The very title of your song, The Worldeater. Makes me think of a concept called subsumption, Marx talks about the idea of subsumption. There’s the idea of the formal subsumption, by which the processes of production are subsumed to the wage relationship; and then there’s the real subsumption; which follows on after the formal subsumption; in which the actual capitalist actually takes control of the production process. So not only do we have the wage relationship, but we have the full control of the workers life is now dictated by the needs of capital. This idea of subsumption is in many ways kind of like a leviathan. It’s literally consuming the entire biosphere of the earth and converting it not just to something that can be bought and sold, but something that can only exist as a commodity. Not only is capitalism hoovering up the rainforest and hoovering up these lithium mines and hoovering up the oil in east Africa and all this; It’s also created a situation where none of this can be a use value for anyone. So everyone is obliged to be part of the machinery of metabolizing all of this stuff for capital, and no one is allowed to metabolize it for human ends. It’s one of the things that Rosa Luxemburg talks about when she talks about the choice between barbarism and socialism. The end of this would be pretty much the destruction of the planet as being able to support human life. Now, there’s another side to that as well. Which is that capital has it’s means that in the short term halt our forward movement. Which is imperialist expansion and war…


The Worldeater bares its teeth at us
Gnashing maw of the ravenous serpent
All consuming, all encompassing
Tendrils reach into every facet
Mundane or sublime
Everything a slave to its purpose
To exist, to survive
Sacrifice to the ouroboros

It’s the struggle that binds us
Capital’s colossus

Atomized and fragmented
Opportunists made into thralls
Dominated, no agency
Everything is bound to its will
Overcome this Leviathan
Strike the heads of this untamed Hydra
Emancipation, from this productive mode
Only comes with the workers united

Unshackle the chains from
Capital’s colossus
It’s the struggle that binds us
Capital’s colossus

…All of the short term solutions to this headlong rush to the ultimate contradictions in capital are themselves brutal and are themselves cruel and sadistic; and in the long run actually accelerate the movement they’re attempting to bring about. These warnings that we get from people like Rosa Luxemburg to me, these are not figures of speech. These are not poetic conceits. These are scientific principles. It’s a scientific prediction that capitalism will destroy the ability of the planet to support life. The general principles ARE laid out in Capital, and they are laid out in Lenin and Luxemburg’s Principles of Imperialism. So, anybody who remains skeptical should look at what Marx and Engels have to say about soil depletion, and how it must envelope the entire surface of the earth and does so in an accelerating way.

The metaphor of a worldeater is not simply a metaphor.
For Marxists, this is a scientific truth.

The thing that really changed the world for me was the MOVE bombing. The MOVE bombing happened in Philadelphia. It didn’t happen in Mississippi, it didn’t happen in Louisiana, it didn’t happen in Arkansa, it happened in Philadelphia. Police dropped a bomb from a helicopter on this neighborhood; Started a fire which burned down many, many city blocks; and the thing that struck me is, we’re used to seeing what are supposed to be totalitarians leaving cities in rubble; and yet even here in the United States; because it was disruptive to the bourgeoisification of the city; we had a huge chunk of Philadelphia bombed out by its own government. They bombed their own people. These were some of the kinds of things we were supposedly going to war in other parts of the world; we were inflicting right here in the United States; and once again, not just in Atlanta, not just in Memphis, not just in Nashville, but in New York and Philadelphia, on our own people; and this disabused me of my fantasy; which was that I was going to move to the big urban north where everyone just sits around and reads Thoreau and Emerson all day. Turns out life is just as vicious there. What we see today; we see developers completely depopulating neighborhoods. We see that right here in Cincinnati. Some people might think it’s kind of alarmist to compare the two; but do we really believe that a bourgeois state? Do we really believe that a ruling class that would drop bombs on it’s own cities as a process of urban renewal; do we not really believe that they’re not simply going to use more subtle means today? Do we really believe there is not and could not be a willingness to engage in genocide or at least semi-genocide for the goals of capital; not just abroad but right here in the boundaries of the United States? Do we really believe that that tendency to consume and cannibalize and liquidate, are we that naive that we’re not thinking that that’s what’s going on mere blocks from where we’re sitting right now?