\u2018Capital,\u2019 Marx famously tells us, \u2018is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.\u2019 Under capitalism, production consumes living labour to create value-larded commodities, which are sold for more than the bearers of that labour were reimbursed, thus realising their surplus value in the monetary form of profit, which can finally be reinvested to engineer more and greater production processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this kind of exploitation is not just a matter of short-changing dispossessed workers who own nothing but their labour. Market competition encourages the reduction of labour time to a minimum while simultaneously positing labour power as the sole source of value. With this structural determination, which encourages the destructive pressurisation of human labour by the acceleration and intensification of production processes, comes the crunching of bones, the rending of muscle, and the liquefaction of brains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Capital, in this view, is a meatgrinder that crushes human lives into sellable commodities<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We need only think of the deformations, injuries, and fatalities caused by strained working conditions at every level of capitalist industry, from neurological trauma through to heart attacks, right down to broken bones, amputated limbs and mass deaths. Outside of those instances, every minute and every hour spent in wage labour is another minute and another hour in which our bodies are wired to a vast machine that only lives by draining our life substances. Capital is indeed a kind of predatory vampirism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or, in an altogether more grotesque formulation, \u2018Capital given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by the consumption of which the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing labourers are reproduced and new labourers are begotten.\u2019 Capital, in this view, is a meatgrinder that crushes human lives into sellable commodities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Descriptions like this get to the very essence of life under capitalism. They remind us how bodies and brains are mutilated into commodities, and how commodities are in fact the mutilated substance of our fellow humans. Just about everything with which we interact, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, not to mention our myriad technologies, has only come to exist through bone-crushing, limb-tearing and physically as well as socially and spiritually ruinous exploitation, usually taking place at some distance from the point of consumption. The consumption necessary to replenish one\u2019s labour power, or to even survive, requires the ingesting of our fellow humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018We may say that surplus value rests on a natural basis,\u2019 Marx reminds those for whom this appears as anything other than horror, \u2018but this is permissible only in the very general sense that there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from disburdening himself of the labour requisite for his own existence and burdening another with it, any more, for instance, than unconquerable natural obstacles prevent one man from eating the flesh of another.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ceaseless horror<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
That capital is synonymous with horror holds currency within socialist and communist thought. In 1916, approximately one year before the Russian revolution, Lenin reasoned for the unspeakable bloodbath that would almost certainly result from an armed insurrection. His justification for probable carnage reframed it as a revolutionary necessity, whose exceptional status would distinguish it from the violence inherent to the incumbent mode of production. \u2018Capitalist society,\u2019 he maintained, \u2018is and has always been horror without end.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What we might call the horror film\u2019s political unconscious became a staple of the genre, modulating in response to the transformations of capitalism<\/p>\n\n\n\n
History teaches us that Lenin and the Bolsheviks ultimately failed to dispose of their adversary\u2019s undead corpse, which continued to stalk the earth post-1917, and so Lenin\u2019s diagnosis has remained agonisingly true. Theodor Adorno later looked back on the culture Lenin once sought to annihilate: \u2018If one were drafting an ontology in accordance with the basic state of facts, of the facts whose repetition makes their state invariant, such an ontology would be pure horror.\u2019 Even though capitalism would continue to grow and mutate, to expand its reach and accelerate its internal processes, it would always do so in coherence with the diagnosis of ceaseless horror.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, as we live through a global pandemic that makes body horror an inescapable reality, it is worth remembering that the nightmarish virulence of Covid-19 owes its existence not only to the vampire\u2019s animal associate, the bat<\/a>, but also to the machinations of capital in the forms of industrial deforestation<\/a>, concentrated urban poverty<\/a>, worsened public health systems<\/a> and a world trade system for which Wuhan is a global centre of commodity production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If a critical understanding of capitalism brings us face to face with horror, can horror, as a popular narrative genre, help us orient ourselves politically within capitalism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Think of the most obnoxiously violent B-grade horror cinema, the kind of horror whose various iterations visually and narratively privilege the abject moment when human bodies are destroyed in an explosion of blood and guts, often to a booming synth score. This kind of filmmaking was popularised in the 1960s by the scuzzy exploitation films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and then fully commercialised in the 1970s by George A Romero\u2019s zombie epics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So many horror films of this sort seem to inhabit a world wherein the working poor are made to face off against the industrial and financial elite. Their narratives exploit and explode a social order structured around the antagonism between two irreconcilable classes, one of which works while the other accumulates the value of that work. The sheer delight in what only appears to be violence for its own sake is a way of narrating the everyday sufferings of the overworked, unemployed and disenfranchised. The carnage is also a way of imagining the most sadistic revenge possible, an insurgent barbarism that reacts punitively to generations upon generations of one-sided, top-down class warfare. Their violence is the insurrection in miniature: less the return of the repressed than a full-blooded revenge of the oppressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This first wave of popularity for this kind of filmmaking came at a time when the American economy, which had been in a state of boom since the second world war, was entering a major crisis. This crisis \u2013 caused by declining rates of profit from industrial manufacture and worsened by a global oil crisis and a series of protracted wars with socialist states \u2013 looms large in horror films from the period. That is what we see, for instance, in films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre<\/em><\/a> from 1974. Here a slaughterhouse foreclosure and a petrol shortage combine to generate the conditions for scenes of cannibalism, which are variously punctuated by tableaux redolent of the ongoing war in Vietnam. This redolence is only strengthened by the film\u2019s more recent remake, which backfills the narrative with a plot about enlisting to go fight the Viet Cong.<\/p>\n\n\n\nEat the rich<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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