Vampire Capitalism: The trope that has found its time

There is no past in the history of ideas, but intellectual history reveals gaps, silences, and marginalization. Powerful tropes can be buried by scholarly shortcuts, academic fashions, and citation politics. Ten years ago, Paul Kennedy published a book titled Vampire Capitalism. Since it was published, it has received 45 citations. From this foundational impact, it has now found its moment of resonance, applicability and value. From the Epstein files to recurrent wars, from xenophobic invasions of cities to irrational and ephemeral decisions about Generative AI governance, scholars and citizens require a theoretical frame to understand this moment of oppression, abuse, and insularity. This theoretical article excavates Vampire Capitalism from the scholarly coffin to reveal the consequences of the collective thrall, and how to – perhaps – awaken the body politic. The main focus of this article is to move Vampire Capitalism from its reformist origins in cosmopolitan sociology and renest it in Claustropolitanism. This theory for the end of the world offers a way of thinking about fear, xenophobia, compression, deaths of despair and a (post) work era fuelled by a techbrologarchy. As life and living is outsourced to neoliberal-framed technologies, (metaphoric) vampires feed on a citizenship under the thrall of consumerism. By returning to the key moment of this transition from cosmopolitanism to Claustropolitanism – the Global Financial Crisis – my article demonstrates that it is too late for reformism. Citizens are voting against their interests to address the imaginary threats of race, gender, and sexuality. Vampire Capitalism feeds on these invented traditions of difference, fear and xenophobia. Instead, it is time for what Marx and Engels described as a ‘sober sense’ to see reality, rather than floating in fear through a cascading simulacrum. This article, in form and content, reveals the capacity for a Claustropolitan Cultural Studies.