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Monsters of the Market Contents Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism By Acknowledgements ....................................................................................... ix David McNally List of Figures ................................................................................................. xi Introduction .................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism ...................................................... 17 ‘Save my body from the surgeons’ .......................................................... 20 The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order ..... 23 Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons ................................................................................................. 37 Anatomy and the corpse-economy .......................................................... 51 Monsters of rebellion ................................................................................. 59 Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: Rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein ............................................................................................. 77 The rights of monsters: horror and the split society ............................. 88 Chapter Two Marx’s Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism ..................................................... 113 Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity ................................ 117 The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities ....................... 126 ‘As if by love possessed’: vampire-capital and the labouring body ... 132 Zombie-labour and the ‘monstrous outrages’ of capital ...................... 141 Money: capitalism’s second nature ......................................................... 148 ‘Self-birthing’ capital and the alchemy of money ................................. 151 Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation ..... 156 Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism ................ 163 LEIDEN • BOSTON ‘Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore’ ... 171 2011 viii • Contents Chapter Three African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation ............. 175 Acknowledgements Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new ......... 186 Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism .................................................... 193 African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities ............................... 201 The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation ........... 210 Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa ............................................ 213 Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers This book has been a long time coming. I hope it is better for the wait. I ſrst of the Earth .............................................................................................. 228 started work on it in 2003, only to have my labours interrupted by a three- year stint (2005–8) as chair of the Department of Political Science at York Conclusion Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia ....................... 253 University. When I resumed this study, global capitalism had entered into its most profound crisis since the 1930s, adding a special resonance to the References ....................................................................................................... 271 themes I explore here. Index ................................................................................................................ 291 While there are many sources for the reƀections developed here, my ideas on several of these topics developed in a sort of dialogue with the work of a number of outstanding scholars, comrades and friends: Himani Bannerji, Susan Buck-Morss, Robin D.G. Kelley, Peter Linebaugh, and Ellen Meiksins Wood, in particular. In some cases, their inƀuence on this book will be obvi- ous, in others less so. But all of them have ſgured importantly in shaping the very questions I have posed and some of the ways I have tried to answer them. Parts of this work have been presented at seminars sponsored by the Center for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, the Historical Materialist Research Network at the University of Manitoba, and at confer- ences in London, Toronto and Amherst organised by the journals Historical Materialism and Rethinking Marxism. I thank all the organisers and participants at these events for their comments and criticisms. Thanks also to Pablo Ida- hosa, who generously read an early version of what is now Chapter Three and offered invaluable suggestions and criticism, not all of which I have heeded, as he probably expected. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Ben Fine who greatly encouraged me in this project and provided thoughtful com- ments on the whole manuscript, and to Ben Maddison and Alan Sears for the abiding interest they took in this work. Huge thanks as well to Véronique Bertrand-Bourget whose incredible conscientiousness and good humour when it came to checking footnotes and references helped preserve my sanity as I prepared the ſnal manuscript for publication. x • Acknowledgements As beſts a work about monsters, this book had a bizarre birth, having been Introduction twice rejected, much like Frankenstein’s Creature, by publishers who had ini- tially embraced it. Notwithstanding universally favourable reviews, this ‘hid- eous progeny’, to use Mary Shelley’s term for her great novel, was thus twice orphaned. Its monstrous transdisciplinarity – crossing social history, cultural studies, political economy, and literary theory – scandalised some publishers, while uncertainty about its marketability discouraged others. I was fortunate throughout these experiences to receive ongoing encouragement from Sebas- We live in an age of monsters and of the body-pan- tian Budgen and Peter Thomas, who urged me to bring this work to the dis- ics they excite. The global economic crisis that broke tinguished Historical Materialism Book Series with Brill and Haymarket. That I over the world in 2008–9 certainly gave an exclama- have now done, with great thanks to both of them. tion-mark to this claim, with Time magazine declar- The people with whom I most intimately share my life have been unwaver- ing the zombie ‘the ofſcial monster of the recession’, ing in their love and support over the years in which Monsters of the Market while Pride and Prejudice and Zombies rocketed up took shape. I had the great joy, yet again, of sharing all phases of my work bestseller-lists, and seemingly endless numbers of on this project with my partner, Sue Ferguson, who offered advice and stead- vampire- and zombie-ſlms and novels ƀooded the fast support every step of the way, while reading and commenting on vari- market.1 As banks collapsed and global corporations ous drafts. I hope I have adequately conveyed my gratitude to her. Our sons wobbled, and millions were thrown out of work, Adam, Sam and Liam have been most intrigued by the idea that their dad is pundits talked of ‘zombie banks’, ‘zombie econom- writing about monsters, none more so than Liam, who at a very early age has ics’, ‘zombie capitalism’, even a new ‘zombie poli- developed his own fascination with rebel-monsters from Malcolm X to the tics’ in which the rich devoured the poor.2 But while outlaw-pirates of the eighteenth-century Flying Gang. It is only ſtting that I zombies took centre-stage, vampires too made their dedicate this work to him. mark, so to speak, particularly in one American journalist’s widely-cited declaration that Goldman Sachs, America’s most powerful investment bank, resembled ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’.3 Hav- ing colonised much of mass-culture, monsters also inſltrated the discourse of world-leaders. ‘We know very well who we are up against, real monsters’, 1. Grossman 2009; Austen and Grahame-Smith 2009. See also Bilson 2009, and Edg- cliffe-Johnson 2008. Also on the proliferation of vampires in mass-culture see Schneller 2009. 2. See Fine 2009, pp. 885–904; Harman 2009; Giroux 2009. 3. Taibbi 2009. 2 • Introduction Introduction • 3 proclaimed the president of Ecuador in late 2008 in a stinging attack on the No great investigative rigours are required to discover zombies and vam- international banks and bondholders who hold his country’s debt.4 Only a few pires marauding across movie- and television-screens, or haunting the pages days earlier, Germany’s president told interviewers that ‘global ſnancial mar- of pulp-ſction. Tales of bodysnatching of abduction, ritual-murder and organ- kets are a monster that must be tamed’.5 Compelling as such proclamations are theft traverse folklore, science-ſction, ſlm, video and print-media.7 As with all they also risk trivialising what is genuinely monstrous about the existential such cultural phenomena, these stories and legends speak to real social prac- structures of modern life. For modernity’s monstrosities do not begin and end tices and to the symbolic registers in which popular anxieties are recorded. with shocking crises of ſnancial markets, however wrenching and dramatic After all, organ-selling is in fact a growing industry, based on commercial these may