A conjunctural approach to the current crisis

Observers discussing the present- day, multifaceted crisis of global capitalism are sometimes invoking the gory imagery of horror films. After the global banking crisis had struck in 2007 and 2008, Chris Harman (2009) and Jamie Peck (2010) spoke of ‘zombie capitalism’ and ‘zombie neoliberalism’, respectively. Around a decade later, Raul Zelik reclaimed this trope (2020a). Witnessing the acceleration of climate change and the lack of decisive interventions to slow it down as well as the COVID- 19 pandemic, he referred to the people suffering under the yoke of global social order the ‘undead of capital’. This is reminiscent of some of the metaphors employed by Marx in the first volume of Capital (1976), who stated that ‘[c] apital is dead labour which, vampire- like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Marx, 1976: 342; see Carver, 1998: 14– 20).

The purpose of using these metaphors is obvious. They highlight the fact that we are in a nightmarish situation. Global capitalism lives off the toil of workers around the world, depriving them of their vitality and their ability to actively take control of their lives. But despite the fact that more people than ever are sucked into the system of wage labour and have to submit to the imperatives of capital, it is still teetering on the brink of collapse. Turning people into zombies, it keeps on surviving – but is becoming weaker and weaker in the process. Zelik puts it this way:

Implicit in this imagery is a specific claim concerning crisis containment: The power blocs around the world are unwilling to, or incapable of, shaking off the neoliberal orthodoxies of crisis management – bailouts for corporations, austerity for the broader populations and market- based attempts to address climate change, for example, emissions trading.