Still from Nosferatu, directed by FW Murnau.

The question of whether the United States is an oligarchy has come to the fore, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez draw major crowds around the country to their Fighting Oligarchy Tour. Their message of combatting the outsized influence of rich and powerful corporate interests has resonated with thousands of Americans. But even as it is clear to so many that something is amiss, the idea of oligarchy can seem ill-defined and opaque. What is oligarchy in concrete terms and how would we know if we were living under one? To answer these questions requires an understanding of the relationship between the state and capital—and between both and the social body.

Martin Buber said, “The State is a homunculus sucking the blood from the veins of communities.” This picture of government as a form of parasitic subordination and control echoes several of the modern period’s most famous descriptions not only of the state, but of the role of capital within the economic order. The image of the vampire—dead yet alive, sustained by the life of humans, possessed of otherworldly power—has long been deployed as a metaphor for the capitalist. Perhaps the most famous example comes from Karl Marx, in Volume I of Capital, which was first published in 1867. Marx writes, “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Later, he describes capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labor.” In both Buber’s image of the state and Marx’s conception of capital, we find the idea of a ruling class that does not need to produce in order to live, but enjoys a privileged position to live off of the work and wealth of others. Marx relies frequently and to dramatic effect on the image of vampires and bloodthirst, for example writing that the “capitalized blood of children” underwrites the power of American capital. But Marx’s was not the first time the owning and employing class had been compared to the undead blood-suckers of folklore.

In his Philosophical Dictionary, published in 1764, more than a century before Capital, Voltaire wrote, “We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces.”

A more immediate reference point for Marx’s use of the metaphor comes from his friend and frequent collaborator Frederick Engels. The vampire appears in Engels’ 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which he discusses the role of religion in subduing the working class: “[N]ecessity will force the working-men to abandon the remnants of a belief which, as they will more and more clearly perceive, serves only to make them weak and resigned to their fate, obedient and faithful to the vampire property-holding class.” But historian of political thought William Clare Roberts argues that Marx’s use of this metaphor “may be yet another détournement of Proudhon.”

In The System of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon describes the employer as “like the vampire of the fable, exploiting the degraded wage-worker … the idler devouring the substance of the laborer.” Proudhon developed........

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