In the New Testament, there’s a well known and striking passage in which Jesus exorcises a demon in the country of the Gadarenes. Encountering a man whose life had been reduced to a self-destructive frenzy in the mountains and among the tombs, screaming and cutting himself with stones, Jesus proceeds to tackle the problem directly, not by addressing the man, but by addressing the demon within:

“He said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many. And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country. Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.

Moloch (in Metropolis)

While the scene doesn’t lack for terrifying elements, the real horror of the New Testament scene consists in the wrongness of demonic speech, the voice which is not that of the man who nevertheless produces it. The words emerge from the man’s mouth—but they belong to another.

This particular uncanny departure from the natural order of things continues to haunt us: while corporate power is of course acknowledged as a serious problem, it is their personhood—their right to speak in their own name—which particularly troubles us in the era of Citizens United. It’s gratifying, and perhaps even politically useful in a crude way, to imagine that when a lawyer argues before the Supreme Court on behalf of his corporate employer, he is, like the man from Gadara, not speaking himself, but rather only serving as the debased vessel by which some evil is personified and made manifest.

Sascha Schneider, Der Mammon und sein Sklave

Indeed, it’s a fairly common trope to come to terms with the horrors of the economy by use of the metaphorical resources provided by supernatural evil. Mammon, for instance, names the demon form of money, which, in being something one can serve instead of God, became endowed with personified agency—the word originally only meant “money” or “wealth” in Hebrew. Mammon thus is for all intents and purposes a demon created entirely within and from out of the worldly process of commerce and exchange. Moloch, the ancient god of sacrifice, has, in works from Lang to Ginsberg, put a face on the devouring impersonality of the industrial condition. And even the key story of the marginal Christian literature on demons, the pseudepigraphical Testament of Solomon, is essentially about the powers of industry: Solomon summons and binds a host of demons in order to build the Temple, carefully controlling the forces he is required to unleash to complete his construction project.

What would it mean to take these metaphors seriously? When we try to regulate corporations, bind them to codes of “social responsibility,” or elaborate their specific powers in a benefit charter, are we acting like lesser Solomons, trying to channel the destructive energies we have dared unleash? Should we be less than surprised when our pacts with these demonic presences turn out for the worse?

Could we get a little more mileage out of this crude rhetorical trope? We can, but only by first taking a slight detour into some more serious anticapitalist theory. Specifically, we need to explore a key problem in the suggestion that, in our new era of increasingly networked automation, labor “steps to the side of the production process,” as Marx put it in the “Fragment on Machines.”

George Caffentzis, in his critique of Jeremy Rifkin and Antonio Negri’s wildly politically divergent but ultimately complementary celebrations of immaterial labor, reminds us that the process by which capitalism creates value is fundamentally linked to domination:

In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labor but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branches create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, “new enclosures” in the countryside must accompany the rise of “automatic processes” in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg's existence is premised on the slave.

This is a critique that bears repeating—even in the most blameless Silicon Valley startup, the market valuation and payout, in the last instance, depends on the ability of an “immaterial” worker to command the material labor of other people. In other words, value isn’t a product, but a social relation, one which makes fungible the economic rights one has “earned.” Whether one is inventing new ways to satisfy elite desires for just-in-time servants or doing something nominally more useful, the point remains that economic privilege within the capitalist system requires exploitation, and even if the individual workplace seems relatively egalitarian, at the level of the system, returns to capital are built on the backs of the dispossessed.

Globalization, for Caffentzis, is in part the process by which this dispossession conceals itself by taking place elsewhere. In the last analysis, the privileges conferred by one’s position in the capitalist economic system are made manifest because you can command the labor of others — from the the miner behind the rare earth metals in the cellphone in your pocket, to the slave who caught the fish that your cat ate for dinner, the farmworker who picked the tomato on your salad, and the barista who served your coffee. Capitalism, no matter how networked or immaterial it becomes, eventually comes down to earth in the concrete form of exploitation — someone does something they don’t want to do, and someone else benefits. Breaking this bond between production and domination is the task of anticapitalism, not something that will happen all by itself as capitalism catches up with Moore’s law.

By now, you are probably asking — what does this all have to do with demons?

Let’s go back to the story of the demon Legion, singular and plural at the same time. This demon begs to not be sent “away out of the country” — but the original text refers to this place where the demon will be returned to as the chora. In the philosophical imaginary, the chora attempts to name that paradoxical and unthinkable space outside, before, and between in which meaning unfolds. For a demon to be returned to the chora, to the gap between the sensible, rather than to some transcendental hell beyond or beneath our world, gestures in the direction of a materialist demonology. The challenge posed by the critique of immaterial labor advanced by Caffentzis is in the way it induces a kind of vertigo: every action, every moment of consumption, no matter how innocent or seemingly insignificant, veers into complicity with the globalized mechanism of dispossession and domination. Our relation to capital becomes nearly unthinkable, much like signification’s relationship to the space which precedes it and makes it possible.

And this is where demonology can prove to be of some assistance — to remember what takes place, occluded, in the economic chora. It is precisely in this space in-between in which capitalism takes place, unfolding in the gaps between a million wages paid and purchases made, all coalescing in a system in which banal interactions on one side of the globe translate to brutal exploitation on the other.

Demonology can help us make some sense of this tragically normalized totality — the demon is, after all, the figural representation of an evil made manifest through the actions of the many, a latent evil, the world’s implicit horror made manifest and personified. It is that being in the world which is called into existence through the multitude of transactions, the moral remainder of unconscious attachment to and identification with an inhuman system. Demons come from the space in between buyer and seller, called into existence by the occult abstractions of financialized life, and speak to us in the unholy name of the corporate brand. The metaphorical presence of the demon — the whole apparatus of evil invoked, made tangible, and personified — is not a substitute for political economy, but can serve as an aide to our memory, which is all too happy to forget the untruth of life under and through capitalism. If every time we hear a corporation “speak” we remember the unthinkable multitude of tiny acts of dispossession and subjugation that, together, lie behind its claim to being, and give this claim its power, then anticapitalist demonology has done its job.

The question remains, however: if corporations are demonic, what forms of economic life correspond to something more angelic?