Capitalism Is the Parasite; Capitalism Is the Virus

“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.”

- Karl Marx

With hindsight, a few years from now, it may well appear to us that the year 2020, the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, marked the dawning of our new parasitic times. We can tell this much even by looking at one of the year’s most popular films. Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019) tells the story of the poor Kim family living in a basement apartment of a decrepit house in the ghetto. Both parents, Ki-taek and Chung-sook, as well as their young adult children, Ki-woo and Ki-jung, are unemployed. They scramble together to make ends meet, taking on every and any odd job they can find.

The apartment sits mostly below ground, but a window pane in the kitchen breaches the surface somewhat, giving them a ground level perspective of the outside world, which almost seems like the view of insect life looking up out into the larger world of human living. The space, in this way, is an apt metaphor for the subordination (sub-ordination) of the poor, festering below the surface of ordinary life.

One day, the family is visited by Ki-woo’s friend, Min-hyuk, a university student who is about to go abroad for a study trip. Min works as a tutor for the daughter of the wealthy Park family and he invites Ki (who also goes by the name Kevin) to take over in his absence. But in order to work as a tutor, Ki must forge documents proving his credibility. After being accepted as a legitimate tutor and gaining the trust of the Park family, Ki recommends his sister as an art therapy tutor for the young son of the Park family. Jung, however, must also hide her identity and forge her credentials. The Kims further encroach upon the Park family as the children recommend their parents (again, hiding their real identities) to work for the household to replace the current chauffer and the trusted family housekeeper, whom the children frame in order to have them fired and replaced.

One night, while the Parks are on a family camping trip, the Kims (now all employed by the Park family) decide to enjoy the luxuries of the empty house together. In the middle of their festivities, late at night, the doorbell rings. They see on the external security camera that it is the old housekeeper, Moon-gwang, waiting there in the rain. She tells them that in her haste to leave the house after being fired she forgot to take something with her. She is let into the house and quickly runs to the basement where she uncovers a secret bunker below the house. Her husband has been hiding in the bunker from loan sharks and she’s come to rescue him. However, amidst the commotion, she discovers the Kims’ secret, that they’ve fooled the Park family, and threatens to turn them in. Ultimately, the two families struggle and fight with each other over who will maintain access to and feed off of the wealthy Park family, hence the title of the film, “parasite.”

The title, of course, seems appropriate given that the two families’ struggle over who will be able to devour and thrive off of the wealthy living of the Park family. The visual metaphor of the underground bunker, and the basement apartment reflect the parasitic portrayal of the poor feeding off of the rich. But things are surely not so clear cut. While the poor families battle against each other like vermin, beneath the surface of the shiny veneer of the rich, we might do well to turn things around and to ask what in fact is the source of their poverty in the first place?

Popular opinion is sure to read the parasite from the gaze of the elite, in which case it is the poor who are parasitic upon the wealthy. This, after all, is the leading practice of perceiving the abject and the excluded. The poor are typically portrayed as scum; vultures living off of the remainders and shreds of life of the rich. But by asking about the source of the wealth of the elite we are able to understand the reverse. Doing so lets us connect the film to a great number of issues facing us today, which intersect in the capitalist system. As Marx famously put it in Capital, Volume 1, capitalism survives by “sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”[i]

Many have noted that during the COVID-19 pandemic, while most of us have had to limit and self-regulate our everyday lives, going into lockdown and quarantine – with many people being laid off of work as businesses have ceased operations and are no longer making any profit – that during this time many of the world’s wealthiest people, including big tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, have in fact increased their wealth substantially.[ii] As the old socialist saying goes, during times of prosperity, profits are privatized and rise to the top, whereas during times of crisis, risk, debt, and loss are socialized. The neoliberal myth of the trickle down, it would seem, is only true in the case of socializing losses. It is loss that trickles down while the parasitic capitalists appropriate the world’s wealth, especially and even during a time of great crisis for many. What we see all too often is that the capitalist system, much like a parasite, exhausts and devours global resources, leaving the majority to scramble and fight amongst ourselves for access to basic needs. In this sense, we should see the Park family, not the Kims, as the real parasites of the movie.

We should think about the coronavirus in these terms, as well. The virus, not unlike a parasite, infects and replicates, and eats away at all forms of life confronting it. The culprit of the pandemic seems to be the virus itself, this nonhuman force of nature; but what we have been seeing is that, as another popular meme has put it, the real virus is capitalism – that is, the capitalist system that erects further barriers to our collective treatment of the virus. The true crisis is not simply the virus itself, but the limited capacities in the system to meet the needs for treatment amongst the population.[iii] This is a system, we should add, that has become relatively starved due to decades of neoliberal cuts to social and public services, benefits, and institutions that subsidize the costs of life and living, and that provide access to needs, lowering barriers to those who struggle. In this sense, capitalism is very much the real virus, indeed.[iv]

Systemic crises are all around us, and not least as we are also currently seeing with the mass Black Lives Matter protests against racism, police violence, and police murders of African Americans, like George Floyd, in the United States.[v] The police, Donald Trump, much of the Right Wing media all want to make the protesters look parasitic upon the society.[vi] But, once again, we must be vigilant enough to note that it is the broken system – a system that is not merely neoliberal and capitalist, but also very much white supremacist and extremist – that continues to be the true parasite upon the people.[vii]

We should even be hesitant deploying concepts like the Anthropocene and the idea that there is an Anthropocentrism at the core of our environmental troubles.[viii] Object-Oriented Ontology and new materialist thinkers, like Timothy Morton, are on the brink of declaring humans as the real parasite of the Earth. As Morton, himself, puts it, “In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont… Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite?”[ix]

The danger here is, of course, contrasting the innocent nonhuman nature with the guilty human species or culture. The potential result is the self-defeating construction of humanity as the real parasite of the Earth, which has the potential to devolve into dangerous forms of activism, such as the death politics described recently by Patricia MacCormack in her book, The Ahuman Manifesto, where she advocates for the cessation of human reproduction and the death of humans. MacCormack calls for “an end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species.”[x] The risk in seeing humanity (as a monoculture) as the uniform culprit of environmental catastrophe is that it misses the systemic forest for the individual trees. Like the examples of the systemic problems of treating the coronavirus properly, while the rich increase and amass more wealth, of anti-racist protesters demonstrating against a violent and racist system being labelled “thugs,” or even like the Kim family struggling to make ends meet, the theory of the Anthropocene ends up portraying the victims of the guilty system as virus-like and parasitic.

With so much attention being paid, today, to the problems of the Anthropocene, it is no wonder that post-humanism is becoming the dominant ideology of twenty-first century capitalism; post-humanism, that is, both as a critique of the hubris of previous historical humanisms, and as an ideology of transhumanist technological transcendence of the limitations of corporeal humanity. On both ends, the critique of humanism displaces the cause of our woes from the capitalist system onto humanity as such. Instead, we should focus our critical and ethical attention to the real contradictions of the capitalist system. We need to move from the prism of the Anthropocene to that of the Capitalocene. Capitalism is the real virus, the true parasite upon our thriving in the world today. What we need to learn is, not how to be post-human, but how to be equitably post-capitalist. If capitalism is the parasite, then perhaps an emancipated post-capitalist society is the cure.