Today's instance of the persistence of vampires comes in the form of a political t-shirt.
NB: the Draculablog does not endorse political candidates. We're just noting an instance of what we're studying, as it appears in culture.
There's certainly a left history to this trope. Compare, for example, with this 18th-century version using vampires to critique class:
One does not hear about vampirs in London nowadays – I can however see merchants, speculators, tax-collectors, who have sucked the blood of people in broad daylight, but who are definitely not dead, although they have been corrupted enough. These real bloodsuckers do not live in cemeteries but in very pleasant palaces.
(Stuart, Roxana. Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-Century Stage. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1994. p. 17)
Karl Marx made use of this trope as well, in Capital:
Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
This did not, however, prevent [the silk manufacturers]... from spinning silk for 10 hours a day out of the blood of little children who had to be put on stools to perform their work.
But when the transaction was concluded, it was discovered that [the worker] was no 'free agent,' that the period of time for which he is free to sell his labor-power is the period of time for which he is forced to sell it, that in fact the vampire will not let go 'while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited.'
If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
A Hungarian text of the French Revolution's anthem offers another instance:
The bloodsucking tyrant race
Points his arms against your breasts
And dips his ugly hands into your blood(Klaniczay, Gabor. The uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe. Trans Susan Singerman. Ed Karen Margolis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. p. 188)
I'm trying to think of non-left versions of this trope. Anne Rice's positioning of vampires as slaveholders and sympathetic characters in Lestat is what first leaps to mind.
(thanks to Elizabeth Miller)
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