Parasitism, Capital and my Unconscious

Nature, The Working Class, and Underground Theory

There are still gnats at my work. I work construction, outside, and it is well into January, yet it has been so unseasonably warm in the North West of America, that the gnats have not disappeared, they have not died off until just this week. It was so warm a week ago that the flowers thought it was spring, flowers were blooming all over, only to be struck down by a late cold plunge that has only just arrived this week. I noticed I was disturbed by this eerie warmth, as warm as fifty five degrees Fahrenheit right after Christmas. Then I watched the remarkable show called Scavanger’s Reign, that settled deeply into my unconscious as well, so deeply that I did not notice it for weeks; I loved the show, but I forgot about it for the most part, going about my weeks, back and forth between the drippy Oregon coast and the strange city of Portland for work. I didn’t realize that my “forgetting” the show, might have been repressing it, and the repressed certainly returned. It’s a really good show, very well written and beautiful, you should watch it, but it is pretty unsettling.

A few weeks after I finished the show, I had one of the most disturbing dreams which I’ve ever had. I’ve always hated the idea of parasites, always been unnerved by the idea of visiting a tropical climate, some place like the Amazon. What’s disturbing about a parasite is the presence of another living thing, with intent, which rather than having the good manners to kill you before eating you, and the decorum to eat you from the outside in, the parasite, wants to keep you alive, and treat you like an air B&B at best, a junkie squat at worst. Parasites make you feel used, inhabited, like a thing. That’s why they’re so disturbing, they make the most intimate parts of your body, your insides, feel used, for food, for shelter, as latrine. Its degrading is what it is. Being killed by a pack of wolves seems to me a more appealing fate than being gnawed on, and sucked at, and digested while you know its happening, and there’s nothing you can do, by some nasty slug, or clinging mollusk-thing.

The truth is though, we are full of parasites; or symbiotes. Our skin crawls with mites, our stomachs are full of bacterial life, some of our organs might be the long lost descendants of foreign creatures, which once infected our biological, microbial ancestors. Parasitism is essential to life, and symbiosis is a congenial, or at least a détente parasitism. Parasitic creatures sometimes clean and defend their hosts, feeding off of other, evil parasites or other infections, who would otherwise slowly rot the host, killing it in the slowest, most agonizing and undignified way.

So parasites aren’t all bad, but when I say I hate parasites, you know what I mean, I hate those malicious ones, those dishonorable predators, those horrible bloodsuckers, egg layers, body snatchers; the wasps who ley their eggs in caterpillars, whose young eat their way out. Disgusting things living within, using you, without even the decency to kill you quickly to survive off of your corpse. There’s something so utterly disgusting, and such a severe lack of manners, of something that would live rent free in your body, trash the place, and then just walk off, leaving you in ruins. This is what is so awful about cancer too, but cancer is the body betraying itself, so while deeply tragic, it doesn’t quite have the horror factor of a foreign malicious body, integrating itself, poorly, into yours. An unwanted visitation, from an ungodly guest. The existence of Parasites is the best argument against the existence of a benevolent God. But the argument ultimately isn’t entirely successful, because the price of free will is genuine chaos, and the price of chaos is the almost inevitable evolution of parasites. Besides, it turns out that the worst parasite of all, is man on himself.

While their are congenial foreign bodies that would like to integrate themselves with you, the world we live in now is full of hostile ones. Scavanger’s Reign is a beautiful, and horrifying exploration of a world in which parasitic creatures, fungi and plants are truly in charge of the ecosystem. There are predators in that world, but their role is reversed from the way it is on earth, the greatest predators are the parasites, and the traditional predator-prey relations, are more of an after thought.

Everything on the planet of Scavanger’s Reign fits so perfectly into everything else, to the extent that it is remarkably puzzle-like. As a result nothing is out of place, meaning that nothing resists incorporation into the ecosystem for long. What we watch in the show is the characters fighting tooth and nail to resist becoming part of the planet, resisting becoming parasitized, becoming seamlessly incorporated into the great puzzle. But we are also watching them, through adaptation, becoming nonetheless a part of the planet. The question is only whether they become incorporated as autonomous parts of a greater whole, on their own terms, or absorbed, on the terms of the planet. What they have to do is fit in in such a way that they don’t loose themselves, so that they do not become assimilated by the infinite number of horrible ways that nature has found to consume them, in that disgusting, biological hijacking sort of way.

I realized recently that that show can be thought of as a metaphor for capitalism, and for human economic relations in general. How do we live in a system of instrumentalization, wherein our energy and our time, our interests and passion, is hijacked for the purpose of serving the economy - the human ecosystem - rather than for pursuing our own ends. It is so easy to think that some form of enjoyment and love is your own idea, when it might not be, at least, you didn’t come up with it on your own, it was fed to you by the algorithm, for instance, like the black psycho-active goo in Scavanger’s Reign, which the psychic panda feeds the creatures it brainwashes into doing its bidding. That brings me to my dream.

In my dream, those very real, unnaturally late season gnats had spent the last unnaturally warm week laying little obscenities of nature under my skin. It’s larvae were these inch long little grey worms, and when I tried to pull them out with tweezers they would pull themselves further down through my skin, trying to embed themselves into my muscles, fishing themselves through my precious layers of skin, making me their personal abode; like the junkies - their bodies hijacked by manufactured substances, probably heroin - who broke into my sister’s house while she was away, and rolled their filthy bodies around in her bed, raided her fridge and relieved themselves on her carpets.

Of course, the analogy of a parasite has long been used to describe the relationship of the capitalist class to the working class; an especially salient metaphor when it comes to unproductive capital; rent seeking leeches like landlords, and private equity investors, who don’t produce anything at all, whose contribution to value creation is entirely fictitious, and who in 21st century digital capitalism, are particularly ascendant. But I don’t write this piece to whine about capitalism and capitalists; there is little worse than someone who complains about something they aren’t willing to do anything about, and as there is no meaningful path to “Large Scale Structural Change” (as Dave McKerracher would put it) right now (since The Way is Shut) I’d like to avoid adding to the increasing noise coming out of the chattering class, about Identity Communism.[1] [2] Ideas of class have recently, since the Bernie campaign, been layered on top of ideas of racial, gender and sexual identity politics, which has resulted in a pretty stupid workerism; leftists obsessed with the working class as a naturalized identity category. This is so out of place in a time when capitalism is making work so unrewarding and unredeemable, sometimes by making it into incredibly easy drudgery, that it becomes more manifest than ever, how massive a waste of time instrumentalized labor under capitalism really is. Nobody cares, or should care, about their identity as a shelf stocker, sorry, but everyone is trying to get as far away from possible from identifying, especially with types of work which a trained crow could accomplish, especially when those shelves are being stocked with useless and stupid items, whose production and distribution adds infinitely more carbon into the atmosphere than lasting joy into the soul. But don’t worry skilled trades, the post-work era is coming for you too, construction spiders will replace ironworkers eventually. Electrician and plumber robots? I’m not saying it is guaranteed to happen, but are we really confident to say that it’s impossible? You might want to find something for your grandchildren to identify with, besides their labor, what worked for you, may not work for them. Besides, the idea of society and community is dead, even the skilled trades are just slaving away for the bureaucratic network of private-public economics. When was the last time you could stand back and not just be proud of the work you did, but proud of what you actually built? How many people can say they helped to create something of genuine lasting social and intrinsic value, while they were earning a paycheck? Not many. Clearing bald eagle habitat to put up a Jamba Juice, that’s what I’m supposed to be proud of? I for one, am not feeling it…. I literally worked on a construction project which displaced a bald eagle family, as well as a bunch of bears and salamanders who were clearly making a home of the land that was cleared. It wasn’t a Jamba Juice we built there, but still. The point is, I don’t identify with my labor, I don’t want to, and I’m far from alone in that. My own foreman likened human society to that of ants: we just build, we don’t know to what end or anything, we just run around mindlessly erecting various structures, many of them poorly designed, hideous, and possibly nefarious, entirely unaware as to why, or for what purpose.

But there I go whining, I hope I’m not just whining though. I hope we can realize that the massive parasitism of value has lead to a qualitive change in the nature of the parasitism; Capital parasitizes the mind too. It implants ideas which are agreeable to it, and workerism, is one of those pseudo-cultural concepts. The goal is to become more than a mere worker, not to become reduced to little more than one. But lest I just be read here as some Quixotist-Marxist (a greater insult I cannot imagine), nostalgic for the LOST era of revolution, lets cut the bourgeoisie a little slack.[3] Likening them to bloodsucking slugs is just rude, and only really merited as an insult hurled at them while you’re on the picket line in 1929, nursing entirely un-metaphorical wounds from their hired Pinkerton’s clubs. “Parasite” isn’t really a good analytical category… or is it?

Remember, parasites aren’t all bad, and sometimes they turn into benevolent symbiotic critters. Things like white blood cells are sort of independent creatures devotedly serving the host species, trying to repulse invaders: there is nothing about the white blood cell which necessarily naturalizes it as belonging to your body, it is and independent part of the network that is your body, and it is adapted to fight that which wants to destroy its host network.

What the rich have always had access to, even while many of them choose to squander it, is time. In antiquity, as in the pre-civil war American south, to have your Otium was the reason to own slaves. Leisure time is the wages of Timenergy parasitism; what you are sucking up is time, sweet time, in which you can be anything you want, do anything you want, and you genuinely access the ability to do things for their own sake.[4] On the one hand what glory, but can glory be founded on the rot of such an ignoble theft? Regardless of moral considerations however, what owning slaves makes possible for you, is the ability to think and feel, unencumbered by the crushing burdens of necessity and of your own survival. You might be a parasite, but a what a beautiful parasite you might become.

What would happen when one of these gilded parasites, enlightened by their Otium, able to think, its brain engorged with the sweet blood of its those it has turned into its hosts, were to look back over its domain and see it for what it is: a putrid empire built on exploitation, suffering, and the ultimate tragedy of millions upon millions of wasted human potential. Perhaps then, a symbiosis can emerge. A parasite cannot change what it is anymore than a host can, not in the sense that there are naturalized hosts and parasites in the human community, but in the sense that society is built already on these relationships. You can’t change these long historical foundations by snapping your fingers. But perhaps the parasite can change its relationship to its host, to become eventually, an organ within it, and perhaps someday the parasite can master a strategy which can set the host free entirely. Or is it still necessary, that we keep trying for the host to attempt to overpower its own parasite? But how can that be done today, remember, it isn’t the 20th century anymore.

The reason why I have invited you into my unconscious for a moment is to make the point that, perhaps, only if we understand the brutal reality of our world might we be able to transform it; but throughout that transformation there are certain fundamental structures of the material world, whether natural or historical, which we might not be able to change, at least not without severe and potentially fatal consequences. But altering the relationship of the these parts to one another, that could be the process wherein redemption for all lies. The master is made filthy by his relationship to the slave, and the slave ruined by his relationship to the master. But undoubtedly free, craft labor, is an advance over slavery, and what comes after mechanized labor could either be an advance over mechanized labor, or a new, unspeakable form of slavery. I’m not optimistic about the direction we are headed, or about the lack of access to levers of power by which we might steer the ship. But all we can do right now in our pathetic moment, is try our best to think, and hopefully gather strength, to do that we have to tarry with the collective as well as our own individual unconscious. I wrote this to excise a parasite, here, onto the page. Perhaps someone will learn something from it.