Monsters of the Market

by McNally, David

• ISBN13: 9789004201576
• ISBN10: 9004201572
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-30
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and body-theory .

Author Biography

David McNally, Ph.D (1983) is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books and has published widely on political economy, Marxism, and contemporary social justice movements.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
List of Figures	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism	p. 17
'Save my body from the surgeons'	p. 20
The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order	p. 23
Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons	p. 37
Anatomy and the corpse-economy	p. 51
Monsters of rebellion	p. 59
Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: Rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein	p. 77
The rights of monsters: horror and the split society	p. 88
Marx's Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism	p. 113
Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity	p. 117
The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities	p. 126
'As if by love possessed': vampire-capital and the labouring body	p. 132
Zombie-labour and the 'monstrous outrages' of capital	p. 141
Money: capitalism's second nature	p. 148
'Self-birthing' capital and the alchemy of money	p. 151
Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation	p. 156
Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism	p. 163
'Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore'	p. 171
African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation	p. 175
Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new	p. 186
Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism	p. 193
African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities	p. 201
The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation	p. 210
Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa	p. 213
Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the Earth	p. 228
Conclusion Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia	p. 253
References	p. 271
Index	p. 291
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

IntroductionWe live in an age of monsters and of the body-panics they excite. The global economic crisis that broke over the world in 20089 certainly gave an exclamation-mark to this claim, with Time magazine declaring the zombie 'the official monster of the recession', while Pride and Prejudice and Zombies rocketed up bestseller-lists, and seemingly endless numbers of vampire- and zombie-films and novels flooded the market. As banks collapsed and global corporations wobbled, and millions were thrown out of work, pundits talked of 'zombie banks', 'zombie economics', 'zombie capitalism', even a new 'zombie politics' in which the rich devoured the poor. But while zombies took centre-stage, vampires too made their mark, so to speak, particularly in one American journalist's widely-cited declaration that Goldman Sachs, America's most powerful investment bank, resembled 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money'. Having colonised much of mass culture, monsters also infiltrated the discourse of world leaders. 'We know very well who we are up against real monsters', proclaimed the president of Ecuador in late 2008 in a stinging attack on the international banks and bondholders who hold his country's debt. Only a few days earlier, Germany's president told interviewers that 'global financial markets are a monster that must be tamed'. Compelling as such proclamations are they also risk trivialising what is genuinely monstrous about the existential structures of modern life. For modernity's monstrosities do not begin and end with shocking crises of financial markets, however wrenching and dramatic these may be. Instead, the very insidiousness of the capitalist grotesque has to do with its invisibility with, in other words, the ways in which monstrosity becomes normalised and naturalised via its colonisation of the essential fabric of everyday-life, beginning with the very texture of corporeal experience in the modern world. What is most striking about capitalist monstrosity, in other words, is its elusive everydayness, its apparently seamless integration into the banal and mundane rhythms of quotidian existence. This is why the most salient representations of the capitalist grotesque tend to occur in environments in which bourgeois relations are still experienced as strange and horrifying. In such circumstances, images of vampires and zombies frequently dramatise the profound senses of corporeal vulnerability that pervade modern society, most manifestly when commodification invades new spheres of social life. As the following chapters demonstrate, the persistent body-panics that run across the history of global capitalism comprise a corporeal phenomenology of the bourgeois life-world. Throwing light on the troubled relations between human bodies and the operations of the capitalist economy, such panics underline the profound experiential basis for a capitalist monsterology, a study of the monstrous forms of everyday-life in a capitalist world-system. In what follows, I seek to track several genres of monster-stories to explore what they tell us about key symbolic registers in which the experience of capitalist commodification is felt, experienced and resisted.Yet, it is a paradox of our age that monsters are both everywhere and nowhere. Let us begin with the everywhere.No great investigative rigours are required to discover zombies and vampires marauding across movie- and television-screens, or haunting the pages of pulp-fiction. Tales of bodysnatching of abduction, ritual murder and organ-theft traverse folklore, science-fiction, film, video and print-media. As with all such cultural phenomena, these stories and legends speak to real social practices and to the symbolic registers in which popular anxieties are recorded. After all, organ-selling is in fact a growing industry, based on commercial clinics that harvest parts, like kidneys, from poor people in the global South on behalf of wealthy buyers in the North. Here, then, we have monstrosities of the market enacted in actual exchanges of body-parts for money. But, the revulsion elicited by such transactions often occludes the much wider range of monstrous experiences beginning with the everyday-sale of our life-energies for a wage that define life in capitalist society. And this brings us to the nowhere-ness of monsters today. For, effectively, nowhere in the discourse of monstrosity today do we find the naming of capitalism as a monstrous system, one that systematically threatens the integrity of human personhood. Instead, monsters like vampires and zombies move throughout the circuits of cultural exchange largely detached from the system that gives them their life-threatening energies.One purpose of this book is to bring the monsters of the market out of this netherworld by exploring the zones of experience that nurture and sustain them, that provide them the blood and flesh off which they feed. Central to this exploration is the claim that tales of body-snatching, vampirism, organ-theft, and zombie-economics all comprise multiple imaginings of the risks to bodily integrity that inhere in a society in which individual survival requires selling our life-energies to people on the market. Body-panics are thus, I submit, cultural phenomena endemic to capitalism, part of the phenomenology of bourgeois life. But, because liberal ideology typically denies these quotidian horrors, apprehensions of the monstrosities of the market tend to find discursive refuge in folklore, literature, video and film. Once we turn to these media, however, we also realise that monsters of the market operate on each side of body-panic, as both perpetrators and victims. In the former camp, we have those monstrous beings vampires, evil doctors, pharmaceutical companies, body-snatchers that capture and dissect bodies, and bring their bits to market. In the camp of the victims, we find those disfigured creatures, frequently depicted as zombies, who have been turned into mere bodies, unthinking and exploitable collections of flesh, blood, muscle and tissue.At its heart, this book is about these monsters of the market and the occult economies they inhabit. In the chapters that follow, I argue that a whole genre of monster-tales, both past and present, manifest recurrent anxieties about corporeal dismemberment in societies where the commodification of human labour its purchase and sale on markets is becoming widespread. In making this argument, my study ranges from popular opposition to anatomists in early-modern England, an opposition captured in the poetics of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to vampire- and zombie-tales in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. In so doing, our investigation tracks themes of dissection, mindless labour, and the vampire-powers of capital across writers from Shakespeare to Dickens, from Mary Shelley to Ben Okri. And it re-reads Karl Marx's Capital as, amongst other things, a mystery-narrative that seeks out the hidden spaces in which bodies are injured and maimed by capital. Across all these readings, it shows how and why fears for the integrity of human bodies are so ubiquitous to modern society.Today, Sub-Saharan Africa is the site of some of the most resonant legends of market monstrosity. Ravaged by the forces of globalisation, the African sub-continent is rife today with tales of enrichment via cannibalism, vampirism and extraordinary intercourse between the living and the dead of paths to private accumulation that pass through the mysterious world of the occult. In various parts of the African subcontinent, we encounter tales of magical coins that turn people into labouring zombies, of credit-cards that provide instant commodities with