Abstract
Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's vampire metaphor is limited to accentuating the excessive and predatory nature of capitalist accumulation. Against the predominant view, this essay argues that the standard reading of Marx's vampire metaphor implicitly endows the category of “living labor” or the “worker” with a transcendent rather than immanent ontology. Drawing predominantly from Louis Althusser's reading of Marx in Reading Capital, this essay argues that interpreting Marx's vampire metaphor as representing the concept of value—or surplus-value more specifically—avoids the problematic tendency to reify living labor by underscoring the immanent and totalizing character of Marx's critique of capital.
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