$20.2T and counting

Red Dead Labour — two references in one name:

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."

— Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. 10

In Marx’s critique, "dead labour" refers to the product of past work—machines, buildings, money—that has been crystallised into capital. The product of labour is no longer shared; it no longer serves the life of the community that created it. But this "dead labour" does not stay dead. It returns like a vampire to drain the energy of living workers, growing ever more powerful the more labour it consumes. What Marx gives us, in the words of scholar Mark Neocleous, is "the political economy of the undead."

The Red Dead part echoes Poe’s "The Masque of the Red Death" — a group of wealthy people isolated from the rest of the world, living by their own rules, a clock chiming a disturbing melody, finally a spectre is haunting their masquerade — the spectre of the Red Death.