I’ve complained that vampires are boring because they’re everywhere. My latest encounter helps prove the point. It took place while thumbing through Capitalism and the Jews, a new book by Jerry Z. Muller. In it, Muller writes of Karl Marx and Capital:

The book is replete with images of parasitism, vampirism, and even cannibalism.
“Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and live the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him.” Marx sustains the metaphors of vampirism, werewolfism, and cannibalism through much of his discussion of the condition of the worker under capitalism. … When Lenin later referred to the necessity of eliminating capitalists because they were “bloodsuckers,” he was merely heightening Marx’s own metaphor.