How You’re In A Symbiotic Relationship With Your Job

A Marxist reading of Spiderman

indi.ca
8 min readMay 14, 2022
The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #258

In the 1980s Spiderman didn’t wear a suit. He wore an alien. Old Peter Parker wore an alien symbiote and it was really amazing… until it wasn’t.

Marvel

Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8

In the very first Spiderman Peter Parker hand-sewed his suit and wore the familiar red and blue for years. In the 1980s, however, he was fucking around on some alien planet and got a new black suit. He thought it was just alien technology, but it turned out to be a whole-ass alien.

Peter noticed because kept having these fucked up dreams which weren’t dreams at all. The suit was wearing him and web-slinging around the city, exploiting his surplus labor even as he slept.

The Amazing Spider-Man #258

Trying to figure out what was going on, old Spidey swung over to the Fantastic Four headquarters, and they told him the crazy news. He wasn’t wearing alien tech, he was wearing an alien. In fact, in the alien’s opinion, it was wearing him.

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.