Happy Halloween from the Vampires of Capital
How an occult reading of Marx can help us exorcise the demons of capitalism.
The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore once said that she read Marx’s Capital as if it were a Victorian novel. This is brilliant advice, and Marx seems to encourage it. After many pages of dry economics, he veers headlong into folkloric and supernatural language. Here’s a taste:
Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day.
Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
It’s even there in the first line of his most famous piece of writing, the Communist Manifesto:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre…
Marx seemed to love a good ghost story — according to the writer Christopher Frayling, he read the horror fiction of Alexandre Dumas and E.T.A. Hoffmann. So, as spooky season descends, let’s explore how Marx’s monsters reveal deep truths about the horror show that is capitalism.
The egregore and the vampire
Exo Studies scholar, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, classifies egregores as archetypes or interpsychic beings (“we-beings”) which “emerge from the collective minds of multiple objective beings… through the power of focused or repeated cultural awareness.” According to occultist writer Astennu Sever, “Egregores can best be described as spiritual entities that feed off the thoughts and energy of a unified multitude.”
Once summoned, egregores take on a life of their own. Like us, their highest priority is usually survival — ensuring that the rituals sustaining them continue to be enacted. But they often have other desires, too, and use the bodies of humans to pursue them. Sever writes that egregores “can possess lawyers, priests, soldiers and accountants to take up the sword and fight for a symbolic representation of a spiritual reality which has no bearing on their personal well-being, and is in fact often detrimental to it.”
By Esbjörn-Hargens’ and Sever’s definitions, Marx describes egregore possession in Volume I of Capital: “As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour.”
Egregores are shape-shifters, taking different forms in different times and places. “Like all spirits that can be summoned, egregores can assume different appearances,” Sever writes. “Here, as in other places, we must distinguish between the egregore in its true form that contains all of its inherent possibilities, with the manifested form that is in essence only one of those possibilities.”
According to Marx, capital is a shape-shifter par excellence. It goes from its money form — perhaps its “true form” in Sever’s words — into its forms as “variable capital” and “constant capital.” Variable capital is labor (i.e. wages and benefits). Constant capital is the means of production: the tools, machinery, raw materials, and built environment required for producing goods and services. Some portion of constant capital is stationary or “fixed” in the production process while the other is transient or “circulating.” For example, in a sawmill, the giant saws would be considered fixed capital and the logs circulating capital. Commodities are the end result of production (e.g. the sawmill produces lumber). When they are sold on the market, capital returns to its money form. As shorthand, Marx calls this circuit of capital “M-C-M”: Money-Commodity-Money.
As we all know, capital doesn’t shape-shift just for fun. It transforms into constant capital, variable capital, and commodities only to become more money in the future. It wants to grow. In Marx’s words, it lives only to “valorize itself.” So, at some point in its transubstantiation — in its incarnation as myriad worldly forms — it feeds and grows. How, and on whom, does it feed?
If capital can transfer more value from workers’ labor into commodities than it pays out in wages and benefits (i.e. variable capital), it can exchange those commodities for a profit and add value to itself. Capital grows, then, only by acting as a parasite on workers, taking more value than it gives in return. Political economist Mark Neocleous notes: “Since the vampire is a parasite, Marx could have simply chosen the term ‘parasite’ or ‘leech’ or something similar; but he chose not to.” How come?
Marx writes: “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labour over immediate living labour that stamps the accumulated labour with the character of capital.” Note the distinction between “past, accumulated, materialized labour” and “living labour.” He continues: “Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labour serves living labour as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that living labour serves accumulated labour as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value.”
Marx ultimately describes capital, or accumulated labor, as “dead labor” feeding on the living. Gothic affinities notwithstanding, this is the true origin and function of the vampire metaphor, according to Neocleous:
But this was not simply a rhetorical device, for Marx uses it to illustrate one of the central dynamics of capitalist production — the distinction between living and dead labour, a distinction that picks up on a more general theme in his work: the desire to create a society founded on the living of full and creative lives rather than one founded on the rule of the dead.
The rule of the dead: capital as a real god
Although capital is cloaked in the jargon of secular economics, there’s clearly something occult or religious about it. Ordinary people, news commentators, and politicians talk about the market as if it’s a mysterious, metaphysical entity — an “invisible hand,” perhaps — which giveth and taketh away.
Capital requires rituals we know all too well: applying for jobs, working for less than we’re worth, paying rent or a mortgage, consuming, going into debt, and investing for the future. Disobedience to these rituals elicits discipline and punishment. According to Marxist theorist and machine learning engineer Ian Wright:
[Capital] can possess humans, and control them, by forcing them to work, or forcing them to accumulate. This entity directs social activity by giving and withdrawing its magical substance, which we call value. We sacrifice ourselves to it, we appease it, and we hope it will favour us.
In his 1844 “Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique” Marx describes capital — accumulated dead labor — as “an entity outside man and above man,” an “alien mediator,” and a “real God.” He clearly views it as an agent with a will of its own. According to Wright, although this real god is an actual agent, it need not have a mind or consciousness. It can be understood as an agent in the same way as a thermostat, for example: it has sensors and feedback mechanisms allowing it to maintain a goal state. Capital is a highly complex control system, in Wright’s view, whose goal is two to three percent growth per year, ad infinitum.
Around the world, wealth managers are analogous to the feedback mechanism in the thermostat, withdrawing capital from firms with lower profit projections and injecting it into those with higher ones. This provides the incentive for firms to transform themselves into lean, surplus-value creating machines. Suppressing wages and externalizing costs to public health and the environment are key strategies. Underperforming firms are starved of capital and die out. It’s a process of artificial selection through which the egregore of capital evolves vampires.
“The entirety of the world’s material resources, including the working time of billions of people, are repeatedly marshalled and re-marshalled away from low and towards high-profit activities,” writes Wright. “In the space of months, entire industrial sectors may be raised up, relocated, or thrown down.”
Exorcizing the egregore
Wright argues that the god of capital, unlike others in human history, benefits from not being named as such. To rule in the post-Enlightenment era, it must disguise itself in the language and rituals of science. By showing that the egregore has no clothes — that we really are up against an agent with its own goals, beliefs, and ways of acting on the world — do we stand a better chance of exorcizing it?
For whatever evolutionary reason, our minds seem streamlined to solve agent-related problems, not complex system-related problems. We’re social animals, after all. Philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that, by viewing complex control systems as agents with desires and beliefs, we can more easily predict their behavior and evade control. He calls this the “intentional stance.” He seemed to have artificial intelligence in mind when he published a book by the same name in 1989. According to Google Scholar, as of October 8, 2023, that book has been cited 10,577 times; about 6,000 papers pop up with search terms “intentional stance” and “artificial intelligence.” People are apparently interested. Dennett explains how it works:
First you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in many — but not all — instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.
While the egregore in the computer is worthy of discussion, the one in the financial system has been wreaking havoc for centuries. Are there any applications of Dennett’s theory for evading control by capital? To find out, we could begin with these questions: How does capital view me and my co-workers/co-tenants/co-debtors/collaborators in struggle? What does it want in this situation? What does it know or believe? Many organizers do this already, of course. The point is that we shouldn’t be deterred by the complexity of capital or the institutions acting on its behalf. By viewing them as agents, we can resist and overthrow them with relatively little knowledge of their inner workings.
Ultimately, to exorcise the egregore, we have to stop doing its rituals. But we can’t stop doing them alone. Egregores come into and fade out of existence only through collective action. As movements throughout history have shown, our strength lies in disobedience: we walk off the job, stop paying rent, default on debts, flood the streets, and build alternatives together as unified bodies. Capital is big, but we can be bigger.
Ready to become a vampire slayer? Here are three things you can do:
- Check out Ian Wright’s amazing work. His analysis is fascinating and rigorous. Plus, his website features some really cool art.
- Opt out of the seance: Post Growth Institute’s Offers and Needs Market shows us how we can meet each other’s needs beyond — and against — capitalism.
- Disobey the egregore. Organize and get involved in whatever strikes you can: rent strikes, debt strikes, and labor union strikes.
