Rev Left Radio - Capitalism: A Horror Story

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

On this Halloween, Jon Greenaway returns to the show to discuss his new book "Capitalism: A Horror Story (Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side off the Radical Imagination)".  What does it mean to see horror in capitalism? What can horror tell us about the state and nature of capitalism? Blending film criticism, cultural theory, and philosophy, Capitalism: A Horror Story examines literature, film, and philosophy, from Frankenstein to contemporary cinema, delving into the socio-political function of the monster, the haunted nature of the digital world, and the inescapable horror of contemporary capitalist politics. Revitalizing the tradition of Romantic anticapitalism and offering a “dark way of being red”, Capitalism: A Horror Story argues for a Gothic Marxism, showing how we can find revolutionary hope in horror- a site of monstrous becoming that opens the door to a Utopian future. Check out Jon's Substack HERE Check out and Support the Horror Vanguard Podcast HERE ------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left HERE Follow RLR on IG HERE

Hello, Danny. Come play with us. Come play with us, Danny. Come play with us, Danny. And ever, and ever. On today's episode, on this sacred day of Halloween, we have on the show John Greenaway to talk about his book, capitalism, a horror story, gothic Marxism, and the dark side of the radical imagination. This was an incredibly fun conversation. We play a little Halloween game in the middle of it, but the insights, the analysis is always top tier when it comes to John and his work, and we thought this would be a great episode. to do in general, but it also happened to align with Halloween, so we figured why not make

it a little thematic and drop it on Halloween as well to give everybody something to listen to on this day of trick-or-treating. So here is our conversation with John Greenaway on his book Capitalism, A Horror Story. I really hope you enjoy it. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft, you can join us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And in exchange for a couple dollars a month, you get bonus episodes as well as a back catalog now of over 300 episodes that we've done since we started

the Patreon many, many years ago. So thank you to everybody who supports the show. It really helps support me and producer Dave's families, and we couldn't do it without that support. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with John on Capitalism, a horror store.

Hey, everybody. It's John. It's really good to be back on Rev Left. Longtime listeners might remember me from a whole bunch of episodes covering things like Walter Benjamin or Mark Fisher's capitalist realism. I am a writer and former academic. I'm also the co-host of the podcast, Horror Vanguard, which is a show dedicated to talking about horror film, politics, philosophy and theory. And yeah, I'm really happy to be back on the show. Thank you so much for having me on again. Absolutely. It's a pleasure and an honor. We go way, way back. I mean, listeners of the show from way back in the early days, probably, I think your first ever

episode was probably on Gothic Marxism back in the teens. Oh, yeah, deep cut. Yeah, absolutely. One for the old heads. Absolutely. And we were talking beforehand that usually I have you on probably at a pace of once a year. But horrifyingly, it's been two years since you've been on last time. So I'm glad to finally correct that. I can't believe time flies as fast as it does sometime. It's been way too long. It's

been way too long. And thank you again for having me on, especially now that capitalism, a horror story is out in the world. Absolutely. I'm so excited to see your work continue. And this book come to fruition. And it's a perfect episode for Halloween, which we're going to release this on Halloween as, you know, a fun little gimmick. And also just a great conversation for that day, as, of course, we're mixing capitalist critique with Gothic Marxism and horror genre and so much more. So I guess the first question would be, can you just kind of introduce your book? Tell us what it's attempting to do and why you wanted to write it in the first place. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the book is called Capitalism, a Horror Story, Gothic Marxism, and the Dark Side of the Radical

imagination. It is out now from the Great Left imprint repeater books. And so, yeah, if you've listened to the Gothic Marxism episode back in the day, you'll know really what I was interested in and what I've been interested in is like, what is distinctive about horror as a mode of culture that's kind of useful for, one, developing a kind of conception of culture that includes the irrational and two, allows us to, like, elucidate and explain the metaphors and kind of gothic imagery that we find in so much Marxist writing, right? So the book is an attempt, it focuses on contemporary horror film and is an attempt to offer a series of readings of films from about 2018 all the way up to the present, focusing on the ways in which horror makes visible a set of kind of cultural and philosophical. anxieties that are really useful for political thinking. Absolutely.

And we've, we've had you on the show many times, as I've said, and we've done an entire episode on the concept of Gothic Marxism, which I'll link in the show notes for anybody who might have missed that episode or newer listeners who never came across it yet. But for those who are new listeners or those that, you know, haven't heard our conversations in a while, can you kind of remind us what Gothic Marxism is, talk about its relationship to psychoanalysis and Gothic horror. as a quote unquote record of our collective unconscious yeah absolutely and for the record one of the things i really appreciate about this show is that you have always been so quick to just kind of give

people space to work things out in public um and if you listen to that episode like a lot of what i think now is kind of developed a lot from that point um often through the through the process of conversations like that and of writing the book itself so very broadly um gothic marxism in in in the way that I think about it is this is is it's two two things it's doing two things it's one it's providing a kind of really phenomenologically detailed analysis of what it feels like to exist within the social political totality of a given historical moment right what does it what does it feel like to live through the anxieties of like capitalism and that's one of the reasons I think that horror has seen such a resurgence and secondly one of the

the things that I think about Gothic Marxism and something I try and get into in the book is like it offers a kind of philosophy of history because the Gothic is all about these things which return, right? These things which kind of come back from the past, things that we thought were over and done with. And in the book, I draw off of, you know, Marxist philosophers like Ernst Block and Walter Benjamin to talk about this idea of capitalism depends upon a kind of sense of naturalization, this idea that it has a very smooth teleology, that it's almost like historically inevitable. And one of the things the Gothic is really good at is showing that the past is never finalized, it's never closed off. It will always kind of return in strange

new ways. So on the level of our kind of collective cultural unconscious, horror is a really good index of what is, what's always threatening to come back, what's always threatening to return. And that which threatens the kind of naturalized order of the state of things is quite often put into this sort of metaphoric and cultural language of what we're supposed to find scary. So at a really basic level, fear is not, fear is socially and politically mediated. I don't think that's a particularly controversial thing to say unless you want to subscribe to like some evo-psych nonsense. But this idea that like we find certain things scary at certain times connects those fears to social, cultural and political forces, right? And so by paying attention to those things, we get kind of insight into, like, yeah, into the state of things, into what it means to be a subject, what it means to be a person at a particular time and subject to this kind of array of ideological forces. Absolutely, yeah.

And, you know, a critique that that you anticipate in your book, and again, I'll link to the whole episode on Gothic Marxism so people can do a deep dive into that if they want to, keeping in mind what you've said, that your politics and, you know, everything, your analysis has, of course, grown and developed since 2017, but still I think it's a wonderful episode. But a critique that you anticipate in this book is that this entire analytic lens is merely aesthetic and stylistic and that it can even overcomplicate. or run astray from an ostensibly more sober-minded critique and analysis that is on offer from Marx. How would you respond to that criticism of Gothic Marxism? And what does Gothic Marxism offer beyond mere aesthetics and literary style? I know you touched on it a bit. Maybe you can go a little bit deeper. Yeah, yeah.

So I think there's two kind of counterpoints. One is to say that there isn't really such a thing as a depolitical style, right? If you're talking about aesthetics, you inevitably kind of end up in the realm of politics. politics if you take it seriously. Second point is this is where I kind of draw off the work of Ernst Bloch. I know we're just doing this episode, but there really should be an episode on Ernst Blok. He's a super, like a really fascinating German philosopher and communist. And Block talks about two sort of tendencies, and not in the kind of party sense, but two sort

modes of thinking that have emerged in the Marxist tradition. One is what he calls the cold stream of Marxism. It's very, it's very, uh, economistic. It is, you know, the ruthless critique of all that exists. It focuses on political economy. And that's an important part of things. But a block also says that in the history of Marxism, there's also been what he calls the warm stream of Marxism. Um, and as he calls it, this is, this is the kind of like prophetic call to, um, to, to, to freedom. So the idea of human emancipation, the overcoming of alienation, it is, it's a, it's a, it's a mode of Marxism that is written in the future tense, right? The most, I think a really good example would be as something like the Communist Manifesto, right? The Communist Manifesto is polemical, right?

It is, it's not in contrast to far more kind of like determinedly scientific Marxism. And Block says there isn't, there isn't necessarily. a contradiction between these two things, but you need to have both. It's in his absolutely kind of magisterial book, The Principle of Hope, which is this huge, it's 1,500 pages long, it's in three volumes in English, but it's this kind of great encyclopedia of hope as a philosophical and kind of universal constant. And Block says, if you just have the cold stream, right, if you just have this very serious, very kind of, economistic mode of Marxism, you get, as he puts it, lost in the fog of obscuritanism.

And he says, if you just have the warm stream of Marxism, then you get lost in, as he calls it, Jacobinism and revenge. So he says, actually, these two things are dialectically interdependent, right? You need both of them to have a kind of complete and compelling vision of a cultural totality of a historical moment. And so, firstly, in the context of kind of the Gothic and horrifying imagery in Marx, There's a great book called Marx's literary style, which shows that actually this is not just a matter of style, but it's actually essential to the construction of Marx's argument, where he talks about, you know, capital emerges dripping blood, that there's a vampirism in capitalism. None of that is just an aesthetics. It's not just a rhetorical flourish.

There's something like essential to his argument that rests there. Engels is also a really good candidate for this, because if you read something like conditions, of the working class in England, like, there are passages from that that wouldn't be out of place in a horror novel. Like, the concept of social death and social murder is horrifying and is framed horrifically. And so it's important to not, one, to try and say that there's such a thing as a deep, an apolitical style is kind of a mistake, I think. And two, I think it's a mistake to discount cultural phenomena because they don't immediately seem to fit into a strictly rationalist conception of what political analysis should be, right?

For a long time, people were like, horror movies are just kind of low culture, it's drag, it's not very serious, we shouldn't be paying any attention to it, but my claim is like you can find in it something, in all aspects of culture, there's something worth paying attention to if you're interested in that ultimate aim of the overcoming of human alienation. Absolutely, yeah, I can see it as a form of superstructural analysis and, you know, these cultural products clearly are inroads into an analysis of the broader society and are certainly something that are deserving of a sort of analytical and critical approach. And I really like

the idea of an Ernst Block episode is one thing. And we'll definitely have to make that happen. Perhaps that's our next one. But that idea of a warm stream and a cold stream within Marxism and that they're dialectically united and they sort of both need one another. You can't just have one or the other because you lose something fundamental and essential. I think is really really crucial. And I've always, you know, in my work, I've always tried to keep that, you know, that warm stream, that ultimate vision, that big beating heart at the center of Marxism alive and well, because I think it, you know, it reaches people at an emotional and moral level when you when you talk about things in that very human way. But there's also, there also is that really

important, analytic, cold, sober-minded, scientific critique that is utterly essential to Marxism as well. And they really are wonderful balances to one another. But that Gothic language within Marxism, you know, the past weighing on the minds of the living like a nightmare, the specter that haunts and the many examples that you gave, it really is. I don't know if it's an unconscious influence, but it's something that comes out of me when I start opening my mouth and talking about politics, maybe on Patreon when it's just me more or less ranting. You know, that sort of language naturally comes out. And whenever I put pen to paper and try to write my thoughts, I mean, you know, blood makes an appearance. Vampires make an appearance, fangs and claws and, you know,

all of these, this dark imagery makes an appearance because when I look out at the capitalist world, when I look at the world of class society, I see monsters, I see horror, I see bloodshed, and it's not a merely, like, again, not a merely aesthetic or stylistic choice. I think it gets at something crucially and viscerally real about life under capitalism that is essential, I think, to the critique and to the articulation of our politics and our criticism of all that exists, our criticism of the status quo. Yeah, absolutely. And I think maybe a slightly stronger claim I would make is that, so Block was writing, he was writing in the middle of the rise of fascism, right?

And he talks about this in a great book called Heritage of Our Time where he says that a kind of great mistake of the left of his day was to forsake this realm of culture and imagination, right? Because if you don't, then fascism can make its appeal based on these, like, imaginative, imagine it on. these imaginative spaces right um and i think uh one thing that i do think is that we are there is such a thing as the kind of communist imagination or the the socialist imagination um and i think it's it is in some ways like deeply atrophied um where we sort of insist all the time that we have to be rational we have to kind of like do the sober uh confrontation with what's in front of us but actually i want to insist that like even the stuff that we think of as just like disposable low culture is valuable for bolstering like that exactly as you're saying this kind

of great vision of um of what will it mean to live in a live live live a life that's free of horror um and you know again this is this is baked into a kind of tradition of marxist thought like you know you said that it comes out when you talk about it and it's like it's part of it's part of this tradition of like um so many different thinkers have tried to wrestle with the fact that like we live in a life of life that is like both materially and also imaginatively like restricted by the alienations of capitalism and I think if horror film and horror media is valuable in any respect it's like this up it is it's a rupture it's shocking it's deliberately like viscerally bodily affecting and that's an opportunity right that's an

opportunity to kind of bring something to to consciousness that has that wasn't there before. Absolutely. Culture, I mean, one way to sum up this part of the conversation is that culture is a valid and important terrain of struggle, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

And it shouldn't be. And just because it's kind of a field of low culture doesn't mean that we shouldn't be paying attention to it. In fact, maybe we should be doing that more. There's a quote that I really love, and I mention in the book, from Frederick Jameson, who recently. recently passed away. And Jameson said, to maintain that everything is a figure of hope is to offer an analytical tool for detecting the presence of some utopian content, even within the most degraded

and degrading cultural product. And then as I said in the book, there is even here, even in the grimace darkness, even when facing the most dangerous monster, even when covered with blood, the possibility of utopia. We're haunted by something. And as the communist manifesto pointed out, what haunts us is the historical embodiment of hope, the specks of communism. Yeah, beautifully said, RIP, to one of the greats. Well, in the opening chapter, you do talk about Ernst Block, and I know you've said quite a bit, but perhaps there is still more to say his Marxist philosophy as well, and what you call the quote-unquote dark way of being read.

Can you walk us through kind of your major analysis and arguments in this chapter and sort of expand on what you were talking about with regards to Block? Yeah, so in this chapter, the dark way of being read, it is basically a kind of like fleshing out of the argument between Block and Georgi Lukash. Lukash is a Hungarian, communist

and philosopher, and I think arguably one of the most important Marxist writers of the 20th century. The two of them are really, really close for a very long time. And they kind of credit one another for helping them develop their ideas.

Lukash eventually kind of breaks with Block as he joins the Communist Party, he is involved in the revolutionary struggle in Hungary and so they have this argument over the rise of a artistic movement

in Europe called expressionism I won't get into all of the details block goes actually this kind of new non-realist quite shocking form of art is really useful and important and socialist should be paying attention to it and Lukash kind of defends

quite very polemically realism. Realism, if you give up on realism you've given up on, as he would put it, grasping the social and political totality. And this is, that's the cause of their kind of break. So what I try and argue for is borrowing a phrase from Michael Lervey, which is critical unrealism. And it's like, we don't have to have

fidelity to this. The only useful culture is like, one which is mimetically useful as in it represents reality to us I think there's a there is a really important place for this dark way of being read it's you know it's my spin on on the it's a kind of gothic spin

on the the warm stream of Marxism right it's it's one that attends to the the the the seeming junk of culture you know the things that are historically antiquated or monstrous or folkloric and finds in all of these

things, something useful. It's something that Walter Benjamin was a great practitioner of. So, yeah, that's a kind of broad overview of what I mean by that. What is the social function of the monster through history? And what is its sort of social function today under contemporary late capitalism? So this is a super interesting question, right? So there's a really famous, there's a really famous short piece of writing called Monster Theory written by a guy called

Jeffrey Cohen and he writes these seven theses on the monster and he says that the monster is if you go to its Latin root it translates as being both a revelation of something a sign of something and a warning about

something and what the monster does is kind of rupture what we take to be normative accepted cultural categories and destabilizes them. So the social function of them is that, to put it in kind of more sort of philosophical terms,

the social function of them is that the monster is a kind of herald of something new emerging. And the new is often terrifying, right? It's often we fear of our, we're repulsed from it because it seems to be overwhelming, but at the same time there's something within us which is drawn to the new.

so what is the social function of the monster now right this is a really important question and I think the category of like who gets label the monster is often determined by ideological and political forces right I think there's there was something I saw in the early days of the Israeli genocide in Palestine um I saw a sign that someone posted on social media, been put up somewhere in the States, and it just said, stand with humanity, stand with Israel. And so the obvious implication of that is, well, what does it mean to be standing with the Palestinian resistance? It means, well, they're made into monsters, right? They're made into, they're no longer human, right? There's a very dehumanizing language.

So it's like the category of monster, like, I think we should be paying very careful attention to whom and what is labeled as monstrous because that I think is it's very revealing, right? It tells you a lot about the current ideological state of forces. Yeah, does that sort of begin to answer things a little? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, in fact, we recently released an episode,

Allison and I on the Life of Yaya Sinwar, titled Living and Dying for National Liberation, in part because not only are the Palestinians and Arab Muslims more broad, dehumanized by Israel, by their allies. I mean, you know, a full generation after 9-11, the terms terrorist, clash of civilizations. We've been indoctrinated, you know, the entire time with this Islamophobic dehumanization, which is, of course, part and parcel of imperialism, but even more specifically, settler colonialism. There's never been a settler colonial state that also

didn't dehumanize the natives whose land they were stealing and occupying. And, you know, it's one thing to, to assert the humanity of Palestinians, of Arabs, of Muslims more broadly. It's even more of a thing to try to humanize the very people who Israel and the U.S. tell us our real life monsters. They are terrorists to the point where they are not even worthy of life. like, sure, maybe you might quibble with us murdering tens of thousands of innocent human beings and children, but certainly you won't quibble with us murdering terrorists. You know, these horrible monsters like Yaya Sinwar, who aren't even worthy of even contemplating the idea that they might be human beings, right?

So there's like this level of dehumanization that applies to all of them, all Palestinians, all Arabs, all Muslims, depending on the conversation. And then there's extra layer where this, this, you know, these people are not only dehumanized, but they are framed as, as monsters by, you know, in so many ways, the real life monsters with all the money, all the power and all the blood on their hands in the first place. Yeah, precisely. So this, this, and I think what we're told to fear, where fear is directed, fear is a very powerful ideological force, right? And so the attempt to incite fear or to make it. others into the objects of fear is about reinforcing

those categories, right? The monster is that which is that which cannot be admitted but also cannot ever be eradicated because if you try and enforce normativity in any sort of sense of categories with the threat of fear and violence you'll never, that security will never arrive, right?

Because the circle of what is acceptable will only ever get narrower and narrower and narrower what is what is what is quote unquote normal will ever will always be a deeply shifting category and so that i think is a really important aspect of the social function of monstrosity right and culturally you see the same thing right um in in horror studies we talk a lot about like the different generations we generally get like a big vampire movie every 10 years or so would you another one right would you Robert eggers who did the northman he did the lighthouse he's doing an adaptation of

Nosferatu. This was originally done this was originally done in 1920 by F.W. Murnau as an incredible European filmmaker, but it's like, why is it now? Why is it now that we've got a remake of Nosferatu? A film

made in 1920s, Germany, in that precise political context, right? What does that say about the contemporary American political and cultural context, right? This is why I think paying attention to these forms of culture is so important and so useful well just to kind of elaborate on that a little bit what what would you say that that it is i mean i know that we you talk in the book about the twilight series in particular which

i found fascinating and amusing equal parts um but yeah the vampire is this reemergent monster this reemergent image at certain times um historically and so i mean yes i mean there are obvious parallels and some not so obvious parallels between 1920s, Germany, and 2020s, the U.S., but maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on that. Well, I think it's like, what is the vampire a symbol of? And particularly in the context of something that's based so closely on Dracula. So Dracula is the 1898 novel by Bram Stoker. There's the famous Bella Lagosie film that's made in the 30s.

Merdow's film is an unofficial adaptation. It's almost destroyed because Stoker's widow sues over the copyright. And the only reason that you can see F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is because somebody hit a copy in their house. And that was the only surviving film print. But, wow. Which is an incredible story. Like film is such a fragile cultural form.

But like in the context of any adaptation of something that's so heavily based on Dracula is very much tied up within finance, right? If you read the original novel, what is it about? It's about this ancient creature from Eastern Europe who's coming to London to buy property. And it's about the response of 19th century imperialists to defend the empire, to defend the British Empire, and to defend the women, right? the count is seen as being this kind of like acquisitive both financially dominative and kind of like sexually dominative figure um so there's these huge anxieties around like financial security the perpetuation patriarchy and i think it's going to be really

interesting to see uh nosferati when it comes out to see what kind of anxieties is agers responding to um and i think it's going to be quite interesting to try and read it and to kind assess it to see what this film is picking up on that maybe hasn't yet kind of found full articulation you know yeah absolutely i kind of want to read a little bit from the from the book itself if you'll allow me that um kind of on this exact topic i don't know there's a perfect place to start but let's just go here dracula is of course on the surface at least an aristocrat a holdover from an older model for arranging social and economic forces yet when the middle class jonathan Harker arrives at the castle, there are no servants, no luxuries, and the signs of the

brash capital accumulation that marks the private property of the aristocracy seem not to have been impacted by the passage of time. The count does not eat or drink, and he does not even seem to take pleasure in his violence. He is instead pure need. Furthermore, he is interested in property with, quote, plans and deeds and figures of all sorts. Maretti is very well attuned to the sociological implications of Dracula and explains it thusly. Quote, His ultimate aim is not to destroy the lives of others, according to whim, to waste them, but to use them. Dracula, in other words, is a saver, an ascetic, an upholder of the Protestant ethic, and in fact he has no body, or rather he has no shadow. His body admittedly exists, but it is

incorporeal, sensibly super sensible, as Marx wrote of the commodity, impossible as a physical fact, as Mary Shelley defines the monster in the first lines of her preface. In fact, it is impossible physically to estrange a man from himself to dehumanize him. But alienated labor as a social relation makes it possible, end quote. And then you go on, what is the vampire? What is Dracula? He is, in Moretti's argument, pure capital, resurrected and instrumentalized money. The shape of capital of 1897 returned from decades of recession and endlessly driving. toward monopoly. And of course you go on brilliantly. But that's a snapshot of the social function that Dracula served at that time, right? Yeah, absolutely. And Moretti's argument is like

absolutely kind of a sort of standard one within horror studies about this relationship between Marxism and Dracula. Now that you have learned what you have learned, it would be well for you to return to your own country. I prefer to remain and protect those whom you would destroy. You are too late. My blood now flows through her veins. She will live through the centuries to come as I have lived. Should you escape us, Dracula, we know how to save Miss Mina's soul, if not her life?

She dies by day, but I shall see that she dies by night. And I will have Carfax Abbey torn down stone by stone, excavated a mile around. I will find your earth box and drive that steak through your heart. And, yeah, in the context of Twilight, because I do talk about Twilight very briefly, right? It's the neoliberal fantasy, right? this is this is that's the that's the contemporary updating of of the vampire as pure need as being a saver as being an accumulator and it's about this fantasy of like um you get to live forever but living only off like your investments because your investments are you've saved so much so yeah this is absolutely a kind of strand that runs through through the vampire yeah interesting stuff well let's let's move on in in chapter four and allow me a little indulgence with the length of this question, but it sparked something in me. In chapter four, you talk about body whore and our post-COVID world. This chapter resonates with me on many levels, one of which is

just, maybe this is too personal, but just interestingly perhaps, my longstanding struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder, which has manifested predominantly through the body as the major site of my anxiety, from contamination OCD as a child to bodily or somatic OCD, which I struggle with today, mixed deeply with health anxiety and hypochondria, which have always haunted me. The post-COVID age of viral infection, microplastics, poison in our food, etc., have really exacerbated my desperate and neurotic need for control over and certainty about my body, especially in a world where I have no control or certainty around virtually anything outside of my body.

And OCD and anxiety, of course, always orbits around the need for control and certainty. this is a bit off the point of course of your chapter but it relates to it perhaps in certain ways feel free to take this question in any direction you want but but please walk us through some of your thoughts in this chapter and the cultural products that you use to highlight your analysis yeah and i think this is such an important question i think it's probably a question that so many of us feel and and that resonate with everything you just said um so basically what I try and do is think about body horror

and this is very, it's heavily indebted to the work of someone I quote in the book Zaviel Dan Areas and it's also heavily influenced by the film films of David Cronenberg and so body horror rests upon the fact that we are like fragile that we are contingent

and that actually even even kind of worse, even sort of more horrifying is that our body the thing that we think of as this kind of like seal monadic unit that's entirely under our control can just change and do things in ways that we have no real conscious control over. A really good example and a really basic example is aging, right? All of us have to embrace our own temporal finitude, right? The fact that like all of us are so fragile. So in the chapter, I put it like this. Body horror is not simply

spectacle, although the visceral thrills are not incidental, but it's a way of reckoning with the contradictions and tensions of human bodies. This can include everything from our own much repressed sense of corporeal fragility to the abject repulsion felt when encountering our own viscera and flesh, or the explicitly political question of what kinds of body are made acceptable and which are excluded, marginalized, or seen as monstrous. So, bodies are socially determined, that they can be inscribed as horrific, right? In a sense, then, body horror concerns itself with the fragility, mutability,

and sociality of human bodies. In our current era of new zoonotic disease, ecological catastrophe, extractive fossil fuel capitalism, and state biopolitical management, body horror is this kind of urgently necessary thing. And so there are two ways of kind of dealing with this, which is that I outline in the chapter with different films,

which is to say that actually, yes, our bodies are in some ways not fully under our conscious control but this is grounds for understanding them as their change to be something quite beautiful, quite full of potential. And this is a real

theme in Kronenberg's work. Kronenberg, who made films like Videodrome, he made The Fly. The film that I talk about quite a lot is his recent film, Crimes of the Future, which is very concerned with bodies and ecology and kind of

our own body is a site of aesthetic change. And it's like, there's something very vulnerable about this feeling, right? But that feeling is something that is kind of at core shared among so many of us. That our own bodies are a site of, like, there's a commonality here that means that we have, there's a lot in common that we can build from. or you can go actually this fear that it inspires is the ground of violence

right if my body is not under my control then the aim has to be to inscribe and enforce violence on the other and there's there's a very violent kind of nasty misanthropic horror movie I talk about in the chapter which is exactly about that if our body's not under our control

there's no real accountability I can do whatever I want because you are no longer really a person you're just kind of meat that I can destroy if I want to So those are the kind of two choices When it comes to Or two of the choices

The body horror presents us with, right? Do we accept our mutability? Do we accept our changeability? And do we accept that as a kind of like Common shared condition? Or do we see it as something that is repulsive And frightening And then seek to like

Use violence to sort of impose a false security of the body? and it I think that's that's that's that's that's maybe what I would say in response to and like I resonate exactly with what you said right these feelings of like we're told that at core we are individuals but actually

we are kind of entangled with one another and this is this is why body horror kind of started in the 80s during the high point of the AIDS pandemic in the first waves of AIDS cases in the US where it's like actually what bodies do and the kind of things the bodies kind of reveal to us about ourselves and about others

there is a kind of very important these important political questions of sexuality and gender that have to be brought into this as well yeah that feels like a very long response but does that sort of make sense No, yeah. I mean, if anything, it also sparks a bunch of thoughts myself. There are so many different strains in our current politic that, you know, you might not think of as directly relating to this, but really do. There is this, of course, you know, fascist obsession with the body, with policing other people's bodies, et cetera. There's this strain of transhumanism amongst certain people, Silicon Valley types that are seeking to transhumanism. transcend the body, you know, through the technological progress. There is the, what does this say here?

I have a note here. I can't fucking read it. Oh, the living longer people, right? There's this sort of low-level obsession with longevity and a few figures, like I believe his name is Brian Johnson, who is running this experiment on himself where he's trying to use every mechanism in technological advance that he can to prevent his own body from aging, right? This refusal to accept the fact that we are ultimately fragile, contingent, ever-morphing bodies that will one day, you know, die and decay away, especially in a society that hyper fixates on youth, on beauty,

and the thing lurking underneath all of that, which is productivity, this fear of getting old, of being left behind by the system, of being disposable when you're no longer productive for it, and then the vampire-like exploitation and feasting that occurs in old age, where you are handed over, in many cases, to, you know, retirement communities that are going to extract profit from whatever, you know, money you might have built up over your life or the money that your family might have built up over their life. And so it's like this fear of never being able um you know this sort of downward slide into oblivion in a society in a culture that that detests it sort of implicitly and that also is is is not really courageous in

in its facing of death and in mortality and of course you have this obsession when it comes to plastic surgery now where you know with the rise of of social media and the internet you know a young impressionable teenage girls but also boys and in the fitness and man nanosphere world, are comparing their bodies to, in some cases, literally impossible photoshopped bodies online and always coming up short and the sort of psychic damage that that can do, right? And so the horrors abound when it comes to the body. And then let's look at COVID. What's that, what that's done to people? I mean, of course, it sparked enormous anxiety, sort of naturally. But as I as I put in these notes, even the anti-COVID people, the conspirator

fear assists, right, who are rejecting COVID as a real threat. It's just the flu, always downplaying it from the beginning. They're, of course, scared of the vaccine, right? So in the same way that most people are scared of the virus, infiltrating their bodies and doing harm and fucking up their ability to live life and be productive and earn money, there's the sort of inverted fear on the, on the conservative conspiratorial right, where it's not the virus that is the threat, but it's precisely the vaccine that is the threat but in both cases we get to the same spot fear of an alien sort of you know penetration into into the body and what that could mean for for your life so i don't know i don't have any way to to nicely draw all those thoughts together but they're just all there

yeah i mean i think it's so important you brought up this this guy brian the guy who's trying to not die because it's like death is really the like if you're rich enough every problem is solvable right because you just need to spend money to fix it death is the thing that that you can't spend money to get out of, and it's also the thing that stops you spending money, right? This idea of the preservation of the body is it's linked to productivity,

our obsession with youth, all of that, I think, is so true. And it's like, if you accept, if you accept, you know, like watching Crimes of the Future is a really interesting experience, because if you accept the kind of possibilities of change,

our own shared vulnerability, our own shared finitude, our own shared contingency, um like there is there is a sort of like radical sort of vulnerability that that forces on you um and it's i i don't want to i don't want to say too strongly that like there's there's something of a kind of politics implicit to it because it isn't necessarily because it kind of easily as you pointed out regress into that reactionary like fear of the other but it's like there's something there like where um you know i i talk about a film called the beach house

in the chapter and it ends with with the character saying don't be afraid right and it's said straight down the camera and the the kind of obvious question is is this character talking to themselves or are they talking to us and I think obviously it's both it's it's both of these things and it's a really good um I think that's that's maybe the kind of final thing I would say about the body horror chapter yeah it's a fascinating chapter I really encourage people to get the book and go through it themselves of course well there's so much that we're not going to be able to fully touch on in an interview. But the last thing I just wanted to say about the Brian Johnson type figures, and this is,

he just sort of stand in for a broader movement of people who are obsessed with longevity, anti-aging, et cetera. There's something very ironic in spending huge portions of your life trying to avoid death to prolong a life in which you continually try to avoid death, right? It's almost as if you're not even living because you're just so, you're so obsessed about the continuation of life as such you kind of forget to live like if all day long you're like I have to do this ointment and I have to you know put that facial thing on my face and I have to eat these supplements and my my cook who I can afford to pay my chef personal chef has to cook the food

with this exact micro nutrient profile and it's like what are you what is life at that point so like you're in some sense you're already dead yeah yeah is this living or is this just kind of like managed stasis. Exactly. The people that want to live forever don't seem to know how to live at all. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on.

So this is really interesting to me. And certainly the Purge series is a film that I always thought was, you know, dripping with political content. And in Chapter 7 titled Crises of Liberalism and Necro-Neoliberalism, you analyzed two very popular film franchises saw and purged. the purge franchises, as a lens through which to examine modern American society, can you talk about these films and kind of explicate what they reveal about our contemporary political landscape?

Yeah, so I talk about both of them, both of these franchises made just ludicrous amounts of money. We're very culturally popular. And I connect them to a, you know, this idea of like neoliberalism is essentially in decay. It can no longer manage its own institutions. and so ultimately sees huge swathes of the population as being fundamentally disposable, which I don't think is a kind of a wild leap to make. Saw is essentially about that disposability on the level of flesh, right?

What are you prepared to give up to keep living? It's a very strange series of people have never watched any of them. A lot of them are not very good, and it's kind of like on Harvanguard, we've talked about it, It's kind of like a new metal soap opera. Very melod... There's like real melodrama to it. But if you kind of push past a lot of that, there is this...

Everyone is disposable in these films. There really doesn't seem to be any kind of like just ordinary people. What you have are basically people who are criminalized. You have the poor. And you have police officers who are... you know, also corrupt and useless. But everyone is kind of disposable within the Saw Films.

And so I connect this to Akeel and Bemay's famous paper on Necropolitics. And a good explanation of it is, so the Soul Films echo the argument of Cameroonian political theorist and historian Akeel and Bermay, who discusses the particular kind of power that operate in colonial contexts, a targeted ruthless biopower that Mbbe calls Necki pro-politics. The famous essay opens as follows. The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides to a large degree in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to

kill or to allow to live, constitutes the limits of sovereignty. The resonances of this with the saw film are abundantly clear. One only need think of Jixor's famous slogan or instruction to those enmeshed within his games, a line delivered often through the infamous figure of Billy the puppet, live or die, make your choice. And the choice is, again, what are you prepared to give up in order to stay alive? I think it's not a surprise that the film franchise went into talking about healthcare quite a lot, because it seems to me to be like this kind of ironclad law in American healthcare of linking your wealth to your life. What would you give up? if you, would you give up all of the money in your bank account?

Would you give up your house? Would you keep a job which abuses and exploits you simply because that gives you some minimal access to health insurance? All of that is, is kind of all the way through these films. The Purge is an interesting franchise that comes later. And in the Purge films, essentially there is this admission, or there's this weird kind of like metaphysics and violence, that there is a sort of naturalized lust for violence within the American sort of soul as it were

and the films can't really admit that violence has social ergo political causes it's really interesting that it comes what's interesting about these films is they come close to putting forward a vision of like actual revolutionary struggle but it gets reduced to aesthetics and then is like deliberately subverted into

electoralism purge election year is a really good example of this. So the purge films admit that there are kind of tensions, contradictions, problems in this kind of normative model of American liberalism. But they have no way of overcoming it, right? So if you think this violence is simply a kind of like metaphysical reality, then the only thing that can happen is what happens at the end of the franchise, which is where America kind of collapses into permanent

kind of warlordism. People have been seemingly driven to the point of madness by bloodlust. This is what happens in the film called the Forever Purge, where the purge suddenly becomes this kind of state that the entire country just falls into. So they're both really interesting because they're super

mainstream, very popular, and a lot of the time the political content of them is just kind of glossed over because of like there's often very spectacular violence, in them but actually if you if you push past those things they're saying uh or they they illustrate and highlight things which are actual pressing political issues that we should be aware of yeah and that's kind of an interesting thing about analyzing cultural products is that a lot of times the themes or the things that are revealed in these cultural products particularly in film

where you have many many many many people working on it um is like Like, it's not even the, sometimes it is, of course, the intention of the writer or director. But in many cases, it is just this sort of thermostat that reflects sort of subconscious anxieties in the society overall. That if you get enough people from that society working on a project, these things come to the surface, oftentimes not even within the, you know, the conscious intent of the creators or the participators in the creation of these films. and I think that's what makes analysis of film in particular so fascinating, different than things like books or paintings where it really does go down to an individual's intention, you know, and sometimes that hits the mark, sometimes it doesn't. But because film is so broad and so many people pitch in on it,

and yes, sometimes there is that auteur that has this vision. But in many cases, some of these, some of this content just rises from a sort of collective, a subconscious and then that reveals something deep about the society that produced it. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Well, it is Halloween, so I want to play a little game. So what I'm going to do, and you know, we talk about psychoanalysis oftentimes, free association. What I'm going to do is toss out figures of horror, and I want you to spend, you know, 10 to 20 seconds kind of telling me what comes to mind. And I don't want you to overthink it.

I didn't give you this list ahead of time. You can talk. Some of these figures will be things you discuss in your book. And so you can take it in that direction or just whatever direction you want. But I thought this would be kind of a fun thing to do. You cool with it? Yeah, yeah. Let's do it.

Let's do it. The first thing is witches. Oh, yeah. Great. Okay. Okay. So I do talk about this in the book. I talk about it in the run up to the 2016 election.

There was a big resurgence in, uh, in the figure of the witch um the like the witch is the witch is there's this long tradition of like this is the point at which uh the witch is the which is about basically about the the um the monsterizing of of a sort of a feminism that no longer depends upon a kind of patriarchal conception of of capitalism um i think a lot of the time the the radical potentiality of the witch is stripped out for a sort of of memified, watered-down merchandised notion of

the sort of slightly spiritual, neoliberalized girl boss approach to it, but like the witch is terrifying primarily because through magic or through secret knowledge, the witch can do things that don't depend upon labor.

They don't depend upon work. And in fact, the big threat of the witch classically was that they would imperil your work, you know, spoiling the milk from cows, ruining harvests, all of these things which bring home the degree to which our survival is contingent upon work. So, yeah, the witch is, also I do talk about Robert Eggers' other film, The Witch, in the

book, super interesting, very, almost like a folk horror tale about what rests in the woods and the ways in which we can choose to kind of take on a new life outside the established order of things. So that that's what comes to mind first. Perfect. All right. Next up is zombies. Ah, yes. Zombies are the great messaphora of late 20th century capitalism. You've got Romero's rightly famous zombie movies from the 70s. You know, I think it's Dawn of the Dead, which is set in a shopping mall full of corpses wandering around.

What came into my mind is the Walking Dead. really famous comic series which then adapted into a TV show and there's something kind of quite grimly nihilistic and sort of very

I'm not a huge fan because it makes explicit something that was always implicit that we are the zombies that it makes it are us right

we are already the Walking Dead but that is that's quite an annihilationist way of thinking about it and it's a way of excusing violence to others, right? If we are, we're only putting off the inevitable,

then our violence is kind of completely excusable. Ramera zombies are interesting because they develop their own kind of consciousness as the films progress. And it's like, this is, this is the default state of the subject under late 20th century capitalism, right? Pacified, shambling around, not really, not really awake.

And so the dream is, Either, is there a new kind of consciousness that emerges from that? Or do you have to try and survive, which excuses all of your sort of, like, violence towards the stranger that you can dish out? It's not a surprise. We've not seen a really big zombie movie for a while, I think. And I think it's really interesting. I think that's really interesting. I think we're probably due, we're probably due on.

I think World War Z, which people may have seen, is maybe the last one that comes. to mind. And that was much more phrase, that phrases it much more in a sort of like biomedical register. Zombies are an infection. Oh, I just remember Danny Boyles, there was 28 days later, there was the sequel

28 weeks later. There is a new, there is the 28 years later, which is coming back. Yeah, so you lots of thoughts sparked, so I think we'll stop that. Yeah, that'll be fascinating. I'm excited for that. So the next one up is aliens.

I mean, the alien is always the outside, right? The alien is always the thing that comes from the cold, dark void above us. And that's phrased, that's kind of presented to us as either something that is like liberating. There's an old Spielberg movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind or even like something like ET, where, you know, there's something kind of magical about it. And it opens existence to being something big. and stranger, or it's annihilation, it's death,

often very violent death. Just think of the original alien film, which is, you know, working class people at their job basically being picked off one by one by this perfect, perfected killer that is

completely, completely, when we encounter the completely other, are we, we drawn towards it because it's sublime or do we flee from it because it's horrific and that's really what the alien does All right, next up is ghosts, specters if you will

I really like talking about ghosts ghosts are people think ghosts ghosts are not necessarily scary ghosts are melancholic right ghosts are almost always tied up with loss there is this idea of like ghosts

and so ghosts are very closely linked with memory um so this this brings us back to what i was talking about at the the top of the show when i was talking about this idea of history we always think that history is something that's done and finished the past is the past is past but actually it doesn't take much for the past to become very present to you right um you know and it doesn't it doesn't even need we've all had these experiences of someone that maybe we inherit something from a family member who's passed away and suddenly every time we see it or we see that picture They're brought back to us.

They become kind of present to us in a very real sense. Ghosts, yeah, ghosts are scary because they bring us back to what we can lose. And they bring us back to the fact that history itself is quite an unstable category. Yeah. I like how you talk about melancholy, memories, grief. There's a quote, I don't even remember where it's from. I heard it years ago. But it says, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them.

We haunt ourselves. And I've always loved that. all right the next monster for you and we have a few more here Frankenstein's monster not Frankenstein mind you because I'm not so illiterate as to not know the difference Frankenstein's monster well I write about and you might notice if you read the book I refer to Frankenstein's creature yeah so what is Frankenstein's creature it's stitched it's stitched he's stitched together from the bodies of the

poor and the working class who were in unmarked graves it's an incredible metaphor and it's been used as a metaphor for the working class for a very long time and for a class that is coming into its political agency so Frankenstein's creature I'm a big fan of I yeah

there's a quote actually that I really like from the novel by Mary Shelley there's a quote from spoken by the creature. Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me and I will defend

it. And I think that's a really good, that is a really good slogan for this stitched together body of the poor. The poor who don't even get to die in peace, right? But by being brought together into this mass, you become powerful.

It's not a surprise that the Frankenstein's creature was used as a metaphor throughout the the 1800s and it's this point where what Joshua Clover would call the riot strike starts to kind of coales as a political tool of working class people yeah so the Frankenstein

Frankenstein's creature this thing which is brought to life by science and alchemy is a really powerful and kind of potent metaphor fascinating all right the very last one and perhaps the scariest of all the current state of the UK

what a nightmare and it's less it's less nightmarish than it is depressing yeah and it's it's there's something there's something so

kind of grey and bleak about it like all the time I find myself thinking about how Mark Fisher described capitalist realism as this gray curtain that sort of draped over the horizon and there's this kind of contraction of social and

political space within which to kind of think differently and you know this is why I think horror is such an appealing thing to me because horror represents rupture it represents you know some some blood being put back into things yeah definitely it's just it's it's always an irony that the the inventors of capitalism seem to not be able to to escape it even as it's clearly no longer working and it's it's really doing a number on you guys so but we relate trust me we relate um yeah yeah all right so let's go ahead and move on and that was very fun thank you for indulging that and as usually did an amazing job fascinating stuff all right so towards the end of the book you discuss ways in which the established order

monsterizes the other, specifically trans people. And I found this, you know, very, very moving and insightful. But other monstering occurs under the regime of capitalism, imperialism as well. We've talked about it a little bit already. The immigrant, the Arab Muslim, you know, in the old days, and maybe Trump's trying to bring it back, the communist, the Marxist, the homeless, you know, in today's world. Can you elaborate on this idea of this monstering that occurs and kind of how we can combat this form of dehumanization and specifically of course again you talk about trans people in this in this regard yeah so i talk about um i talk about two really great horror novels one is tell me i'm worthless by alison rumfitt the other is um called manhunt by uh gratchin falcon

martin both trans writers um and so the kind of the kind of point that i'm trying that i was trying to get at with the kind of conclusion is, well, I put it in the book like this. And Judith Butler, among many others, has made explicit the links between attacks on so-called gender ideology and a deeper, more widespread reactionary turn in politics. Transphobia then is a symptom of a wider fascist backlash. We have to pay attention to it because the category of monster is mobile, where one monster is found, this new reactionary fascist politics will quickly find others. and this is

this I think is true borne out in precisely what you're saying that like it never stops just one

right it's you never find one acceptable target and if you're willing to to kind of leave one group

there in order to let them be monstered by this great apparatus of politics then others

was swiftly going to follow right so you have to insist upon kind of taking this on head on

and yeah I I think it's a very burning, it's a very burning problem in, particularly in British, um, media discourse. Like, it's, what's so, what's so, like, unbelievable to me is I have so many American friends who tell me that, like, British media is awful. And it's like, this is my, these are Americans telling me this. You know it's bad. You know it's bad. You know it's bad if the British media is so virulently transphobic that even Americans are looking at it and going, hang on, what? And this is a continuation of the British media's homophobia, you know, a

generation back. And I want to shout out Sophie Lewis, particularly who's done excellent work on tracing the kind of the rise of turf island, as we might call it. So, yeah, the point is not to say that this, this, the, the, the transphobia is a kind of unique case, but actually to say that this is a, this is a sign of something far wider and deeper that's finding its articulation, uh, in this particular cultural fashion. So, uh, both of the books I think are fantastic and really, really can't recommend them enough. Um, they're both very different in how they approach, uh, the, the, the kind of question. Um, and I think, tell me I'm worth this is a really good example of exploring the fact that there is this sort of insipion. fascism that will make that will pick a target but really it isn't about the target right it's about this wider kind of miasma almost

of fascism that you've just kind of been breathing in and this I think is entirely in line with things like Deleuze and Qatari you know the problem that what did Foucault say about anti-edipus it was the guide to anti-fascist living because the true

the true the true the true fascist danger is like the fascist within your own head and I think trying to draw attention to the way that horror is dealing with it is an attempt to kind of like further that and go actually what who else is in danger of being targeted what what modes and nexus of solidarity might there be and you know how how am i as a as also implicated in this in you know what have i internalized um so yeah that that's that's why i decided to focus on on it in this way Yeah. And of course, you know, as you were mentioning, this, this fascist politics that is built on exclusion where the fascist doesn't know themselves except in relation to who they hate. That's, that can't go away. There has to be the other that can be monsterized, that can be dehumanized. And so you're constantly flitting through, you know, more others, creating and uplifting more others so you can feel sort of defined. in a sense. And that goes back to the fear as being core to reactionary politics in a lot of

ways. And yeah, I find it, you know, brutalizing. And also I think it's informative for us that our politics is built not on exclusion, not on otherizing, on solidarity, on bringing people together across differences to fight for a better world for all of us. And I think that is ultimately our great advantage and our vision for a future where you know humanity focuses on on the things that unite us as opposed to the petty things that divide us and we set aside a politics of fear in favor of a politics of love and solidarity yeah exactly um and i think this there is that is a that's universalist right yes and it's like but it requires this this

this broadening of what it means of what that means you know and it's like this idea of a new kind of existence is not just something that's monstrous it's something that has to happen to us right there has to be a new subjectivity

and this is this goes all the way back to again to Block who's a bit he writes very well on this and it's about the cultural imagination is a kind of it has an essential role to play in this and I think if it's all right I'd like to just read it's basically the very final page of a little bit from the final page of the book.

Yeah. So we live in an age of horror as a polyphonic, multivalent mode of culture and as a structuring metaphor that can function as both diagnosis and as utopian aspiration. The Gothican horror show that change is always possible. Tries it might to prove otherwise capitalism is haunted by something, what the theorist Mark Fisher called the specter of a world that would be free. Block wrote that only Marxism was both detective and liberating. Only in an expansive view of human culture could a truly liberatory cultural politics be constructed, even from the very darkest of places.

If there is a utopian future to be made, it's one that includes all that haunts the capitalist imagination, every scrap of culture that incessantly whispers to us that the world does not have to be this way. It is a utopian notion to see the Gothic and horror, not as a kind of closure of the possible, but as an expansion of what could be. It is a gamble to believe that even in the darkest products of culture, in the midst of violence, horror, and despair, there is an unmistakable trace of hope, glittering under the blood. But when the stakes are so high, when the current situation is so bleak, all resources are needed to find ways out and through the haunted ruins of a necrotic neoliberalism that both chokes off the imagination and limits the horizon of political possibility. To pay attention to the ghost, to the monster, the strange and the supernatural is to find new methods of comprehending not only our past, but the possibility of the future, thus undertaking the vital work of bolstering the utopian imagination. China Mievel puts the problem in useful terms. We know that even many who love us are bewildered by our unrealism, our utopian foolishness, in striving for what we strive for. But can you understand how unrealistic their beliefs are to us?

A gothic Marxism is one that's alive to the possibility of what seems to be unrealistic, finding in the haunting persistence of ghosts and monsters the dark traces of what Ursula Le Guin called the realism of a larger reality. Beautiful, and perhaps the single best way to wrap this episode up. As a closing question, I just want you to give a recommendation. Of course, I'll link to the book, I'll link to your socials and everything so people can find you, follow up on your work, check out your other work, our previous episodes, etc. But if you had to recommend one film and or one book to the audience,

maybe one that you talk about in your book or maybe just one that you're interested in beyond that, kind of keeping with the theme of this discussion and the horror genre, broadly conceived, what would you recommend? There's one that I talk about in the book. It's called The Platform. It's a Spanish language film. It'll be on streaming services somewhere. and it is

it's really good it's really exciting it's really good horror movie I won't get too much into the concept of it but I will say I think it's a really good model

of what does revolutionary struggle mean sometimes and it has really yeah it's really good it's about it's okay I will explain a little bit it's set in a tower

where people are kept on different floors and everyday food arrives from the very top of the tower going all the way down to the bottom. And if you're near the top of the tower, you have plenty to eat. If you're near the bottom of the tower, you starve to death. And it's like, how do you change a system like that? How do you deal with the way that it makes natural that which is constructed?

In terms of a book, I would recommend if you have a fondness for kind of the gory, more spectacular kinds of horror, there's a really great book by kind of friends. friend and comrade of mine called Mark Stephen, it's called Splatter Capital on the political economy of Gore Films. It is, it's really fun, it's really exciting, it's very short, and it will introduce you to a whole bunch of really, a really amazing kind of vintage Gore films and new ways of understanding that this isn't just about spectacular violence, it's making really strong, salient political points. And then finally, my final recommendation would be definitely come and listen to horror vanguard.

We've done hundreds of episodes now covering every kind of horror movie. As we like to say, every film is a horror film if you're willing to look at it the right way. But yeah, those would be my three recommendations for a very happy Halloween for everybody. Hell yeah, perfect. My recommendation would be capitalism,

a horror story, Gothic Marxism and the dark side of the radical imagination by the one and only, John Greenway. And as Gramsci once famously said, the old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, Now is the time of monsters. Happy Halloween, everybody.