Zombie Riots and the Real of Capital

DENNIS BÜSCHER-ULBRICH No Future for Nobody? Zombie Riots and the Real of Capital Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. (Fisher, Capitalist Realism 15) The riot is a circulation struggle because both capital and its dispossessed have been driven to seek reproduction there. […] The police now stand in the place of the economy, the violence of the economy made flesh. […] To riot is to fail the measure of the human. To fail to be the subject. (Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot 46, 125, 166) The unresolved 2007-2009 crisis of accumulation has led to the re-emer- gence in public discourse of the idea that capitalism could end. For many, it was proof of the Marxian notion that capitalist modernity has an endemic tendency towards crisis. For some, this generated hope of capitalism’s ultimate demise. For those instilled with the neoliberal be- lief that ‘there is no alternative’ and a Fukuyamaist sense of the “End of History,” however, it also boosted an already latent dystopian sense of a crisis of civilization—a civilization torn by global military, ecological, ethno-nationalist, and racial conflict. This fundamental sense of crisis ar- guably facilitated and was perhaps also facilitated by the cinematic pro- liferation of the ubiquitous theme of post-apocalypse, in general, and ‘zombie riots,’ in particular. Cultural articulations of the latter, I argue, help create or sustain a cultural imaginary of ontological crisis in which the “unconditional Real of global Capital” (Žižek, Ticklish Subject 4) can be effectively disavowed through fictionalizing one of its most overt material-symbolic symptoms: a growing global surplus proletariat of 2 No Future for Nobody? Zombie Riots and the Real of Capital dispossessed, immiserated, and commonly racialized (non-)workers “no longer directly necessary for the self-valorization of capital” (Marx 557). Anticipated perhaps by Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985), contemporary cinematic zombie spectacles such as Dawn of the Dead (2004), World War Z (2013), and Daylight’s End (2016)1— not to mention the widely successful TV-zombies of The Walking Dead (2010-2018) and Fear the Walking Dead (2015-2018)—create mise-en- scènes that allow to allegorize the condition of the surplus proletariat and related social fears of “wageless life” (Denning), while often resonating in ambivalent ways with current social and political struggles. Since the neoliberal state is at once both the precondition and result of the post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation, the present crisis of capital also expresses itself as a crisis of the state that is characterized by debt, austerity, and repression, as militarized police are concentrated in ‘zombified’ areas emptied of capital. Within this context, as noted by the Surplus Club collective, “state administration of the surplus proletariat corresponds to a globalized geographical zoning of labor forces expected to take on mounting importance in accordance with, for example, massive immigration and refugee flows, as well as an urban and suburban social division of labor” (Surplus Club, “Trapped”). Zombie riots, of course, generally promise ‘no future for nobody’ except a small Hobbesian band of human survivors. This, however, would be to ignore the various undead zombified hordes’ capacity to allegorize (the condition of) surplus populations, the racialization and abjection of “wageless life,” the return of the riot to the repertoire of social struggle, and right-wing fantasies of all-out race war. Nobody wants to be a zombie, not even the zombies. For to be superfluous to the needs of the economy and permanently excluded from capitalist exploitation means to be abject and, increasingly, to be subject to state violence and premature death. A symptomatic materialist reading of zombie riots and related post-apocalyptic spectacles would thus ‘reveal’ the Hobbesian band of survivors as exploited wage laborers threatened by superfluity and pitted against the excluded in a reactionary basic constel- lation. This would be to extend rather than reject critical readings of the zombie metaphor as a product of colonial slavery—a metaphor which 1 Next to equally telling films like Zombieland (2009), La Horde (2009), Exit Humanity (2011), 2012: Zombie Apocalypse (2012), Extinction (2015) or Train to Busan (2016), zombie video games, zombie flash mobs, etc. DENNIS BÜSCHER-ULBRICH 3 still speaks to the gendered and racialized global divisions of forced labor and rising debt (‘rising dead’) that continue to haunt neocolonial modernity (cf. Ehrenberg 32). Before returning to this argument, or rather, in order to prepare for a decidedly materialist and critical-theoretical analysis of zombie spectacles in the present conjuncture, I will first revisit Marx’s concept of “surplus populations” and its significance for understanding the spec- tacular return of the riot, especially since the turn of the century, which Joshua Clover’s historical materialist theory of riots as “circulation struggles” will help elucidate. Second, I turn to Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian- Marxist concept of the “Real of capital” and attempt to unpack Mark Fisher’s much-cited notion of post-recession neoliberalism as an undead formation that “shambles on as a zombie” (Fisher, “How to Kill a Zombie”). I do this in order to clear the way for a sustained discussion of capitalist modernity’s constitutive antagonism and neoliberalism’s relation to post-apocalyptic ‘zombie riots’ since the late 1970s. Drawing on the work of Clover, Žižek, and Stuart Hall, I will read such films as symptomatic allegories that articulate elements of displaced class struggle. Surplus Populations and Circulation Struggles In recent years, as noted by Johannes Fehrle, the more or less explicit critique of ‘consumer capitalism’ that has been a staple of the zombie genre since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) has been extended in two meaningful ways, which also shape recent post-apocalyptic zombie spectacles like World War Z (2013) and Daylight’s End (2016) as well as the numerous remakes of canonical zombie films: “On the one hand, it now extends to matters of ecology; on the other hand, a national scope of mindless consumerism has been transformed into a more threatening global one in which zombies become personifications of an increasingly mobile, increasingly visible, abject global ‘relative surplus population’” (Fehrle 531). Marx famously analyzed the production of “relative surplus populations” (vulgo: structural un-/underemployment) alongside the reproduction of the wage-relation in chapter twenty-five of Capital, where he used the term to describe that part of the workforce “no longer directly necessary for the self-valorization of capital” (Marx 557). According to 4 No Future for Nobody? Zombie Riots and the Real of Capital Marx, the extended reproduction of capital (accumulation, centraliza- tion, automation, etc.) ultimately produces a growing “surplus population,” and it is in this sense that “accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat” (764). Rather than absorbing more and more labor, capital increasingly ejects workers from the immediate process of production into the sphere of circulation: “The more extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation” (798). Joshua Clover has termed this dialectical process “the production of nonproduction” (Riot. Strike. Riot 26), which emphasizes the fact that the twin phenomena of exploitation and exclusion are not simply opposed to each other, but both mediated by the historical dynamic of capitalist accumulation. Michael Denning thus quipped that “[u]nder capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited” (“Wageless Life” 79). As the Endnotes collective further points out: “Capital may not need these workers, but they still need to work. They are thus forced to offer themselves up for the most abject forms of wage slavery [in] informal and illegal markets alongside failures of capitalist production” (Endnotes 2, “Misery and Debt” 30, qtd. in Clover 26). From the perspective of historical materialism, the persistent central- ity of race is hardly surprising. “Uneven deindustrialization,” as Clover emphasizes, “first displaces black workers into informal economies and market struggles, people who now confront extreme policing, hyperin- carceration, and the lived experience of being surplus to the needs of the economy. These are the exemplary subjects […] of a global recompo- sition of class within which the riot of surplus populations is not a likeli- hood but a certainty” (Clover, “Surplus Rebellions”). Judging from the perspective of the longue durée of chattel slavery and the capitalist plan- tation system analyzed by Marx to the African American ghetto and the carceral management of racialized surplus populations analyzed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Loïc Wacquant, and others, it seems mistaken to even try to disentangle race and class relations, especially in the United States.2 “Race,” as Stuart Hall put it, is a 2 According to Wacquant, the “neoliberal government of social insecurity” has severely weakened the “Left hand” and greatly empowered the “Right hand” of the state in order to regulate the effects of economic deregulation

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