The Living and the Dead
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.1 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, âweighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.â2 The prison that holds us today is what right-wing philosopher Francis Fukuyama called âthe end of history,â a predicament in which âwe cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better.â3 Fukuyama welcomed the end of history as the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy. But the end-of-Cold-War triumphalism that Fukuyamaâs book emblematized has disappeared as global capitalism piles crisis upon crisis, and the thinning veneer of democracy reveals callous class rule. This systemâs continued existence is an imposed end of history, achieved by suppressing humanityâs creative ability to âpictureâ a better world, to make history, and to remake itself in the process. The end of history is the enforced stasis of a decaying system stubbornly resisting its slow death. Its life support is imperialist war, ecological destruction, police-state surveillance and brutality, the degradation of culture by corporate mass media, and a mass psychology of hopelessness.
The chaos of war, want, and despoliation today is so gratuitous because it stands in such immense contrast to the level of productive, scientific, technological, artistic, and intellectual accomplishment that the human race has achieved. The destructiveness contrasts so painfully with the well-being and creative flourishing of all that our level of economic, technological, and cultural development places within humanityâs grasp. The resources and capabilities produced by todayâs globally integrated productivity are locked up as financial wealth possessed and controlled by a narrow class layer. According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report for 2015, the bottom half of the global population own less than 1 % of total household wealth, while the top 1 % of wealth holders own half of the worldâs wealth.4 The mass of dead wealth piled up at the top is the denied potential of humanity and the barrier between present and future. The denied future is a system in which the fruits of human productivity are shared equally, societyâs creative and productive capacities are consciously applied for the benefit of all humanity, and living human need, not dead mammon, is the goal of production.
Capitalist culture is necrocultureâa culture that aggrandizes the dead and non-living over the living. Necroculture is the culture of a social world subsumed by capital, one in which relations between human beings have been thoroughly colonized by, and subordinated to, the reproduction of capital. The concept of necroculture, as I use it, draws together Marxâs concept of alienation, as the domination of living labor by its dead products, with Erich Frommâs psychoanalytic conception of necrophilia as the love of death over life.
Fromm interprets Marxâs theory of alienation to be essentially about the relationship between the living and the dead. Fromm argued:
Capital is the power of the dead and of the past. It is dead, but draws sustenance, energy, and power from its exploitation of the living. It becomes living dead by appropriating the life of the worker. Marx wrote, âCapital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.â6 Living death describes the occult power of what Marx called the âanimated monsterâ of capital and the degradation and suffering endured by labor caught in its jaws.7 As it is drained of its energy, creativity, and vitality, labor is transformed from the living into the living dead. The condition of alienation within capitalism is one of living death.For Marx, capital and labor were not merely two economic categories. Capital for him was the manifestation of the past, of labor transformed and amassed into things; labor was the manifestation of life, of human energy applied to nature in the process of transforming it. The choice between capitalism and socialism (as he understood it) amounted to this: Who (what) was to rule over what (whom)? What is dead over what is alive, or what is alive over what is dead?5
The subsumption of life by capital is culturally expressed in fetishistic interest in artificial thingsâtechnology and consumer productsâto the exclusion and detriment of the living world of nature and human relationships. Obsessed with commodities and technological applications, necroculture treats with indifference the ongoing degradation of the richness of human life and the diversity of the natural world. It combines apocalyptic resignation and apocalyptic longing. It is increasingly evident that the wasteful and exploitative consumer-capitalist way of life must come to an end. But along with avoidance, anxiety, and mute despair, and in the ideologically enforced absence of a conscious alternative, there is a cultural undercurrent of attraction to apocalyptic scenarios as wish-fulfillment fantasy, offering release from the impersonal oppression that weighs on people.
Capitalism gains ideological support from the notion that the âfree marketâ sets the individual free from external constraint (providing freedom in a purely negative sense). However, Fromm argues that this freedom from constraint made the individual âalone, isolated,â and therefore powerless before âoverwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself.â With the rise of capitalism, man âbecame an âindividual,â but a bewildered and insecure individual.â8 Capitalist relations subject the individual to the anonymous demands of the market, and these demands are translated into personal forms of domination, submission, exploitation, and competition.9 The business owner aims to annihilate the competition; the manager subjugates and exploits the worker, but, in turn, must meet his performance targets and fears his own superiors; the worker is forced to compete against his fellows. Personal relations infected with envy, resentment, aggression, and contempt are overdetermined by an economic system that makes life a struggle of all against all and turns all increases of productive power into human powerlessness.
The negative freedom of the individual under capitalism, therefore, produces insecurity and subjugation to impersonal forces that are hard for the individual to identify and comprehend. Fromm writes, âAloneness, fear, and bewilderment remain; people cannot stand it forever. They cannot go on bearing the burden of âfreedom fromâ; they must try to escape from freedom.â10 The fear of freedom may be temporarily assuaged by amassing objects. Fromm writes that in capitalist culture, the individualâs self âwas backed up by the possession of property. âHeâ as a person and the property he owned could not be separated⊠The less he felt he was being somebody the more he needed to have possessions.â11 Objects become, under capitalism, not only material security but security of the self. Being is subordinated to having, and life made dependent on non-living things. The spontaneity of life is subordinated to the discipline of the market, and the range of human creativity and desire is narrowed down to the drive to accumulate. The flight from negative freedom also, Fromm argues, is the root of the psychological attraction of fascism and other forms of authoritarianism. These forms of politics express the psychological need to submerge the self in a powerful entity.12
The âescape from freedomâ is linked to a psychology of lifelessness. In his later work, Fromm came to see the fundamental socialâpsychological problem facing modern society as the choice between biophilia and necrophilia, or the love of life versus the love of death. Necrophilia, as Fromm uses the term, is âthe passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, put...