Blood Sucking Business: Dracula and its Resemblance with Modern Capitalism

by Vijay Sharma

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Every culture has its folklore. Mostly to teach direct lessons to people and some to fascinate human minds. Bloodsuckers exist in almost every region in different forms. Egyptian mythology talks about Lamia, Filipinos talk about Aswang, and Indians describe Daini as a bloodsucker. This goes back to vampire-like creatures in Eastern European folklore that can be seen around the 11th century. People of Serbia feared former soldiers as Vampires, but for Russians 'Upir' was related to the unrest of human souls.

Bram Stoker, inspired by these folklores, created “Count Dracula”. Dracula is the most iconic vampire in pop culture. Published in 1897, Dracula initially saw limited success but like fine wine, appreciation grew with time. It was adapted for the screen several times. Dracula is a powerful figure, an aristocrat who wants to expand his empire from Transylvania to Britain. It hires Jonathan for some bureaucratic work regarding British lands. To expand his business, Dracula will have to enslave humans, mostly weaker classes. Like much vampire fiction, it represents the power structure and class exploitation. As Vampires, the capitalist system requires constant expansion to survive, which makes it imperialist. We become nothing more than a fuel to sustain this constant expansion of it. While preaching the gospel of relentless productivity, CEOs like Elon Musk and Narayana Murthy ask workers to spend 70–100 hours in their cubicles. Remember Jonathan’s visit to Count Dracula? The count sends a ride for Jonathan, making him feel important, and finally traps him in its castle.

Dracula was published around 1897 and in the same century Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were theorizing class based exploitations. Das Kapital was published in 1867. In Das Kapital Marx writes, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” The first line of The Communist Manifesto can be used as another example that says- “A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism.”  Perhaps this is why several Marxist literary critics point out Marx as a gothic writer. 

The literature produced in the 19th century was shaping the twentieth. The era witnessed groundbreaking changes in society. There is a common thing in Marxism and Vampire tales, which is blood. Blood is something that can’t be created artificially. The only laboratory to make it is the living human body. So the Vampire needed humans to suck fresh and warm blood.

Marxists chose red to convey that workers from all over the world had the same color of blood. This makes blood more than a literal life source and becomes a metaphor for labour. The symbol of blood became a recurring idea in Marxism, as in vampire tales.

In modern-day capitalism, the equation is the same, but the variables are different. Modern-day Dracula wants to suck blood-equivalents more than the blood itself. But what are these ‘blood-equivalents’? It is our data and attention. Now, it doesn’t kill us directly but makes us a medium to generate different kinds of digital footprints. It uses us to keep double tapping on our mobiles. It asks for our consent for data and if we decline it, we can’t use the service.  We have to accept ‘cookies’ and whenever we do it, we allow them to know our interests. This helps small monsters shape modern Dracula’s marketing strategies as per our interest. Small forces make it possible to surround ourselves with colorful GFX posters and videos. WhatsApp and email marketing are the best examples of these. It is like getting stuck in the castle of Dracula and being surrounded by the elements he uses to keep his prey intern. 

But are these small monsters who serve the count are born as monsters? It doesn’t seem so. While delivering a speech on ‘Marxism and Halloween’, writer China Miéville called for solidarity with these monsters. He underlined that these are the monsters created by capitalism. They are helpless and can’t think of anything other than profit. 

Slowly, cinema inspired by literature started talking about class politics too. Filmmakers started reflecting the power dynamics among weak and strong sections of the society. When it came to the adaptation of Dracula, Filmmakers reinterpreted it in different set-ups with visuals. From the unauthorized adaptation of it as Nosferatu (1922)  to Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), they reframed it as more than a monster, a predatory figure epitomized with capitalistic horror. The visual treatments used in these films interpret Dracula as an exploitative nature of corporate power. In Nosferatu, we see Count Orlok, a skeletal rat-like creature, who controls Hutter's real estate. It reminds us of the manipulative behaviour of corporations for profit. Tod Browning, in his adaptation of Dracula (1931), represents actor Bela Lugosi as an aristocratic one. Francis Ford Coppola uplifts it as a multifaceted predator. The visual treatments in these films are common with the mechanism of a capitalist institution. The continuous hunt of the monster to stay stronger mirrors the corporate strategies to keep customers and employees trapped to accumulate and maximize profits. 

Similarly, in the advertising sector, copywriters are told to detect customers’ ‘pain point’ and sell emotions rather than the product. They use nostalgia, love, fear, and every other emotion to trigger customers. It is all seductive. Just like the charm of Dracula, which masks its bloodthirsty nature.

Capitalism seems immortal, akin to Dracula. The shadow of corporate castles looms over slums much like Nosferatu’s masterful silhouette on the wall, a haunting deception masking predatory intent. But no power is absolute. Just like Dracula, the prophets of modern capitalism fear collective resistance and unionization of workers. They try to maintain distance among workers in their workplace. Workers can reclaim their lives by confronting this modern Dracula, through solidarity and reimagining current economic systems.

Interestingly Bram Stoker himself was a socially conservative and capitalist. Most of the characters, including the protagonist, belong to the upper middle class and professional middle-class society. The representation of the working class and lower class is almost zero. Still, the narrative is capable of underlining the fact that society gets trapped in its own hierarchies, where some class decides the fate of another.