Bloody Mitt

The theme of the vampire had also been ever present in the work of both Marx and Engels. It is clear that as a metaphor the vampire and its connotations play a key role in many of their works.

In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx employs one of his usual dramatic and rhetorical devices: “If money comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” he says, then “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”

In ‘Capital’, Marx claims that “capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. He also comments that the prolongation of the working day into the night “only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour’; thus the vampire will not let go “while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited’”. Capital “sucks up the worker’s value-creating power” and is dripping with blood. Marx writes of lace-making as exploiting children and described as “blood-suckin”. While US capital is said to be financed by the “capitalized blood of children”. The appropriation of labour is described as the “life-blood of capitalism” while the state is said to have here and there interposed itself “as a barrier to the transformation of children’s blood into capital”

 In his ‘Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association’, Marx describes British industry as “vampirelike”, which “could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too”.

In ‘The Class Struggles in France’, Marx compares the National Assembly to “a vampire living off the blood of the June insurgents”.

In ‘The Civil War in France’ the agents of the French state, such as ‘the notary, advocate, executor, and other judicial vampires’, are described as ‘blood-suckers’.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx comments that “the bourgeois order . . . has become a vampire that sucks out its [the smallholding peasantry’s] blood and brains and throws them into the alchemist’s cauldron”

In ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, Engels uses the phrase “vampire property holding class”.

In ‘The Holy Family’ Marx and Engels  comment about a character of Eugene Sue’s that “he cannot possibly lead that kind of life without sucking the blood out of his little principality in Germany to the last drop like a vampire”

In ‘Wage, Labour and Capital’ Marx wrote “The capitalist gentlemen will never want for fresh exploitable flesh and blood, and will let the dead bury their dead"

In his career as a journalist Marx had planned (but never wrote) a  piece called  “The Vampires of the Mosel Region”

In an essay on the Prussian Constitution of 1849, Marx comments on “the Christian-Germanic sovereign and his accomplices, the whole host of lay-abouts, parasites and vampires sucking the blood of the people”.

SOYMB can,, therefore, only imagine, being aware of Marx and Engels frequent use of the vampire and blood metaphors, how if alive they would describe Mitt Romney’s corporation Bain Capital recent acquisition of the once state-owned and now sold-off NHS blood supplier, ‘Plasma Resources’ to blood out of the workers and sell it to the sick, in the name of profits. Romney will indeed be living off the blood of others.