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The Necroculture of Capitalism

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Necroculture

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Abstract

In the television series The Walking Dead, survivors of an apocalypse take shelter in a prison, while zombies circle the fences looking for a way in. The zombies are shadows cast by a past to which the survivors cannot return but which they cannot escape. The living dead represent the past that, as Karl Marx wrote, “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The prison that holds us today is what right-wing philosopher Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” a predicament in which “we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Walking Dead, Season 3, AMC, 2012–2013.

  2. 2.

    Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Robert C. Tucker ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), 594–617, on 595.

  3. 3.

    Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, [1992] 2006), 46. Emphasis in original.

  4. 4.

    Patrick Martin, “Top 1 % Own More than Half of the World’s Wealth,” World Socialist Web Site, October 14, 2015, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/14/weal-o14.html; Daniel Bentley, “The Top 1 % Now Owns Half the World’s Wealth,” Fortune, October 14, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/10/14/1-percent-global-wealth-credit-suisse/; Jill Treanor, “Half of World’s Wealth Now in Hands of 1 % of Population—Report,” The Guardian, October 13, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report

  5. 5.

    Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 339, note 14. Emphasis in original.

  6. 6.

    Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 342. See also Mark Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires,” History of Political Thought 24(4) (Winter 2003): 668–684, esp. 679; David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 113–173.

  7. 7.

    Marx, “Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in idem, Capital Volume, 1, 943–1084, on 1007.

  8. 8.

    Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1969), 120.

  9. 9.

    Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 166.

  10. 10.

    Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 133.

  11. 11.

    Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 120.

  12. 12.

    Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 133, 140–177.

  13. 13.

    Fromm, Anatomy, 332.

  14. 14.

    Fromm, Anatomy, 5, 227.

  15. 15.

    Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 42.

  16. 16.

    Fromm, Revolution of Hope, 42–43.

  17. 17.

    Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 56. Emphasis in original.

  18. 18.

    Fromm, Anatomy, 339. Emphasis in original.

  19. 19.

    Edward Thompson, “Notes on Exterminism: the Last Stage of Civilization,” New Left Review 1 (121) (May–June 1980): 3–31, quoting 6, 7.

  20. 20.

    Rudolf Bahro, “Conditions for a Socialist Perspective,” in Bahro, Socialism and Survival: Articles, Essays and Talks, 1979–1982 (London: Heretic Books, 1982), 123–137, quoting 124.

  21. 21.

    Rudolf Bahro, “Who Can Stop the Apocalypse? Or the Task, Substance and Strategy of Social Movements” in Bahro, Socialism and Survival, 142–157, on 157.

  22. 22.

    Quoting James Cogan, “Iraq’s Tragic Encounter with US Imperialism,” World Socialist Web Site, December 27, 2011, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/pers-d27.shtml. (accessed December 27, 2011); Martin Chulov, “Research Links Rise in Falluja Birth Defects and Cancers to US Assault,” The Guardian, December 30, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/faulluja-birth-defects-iraq

  23. 23.

    John Vidal, Allegra Stratton, and Suzanne Goldenberg, “Low Targets, Goals Dropped: Copenhagen Ends in Failure,” The Guardian, December 18, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal; George Monbiot, “Requiem for a Crowded Planet,” December 21, 2009, http://www.monbiot.com/2009/12/21/requiem-for-a-crowded-planet/ (accessed September 2, 2012); George Monbiot, “Climate Change Enlightenment was Fun while it Lasted, but now it’s Dead,” The Guardian, September 20, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/20/climate-change-negotiations-failure; Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, The Environment, and the Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  24. 24.

    Ban Ki-moon, “Foreward by the United Nations Secretary General,” in Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 (Montreal: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2010), 5.

  25. 25.

    Suzanne Goldenberg, “Gulf Oil Spill: Firms Ignored Warning Signs Before Blast, Inquiry Hears,” The Guardian, May 12, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/12/deepwater-gulf-oil-spill-hearing;

    Suzanne Goldenberg, “BP Cost-Cutting Blamed for ‘Avoidable’ Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill,” The Guardian, January 5, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/06/bp-oil-spill-deepwater-horizon; Elaine Grossman, “Japanese Panel Finds Fukushima Accident was ‘Manmade’ and ‘Preventable,’” Global Security Newswire, July 6, 2012, http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/japanese-panel-finds-fukushima-accident-was-manmade-and-preventable/; Risa Maeda and Linda Sieg “Japan’s Atomic Disaster due to ‘Collusion’: Panel Report,” Reuters, July 5, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/05/us-japan-nuclear-report-idUSBRE8640K420120705

  26. 26.

    Juliette Jowit and Justin McCurry, “A Torrent of Plastic: How to Cope?” The Guardian Weekly, January 6–12, 2012, 1–2; David Pellow, The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005).

  27. 27.

    Fiona Harvey, “EU Unveils Plan to Pay Fishermen to Catch Plastic,” The Guardian, May 4, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/04/eu-fishermen-catch-plastic. Cf. Kim De Wolff, Gyre Plastic: Science, Circulation and the Matter of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2014).

  28. 28.

    MacFayden, quoted in Greg Ray, “The Ocean is Broken,” Yahoo! News (reprinted from the Newcastle Herald), October 22, 2013, http://news.yahoo.com/the-ocean-is-broken-133327474.html

  29. 29.

    Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 125.

  30. 30.

    Guy Debord, “A Sick Planet,” in idem, A Sick Planet, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Seagull, 2008), 75–94, quoting 85. Emphasis in original.

  31. 31.

    Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 15; Brynna A. Jacobson, “Geoengineering and the Politics of Climate Change,” Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, California, August 16, 2014; Bron Szerszynski, Matthew Kearnes, and Phil Macnaghten, Richard Owen, and Jack Stilgoe, “Why Democracy and Solar Radiation Management Won’t Mix,” Environment and Planning A 45 (12) (2013): 2809–2816; John Shepard et al., Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty (London: The Royal Society, 2009). Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), 341; Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism: A Citizen’s Guide to Capitalism and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 122.

  32. 32.

    Sam Perlo-Freeman, Julian Cooper, Olawale Ismail, Elisabeth Sköns and Carlina Solmirano, “Military Expenditure,” in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2011: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (Solna, Sweden: SIPRI, 2011), 157–229, on 157; SIPRI Yearbook 2011: Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security. Summary (Solna, Sweden: SIPRI, 2011), 9.

  33. 33.

    Ralph Summy, “The Paradigm Challenge of Political Science: Delegitimizing the Recourse to Violence,” In Joseph de Rivera ed., Handbook on Building Cultures of Peace (New York: Springer, 2009), 71–87, on 84.

  34. 34.

    John McMurty, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 93. Emphasis in original.

  35. 35.

    McMurty, Cancer Stage, 93.

  36. 36.

    Nikos Passas, “Global Anomie, Dysnomie, and Economic Crime: Hidden Consequences of Neoliberalism and Globalization in Russia and Around the World,” Social Justice 27 (2) (2000): 16–44.

  37. 37.

    Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda, Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narco-Economy (London: Zed Books, 2012).

  38. 38.

    Quoted in Malcolm Beith, “HSBC Report Shows Difficulty of Stopping Money Launderers,” Daily Beast, July 19, 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/19/hsbc-report-shows-difficulty-of-stopping-money-launderers.html. See also Ed Vulliamy, “How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico’s murderous drug gangs,” The Guardian April 2, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs. See also Rajeev Sayal, “Drug Money Saved Banks in Global Crisis, Claims UN Advisor,” The Observer, December 12, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

  39. 39.

    Jeffrey Sachs, “World is Drowning in Corporate Fraud,” Commondreams.org , May 3, 2011, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/03-8; “Blanket Settlement with J.P. Morgan: a $13 billion Cover-Up,” World Socialist Web Site, October 21, 2013, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/21/pers-o21.html

  40. 40.

    Barry Grey, “Senate Report on the Wall Street Crash: The Criminalization of the American Ruling Class,” World Socialist Web Site April 18, 2011, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/apr2011/pers-a18.shtml; David North, “The Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Pseudo-Left: Report to the Second National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US),” July 2012, in idem, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2015), 199–220, on 199–201.

  41. 41.

    Tom Parfitt, “Russia’s Rich Double Their Wealth, But Poor Were Better off in 1990s,” The Guardian, April 11, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/11/russia-rich-richer-poor-poorer; Tom Parfitt, “Heartland of Russia in Crisis as Despair and Vodka Take Their Toll,” The Guardian Weekly April 29, 2011, 3.

  42. 42.

    Noam N. Levey, “Life Expectancy of U.S. Women Slips in Some Regions,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615; Patrick Martin, “Life Expectancy Declining in Many Parts of US,” World Socialist Website, June 16, 2011, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jun2011/life-j16.shtml

  43. 43.

    Time Newsfeed, “Vanishing City: The Story Behind Detroit’s Shocking Population Decline” Time, March 24, 2011, http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/24/vanishing-city-the-story-behind-detroit%E2%80%99s-shocking-population-decline/

  44. 44.

    Julien Temple, “Detroit: The Last Days,” The Guardian, March 10, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/10/detroit-motor-city-urban-decline; “Detroit in Ruins” The Observer, January 1, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit; Joe Kishore and David Walsh, The Defense of Culture and the Crisis in Detroit (Oak Park, MI: Socialist Equality Party, 2013).

  45. 45.

    “America’s Transport Infrastructure: Life in the Slow Lane,” The Economist, April 28, 2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18620944; Thomas Geist, “The Detroit Blackout,” World Socialist Web Site, December 4, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/12/04/pers-d04.html

  46. 46.

    Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari, “The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries,” New York Times, April 30, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html?hp

  47. 47.

    Yian Q. Mui, “What Do the Jobless Do When the Benefits End?” The Washington Post, February 11, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-do-the-jobless-do-when-the-benefits-end/2014/02/11/e135d74a-8eb7-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03_story.html; Paul Harris, “Jobless Millions Signal Death of American Dream for Many,” The Guardian, August 14, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/15/jobless-millions-death-american-dream; Dominic Rushe, “America’s long-term unemployed: ‘For those looking for work, it’s very bleak’,” The Guardian May 3, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/03/us-long-term-unemployed-obama; Andre Damon and Barry Grey, “Cutting Food Stamps: the Ruthlessness of the American Ruling Class,” World Socialist Web Site, October 29, 2013, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/29/pers-o29.html

  48. 48.

    “Child Poverty,” National Center for Children in Poverty http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html (accessed September 2, 2012).

  49. 49.

    Jim Forsyth, “Woman denied food stamps kills self, shoots children,” Reuters, December 6, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/06/us-crime-foodstampoffice-texas-idUSTRE7B51W820111206; Naomi Spencer, “Notes on the Social Crisis in America,” World Socialist Web Site, December 8, 2011, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/socr-d08.shtml

  50. 50.

    Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (London: Allen Lane, 2009); Steven Hall, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum, Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2008).

  51. 51.

    Bruce E. Levine, Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011), 72–73.

  52. 52.

    Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1987 [orig.1967]), 28. Emphasis in original. (References to this book will cite numbered theses not page numbers).

  53. 53.

    Levine, Get Up, Stand Up, 60–68; Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: a Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), esp. 40–48; Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More of Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

  54. 54.

    E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” (orig. 1909), in Groff Conklin ed., 17 x Infinity (London: Mayflower-Dell, 1964), 84–117.

  55. 55.

    Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 101.

  56. 56.

    Bauman, Liquid Fear, 17.

  57. 57.

    Istvan Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 8.

  58. 58.

    Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk Struik, trans Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 113. Emphasis in original. (Hereafter cited as EPM).

  59. 59.

    Marx, EPM, 112 (emphasis in original); John Bellamy Foster, “The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature,” Organization & Environment 13 (December 2000): 403–425; Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 81.

  60. 60.

    Marx, EPM, 113. Emphasis in original.

  61. 61.

    Marx, EPM, 138. Emphasis in original.

  62. 62.

    Marx, EPM, 137.

  63. 63.

    Marx, EPM, 116. Emphasis in original.

  64. 64.

    Marx, EPM, 141 (emphasis in original). See also Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 32.

  65. 65.

    Marx, EPM, 141 (emphasis in original). See also Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 32.

  66. 66.

    Marx, EPM, 182. See also Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 24–26.

  67. 67.

    Marx, EPM, 145 (emphasis in original). See also Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” in idem, “The Dialectics of Nature,” Karl Max and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 313–588, on 452–464.

  68. 68.

    Marx, “From Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt Guddat (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), 265–282, on 272.

  69. 69.

    Marx, EPM, 70.

  70. 70.

    Marx, EPM, 110. Emphasis in original.

  71. 71.

    Marx, EPM, 159.

  72. 72.

    Marx, EPM, 66–67. Emphasis in original.

  73. 73.

    Wilhelm Schulz, quoted in Marx, EPM, 72.

  74. 74.

    Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” 1019–1038.

  75. 75.

    Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 54. See also Istvan Mészáros, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time: Socialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 47.

  76. 76.

    See also McNally, Monsters of the Market, 123–124, 128–129.

  77. 77.

    Marx, Capital Volume 1, 548.

  78. 78.

    Marx, Capital Volume 1, 547.

  79. 79.

    Marx, EPM, 111.

  80. 80.

    Marx, Capital Volume 1, 522, note 51; Christine Griffin, Andrew Bengry-Howell, Chris Hackley, Willm Mistral, Isabelle Szmigin “‘Every Time I Do It I Absolutely Annihilate Myself’: Loss of (Self-) Consciousness and Loss of Memory in Young People’s Drinking Narratives,” Sociology 43 (3) (2009): 457–476; Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, “Living for the Weekend: Youth Identities in Northeast England,” Ethnography 10 (1) (2009): 91–113. “Sunshine in a bag” is a lyric from “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz (EMI Records Ltd., 2001).

  81. 81.

    Marx, EPM, 153. Emphasis in original.

  82. 82.

    Marx, EPM, 148–149. Emphasis on original.

  83. 83.

    Jonathan Watts, “China’s ‘cancer villages’ reveal dark side of economic boom,” The Guardian, June 7, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/07/china-cancer-villages-industrial-pollution; Jonathan Watts, “Chemical plant protest highlights China’s class divide,” The Guardian August 18, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/aug/18/chemical-plant-protest-china-middle-class; David Kirby, “Made in China: Our Toxic, Imported Air Pollution,” Discover Magazine, March 18, 2011, http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/18-made-in-china-our-toxic-imported-air-pollution; Juli S. Kim and Jennifer L. Turner, “China’s Filthiest Export,” Foreign Policy in Focus (January 16, 2007), http://www.fpif.org/articles/chinas_filthiest_export; Dan Shapley, “Your Tuna Is Getting More Toxic,” The Daily Green, May 1, 2009, http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/tuna-mercury-47050102#ixzz1bqCiu7oA

  84. 84.

    Rob Reiner, Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 5.

  85. 85.

    Marx, EPM, 167. Emphasis in original.

  86. 86.

    See also Andre Damon, “The Gates Foundation and the Rise of ‘Free Market’ Philanthropy,” World Socialist Web Site, January 22, 2007, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/01/gate-j22.html; David Walsh, “The Philanthropy of Warren Buffet,” World Socialist Web Site, June 27, 2006, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/06/buff-j27.html

  87. 87.

    George Gallanis, “Seven Million Americans in Default on Student Loans,” World Socialist Web Site, August 26, 2015, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/26/debt-a26.html

  88. 88.

    Marx, EPM, 169. Emphasis in original.

  89. 89.

    Marx, EPM, 169. Emphasis in original.

  90. 90.

    Marx, “From Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” 281. Emphasis in original.

  91. 91.

    See also Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), 25–26.

  92. 92.

    Christopher Caudwell, “Love: A Study in Changing Values,” in idem, Studies in a Dying Culture (New York: Dodd Mead and Co., 1938), 129–157, on 157.

  93. 93.

    Caudwell, “Love,” 154–155.

  94. 94.

    Marx, EPM, 143–144. Emphasis in original.

  95. 95.

    Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 48. See also Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 113–114; Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 87–91; Barbara Adam, “When Time is Money: Contested Rationalities of Time in the Theory and Practice of Work,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 102 (December 2003), 94–125, esp. 97–98.

  96. 96.

    Marx, EPM, 150. Emphasis in original.

  97. 97.

    Marx, EPM, 165. Emphasis in original.

  98. 98.

    Marx, EPM, 168. Emphasis in original.

  99. 99.

    Marx, EPM, 169.

  100. 100.

    Marx, EPM, 156. Emphasis in original.

  101. 101.

    Rowan Moore, “London: The City that Ate Itself,” The Guardian, June 28, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/28/london-the-city-that-ate-itself-rowan-moore; “The Indebted Ones” (Leader comment) The Economist (October 29, 2011) 16, 18, on 18; Suzanne McGee, “Corporations, Artificial People, and the Unintended Risks of Hobby Lobby,” The Guardian, July 6, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jul/06/corporations-artificial-people-hobby-lobby-rights-power-influence.

  102. 102.

    Marx, EPM, 89.

  103. 103.

    Marx, EPM, 119.

  104. 104.

    Marx, EPM, 122.

  105. 105.

    Marx, EPM, 122. Emphasis in original.

  106. 106.

    Marx, EPM, 122.

  107. 107.

    Marx, “Excerpt Notes of 1844,” 281 (emphasis in original). See also Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming, Dead Man Working (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012).

  108. 108.

    Raoul Vanegeim, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1983), 120–123, 176.

  109. 109.

    Marx, EPM, 153.

  110. 110.

    “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood” Published in Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung, Nos. 298, 300, 303, 305 and 307, October 25, 27 and 30, November 1 and 3, 1842. Trans. Clemens Dutt, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm

  111. 111.

    Henry Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Paradigm Publishers, 2006).

  112. 112.

    Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 461; quoted also in Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead,” 680.

  113. 113.

    Marx, EPM, 102.

  114. 114.

    Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” 990; quoted also in Neocleous, “Political Economy of the Dead,” 680.

  115. 115.

    Marx, Marx, Capital Volume 1, 926; quoted in Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead,” 668.

  116. 116.

    Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead,” 679.

  117. 117.

    Marx, Grundrisse, 704.

  118. 118.

    Marx, Grundrisse, 701.

  119. 119.

    Marx, Capital Volume 1, 247–257, quoting 255. See also McNally, Monsters of the Market, 132, 145.

  120. 120.

    McNally, Monsters of the Market, 151–156.

  121. 121.

    Glenn Rikowski, “Alien Life: Marx and the Future of the Human,” Historical Materialism 11(2) (2003): 121–164, on 158.

  122. 122.

    Albert Borgmann, “The Moral Complexion of Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research 26 (4) (March 2000): 418–422.

  123. 123.

    Neocleous, “The Political Economy of the Dead,” 683.

  124. 124.

    Mark Tran, “Girl Starved to Death While Parents Raised Virtual Child in Online Game,” The Guardian, March 5, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/05/korean-girl-starved-online-game

  125. 125.

    Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 2–3, 14–15.

  126. 126.

    Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Contribution to the Knowledge of Man,” in idem, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx, and Social Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1970), 62–75, on 72. Fromm should say “not only in a biological-physiological sense.” For the working class, alienation is indeed biological: it is about whether they eat, have a roof over their heads, medical care, and so on. To be estranged from one’s labor is to be estranged from one’s biological ability to live, which now depends on an alien power. This is combined with the psychological aspects of alienation.

  127. 127.

    Fromm, “Marx’s Contribution to the Knowledge of Man,” 73.

  128. 128.

    Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (London: Continuum, 2010), 63. See also Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), esp. 57.

  129. 129.

    Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism,” in Peter Gay ed., The Freud Reader (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989), 293–297, on 296–297.

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    Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 63–64.

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  133. 133.

    Fromm, The Sane Society, 141–142.

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    Cf. Cederström and Fleming, Dead Man Working, 31–42.

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    Fromm, Anatomy, 240–241.

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    Fromm, Anatomy, 242–251, esp. 248–249 for unconscious depression. See also Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).

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    Fromm, Anatomy, 245. Emphasis in original

  138. 138.

    Fromm, Art of Loving, 105.

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    http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/. Accessed December 17, 2013.

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    Turkle, Alone Together; Mark C. Taylor, Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 216–218.

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    Neither Google Glass nor the Amazon phone were market successes. This, perhaps, suggests that these devices represent a degree of technological subsumption to which people are still resistant. But everyday life is increasingly mediated by devices, in many different and changing forms. Taylor Hatmaker, “Google Explains Why and How Glass Failed,” The Daily Dot, March 17, 2015, http://www.dailydot.com/technology/google-glass-failure-astro-teller/; Ben Fox Rubin and Roger Cheng, “Fire Phone One Year Later: Why Amazon’s Smartphone Flamed Out,” CNET, July 24, 2015, http://www.cnet.com/news/fire-phone-one-year-later-why-amazons-smartphone-flamed-out/

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    Fromm, The Sane Society, 111 (emphasis in original). On abstraction, see also McNally, Monsters of the Market, 128–131.

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    Fromm, The Sane Society, 114.

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    Fromm, The Sane Society, 120.

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    Fromm, Anatomy, 350. Emphasis in original.

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    Fromm, Anatomy, 351.

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    Quoting Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), 55. See also Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor, 1990), 26–27 and 39; Charles Thorpe, “Death of a Salesman: Petit-Bourgeois Dread in Philip K. Dick’s Mainstream Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 38(3) (November 2011): 412–434.

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    Using a term from China Mieville’s novel The City & the City (London: Pan Books, 2009).

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    Quoted in Paul Stuart, “Luxury Apartment Complex in London uses Spikes to Deter Homeless,” World Socialist Web Site, June 14, 2014, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/14/spik-j14.html

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    Charles Thorpe

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Thorpe, C. (2016). The Necroculture of Capitalism. In: Necroculture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58303-1_1

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