Capitalism: A Horror Story
by Jon Greenaway, Repeater Books, £10.99
 

STUDIES of the radical imagination tend to emphasise gritty realism at the expense of the irrational. Jon Greenaway’s latest book corrects this imbalance by highlighting links between capitalism’s real-world atrocities and the imaginatively constructed evils of the horror genre.

The approach employed, “Gothic Marxism,” draws on the objectivity of Marxist analysis, but is also rooted in the traditions of romanticism. Greenaway sees it as a philosophy that allows us to reinterpret the past, describe the horrors of contemporary society and theorise about a utopian future. Specifically, it supports a radical interpretation of the literature and films of the horror genre.

The book outlines the long history of supernatural and macabre imagery in critiques of capitalism. For example, Marx and Engels opened the Communist Manifesto (1848) with the phrase “A spectre is haunting Europe” and, in the first volume of Capital, Marx’s metaphors are soaked in the blood and viscera of exploited workers. According to Greenaway, this language was not chosen for impact or decoration, but to capture the severity of the damage wrought by capitalism.