The parasite…

 

The parasite…

(The truth is a public good, therefore a public service.)

Capitalism is not a master. Nor is it an architect or a strategist. It is a parasite. A parasite of a particular kind: it feeds on everything that society puts in common, yet denies the very existence of that common. It lives thanks to the social organism while pretending to be the sole cause of its vitality. It pumps, sucks, diverts, privatizes — and pretends to have produced everything itself.

The parasite has no need for intention. It does not need to think of itself as a parasite. It follows its internal, mechanical logic, inherited from the ancient constraints of the species: accumulate before others, climb higher in the hierarchy, possess what reassures, and turn that security into domination. Capitalism emerges in this way, without plan or conspiracy, as a direct consequence of human biology. Social structures are only its outer shell.

This parasite thrives on a ground it never produced. Roads, bridges, networks, electricity, satellites, education, public health, justice, police, social order, air, water, soil, future generations, planetary resources, accumulated knowledge — this is its food. It feeds on what, by nature, belongs to all and should remain accessible to all. It feeds on it as if it were its due.

But the parasite hates when one points out its host. It can live from the common; it cannot survive the awareness of that common. For if humans realize that everything supporting capitalism is common, then they will ask why the fruits of this common are privatized.

The parasite therefore lives in a permanent war against lucidity. It cannot eliminate the commons, because they are its condition of existence. It therefore attempts to erase their obviousness: — by privatizing what belonged to all, — by claiming that the individual “creates” everything alone, — by appropriating the credit for infrastructures paid for by the collective, — by glorifying individual success to conceal collective work, — by criminalizing the very idea of rational sharing.

This is why the word “communism” is unbearable to it. Not because of its historical achievements, but because of what it reveals: that human society already functions in common. That the individual is nothing without the collective. That personal enrichment is possible only by siphoning off common wealth. For the parasite, the danger is not actual sharing — it is indispensable to it — but the understanding of this sharing.

Here we find the same mechanism as in religions facing heliocentrism. They could not bear the idea that the Earth was not the center, not because it changed daily life, but because it displaced prestige. Capitalism cannot bear that the common is the foundation. It shifts its prestige. It overturns the pyramid.

Like all parasites, it does not aim to annihilate its host. That is not its intention — it has none. But it ends up weakening the social body through excessive extraction, negligence, and short-term obsession. It diverts vital resources toward unproductive zones, enriching a few individuals at the expense of the whole. And like autoimmune diseases, it accelerates when the organism weakens, instinctively believing it must take even more to survive.

This parasite, however, has a structural weakness: it cannot tolerate light. Not the light of scientific knowledge or of technological progress — it lives on those. The light it fears is simpler: collective lucidity, the rational understanding of the common, and the questioning of the hierarchy that follows from it.

It is enough for humans to see the tree — the common — to understand what its fruits really are. It is enough for them to see the organism to recognize the parasite.

Capitalism is not eternal. It can survive only as long as the social body ignores where the real circulation of life is located. It will disappear not through violence, but through understanding: through the realization that wealth is never individual, and that society is not a competition between the cells of the same organism, but the obligatory cooperation of beings fabricated blindly, thrown together into a world they did not choose.

The parasite does not disappear through combat. It disappears when the host understands that it is one.

To whom does money belong, if it had no existence and no value unless it were common? Answer: to the people who produce it — for it is an equivalent, a measure of their work. Where does most of this money remain? Answer: in the pockets of a few, the capitalist-parasites. For what purpose? To orient our lives according to their whims…

End – E. Berlherm

(The obligation to exist implies the innocence of existing permanently, which is true for parasite-wolves as for sheep.)