How Humans Are In A Threesome With Capital
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.