Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

“Dead is in,” proclaims a Halloween poster outside my local thrift store. Case in point, consider the record ratings for the recent season premier of AMC’s The Walking Dead , which now boasts the largest viewership in the 18–49 age group in the US. Driving the success of The Walking Dead is a doomsday fascination with zombie apocalypse. In the face of crumbling cities, soaring job loss, decaying social services and ecological destruction, impending doom can seem not only inevitable, but even preferable to the slow death march of late capitalism. But the global economic slump that began in 2008 sent the popular infatuation with the undead truly viral. As millions entered the night of the living dead of mass unemployment, zombies invaded popular culture, prompting Time magazine to declare them “the official monster of the recession.” In a social order haunted by death and decay, it is little surprise to see films, video games, YouTube clips, and a store (in Las Vegas, naturally) all bearing the title, Zombie Apocalypse . Even the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have gotten into the act, with a tongue-in-cheek riff on the undead in the form of a booklet called “Preparedness 101: Zombie Novella” — all in an effort to get us ready for the next plague. It would be hard to take self-parody farther, however, than a Detroit entrepreneur‘s plan to build Z World, a theme park in his devastated home town where participants are to be chased through abandoned factories and ruined houses by a horde of zombies eager to bite into new recruits. “It turns perceived liabilities into assets,” says promoter Mark Ziwack of his plan to capitalize on industrial ruin, social decay and urban blight. Call it zombie capitalism.

Zombie Capitalism The problem with prevailing images of apocalyptic zombie capitalism, however, is that they have lost sight of its most subversive underside: the zombie laborer. The zombie laborer emerged in Haiti, at one time the world’s largest slave colony, assuming its quintessential form during the period of American occupation (1915–34), when US marines, wielding violence and terror, deployed forced labor to build roads and other infrastructure. As I document in Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, it was in modern Haiti that zombies acquired their unique meaning as the animated dead, mere flesh and bones, bereft of memory and identity, toiling on behalf of others. This view of the living dead, which entered the American culture industry in the 1930s and 1940s, carried a critical charge: the notion that capitalist society zombifies workers, reducing them to interchangeable beasts of burden, mere bodies for the expenditure of labor-time. But the idea of the zombie as a living-dead laborer was displaced in American cultural production in the late 1960s by that of the ghoulish consumer. While this cultural shift can be bitingly satirical, as in George E. Romero’s 1978 zombie-film, Dawn of the Dead While images of insatiable flesh-eating can cleverly lampoon a late capitalism choking on its own excesses, these satires too readily lose sight of what the Haitian image of the undead grasped: that all this manic consumption is impossible without the millions of workers who feed the machinery of profit with their labor.