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Although today’s undergraduates may not have considered the implications of class struggle, they are generally well-versed in the intricacies of vampire lore. This article outlines how the vampire metaphor can serve as a valuable pedagogical tool for introducing students to fundamental concepts in Marxist thought. As opposed to the supernatural vampires featured in Stoker’s Dracula or Meyer’s Twilight saga, this approach treats capitalism as a form of economic vampirism—with the capitalist taking on the role of the vampire and the worker relegated to its prey. The article further extends the vampire metaphor and demonstrates how it can be used to teach the Marxist perspectives on class conflict, alienation, and false consciousness.
“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” claimed Karl Marx in Capital, his multi-volume magnum opus. Elsewhere in Capital, he wrote of “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor” and explained that “the vampire will not lose its hold . . . so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” Marx’s partner-in-crime, Friedrich Engels—equally enamored with this hemovoric horror metaphor—referred to “the vampire property-holding class” in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England.
While it is true that vampirism was a common metaphor for Marx when discussing capitalism, it was not his only use of occult imagery to describe the conditions of the worker and the problems of capital. Writer Christopher Frayling explained, “Karl Marx enjoyed reading the horror tales of Hoffman and Dumas père for relaxation at bedtime. When he was seeking a compelling image to characterize the attributes of capital . . . he chose a whole series of fantasy images, whose unifying theme was blood.” Marx notably utilized the imagery of anthropophagism and lycanthropy, proferring phrases like “the cannibalism of counter-revolution” and “the werewolf’s hunger for surplus labor.” Had he lived in a later period, it is not difficult to imagine Marx using a different metaphor for capital that could have superseded all three of these iconic images—a metaphor that could incorporate the undead lifeforce-draining bloodlust of the vampire, the ouroboric consumption of the cannibal, and the monstrously inhuman marked nature of the werewolf—and that metaphor would be what we now call the living dead, the walking dead, the zombie.
https://lithub.com/the-zombies-of-karl-marx-horror-in-capitalisms-wake/
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