Capitalists < Parasites
How a capitalist philosophy of nature has tarnished anti-capitalist rhetoric from Marx to Lenin to Bong Joon-ho.
Someone out there is taking from society without giving a damned thing back. They lounge on the gravy train while you work hard and many others starve. They shirk their responsibilities and take free money. They consume but not produce. They look at you struggling to make ends meet, and they see a sucker.
A loathing for such people is instinctive, I think; and for good reason: historically, there has probably been few greater threats to human survival than people who take without giving. We have many names for them — freeloaders, bums, mooches — none of them flattering. But when they are really offending us, when we want to express our contempt in no uncertain terms, and when we want to give out complaint the authority of science, only one word will do: parasites.
While everyone can agree that parasitic people exist, however (and also that they are just the worst), their identities are hotly debated.
According to capitalists, the parasites are the unemployed and the poor: those who do not work but depend on charity for survival. Such people take without giving, capitalist philosophers have been saying for centuries; ergo, they are parasites. And such simplistic logic is still alive and well today — see the recent Fiscal Responsibility Act, which imposes work requirements on poor Americans who wish to qualify for government nutrition assistance programs, like food stamps.
But socialists know better. We know that the unemployed and the poor are in fact being brutally oppressed. They are hardly playing the system; the system is rigged against them. For one thing, while rich children get a huge head start, poor children must begin navigating the snakes and ladders of capitalism from square one.
Socialists can also point out that capitalism demands some level of unemployment and poverty, because unplanned, free market economies by their very nature cannot sustain full employment. Nor do they even aim to achieve it, since the working class is dangerously empowered when there are good jobs for all — something capitalism cannot abide.1 And how can poverty be held against someone when if not them then someone else?
The real parasites, socialists have traditionally concluded, are not the poor, but the bosses and the landlords: those who steal from the workers once in the name of profit and again in the name of rent. It is the shareholders and stock traders. It is they who have made the world economy a giant pyramid scheme — a system predicated on parasitism — and it is they who sit at its peak, engorging themselves and letting their excrement run downhill. What other purpose do they have besides appropriating worker’s wealth? If they ceased to do so, they would cease to exist. And if they ceased to exist, what in the world would change but for the better? Surely, socialists have long insisted, the true parasites are the capitalists.
This, I hope you will agree, is far more persuasive argument than the one that capitalism tempts people into.2 However, I would here like to propose that even the socialist side of this debate could use a small but significant improvement. Because, in my opinion, analogizing capitalists to parasites is actually somewhat misleading, and even mildly problematic.
Simply put: it is too accommodating of capitalists.
I say this knowing full well that analogies between capitalists and parasites have a long tradition in socialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric that goes back at least to the time of Karl Marx, who occasionally indulged in them himself. Many socialists have also followed Vladimir Lenin’s lead in using the word “parasitism” to describe the relationship between imperialist countries and the countries they have subjugated, as he did in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).3 And in 2019, many socialists celebrated the stunning success of an anti-capitalist, Bong Joon-ho-directed movie entitled Parasite.
But while I admit that there are some similarities between capitalists and parasites, and while I grant that highlighting these similarities can be an effective rhetorical device, I also think it is important to recognize that such analogies spring from a fundamental misunderstanding of parasites. More to the point: they spring from a conception of parasites that is actually distinctly capitalist.
This capitalist understanding of parasites tends to be taken for granted even by socialists because the natural sciences have labored under capitalism virtually since their inception; and historically, capitalist science has only taken an interest in parasites to the extent that they effect human health, or the health of crops, livestock, or natural resources. In other words, parasites have long been considered either an economic or a medical problem, full stop. And from this, the word “parasite” has come to mean something entirely negative — something that must be controlled, or eradicated.
Admittedly, this limited scientific perspective has been slowly expanding in recent decades, as ecologists and evolutionary biologists have been forced to reckon with the importance of parasites to their work. The embarrassing realization that parasites are missing from food webs is a good illustration of this changing perspective. And simply by taking better account of parasites, scientists have found answers to a number of great natural mysteries. For instance, they now say that parasitism:
has driven the evolution of bright, colorful plumage in male birds;
plays a major role in invasive species dynamics (see the enemy release hypothesis);
explains why sexual reproduction (as opposed to asexual reproduction) is such a widespread natural phenomenon (see the Red Queen hypothesis);
and may even explain how the partnership between eukaryotic cells and mitochondria came into existence: an event that set the stage for multicellular life.
But still the capitalist definition of “parasite” reigns supreme. Even in light of these advances, it is still rare to hear scientists, let alone lay people, recognize that (A) parasites are an integral, essential part of the biosphere and (B) that they may even — gasp! — possess an inherent right to exist, just like other species do. These are objective, important truths, but they are truths that capitalism has little use for.
Not coincidentally, these are also precisely the key points of difference between capitalists and parasites.
In fact, simply by virtue of their sheer abundance parasites are a critical component of the biosphere, as even conservative estimates suggest that they could comprise a full third of all species on the planet. And the true number could be far higher. To rid the world of parasites, in other words, would be to usher in the apocalypse — a polar contrast to the situation with capitalists, who absolutely have to go if the apocalypse is to be averted.
In nature, parasites are not the one percent. They might even be the majority.
At issue is more than mere semantics. Rather, the jaw-dropping failure of bourgeois science to appreciate parasites as anything but a problem is an important criticism of capitalism, and not one that socialists should forego. Moreover, socialists should seek to transcend the dominant capitalist “economical” philosophy of nature, according to which salmon, for example, are nothing but a resource, and parasites like sea lice are nothing but a threat to that resource. Instead, we should strive for a philosophy of nature that is informed by dialectical materialism. This means recognizing that — just like all creatures — parasites can sometimes become a problem that needs to be controlled, but they are also contextual and dynamic, and cannot be defined by any one “role”; and the reason for their existence is tangled up in the fact of their existence.
And this understanding brings with it an unavoidable appreciation of the key differences between capitalists and parasites.
So think about this the next time you find yourself scorning capitalists as “parasites”. I won’t urge you never to do it — I will even admit that the comparison can be effective given the unfortunate state of public consciousness vis-à-vis parasites. But at the very least, keep it in the back of your mind that, in addition to their similarities, there are also significant differences that are distinctly unflattering to capitalists. And most importantly of all, remember that when you drag parasites down to the level of capitalists, you are appealing to, and thus validating, a capitalist conception of nature — something that has done much to rationalize nature’s destruction.
When central banks raise interest rates, as they recently have been, they are deliberately putting people out of work.
There are also other opinions on who the parasites are beyond the two I compare, of course. For example, bigots claim that they are the Jews or whatever other religious or ethnic group they wish to demonize, and others are sympathetic to the view of the philosopher Michel Serres, who saw humanity itself is a kind of universal parasite on the body of nature.
Lenin’s ideas about imperialism were later developed by Danish socialists into the “Parasite State Theory”, which became the guiding principle of the fascinating Blekingegade Group.
Thanks for the laughs, I agree with the title 100%. My impulse is to agree that humans might be a parasite of the earth, but to qualify that, it's so-called civilized humans (AKA capitalists!) who consume much much more than what they give back. That's the 'Economy' in a nutshell, isn't it?