Greed That Turns People Into Vampires

“You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of an animal protection society, even known for your piety — but to me, what you represent is someone without a heart. What seems to be beating in your chest is actually the beating of my own heart. Like any other vendor, I demand the value of my labor; therefore, I ask for a regular working day.” (p.231) These words are from Karl Marx’s famous Capital.

It is true that Marx had a profound influence on my thinking in my youth — but it is even truer that I had parted ways with him before I turned 23. Indeed, Marx is not a thinker one can simply discard from the mind at once. Yet throughout my life, whenever necessary, I have reckoned with him. I attempted to write about these reckonings during my “journey with Marx” in the Karl Marx Special Issue of Hece magazine. I also recently summarized them here: (https://kritikbakis.com/en/what-is-missing-in-marx/)

In my opinion, despite Marx’s many incomplete and flawed understandings of humanity and society, the aspect in which he was most right was his assertion that material life practices inevitably shape the human mind and consciousness. The quotation at the beginning of this piece is one of his most accurate insights. According to him, living in a palace or in a hut has a directly transformative effect on the human mind — one cannot think the same way in a palace as in a hut. When considered alongside Ali ibn Abi Talib’s saying, “What we believe does not determine how we live. How we live determines what we believe” (Nahj al-Balagha), Marx’s idea gains even greater depth and breadth. But let us not stray from our topic for now…

Capitalism represents an entirely new form of production relations in human history. It cannot be understood by comparing it to earlier systems — for example, by analyzing capitalist-worker relations through the lens of the master-slave dialectic. Whether the worker, the employer, or both are devoutly religious, the production process has its own uniquely functioning rule. However, unless we understand this rule — which can be explained as “insatiable greed and desire for growth” — it is impossible to intervene in or transform the process.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that under capitalism the system alone shapes the human being in an inescapable way. While it is true that capitalism imposes a sort of formatting on people, the human interior — the flow of desires — must also align with this format. I believe capitalism amplifies the envy and greed already present in human nature (one may call these the “devilish” aspects), in a way unprecedented in history. It manages to spread a dynamic that once applied only to a small elite across all segments of society. As a result, escaping this web of desire that envelops everyone in society becomes nearly impossible. This force is so powerful that even those who resist or rebel against it eventually begin to resemble it, becoming absorbed into the chain of consumption.

Marx attempts to explain the capitalist’s insatiable greed through the metaphor of the “vampire,” which forms the foundation of Capital and his broader work. In the Karl Marx Special Issue of Hece magazine, Mustafa Ertürk discusses the layered meanings of the vampire metaphor in Marx as follows: “On the first level, it represents the capitalist and the bourgeoisie; on the second, it represents capital itself; it expresses the ‘living-dead’ or ‘labor-living-dead’ condition of the capitalist and capital; and finally, it reflects the notion of expansion inherent in capitalism and capital. By metaphorizing social reality through economic reality, Marx makes the cyclical and invisible economic reality of capital, labor, and exploitation visible.”

Indeed, the vampire metaphor aligns perfectly with the fact that capitalist capital can only survive by constantly expanding. But it is precisely at this point that we must pause and ask: within these production relations, is the only way to reverse the process for workers to seize the means of production and nationalize them? Is there truly no other alternative? According to Marxists, there isn’t.

Ivan Ascher, author of Portfolio Society (Portföy Toplumu – Açılım Kitap), is far more pessimistic. By applying Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism from Capital to today’s financial world, Ascher concludes that even the vampire metaphor falls short — the “vampire” has now transformed into a “zombie.” No one can escape the zombies.

According to Ascher, today’s financial markets are wreaking havoc on societies, because the capitalist mode of production has evolved into a capitalist mode of prediction. Those who command the economy have shifted from production to prediction, turning both the economy and the social realm into a gambling hall. The difficulties of actually producing goods or delivering services are no longer anyone’s concern. Instead, people are forced to participate in the lower tiers of a “risk society,” compelled to support a system that distributes risk and discipline downward while concealing its mechanisms.

Contemporary financial capitalism is far faster and more intricately complex than the world Marx tried to analyze. It conceals its contradictions by mesmerizing society. Ascher argues that in today’s portfolio society, everyone jumps from one thing to another — tracking markets, stock exchanges, global currencies, precious metals like oil and gold, and the price of bitcoin — claiming to invest in the most profitable option, yet in reality, they are caught in a process they can never control, and thus become, effectively, zombies.

Yes, I share the same view — like everyone else, we too are gradually losing our humanity and turning into zombies. The society we live in, through markets, and via the industries of fashion, advertising, and public relations, compels us to make our life plans, decisions, and choices through a mental process that increasingly resembles a game of chance.

Day by day, our lives begin to look more like gambling games, and our minds begin to resemble those of gamblers. In my book The Game of Life (Hayat Oyunu- Kapı Yayınları), I tried to explain how, without even realizing it, we have all started to develop the mindset of gamblers because of the market. And if our minds function in essentially the same way, then resistance strategies such as “interest-free banking” will naturally prove insufficient.

Is There No Way Out of This Tunnel?

I must admit that I agree with the views of Marxists and pessimists — but only up to a point. After all, we are among those who stand with humanity and hope, who consider despair a grave sin. Of course, I regret that instead of rereading Shakespeare every year, Marx did not spend more time reflecting on human existence and psychology, or pondering why the world has grown heartless under capitalism, or thinking more deeply about religion, which he called “the heart of a heartless world.” Yet I know I must not remain stuck in that regret — I must seek the possibility of hope.

Hope does not lie in waging war on capitalism or seizing the means of production. It lies in the spirituality of human beings. To liberate ourselves from the envy and greed that first turned us into vampires and now into zombies, we must abandon the dream of burning everything down and building a new world, and instead return to spirituality, to deep thinking and contemplation. The overwhelming power of material life practices and the injustices inherent in the economic processes — where human greed is most plainly visible — can only be overcome by the spirituality hidden in our inner selves and the wisdom it offers.

We must walk this path without losing touch with reality or abandoning scientific thinking. In a recent article (https://kritikbakis.com/sermaye-devlet-ve-adam-smith/), we discussed Adam Smith, whose economic and political perspective I find closer to both truth and viable solutions than that of Marx. This deserves further discussion…