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Re: [OPE-L] The HM [Haunted and Mysterious] Conference

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Marx was clearly referring to vampire bats, who live off other
animals by sucking their blood: the analogy was intended to imply
that capitalists were parasites.

> 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 


--
Associate Professor Ian Hunt,
Dept  of Philosophy, School of Humanities,
Director, Centre for Applied Philosophy,
Flinders University of SA,
Humanities Building,
Bedford Park, SA, 5042,
Ph: (08) 8201 2054 Fax: (08) 8201 2784

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