From: Andrew Brown (A.Brown@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK)
Date: Wed Oct 26 2005 - 04:51:14 EDT
Hi, Actually I think the notion of 'undead' is entirely in keeping with Riccardo's position and Marx's. Yes constant capital is dead labour but the whole point is that, as part of capital, dead labour *actively* feeds off the living. So it isn't ordinary dead labour, it is *not* analgous to dead people per se. Rater it is analogous to a dead person who is active and interacting with the living. Now, one way of putting this is that value is 'ghostly'. This is exactly how Marx does put it prior to introducing the capital form. However, in the capital form then its not just a ghost but a blood (living labour) sucking ghost so the switch to a vamprie analogy, to the 'undead', seems entirely appropriate. Many thanks Andy -----Original Message----- From: OPE-L on behalf of Jerry Levy Sent: Tue 25/10/2005 13:59 To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Cc: Subject: Re: [OPE-L] The HM [Haunted and Mysterious] Conference > If capital is dead labour sucking living > labour to grow as more dead labour, where's > the problem in the analogy with vampires? Riccardo: You have not watched enough Gothic horror films. Vampires in literature and film are NOT dead -- they are NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD. They are *UNDEAD*. The vampire analogy that you, following Marx, are asserting would only work if the capital represented _undead_ labor and when bitten by the vampire-capital workers become _slaves_ to capital. That, however, makes no sense if it meant to describe the exploitation of workers by capital. ******************* It is worthwhile to recall that Bram Stoker began research for _Dracula_ in 1890 and published that book in 1897. This, of course, was decades after the first edition of Volume I of _Capital_ was published (1867). This suggests that the vampire that Marx was thinking of when he wrote the famous vampire quote was _not_ Dracula_. It's also worthwhile noting that the Dracula Myth was (very!) loosely based on the legend of an actual historical character -- Vlad the Impaler, a Rumanian royal from the 14th Century. It was Stoker, however, who transformed the bloody Vlad the Impaler legend into a _vampire_ legend. Note further that the vampire legend is also associated with the superstitions that arose in Medieval Europe under feudalism and in that sense are cultural remnants of feudalism that survived into the modern bourgeois epoch. For the analogy to work (no pun intended) wage-workers have to be re-conceived as *not* workers. In solidarity, Jerry
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