If you feel exhausted at the end of the work day, your eyes
are tired and blurry, your back is sore, your hands hurt from carpel tunnel or
repetitive motions; or perhaps too many cuts and bruises, knees aching from bending
down, or coughing from what is in the work air. And your mind plain doesn’t want to do anything but watch shitty TV and
drink. Then you are experiencing the ‘body’ impact of capitalism. Not just from work, but from alienated
work. If you are in some countries, you
hope to make it to ‘retirement’ – that pleasant land beyond forced labor - but
will you?
This book sheds light on the body-part issues that underlie the vampire/ zombie/ monster mania
of present culture, highlighting it using materialist methods. McNally wrote a chapter in the book “Catastrophism”
(reviewed below) that explained the class nature of the zombie meme. That eye-opening chapter is derived from this
book. After all, vampires didn’t come
out of nowhere. They are based on actual material life, not really on people who
literally suck blood out of necks with fangs. Count Dracula was a real person, Vlad the Impaler of Transylvania, who put enemies heads on spikes and 'drank their blood' to supposedly make himself stronger - not a fake movie character. Could the vampire fear be based on the young Millenial generation’s
trepidation towards life-long marriages or jobs, which can be arenas where
someone figuratively 'sucks the blood out of you'? Same
with zombies – do young Millenial’s want to be zombie workers, covered in scars? Or are there some young people who want to be the upscale vampires of the '90210' class of Beverly Hills? I.E., suck or be sucked?
THE GOTHIC MARX
As McNally points out, Part II of the first volume of ‘Capital’
by Karl Marx is filled with images of the brutal work endured by English
workers in the 1800s. Marx compares the
capitalists to vampires and werewolves, who literally suck the life-blood out
of the working class in the process of commodity production, turning many workers
into zombies working endless hours at little pay. Marx repeatedly likened the whole system to a
‘monstrous machine’ that preys on the bodies of the living. Marx doesn’t limit his analysis to England or Europe, but refers to the ‘monstrous’
conditions in the colonies - “Africa … a preserve for the commercial hunting of
black skins” and “the entombment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.” It is no accident that the key zombie story
in American culture originated in Haiti
out of the lives of enslaved sugar-cane workers.
Now that the conditions of the 1800s in Europe and the U.S. have been exported to Nigeria and Bangladesh
and China,
nothing really has changed except the location of the blood-sucking and
bone-breaking. The majority of people there
have also been forced off the land and into urban areas, into precarious and
dangerous employment in the ‘planet of slums,’ as Mike Davis puts it. ("Planet of Slums", reviewed below.) Where ‘the capitalized blood of children‘(Marx)
in English factories and mines is now visited on Indian and Pakistani
children. As Marx put it, capital came
into the world ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and
dirt.’
McNally calls this flavor of analysis ‘Marxist Gothic’ and
he insists this literary method was used by Marx for a reason. In the second section of Capital, Faust’s
descent into hell is consciously paralleled by Marx when he descends into a
description of the lives of English workers.
After all, pure numbers and formulas like M=MP+LP=C=M’ do not do justice
to what actually happens to many working people, soldiers and sailors when they
work under the whip of capital.
The book, “The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism,”
(reviewed below) explores what I call ‘sado-capitalism’ in the legend of
Procrustes – a Greek bandit who stretched short people or chopped off parts of
the too-long legs of tall people – all to make them ‘fit’ his iron bed, i.e. into
Margaret Thatcher’s ‘system.’ McNally
analyzes various English literary works to reveal the conditions under which
the English working classes were first cut off from the land, then forced into
factory, mine or mill labor. Through it
all he focuses on the ‘body’ issue, as capital cannot survive without using the
bodies of the living.
CULTURE REVEALS
McNally looks at Rembrandt and Hogarth paintings of
dissections, the Dickens book, ‘Barnaby Rudge’; the Shakespeare plays, ‘Coriolanus,’
and ‘King Henry the Sixth (2nd Part)’ and most importantly, Mary Shelley’s
‘Frankenstein,’ to illustrate the themes of bodily destruction and plebian
revolts in England, the birthplace of capitalism.
The latter works were all reflections of powerful
working-class rebellions in the 1600s and 1700s - Kett’s Rebellion; the Midland
Revolt, the uprising of the Luddites, the Gordon riots. Shakespeare, Dickens and even Shelley, the
most radical, were sympathetic to the rebellions but never joined them, as they
were liberals, not radicals.
McNally’s handling of “Frankenstein,” given its place in
American film history, is the most interesting.
The Monster was not a mute in the book, as Karloff insisted on playing
him in the film. Instead a good part of
the book is a paen to rebellion spoken by the monster against ‘society.’ The body parts he was made of were stolen
from executions, mortuaries and graves by Dr. Frankenstein. This practice disgusted British workers, as proletarian
bodies, even after death, were still claimed as ‘things’ and commodities by the
capitalists. (Bloomberg.com even had a story on October 17, 2013 about
the selling of hair, blood, human eggs and kidneys by desperate American
workers.) The ‘wretched’ Monster’s
speech is about revenge against Dr. Frankenstein and his family members. The ending of the book is a rebellion of
proletarian sailors against a captain who is sending their ship into the cold
of the arctic with little chance of return. All this is butchered in the
American version of the film.
McNally locates Shelley’s politics alongside her husband,
Percy Shelley, and her father, the proto-socialist & Jacobin writer William
Godwin.
Of note, the severe ‘vagrancy’ laws that were instituted
against Irish and English workers by the English ruling class in the 1600s and
1700s made a return to the U.S.
mainland in the vagrancy laws aimed against black workers in the post-Civil War
south. (See review of “Slavery by
Another Name,” reviewed below.) It
seems that much of the brutality of American life we owe to our rich English
ancestors, especially in the south. Even
the term ‘cracker’ was an insult used by propertied English referring to the
slightly ridiculous comedic skills of those dispossessed rural English
proletarians. (i.e. to ‘crack’ jokes)
Later this term was combined by black people in the south with those who
‘cracked whips’ under slavery to describe a strata of poor white workers who
lorded it over blacks as their pitiful form of class arrogance.
FANTASTIC REALISM
McNally ends his book with a section on recent vampire and
zombie news and literary stories, films and songs from Africa,
a region that is at the bottom of the capitalist world system. Africa, however, is not the only place these
stories are found – others can be located in the mountain uplands of Peru, Bolivia
and Ecuador,
where armed gringo’s are rumored to extract the fat out of children to grease
the machines of ‘El Norteno.’
Southern Africa is where
rapacious capitalism has generated wars over cell phone minerals, terminally polluted
areas around oil fields, indebted it to World Bank SAPs, begun to buy up
massive tracts of land and introduce the money/debt economy. Africa reflects
this recent investment by capital in witchy stories of cash and body parts,
which McNally points out, is not a reflection of some racist idea of
‘primitive’ culture but a reflection of the ‘now.’
The word, ‘nzambi’ is a Yoruba word describing a dead man
who can return to visit his family, to do good or evil. Stories of humans who spew money like ATMs;
of children stolen and disappeared; of people eaten by diamonds; of pythons in
prostitutes’ vaginas that collect her vomited bank notes; of a man who gains
wealth by killing his wife and drinking her blood; of the murderous harvesting
of body parts for money, or selling the skins of children; of vampire pits
beneath work sites; of people captured and turned into zombies; of witches who
accumulate huge amounts of money like magic, or dead witches that invite the
living to marry them to become rich. These
are all reflections of various forms of money magic in a society whose tribal
or family unity is breaking down to be replaced, not by capitalist industry per
se, but by a rentier economy, a financialized world of manic selling and bloody
violence over extractive commodities.
One commentator called it ‘cannibal capitalism.’ Africa is
now a victim of recolonisation and wars, not over ethnicity, but over economic
issues.
McNally highlights recent news reports out of a small
village in Nigeria,
Owerri, in which a young boy disappeared, only to have his head found, along
with 20 others, in the house of a local rich hotel owner. Riots ensued, and the stores, hotels,
Pentecostal churches and businesses of the rich were all burnt down. One rumor even insisted 200 penises were kept
in a goat’s belly in a freezer in the same house. The disappearance of children, either by
being sent off to work in other cities, and never to return, or by being killed
in road accidents, or actually kidnapped and killed or abused, is part of the
living nightmare of parents in present-day Nigeria.
McNally also looks into the Nigerian author Ben Okri and his
cycle of novels, “Famished Road,”
which depict what is happening to Nigeria under this cannibal
capitalism. Okri urbanizes the
forest-bound colonial-period writing and images of Amos Tutuola, updating it
into the sprawling mega-ghettoes of Lagos. McNally again combines political economy and
literary analysis to expose the dark reality of African capitalism – a reality
that Marx would be no stranger to.
Recently I just passed through the Zombie Pub Crawl - a street festival of zombiefication - on the West Bank in Minneapolis near our Mayday Bookstore, attended by thousands of young people dressed as zombies. However, the ostensible point of the event - consuming beer - would be different if the 'zombies' turned over a police car or marched on City Hall or the Federal Building. But they don't. And that is the tale of our mostly passive cultural environment today. Yet there is still something of a cultural criticism in this event nonetheless, which cannot be hidden. It was started by anarcho-punks, not bar owners. After all, do you want to be a zombie for your life? With enough beer, yes!
Recently I just passed through the Zombie Pub Crawl - a street festival of zombiefication - on the West Bank in Minneapolis near our Mayday Bookstore, attended by thousands of young people dressed as zombies. However, the ostensible point of the event - consuming beer - would be different if the 'zombies' turned over a police car or marched on City Hall or the Federal Building. But they don't. And that is the tale of our mostly passive cultural environment today. Yet there is still something of a cultural criticism in this event nonetheless, which cannot be hidden. It was started by anarcho-punks, not bar owners. After all, do you want to be a zombie for your life? With enough beer, yes!
And I bought it at Mayday Books!
Red Frog
October 20, 2013
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