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Description
Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize

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.
Author Bios

David McNally is the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston and director of the Center for the Study of Capitalism. McNally is the author of seven books and has won a number of awards, including the Paul Sweezy Award from the American Sociological Associaton for his book Global Slump and the Deutscher Memorial Award for Monsters of the Market.

More Info

Publication date: August 21, 2012

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism
‘Save my body from the surgeons’
The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order
Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons
Anatomy and the corpse-economy
Monsters of rebellion
Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein
The rights of monsters: horror and the split society

2. Marx’s Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism

Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity
The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities
‘As if by love possessed’: vampire capital and the labouring body
Zombie-labour and the ‘monstrous outrages’ of capital
Money: capitalism’s second nature
‘Self-birthing’ capital and the alchemy of money
Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation
Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism
‘Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore’

3. African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation
Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new
Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism
African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities
The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation
Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa
Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the Earth

Conclusion: Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia
References
Index

Reviews

Series

Part of the Historical Materialism series.

Blog Posts

Activist economists David McNally and Hadas Thier discuss the state of the global economy.

Haymarket's Historical Materialism book series is an important source of never-before-translated Marxist classics, contemporary left debates, and groundbreaking original monographs.
In this extract from Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, David McNally explains how Marx's frequent summoning of monstrous figures dramatizes the processes whereby capital dehumanizes and sucks the blood from living labor. Happy Halloween!

Other books by the author