ABSTRACT
The Devil is the longest-standing, most consistently used figure deployed to voice a critique of capitalist accumulation and organisation: predating, for instance, Karl Marx’s penchant for gothic figures such as vampires, spectres, werewolves, gravediggers and zombies. A proliferation of accounts and accusations of individuals selling their soul and signing blood pacts for unholy personal gain shows the Devil to have already been inextricably bound up in the West with the business contract by the early modern period. The birth and spread of monotheistic religion, with the figures of a personified and unique Devil waging war against a personified and unique God, is identified as originating among the Kurgan horsemen occupying the Dnieper and Donetz basins, the low valley of the Volga and the Kazakhstan steppes—south of Russia. Even the shining centrepiece of neoliberal subjectivity, the accumulation of personal wealth, finds religious support.
