Re the “spectre” and “haunting,” at the beginning of Marx’s Manifesto, Derrida associates Marx’s with Hamlet’s. 

As in Hamlet, the Prince of a rotten State, everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing (“this thing”) will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won’t be long. But how long it is taking. Still more precisely, everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play. The spirit of the father is going to come back and will soon say to him “I am thy Fathers Spirit,” but here, at the beginning of the play, he comes back, so to speak, for the first time. It is a first, the first time on stage….The experience of the specter, that is how Marx, along with Engels, will have also thought, described, or diagnosed a certain dramaturgy of modern Europe, notably that of its great unifying projects. One would even have to say that he represented it or staged it. In the shadow of a filial memory, Shakespeare will have often inspired this Marxian theatricalization. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp 2-3

The association with gothic literature makes more sense to me than the one with Shakespeare.

At the end of section I of the Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

This sounds like the “mass-walking-dead proletariat” except the proletariat are alive and are burying the capitalists. There’s another layer of Marx’s storytelling, which is that he expects this outcome to be the result of violence. He’s not all that bothered by the violence of colonialism insofar as it accentuates the fall of capitalism, which will require violence.

There’s another “haunting” in Marx related to alienated labor and the commodity form/commodity fetishism…

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1944:

If then the product of labour is alienation, the production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself.” Marx then goes on to explain the conditions of alienation. “… man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions — eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal…. The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. 

This alien object exercising power over the worker, transcendent, and otherworldly, is explained as commodity fetishism. 

Capital, volume 1:

It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.

There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism …

More “gothic qualities”: the human becomes animal (shapeshifting; werewolves, vampyres); the inanimate becomes animated by unseen forces (table-turning, commodities are like wooden puppets come to life); the grotesque. For Freud, the uncanny is something recollected that was once repressed. For Marx, the uncanny is the product of the capitalist mode of production, an exemplar of civilization, which draws out animalistic and animistic behavior and thoughts (estranges “man” from “himself”) and populates the world with spectral forces (commodities that take on the qualities of human beings, in particular movement).

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I was in a class with a prof who wasn’t particularly pro-Marx, but whose students were (and who were also “ecological-minded”), go through all the passages in Capital or the Grundrisse that began with something like “Subjection of Nature’s forces to man” to draw attention to the fact that Marx was no environmentalist. He is a fan of industrialism for the wealth it creates (technological advance = civilization in French perspective) and for fostering the growth of class consciousness among workers.

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There’s a “crisis” of crisis theory, a perpetual crisis in that capitalism is always supposed to end tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Marx thought the crisis was imminent at the time of the writing of the Manifesto (his The Eighteenth-Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte registers his disappointment, in a deflective form of satire). By the 1960s, Western Marxists began to use the term “late capitalism.” I suppose that today we are at the stage of “later” or “really late” or “super late” capitalism. Perhaps the switch to “neoliberalism” is an effort to dig out of the crisis theory rut. But whatever we want to call it, the predictions of the final crisis have all failed, which indicates the crisis prediction business is a scam.

Why didn’t capitalism end as predicted? One theory is that Marx did not envision the welfare state or the total incorporation of workers into the capitalist system via trade unionism and consumer culture. Another view (mine) is that Marx himself gave an account of why capitalism probably would not end without some sort of cataclysmic intervention from outside the system:

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”

What distinguishes capitalism from feudalism is a characteristic Marx praises about the former: it never stops developing, it never stands still, it doesn’t cling to tradition, it melts everything that is solid into air. Insofar as capitalists perpetually destroy the existing productive forces in order to innovate these forces (from hand looms to mechanical looms, from industrialism/Fordism to post-industrialism/post-Fordism, from a production economy to a consumer/service economy, from fossil fuels to “green energy,” etc.), the capitalist system is reinvented and never grows stagnant. Despite the predictions of a falling rate of profit or “more destructive crises,” the capitalist mode of production has only renewed itself over the course of three centuries, in part by being a system that lets in just enough of its environment to replenish its energy without being overwhelmed/changed by its environment.