‘The Sunset of Humankind Is the Dawn of the Blood Harvest’: Blood Banks, Synthetic Blood and Haemocommerce

Abstract

In the passage from modernity’s industrial economy based on factory labour to postmodernity’s new post-industrial economy based on information, affect, services, communicative and cooperative labour, boundaries collapse. Capital marches through the world ruthlessly subsuming under its control global society and translating previously established forms of status and privilege into calculable economic terms.¹ Through its system of equivalence capitalism inserts all material, biological and cultural products, from ideas to species of animals and blood, into the cash nexus, assigning them a monetary value and making them into private property. Vampire capital no longer exploits the worker as Marx tells us, but engulfs the whole of society, feeding like a vampire squid² on anything that might generate maximum profit for least possible cost. No longer embodied by the malign figure of Dracula, capital is not a subject but an abstract ‘shadowy, centerless impersonality’ that ‘would be nothing without our co-operation’.³ It is a mistake, then, to disavow our own participation within the bloody, rapacious and oppressive networks of capitalist production and circulation by cynically distancing ourselves and demonising gothic Others as evil capitalists.