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[OPE-L] Bloody Capital and Dead Labour Cultural Studies or the Critique of Political Economy? By Mark Neocleous
- To: OPE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Subject: [OPE-L] Bloody Capital and Dead Labour Cultural Studies or the Critique of Political Economy? By Mark Neocleous
- From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2006 18:18:16 -0700
You may cite this message only if you
do not disclose who wrote it.
Title: Bloody Capital and Dead Labour Cultural Studies or
the Cri
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 hard copy provided it is not modified in
any way, the rights of the author not infringed, and the paper is not
quoted or cited without express permission of the author. Electronic
copies of this paper may not be posted on any other website 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 â¤" 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 â¤" from â¤?softeningâ¤? 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 �. 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.
__________________________________________________
Notes
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