[Marxism] Vampire capitalism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

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

Bloody Capital and Dead Labour
Cultural Studies or the Critique of Political Economy?

Mark Neocleous
Politics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH
mark.neocleous@xxxxxxxxxxxx

"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.  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 É. 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.

full: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/ias/polecon/workingpapers/5neocleous.doc


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