Life & Mortality Quote by Karl Marx

Marx doesn’t argue; he stages a horror scene. By calling capital "dead labor", he yanks it out of the neutral language of markets and puts it back where it came from: past human effort congealed into property, machines, factories, money. Then he makes that congealed past parasitic. The vampire image is doing surgical work. Capital isn’t just accumulated work; it’s work that has been separated from the worker, animated by law and ownership, and set loose to feed.

The subtext is a reversal of bourgeois common sense. In polite economics, capital is productive, even benevolent: it “creates jobs,” “makes growth possible.” Marx flips the causal story. Living labor is the only source of new value; capital survives by extracting it. That’s why the vampire “lives the more” the more it sucks: accumulation is not an incidental outcome but the system’s pulse. More work hours, faster pace, higher intensity, lower wages, longer supply chains - all become ways to keep the undead moving.

Context sharpens the bite. Marx is writing in the age of steam, factories, and urban immiseration, when industrial expansion was sold as progress while workers were treated as inputs with a replacement rate. The metaphor also smuggles in a moral accusation without sermonizing: exploitation isn’t a glitch, it’s the operating logic. Even the rhythm of the sentence mimics compulsion - "lives only", "lives the more" - as if capital has no choice but to feed. That fatalism is part of its power: the monster isn’t a bad actor; it’s the rules of the game.