If capital, as Karl Marx has argued, “lives only by sucking
living labor,” what formations of value are reproduced
through death? Or, how might disability studies, critiques of
racial capitalism, and queer theory help us argue that dead
labor, or necrocapital, is central to the extraction of surplus
value? Reading with an HIV-reagent bank run by the National
Institutes of Health and ACT UP’s 1992 “Ashes Action,”
this talk tracks the massive wealth accumulated by global
pharmaceutical companies and the structured abandonment
of its viral laborers. It is in this interdiction of the money form
and the biopolitical that the question of whom and what
constitutes the human, and who is ground into dust, appears.