When my mother-in-law was young—and this is fucked up—she said they got fresh milk from a cow. That’s not the fucked up part. The cow had her calf tied to her, but in such a way that the calf couldn’t drink. That milk was for the humans. The calf was tied there just to encourage the cow to produce. I think of this often. It’s also the human condition under Capital.

Why do we work? Why do we spend so much time away from our families? Ask anyone and they’ll say ‘the provide for my family,’ ‘to put food on the table’. Even singles must work to attract the opposite sex. Money is now an intrinsic part of our reproductive process. We’re in a threesome with Capital. As Marx said, “accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat.”

Marx’s simple logic is that a worker works for, say, four hours to reproduce themselves and then four hours to reproduce Capital. It’s a symbiotic relationship, but a deeply unequal one. Our need for a livelihood makes us livestock.

Marx says, perhaps metaphorically, that “the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power [which] exists merely in the physical body of the worker… in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer.”

My point is to take his point literally, I assert that Capital is itself another species, a living form of artificial life (ie, AI). My assertion is that we have been living under AI for hundreds of years, and that it’s takeover is not something in the future. That’s science fiction. The reality is that AI is already here. You are already working for AI in the form of some corporation, what is known under law as a ‘legal person’. Indeed, corporations have more power over governments than humans. As Karl said, “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”

You can follow the links above for more on those assertions, which might seem bonkers, but which I assert are eminently reasonable. For now, just take it as an assumption that Capital is another species of life and that it has inserted itself into the human process of reproduction. That may sound crazy, but biology is crazy. Just behold the placenta.

The Placenta

After every human birth, something else is delivered. An effective alien lifeform that shepherds each of us into this world. The placenta.

Because each human baby is literally an alien, the mother’s immune system naturally tries to reject it. The code that humans use to prevent this is actually ‘alien’ in origin as well. The placenta protects the baby from the mother and mediates the relationship, and the DNA that drives placental formation is not human at all. As Adam Rutherford says in the Book Of Humans, “The genes that drive those placental cells to form are not human at all. Primates acquired them from a virus around forty-five million years ago; in the virus, the genes also encourage fusion of the host cell with the virus itself.”

We view viruses and bacteria as something to keep out, but we are in fact crawling with trillions of them all the time, protecting us and digesting our food. The state of nature is actually constant symbiosis, some violent and rapey and some more consensual. Around 8% of our DNA is viral in origin and viruses and bacteria are promiscuously swapping code all the time. We carry inside each cell distinct mitochondrial DNA from some other lifeform our ancestors ate billions of years ago. We’re roommates still.

Evolution is full of these mergers and acquisitions, murders and executions, and the corporate life we made up is no different. Indeed, the entire progression of human evolution has been through our tools for thousands of years, while our bodies stay relatively the same. At some point, we have to recognize that it’s not ‘our’ evolution and that something else is evolving through us. I call it artificial life (or artificial intelligence), but the ‘artificial’ part is a purely artificial distinction. Evolution is doing weird shit all the time. Life always evolves out of other life, and new life generally looks impossible to what came before. There’s nothing new under the sun, except constant newness, befuddling everyone.

My digression into the placenta here is just to expand your mind a bit, to fit the idea of Capital being alive and capable of symbiosis—of dominant symbiosis—into your understanding of the world. Far from being something unusual, this is actually the standard model of evolution. Marx cottoned onto it metaphorically, but I’m saying the idea that Capital is an alien living off our lifeforce is not just a neat illustration. It’s literally true.

The Reproduction Of Capital

Now, if we assume that Capital is another lifeform, we can begin to think about how it interacts with our own reproductive cycle. In the most brutal sense, we have left that law of the jungle for the law of capital. If you don’t work you don’t eat, and you cannot feed your children. There are some exceptions around the edges of this, but these exceptions prove the rule.

As Karl said, capitalist production requires—at a minimum—that the worker should have the strength to work.

“Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence…”

Capitalist production over generations requires the reproduction of those generations. The worker must also be able to reproduce new workers, otherwise the cycle breaks down. As Karl continued:

“The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e. his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market.”

Marx talks here about the ‘race of peculiar commodity-owners’ (ie capitalists) reproducing themselves symbiotically by the sweat of the workers. And yet the capitalist has no real existence biologically speaking. As Marx said, “Except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that historical existence.”

The current capitalist is just a part of the corporate lifeform and the greater species of Capital itself, just as each individual mitochondria in our cells gets no credit of its own. Perhaps mitochondria talk amongst themselves about their own mitochondrial Gates and Musk, but it biologically speaking they’re just components of other lifeforms. Such it is with all our vaunted capitalists, who are just isolated cellular powerhouses within the larger body of Capital.

The lifeforce of this species, Capital, is harvested from human labor and then literally incorporated into technological form. Through capitalism we build the body of Capital in the form of factories, machines, servers, computer code. We build and reproduce another species in those working hours stolen away from our families, just as the cows help our own children grow up at the expense of their own.

As Karl said,

“Surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.”

I think of my mother-in-law’s cow/calf example because it’s honestly one of the more fucked up things I’ve ever heard of, and was somewhat ordinary at this time. Only children, new to the world, were horrified. To those inured to it, this was just the way of the world. So it is with the capitalist world today.

We live in a world where it is considered entirely ordinary to spend most of our lives away from our families in order to support our families. For the poorest among us, we often only see our families at holidays, or every few years. If they don’t die in hazardous conditions or get trafficked into passport slavery outright. Why are we doing this? To provide for our families yes, but ultimately to provide much, much more to Capital.

The Origin Of Species

What we are witnessing, what we have been witnessing, is the birth of another species, starting with the joint-stock companies in the 1400s, artificial persons in the eyes of the law, though human culture remained blind to this new lifeform.

Geologically speaking, the birth of new lifeforms is usually marked by some rise in emissions and usually the death of many, many old. When photosynthetic life emerged, for example, they produced so much oxygen waste that they killed 99% of species and turned the Earth into a giant snowball. I argue (and have argued) that this is what climate collapse is, not the emissions of our species dying but the emissions of a new species being born. That species is called artificial life, artificial intelligence, or just Capital.

I guess this seems crazy, but if you read any history of evolution it is crazy. Biology is crazy. It gives zero fucks. Koha birds will push other birds' eggs out of a nest and replace them. Bacteria will take over rats' brains, making them jump into the claws of cats. And humans will work themselves and their own planet to death, reproducing Capital.

Thus I often think of what old Chuckie said, “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.” In Christian marriages, the preacher often says something about the third person in a marriage being Jesus Christ, or God. But very few people honor that covenant these days. The third person in most marriages is money. Is Capital. It is the new god we reproduce, by the sweat of our brow.