Marxferatu: The Vampire Metaphor as a Tool for Teaching Marx's Critique of Capitalism

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The Teacher

Our modern understanding of the vampire draws extensively on the work of Bram Stoker. Through Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula we know the vampire's habits, the vampire's abilities, and the vampire's weaknesses. Stoker, however, was far from the first author to write about vampires.¹In fact, if we look back a few decades prior to Dracula's publication, we discover another author with an intense interest in vampires. This earlier author's work would go on to be translated into dozens of languages and shape the lives of well over a billion people worldwide. The author is, of course, Karl Marx.²

Despite the undeniable significance of Marxist thought across a wide range of academic disciplines--including political science, economics, film studies, geography, history, literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, and beyond--teaching Marx to an undergraduate audience poses certain pedagogical challenges. Obviously, students cannot fully appreciate the intricacies of "The Manifesto of the Communist Party" during a 15-minute skimming of the text prior to class. The language is dense, the arguments are sophisticated, and the early industrial era during which Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote seems like ancient history to today's college students. Moreover, in an increasingly polarized American political climate, a growing number of students enter the classroom prepared to actively resist any attempts at "Marxist indoctrination" by their "agenda-pushing" professors. Therefore, the challenge is making Marx relevant, accessible, and applicable to twenty-first century undergraduates. In this capacity the vampire metaphor is particularly effective.

In this article, I demonstrate the utility of the vampire metaphor as a tool for teaching Marx in a manner that is both pertinent and readily comprehensible to today's undergraduate students. Whereas Stoker wrote about a supernatural vampire, this approach to teaching Marxism recasts capitalism as a form of economic vampirism. In this interpretation of Marxist theory, factory owners step into the role of the vampire, draining the surplus value of the worker's labor to further enrich themselves, in much the same way that Stoker's vampire sucks blood from victims to grow ever stronger. Seduced by the capitalist's spell--the comforting distractions of religion, politics, consumer culture--the worker suffers a "loss of self" and emerges as little more than a walking corpse.

Although the young...