If capitalism is a cancer, what are we?

What immunology taught me about living on Earth

Every multicellular organism exists because at some point, evolution favored cooperative cells over solitary ones. Cooperation evolved on this planet because it comes with great reward, complexity and resilience otherwise unavailable, but it has one essential cost: regulation. In order to glean the rewards of the whole, each part must forgo some individuality through self-regulation or regulation by its partners. That’s as true for the cells in a nematode or the ants in an ant colony as it is for the people and systems that make up an entire civilization. If regulation is abandoned, the complex system will eventually fall apart.

We are all aware of a particularly awful version of this phenomenon. Cancer forms when a cell loses its ability to be regulated. Where a cell once knew to limit itself, or where it was once limited by systems around it, it now divides and divides, draining resources at a rate the body eventually cannot sustain. In time, cancer undermines itself as it destroys the functions that, unbeknownst to it, sustain it. Cancer has no foresight. It doesn’t know it's rushing toward its own demise, it grows because it is brainless machinery.

The parallels between cancer and today’s capitalism start to become clear. Capitalism is an economic system that resists regulation (neoliberalism’s rallying call is quite literally deregulation) and gamifies large groups of people towards ever-increasing growth as a means for return on capital. When it comes to unfettered growth on a finite planet, or in a finite body, something’s gotta give.

I’m not the first to relate our current economic system to cancer, but my past research in oncological immunotherapy has shown me that the metaphor usually doesn’t go far enough. If capitalism is a tumor, what does the inside of a tumor tell us about who we are as actors in this story? And what does this metaphor tell us about our pathways toward recovery?

Inside The Tumor

The center of a tumor is what biologists call “immune privileged”—meaning, it is biophysically shielded from the immune system. Because the immune system often can’t access the inside of a tumor, the rules governing the rest of the body don’t apply. This privilege is not only conducive to the cancer’s own unchecked growth, it unintentionally creates a safe haven for other immune-evaders (namely, bacteria).

In their insatiable hunger, tumors create a space inside them rife with excess. Inside a tumor there is an excess of necrotic tissue for bacteria to feed on (yum!). In our analogy, that means the material excesses afforded (to some), in the long arc, by forced labor and colonialism, and in the short arc, continued extractivism.

Drawing the connection between cancer and capitalism wasn’t as profound to me as drawing the connection between the interior of a tumor and what it feels like to be living inside capitalism. There is a sense of unrealness that comes from being dislocated from reality (the body/the Earth). And there is a sense of unease as the immune-privileged gorge themselves on the necrotic bounty of once healthy living systems, unaware of where the bounty came from and what awaits them outside the tumorous fortress they take for granted.

Which begs the question, from what are people at the center of a tumorous system privileged? What sort of “immune system” is knocking on the fortress walls in this analogy? The answer has been revealed through climate change and the degradation of our ecological and social systems. Capitalism has protected many people, momentarily, from the physical realities of the Earth System. The anxiety climate change has stirred in many is the fear that they may suddenly run up against reality. They may run up against consequences as the tumorous shell dissolves before our eyes. Unlike cancer or the machinery of capitalism, we have the curse of foresight. If we choose to look, we can see the disaster we’re rushing toward.

The Immune-Privileged Self

The characteristic disconnect from reality inside a capitalistic culture is what has been worrying me since at least 2016. It seems, when you give a bunch of people temporary excess and protection from the realities of the Earth System, you get a maddening cesspool of ideas and systems that can only survive at the center of a tumor.

You get toxic individualism, anti-science mentalities, post-truthism, growth-at-any-cost mindsets, consumer culture, pollution, resource recklessness, aspects of new age spirituality, and even hedonistic avoidance and apathy. The list goes on, but the common thread is any idea or system that is free to multiply because the temporary excesses of capitalism protects it from the consequences that would hinder its existence under normal circumstances.

For example, imagine some magical force suddenly prevented trash from being moved more than a mile from where it was created. Piles of trash would quickly overrun the streets, any open space, your apartment. Fast fashion, plastic waste, and throw-away culture would disappear nearly overnight if the imaginary “away” suddenly met face to face with reality that there is no away. If people inside a capitalist culture weren’t protected by the systems that make trash disappear by transporting it to poorer nations or by burying it underground where it produces atmosphere-warming methane, they wouldn’t act the way they do or believe the things they do. Climate change, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and microplastics in every crevice of the earth (including our organs and pristine mountaintops) are proving that if we won’t acknowledge reality, reality will acknowledge us.

At the center of all these unreal beliefs is the proliferation of ecological illiteracy. For almost all of human history, it was nearly impossible to be ecologically illiterate. You had no choice but to be in constant communication and relationship with the ecosystems around you. Being attuned to that relationship meant life or death. However, in this culture’s quest to dominate nature, and in its self-delusion that it has done so, ecosystems were abused and pushed aside. The people inside the system were largely protected from our ecosystem's potential wrath and therefore the need to build relationships with them. But that “dominance” was always tenuous and illusory, the abused ecosystems are breaking through the walls of capitalism to indiscriminately haunt us all.

Those walls and structures of capitalism are both outside of us and inform what is inside of us. Our economic system creates the conditions conducive to “unreal” behaviors and mindsets, leaving many people with lifestyles that can only exist in their unsustainable context. A context which is rapidly disappearing.

The Pollution Inside

The climate crisis has brought to our attention the dire need to regenerate and rewild our degraded ecosystems. We must also consider the human psyche to be a territory equally polluted by the same institutions and belief systems that polluted our world. 

In Lisa Wells book, Believers, she interviews a nomadic radical-rewilder, Finisia Medrano, who makes a potent accusation when Lisa falls ill:

“How healthy do you think you are? You probably look as poisoned as that landscape around you. You’re probably as devastated as those woods in Oregon. You’re probably as polluted as Fukushima.”

If a bit dramatic, the observation is an apt one. The same systems that pollute the earth, pollute us both literally and metaphysically. We are being poisoned with PFAs, pesticides, microplastics, and unhealthy food that is created not to nourish us but to drive profit. Meanwhile, our internal world is subject to cognitive warfare. Our mental capacities are being polluted by addictive media, advertisements, weaponized status anxiety, misinformation and consumer culture. Perhaps most importantly, many people on the inside of the “tumor” have been polluted and indoctrinated with the same beliefs and mental frameworks that create the pollution. This has become known as “internalized capitalism,” a phenomenon by which our self-worth becomes tied to our ability to produce profit at all costs, by our ability to help the tumor grow and metastasize.

But we have reached an inflection point in the progress of the tumor, it is straining the body/Earth to the limit. We are being forced to consider what is next. If the denizens of capitalism are not provided with an alternative, they will continue to behave like a tumor: with no foresight. 

“A society that allows itself to be steered by a faulty myth risks foundering on the shores of a harsh reality. To cling obstinately to outdated ideas as the world proves them wrong is to court both psychological despair and cultural disaster. But when myths fail, hope itself begins to fade. The role of cultural myth is to furnish us with a sense of meaning and to provide a sense of continuity in our lives. The need is a perennial one. The loss of a sustaining myth undermines our sense of meaning and threatens our collective wellbeing. Developing new myths, better stories and clearer visions is as essential as understanding the dynamics of collapse.”

-Dr. Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development in his book Post Growth.

Instead of moving toward productive responses of myth-building, many feel overwhelmed and trapped, adopting dissociative stress responses of apathy and hedonism. This is of course why I write so much about Solarpunk and the construction of an Ecological Civilization. They are the sustaining myths I see as necessary for constructive action against the crumbling fortress of capitalism.

What worries me about this whole situation is that people are not physically or metaphysically ready for what happens when the walls of the fortress inevitably fail.

I’m trying to think like an immune system and also an ecologist; if the immune system comes crashing in, we need to look like friend not foe. The metaphor here is purely gestural; the Earth system isn’t going to discriminate against good and bad ecologists, but the sum total will matter in determining the net calamity of the immune response. It would be better to heal the tumor from the inside, to brace the immune system’s force and ease the transition by actively guiding the healing process instead of letting the provoked immune system smash into us without preparation.

The Allies on the Inside

There is good news. The beings that live inside the tumor can be reprogrammed. A dear friend of mine just did exactly that. She reprogrammed tumor-infiltrating bacteria to work in tandem with the immune system, helping heal tumors from the inside out. That’s all fine and good for science, but how do we turn antagonist to ally in the real world? In the real world, we must leverage the pollution inside. There is great hope in an emancipatory practice that releases everyone from the toxins and pollutions inside and out.

Here's a beautiful insight I gleaned from T.X. Watson's Memetic Engines of Anticapitalism: All of these toxins originate from ideas, of which their human hosts are complicit, yes, but their human hosts are also "held in position by the threat of pain." Because our enemies are more the ideas than the people, and because the people hosting those ideas are in pain because of those ideas, that makes those people potential allies. The fact that these beliefs cause their hosts pain is the opening that needs to be strategically explored.

Pathways to Recovery

My hope is to situate all individuals against the tumor, as capitalism will fail everyone in the end. While people currently exist along a spectrum ranging from extracted victim to beneficiary perpetrator even if we’re victims we have no choice but to strategize and implement the cure. With the cancer and immune system metaphors in mind I can see a few crucial paths to recovery.

(1) As many cells as possible need to stop looking and acting like cancer cells. 

We must have honest conversations with ourselves in regard to our behaviors and beliefs. Could they exist outside of the context of capitalism? Are they enabled by the existence of unsustainable excess? I understand as individuals we’ve been gamified; we receive benefits for adopting behaviors that perpetuate the tumor. But we can, at the very least, interrogate and understand the nature of our behaviors, and change them when possible. Everyone should seek to exist in a way that puts less strain on the “body”, or ideally in a way that helps regenerate the body.

In biological terms, the larger the tumor is, the more cells that are tumorous, the more destructive the eventual immune response will be. In terms of climate, the longer we delay, and the more people that pile on the harmful effects of unsustainable growth, the larger the consequences. We need to both organize for a structural behavioral transition, and preempt it with our own behaviors.

(2) We need to burst the illusory bubble, and bring reality to the center of the tumor.

My friend who trained bacteria to be agents against the tumor at its very core, used the bacterias’ privileged position to help guide the immune system into the fortress. In our analogy this means proliferating the lessons of reality, the lessons of ecology, to those who are still invested in or entangled with the unreal ways of capitalism. Whether you call it a responsibility or an opportunity, those at the center, those most protected from the realities of the world, are in a crucial position to advocate on behalf of reality. 

Part of this is helping shift cultural norms around what is deemed proper or aspirational (exploitation out, ecology in), and part of this is bringing the plight of frontline communities to the doorsteps of those who continue to live in the bubble. The tumor only protects some, but the immune response it’s generating is already very real all over the world. People near the center of the tumor rarely respond to calls of complicity as such tactics position them as enemies. Naturally they will retreat or defend themselves. I find it helpful to leverage “the pollution inside”. How can you align their liberation with the liberation of all? How can you turn them from enemies to allies? The atmosphere, our oceans, and the resilience of our ecosystems are our global commons. Harm to them anywhere is harm to them everywhere.

(3) As many people as possible need to act as a decentralized immune system.

The immune system isn’t a centralized intelligence; it is an emergent intelligence like an ant colony. It achieves complex coordination through decentralized actors. These disconnected individual immune cells perform their unique functions where they are best suited and convene intermittently to share information about the enemy.

A human-powered “immune system” against capitalism would mimic this organized decentralization, preventing tumorous growth where it can, and using each person’s unique abilities to best achieve the nearest task of dismantling the engines of capitalism. A large part of this task is financial and structural divestment from extractive and harmful businesses, especially the fossil fuel industry. 

(4) Integrate into the body as a part of the body

There is no biological precedent for this, so it will have to be a uniquely human endeavor. But the tumor and all its inhabitants must not simply divest and dismantle, they must also reimagine and reassemble. In an organism, growth is essential to a point, the human endeavor must find what form it should take in balance with the rest of the body. It must decide what a mature, fully realized civilization looks like. In a sense, it should seek to become an organ in an interdependent relationship with the rest of the Earth. This whole process asks us to divest from capitalism and invest in the ecologies of our earthly home. 

“Seeing investment as a commitment to the future calls on us to build and maintain the physical infrastructure for a very different kind of life. One in which it is possible for people to live in ways that are not just more sustainable and more resilient, but also healthier and more fulfilling than life under capitalism.” 

-Dr. Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development in his book Post Growth.

Understanding that it is the biosphere we rely on and the Earth’s “immune system” we fear, we can chart a course to survive this inflection point by becoming agents for regenerative healing. Becoming an agent that actively fights against the tumor and its influences and appears to the immune system as friend not foe, will require a proliferation of beliefs and behaviors that both enrich their hosts and help realign the structure of our civilization with the reality of the Earth system.