![]() Through this exchange of blood, the bite-victim also receives the vampire’s curse, becoming a vampire, a bloodsucker, a consumer-Nosferatu. ![]() “My blood now flows through her veins,” the Count gloats to Van Helsing. “We become as him,” according to Mina Harker’s journal in the novel, “we henceforward become foul things of the night like him-without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best.” For the vampire does not merely drain his bite-victim of his or her blood, the transaction is reciprocal-though not equivocal-with the victim receiving the vampire’s blood in exchange. ![]() Similarly, Marx pointed out, “the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labor and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out labor-power from others, and compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life.” There is also the self-replication of capitalist consumerism, consuming consumers who must continue the pattern of consumption, and the enslavement through this replication, which is there in Dracula too. Count Dracula, like a capitalist, grows in strength through his predation-a strength increasing in inverse proportion to his bite-victim’s weakening. The vampire’s continual need for possession and consumption resembles the ravenous thirst of capital, and the thirst it conjures up in those under its spell. Count Dracula’s bloodlust mirrors that of capitalism, where eros and thanatos commingle. With these allusions to vampire folklore already swimming through the bloodstream of Marxist theory, it’s not difficult to imagine a reading of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula or Tod Browning’s 1931 Universal adaptation of Stoker’s tale as a parable of the perils of capitalism. so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited.” Marx’s partner-in-crime, Friedrich Engels-equally enamored with this hemovoric horror metaphor-referred to “the vampire property-holding class” in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England. Elsewhere in Capital, he wrote of “the vampire thirst for the living blood of labor” and explained that “the vampire will not lose its hold. “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” claimed Karl Marx in Capital, his multi-volume magnum opus.
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