Monsters of the Market

This outstanding new work from David McNally is indispensable for serious monster fans and radicals both and almost giddyingly so for those of us who are both.
China Miéville, author of Embassytown

"McNally delivers a tour de force analysis of global capital from the upper registers of derivatives trading down to popular fables of African monsters Monsters of the Market is one of the best books I've read in years and it will definitely stimulate thinking about the nature of globalization, the labor theory of value and the relationship between commodities and speculative objects, collective fantasy, and other nebulous problems confronting historical materialism in the future."
Mark Worrell, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

"The most vicious of monsters are those with human faces. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism explores Marx's consistent use of folklore and monster as metaphor in his criticism of capitalism. From Frankenstein and the dissection of the market, vampires that feed off the misery of others, among other ideas ... Monsters of the Market is an intriguing way of explorig economics, very much recommended reading."
Midwest Book Review

"David McNally ... has written an excellent book. [He] approaches the topic from a more comprehensive framework. Unlike other works of "monsterology," he links the production of meaning with the economic mode of production while also researching its manifestations across the world ... Monsters of the Market is well worth reading: it demonstrates that the marginalizedthose who inevitably become the misshapenhave a long history across different cultures of articulating narratives of resistance to the various modes of night thrown up by a pitiless global system."
Thomas Ponniah, rabble.ca

Vorwort
Features in Historical Materialism
Promotion targeting left academic journals
Published to coincide with the annual Historical Materialism conference
Publicity and promotion in conjunction with the author's speaking engagements

Autorentext
David McNally Ph.D (1983) is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books and has published widely on political economy, Marxism, and contemporary social justice movements

Klappentext

Everywhere the Market goes it spawns monsters in its wake. From Frankenstein, to Zombies, McNally analyzes these creatures of Capitalism.

Zusammenfassung
Winner of the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize

Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, this book links tales of monstrosity from England to recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx's persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, McNally offers a novel account of the cultural economy of the global market-system.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism
   'Save my body from the surgeons'
   The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order
   Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons
   Anatomy and the corpse-economy
   Monsters of rebellion
   Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein
   The rights of monsters: horror and the split society

2. Marx's Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism

Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity
The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities
'As if by love possessed': vampire capital and the labouring body
Zombie-labour and the 'monstrous outrages' of capital
Money: capitalism's second nature
'Self-birthing' capital and the alchemy of money
Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation
Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism
'Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore'

3. African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation
   Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new
   Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism
   African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities
   The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation
   Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa
   Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the Earth

Conclusion: Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia
References
Index