural theorist like all the
others; the truly original dimension of his work,
the dimension on which he aimed to be judged in
the most scholarly as well as the most political
terms, gets left behind.
That this is so might tell us something
important about the ⤗discipline⤁ of cultural
studies and its relation to Marx. As is well
known, the emergence of cultural studies was
closely tied with Marxism in Britain. But despite
this - or perhaps because of it? - cultural
studies has always had a decidedly fractured
relationship to Marxism. Stuart Hall once
commented that cultural studies can be seen as
⤗working within shouting distance of Marxism,
working on Marxism, working against Marxism,
working with it, working to try to develop
Marxism⤁. However much that may have been true
historically, the account of the vampire I have
presented here suggests that too many cultural
theorists have given up reading Marx in any
sustained fashion. Where once this working
on/against/within produced work of enormous
importance and enviable quality, Marx appears now
to be barely read by a large number of cultural
theorists. This is shame since, to take one
simple metaphor, a more careful reading of Marx
may well offer cultural theorists more than they
realise. Whatever one feels about Marx⤁s use of
the vampire that I have presented here, it cannot
be denied that Marx had a far more credible grasp
on what he was doing when he invoked the vampire
to describe capital. Cultural studies, in
contrast, has tended to view the vampire through
a distorting lens in which the vampire⤁s
Otherness and subversiveness appears everywhere.
This is part of a far more widespread
de-politicization within cultural studies, which
has become so dominated by a relativist orthodoxy
that taking up a clearly held political position
has become almost impossible. The obsession with
⤗difference⤁ and ⤗Otherness⤁ has made
cultural studies more or less unable to hold a
political position other than one which idealizes
a politics of principled uncertainty. Or, worse,
one might even suggest that it has in turn
misrecognized this principled uncertainty and
interest in otherness as the only political
position worth holding. Either way, politics is
thereby subsumed into the cultural.78 And since
the cultural is all about recognizing difference
and otherness, so the simple reassertion of these
themes becomes the only politics possible. Jessop
has rightly pointed out that ⤗although every
social practice is semiotic (insofar as practices
entail meaning), no social practice is reducible
to semiosis⤁.79 But in cultural studies rather
a lot is reduced precisely to semiotics. And this
has a substantive political implication. Marx⤁s
critique of political economy was founded on the
assumption that the power of theory lies in its
ability to transform consciousness, to change
people and simultaneously spur them to change the
world. He thus uses the notion of the vampire as
an imaginative device to show how capitalism is
literally founded on the death and constant
horror of exploitation. In cultural studies, in
contrast, the metaphorical is always given more
weight than the literal. Debates about the
vampire thus get reduced to their metaphorically
exciting and/or subversive Otherness. Where Marx
wanted to spur people into historical action, to
liberate the living from the rule of the vampire
capital, cultural studies collapses history into
a universal cod-psychology regarding the
liberating power of Otherness (and thus tales of
its own fantastic, but ultimately fake,
subversiveness). The outcome of this is the
danger that capital itself goes uncriticised and
unchallenged.81
I suggest that this has potentially huge
implications for the cultural turn taken by CPE.
It has been pointed out that in CPE both history
and institutions continue to matter in economic
and political dynamics.82 But it is worth noting
that cultural turns can sometimes leave history
and institutions behind. CPE needs to learn from
this experience. For while it may well be a way
for political economy to incorporate key
dimensions of the more general recent ⤗cultural
turn⤁, it needs to be aware that cultural turns
can sometimes turn out to be political wrong
turns.83 I would therefore like to add a further,
more explicitly political injunction, to the five
research injunctions that Sum and Jessop suggest
lie within the cultural turn in political
economy: that we retain the political project
inherent in Marx⤁s original critique of
political economy. Doing so need not mean
eschewing all the imaginative delights that the
⤗cultural⤁ might bring; quite the opposite,
as Marx⤁s own use of all sorts of cultural
metaphors and imaginative motifs shows. But it
would mean that keeping in sight the devastating
effects of capital that Marx was intending to
expose in his critique of political economy.
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Notes
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