This is not a new book, but since it’s Halloween, I thought it was a good opportunity to raise it like a spectre again for people who might not be familiar with it. 

Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism is a unique look at how socialists have used folklore and horror as analogies and metaphors for capitalism. Written during and published after the 2008-9 world economic crisis, which got turned into a social crisis for the rest of us through austerity and declining living standards, McNally comments on the rise of new terms to describe these ailing corporations – ‘zombie banks’. Neither alive (making a profit) nor truly dead, because they were kept breathing only by the state. Banks and other financial institutions were increasingly described as vampires, blood suckers and parasites preying on living labour.  

Zombie capitalism described the period immediately after the financial crash in which Lehman Brothers collapsed, more regulation was introduced, and some bankers had to pretend to be sorry for a couple of years.  Perhaps a new way of thinking about our current death cult system galloping us all towards planetary environmental catastrophe is a monsterology?  

David McNally starts with a look at the OG science fiction blockbuster – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a gothic horror novel started when she was 18 years old, as she holidayed with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron by Lake Geneva.  The scientist playing god, drunk on hubris, creating a being that he reviles and hates what he has made, is analogous to the supremacy of the capitalist class, forming the working class through brute force, enclosing them off the land and forcing them into cities and towns to work in their factories. 

But the capitalist class hates the ‘poor’, hates what they have created.  Isn’t the corporeal dismemberment of Viktor Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ a reminder of so many workers with mutilated bodies, injuries, diseases and living in poverty, a state which horrifies the capitalists in their mansions and their posh banquets, paid for by the toil of those same workers.  

As McNally says, for many people, “bourgeois relations are still experienced as strange and horrifying”. The horror of capitalism isn’t just in the immediate but in the secret circuits of capital that are not immediately apparent. Like a phantom, capital is an  “elusive power that grows and multiplies through their deployment remains unseen, un-comprehended”. 

The role of abstract labour in Marx is central to his critique of capitalism. The way that the capitalists detach our energies, our creativity, our intellect, metabolism of our bodies and force us into work, buying our labour power as if it were any other commodity. Capital takes possession of us, psychically mutilates us and drains our life force. Only when we are older and less useful to the bosses do they allow us to retire, the prime of our lives given over to their machines of production and exchange.

Capitalist operations mutilate the worker and end up ‘turning him into a fragment of himself’. Marx even calls this a ‘demonic power’. Marx loved quoting Goethe’s Faust in his work, the cautionary tale of an intellectual seduced by the Devil into seeking knowledge, pleasure, and control over other humans, even if it leads to their destruction (as Mephistopheles smirks during his corruption of Faust, “I am the spirit of perpetual negation”).

Monsters of the Market is a fascinating read with a wide range of analysis. Early chapters looking at the battles against grave robbing ‘surgeons’ by the London poor in the 17th century and the fascination with dissections and anatomy as the enlightenment and modernity developed in places like the Dutch Republic show the morbid curiosity of the human body wrapped up in scientific advances, all the better to establish techniques for labouring processes.

The role of folklore about modern-day monsters and supernatural forces in sub-Saharan African states and the Andes in South America, as people reacted to economic and social crises in recent times. Is it no wonder that in countries devastated by predatory capitalism and colonialism, the local myths of ‘zombie workers’ who have had their souls sucked out are so common?  

Books like these are helpful in helping us to think critically about capitalism – a monstrous system that is not natural or normal but an imposed economic model that benefits a tiny minority over the rest of us. The case study on Enron and the “occult economy of late capitalism” is definitely worth reading, not just because of what happened to Enron but what it tells us about capitalism more generally; “beneath the esoteric circuits of finance lie material practices of plunder of the world’s resources and its labourers.” 

And given the AI boom of the last couple of years, how can we not help but think of monsterology! The predatory, grave-robbing, soul sucking rise of AI, robbing from the creative and intellectual work of human beings to make profits for companies, whilst burning hot data centres burn through gallons of water in minutes to keep their servers cool. These flesh-eating ghouls, like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who said that his creation might end up destroying the Earth, but in the meantime, we just have to live with it. 

McNally ends on a positive note, stating that the mutilated bodies of workers under capitalism can free themselves, overthrow their masters, and, in doing so, find a new striking individuality within a new society. Our labouring bodies can be rescued from near death, and we can have a new life, overthrowing the vampires, the ghouls, and the demonic forces that dominate our lives and creating a new world of abundance and plenty for all. 

So this Halloween, whether you’re watching an old horror classic, partying with friends, or scaring neighbours by going trick-or-treating when you are clearly way too old, think about driving that stake through the heart of global capitalism, too.

Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, published in Hardback by Historical Materialism in 2011 and in paperback by Haymarket in 2012. 

Art Book Review Books Capitalism China Climate Emergency Conservative Government Conservative Party COVID-19 EcoSocialism Elections Europe Fascism Film Film Review France Gaza Imperialism Israel Italy Keir Starmer Labour Party Long Read Marxism Marxist Theory Palestine pandemic Protest Russia Solidarity Statement Trade Unionism Ukraine United States of America War