Monsters of the Market ─ Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism

With the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, it became not uncommon to read critiques of the big financial houses as operating a form of "zombie capitalism," while Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi was spurred to describe the investment bank Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." Such connections between capitalism and monstrosity are not new however, according to McNally (political science, York U., Canada), who argues that there is a history of body-panics under capitalism, particularly when commodification invades new spheres of social life. He analyzes stories of zombies, vampires, body-snatching, ritual-murder, organ-theft and other horrors as symbolic expressions of body integrity fears that inhere in a society in which individual survival requires the selling of one's life energies on the market. The discussion ranges across the poetics of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, vampire and zombie tales in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa, and a re-reading of Karl Marx's Capital as "a mystery-narrative that seeks out the hidden spaces in which bodies are injured and maimed by capital." Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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.