Verlagstext:
Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, this book links tales of monstrosity from England to 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, McNally offers a novel account of the cultural economy of the global market-system.
Stimmen zum Buch:
"This outstanding new work from David McNally is indispensable for serious monster fans and radicals both - and almost giddyingly so for those of us who are both."
-China Miéville, author of Embassytown
"McNally delivers a tour de force analysis of global capital from the upper registers of derivatives trading down to popular fables of African monsters … Monsters of the Market is one of the best books I've read in years and it will definitely stimulate thinking about the nature of globalization, the labor theory of value and the relationship between commodities and speculative objects, collective fantasy, and other nebulous problems confronting historical materialism in the future."
-Mark Worrell, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
"The most vicious of monsters are those with human faces. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism explores Marx's consistent use of folklore and monster as metaphor in his criticism of capitalism. From Frankenstein and the dissection of the market, vampires that feed off the misery of others, among other ideas ... Monsters of the Market is an intriguing way of explorig economics, very much recommended reading."
-Midwest Book Review
/ AUS DEM INHALT: / / /
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
List of Figures xi
Introduction 1
Chapter One Dissecting the Labouring Body: Fmnkenslein, Political
Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism 17
'Save my body from the surgeons' ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo o oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 20
The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order 00 000 23
Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English
commons 37
Anatomy and the corpse-economy 51
Monsters of rebellion59
Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: Rebel-monsters in the age of
Frankenstein oooooo.ooooooooooooooooooo o 77
The rights of monsters: horror and the split society 88
Chapter Two Marx's Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the
Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism 113
Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity 117
The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities 126
'As if by love possessed': vampire-capital and the labouring body 000 132
Zombie-labour and the 'monstrous outrages' of capital 141
Money: capitalism's second nature 148
'Self-birthing' capital and the alchemy of money 151
Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation 00000 156
Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism ooooooo o oooooo.163
'Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore' .0 171
viii o Contents
Chapter Three African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation 175
Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new 186
Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult
economies of globalising capitalism 193
African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities 201
The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation 210
Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa 213
Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers
of the Earth 228
Conclusion Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia 253
References 271
Index 291