The sun has abandoned us and the moon has gone missing

[T]o establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into “free labouring poor,” that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.  —Karl Marx, “The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist” The world has been dreaming. It dreams about undead things. Do you want to know about the world? Do you want to know about its dreams? Let me tell you. Listen. The sun has abandoned us and the moon has gone missing. We have lost the path. We have tumbled into the night of the world. You think you are loved but you are not. We have tumbled into the dark of a babel choir. There we meet people; we meet the people, forlorn, dolorous. There we meet the empousa. She greets us with spirits. She greets us with metals. She tempts us. She looks to be tempered. The empousa offers many gifts, takes many shapes. She lives underground. Some say it is where she hides. Do you want to know what the empousa looks like? Or how to know her shape, her design? Manifest, she is everything beautiful, the object of all desire. A latency, she is a monster, a thing lusting for blood. A latency, the empousa rises from her lair to stalk the villagers. She leaves her home so that she might feed upon the lives of men. She haunts the cities, an alluring image of all one might become, the fulfillment of all one could ever desire. Her metals, a mirror, she fashions all as beauty. She solicits. She elicits. She invites the people into the mines where she lives; she claims them as her own. She stands on her single copper leg and stares, shining, polished metal. Hers is the body of fashioned metal, of capital, endlessly plastic, condemned to a half-life of infinite transubstantiation; a body, caught in an ancient and obsolete religion, bending to meet the new salvation. Outside time, without age, she is a voracious child. Drawing upon her mother, drawing upon her father, aching for them both and for their flesh, she eats until both are feeble and wasted, skeletal forms, unloved bags of loose skin. The empousa is without sympathy. Neither living nor dead, she cares nothing for the lives of others. Until they reach the point of their expiration, their lives do not matter. When they die, she hunts for more. She knows there will always be more. The villagers cannot resist their quaint, fleshy pleasures, and their pleasures ensure—they do not suspect—that there will always be more. The seduction begins again, most often in the Fall, with the apples, and the leaves. The dream of beauty and love, companionship and care, of loving and being loved, in this season, is too enticing. The air is crisp. The empousa knows this. She knows that dreams are the key to possession. She has heard these dreams before. She has made a study of the wind. She is listening to your dreams right now. She says to herself, how might I make you mine, how might I take you right now, drawing you underground, into my mines. These mines where we find beauty before it is polished, before the surfaces are gleaming, while we await the horses, while we await the harness and the sledge. How do we live with the ugly before the beautiful, she asks. You do not want to know her answer. This is what I say: She is the ugliness that feeds off the beautiful. Step away. These mines—all mines—are a crypt. All of this is speculative, but is this not appropriate for a book about capital and its aesthetics? Its monuments—ugly, spectacular, beautiful, mundane—are as much story as substance, both real and unreal, manifest and latent, as the ancient figure of the empousai. Are we not still haunted by her ancestors? Does she not still lure us into her mines? She maybe long dead, but do we not deserve to find those who went with her, who were lured into her mines? What after all is a mine? And might we follow their sad ends to discover the remains of her copper faces? As such, while this is not a book about the empousai, it is a book about the dead and the undead as unexpressed elements of a story about capital and empire. Minerals, stone, iron and steel: It looks to a variety of manifest ghouls to think about all those who have been forced to dwell in the mines. Flesh but not flesh, bone and spirit, this book tells a story about capital and empire and their manifestations that conjures all the things that have been made to live and die underground. It is a book is about what emerges from the mines: about metals, about money, about the forms they take, how they are fashioned, about the fascination and the glamour. It is about lives stolen, and the lives that return to us as dead labor. It is about what happens when those that have been buried crawl out of the dark. It is therefore a story about capital that begins with mines and mining, with the mine as a grave, and possession a movement unto death, the sacrificial rites of five hundred years. It is about mining and extraction as the latent content of the dream of capital, that being the dream of capital and eternal life, of unending circulation and extension, of a world consecrated to the story capital tells about itself, about its beauty. In this story, we will begin with copper. It will end with oil. Along the way, we may have an opportunity to talk about coal. Minerals aside, we will talk about capital and the history of education in the Middle East. We will discuss these in their relationship to the endless varieties of enclosure and extraction, materiality and latency. The reasons for these choices will become clear enough as we move along. For now, it is enough to know that it is impossible to imagine the world of twentieth and twenty-first century capitalism without either copper or oil. That is to say, it is impossible to conceive of an electrified world without either copper or oil. Or, perhaps more precisely, it is impossible to imagine a world of cheap energy without either, insofar as both commodities are bound to histories of labor discipline that have interrupted the circuits of solidarity, that have robbed workers of the possibility of local and international solidarity as sources of power and the illuminations of democracy. There is a reason Lincoln is on the penny. And why Jackson is on the $20 bill. I will leave you to think about who goes where and why. And darkness covered the face of the deep. Marx long ago described capital as dead labor, a scabrous description of something apparently dynamic and lively as a tremendous accumulation of expired, exploited things, of people, lands, plants, animals corrupted and destroyed so that all the many forms of the undead may carry on their half-life, entombed forever in an earthly limbo, scattering their metals across the face of the planet. These dead things would be left behind, underground, no solace to be found in the catacombs of the mines. “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.” Extirpation, enslavement, entombment: in this passage from Capital, Marx highlights a sequence that might be readily identified as the ineluctable linearity of imperialism and capital, each term in the sequence prefiguring and enfolding the next, life violently oriented toward the ostensibly idyllic expressions of capital, different moments of exploitation and expropriation leading unto exhaustion and death, to the tomb of the mine. A figuration of hell, the mine is the realization of the afterlife, of a ghostly living death of subterranean tortures, a punishment that reverses the order of death and life, a realm in which the sentence precedes the judgment. The visitation of the mine as tomb, in this sense, forces an encounter with that which capital must obviate: that its life is predicated upon an ending chain of violences that hide behind an actuarial calculus of life passing into death. As Marx’s description of the mine as tomb might suggest, within the literary culture of capital and empire, the word “mine” functions as both metaphor and metonym of colonial extirpation, a macabre poetic effusion that brings to light the violences of colonialism as the undying grandfather of capital; “mine” as a literal grave, unmarked, untended, and “mine” as a childish claim to ownership, a violent injunction. Just as the description of mine as tomb forces an encounter with the histories of violence occluded by capital, the hideous entanglement of the literal and the figurative of “mine” demand an accounting with “mining” as a figurative and literal, literary and historical, act of possession. “Creation’s heir—the world, the world is mine!” Drawn from Oliver Goldsmith’s 1765 poem “The Traveller,” in his 1838 volume Colonization and Christianity, William Howitt employs the line as a means to deflate the pretense of the Spanish monarchy in their fifteenth-century claim to dominion over the Atlantic and all the unknown lands to the west. Flagrantly ignoring the obvious attribution of the line, as well as the deeply held Anglicanism of the Anglo-Irish Goldsmith, Howitt places Goldsmith’s words in the mouth of the Pope, tarring Ferdinand and Isabella with the irremediable blemish of adherence to the “doctrine of popery,” in open defiance of the Ten Commandments. “The sovereigns constituted Columbus high-admiral of all the seas, islands, and continents which should be discovered by him, as a perpetual inheritance for him and his heirs….This was pretty well for monarchs professing to be Christians, and who ought to have been taught ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor thy neighbor’s wife…nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.’” Subtle, wicked, Howitt expands upon the tenth commandment as a means to conjure, to foreshadow, the myriad violences that abetted the Spanish colonial project in the Americas. Yoking the violation of the home to the sexual violation of women, Howitt draws attention to the ways in which the Decalogue treats women as a species of property, one protected in common with animals, but most especially beasts of burden. Quietly refusing the moth-eaten common sense of the rootless, wandering Indian, slave to his passions but incapable of tenderness or love, Howitt asks his readers to note the ways in which the Decalogue advances a vision of conviviality and of home outside notions of property as conceived by the architects of capital and colonialism. Artful wordsmith, his not at all incautious reference to the commandments gestures back to Goldsmith and to “The Traveller,” the second stanza of which describes a scene of home and contentment, in language particularly apt for address to a potentate. “Eternal blessings crown my earliest friend/And round his dwelling guardian saints attend.” Wielding the poison pen of English Protestantism, Howitt revisits the calumnies of the Black Legend to visit upon Spain the worst cruelties of American colonization, according it the culmination of mercenary devotion to an extravagant Romish tradition, all too ready to countenance violence in service to the Lord, all too easily bent toward the ends of avarice. Implicating the Petrine doctrine resting upon the formulation “creation is…mine,” Howitt accuses Ferdinand and Isabella of a singularly Catholic voraciousness that sets itself above the law, and in negation of the law, while expanding upon the linguistic thicket embraced by the English word “mine” to bind the King and Queen, by a crown of thorns, to a vision of “mining” as taking possession, and mining as a literal practice, their especial interest in the Americas. The history of capital and empire is the history of the world, is the history of mines. The implicitly theological examination of colonialism staged by Howitt turns upon the abundant valence of the word “mine” within English, as it draws upon the material equivalence of the thirst for metals—a history that preoccupies Howitt throughout his work—and the act of taking possession, a wholly figurative accomplishment rooted in the fiction of discovery, and ratified through the act of naming. If the violence of primitive accumulation, of colonialism and empire, were the mechanisms by which to establish “the ineluctable principle that the capitalist mode of production was, in fact, the highest expression of the eternal laws of nature,” capital first had to kill that nature so that—Adam-like—it might call all that was nature by new names. It had to bury it so that it might claim it, that it might summon the specters of its dead by speaking new, unfamiliar names: the empousa becoming the vampire commanding the zombie. Naming, as is known to all witches and Catholics, is the key to possession.