Nightcrawler Commodities: How capital subsumes nature and labour in Ontario’s underground bait worm industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation uncovers the development and contemporary constitution of the ‘underground’ nightcrawler (Lumbricus terrestris) industry that has consolidated in southwestern Ontario. My theoretical starting point is the ‘subsumption of nature’ framework that identifies the strategies by which ‘nature-based industries’ harness biophysical processes to produce surplus value. While Boyd, Prudham and Schurman (2001), initially treated the subsumption of nature as “analogous” to the subsumption of labour in how they reflect the dynamics of capitalist design and control over the production process, I argue the subsumption of labour and nature are not merely parallel processes but are, in fact, conjoined; the formal and real subsumption of labour is dialectically related to the formal and real subsumption nature. The extent to which capitalists can control the ecological conditions of production will shape how labour is arranged and subsumed in the capitalist production processes. The characteristics of the peculiar nightcrawler industry result from the capitalist’s uneven ability to subsume the nightcrawler’s biological characteristics and ecological conditions necessary for commercial production. The research relies primarily on semi-structured interviews, as well as newspaper archives, and secondary natural science research. Through these methods, I describe the history of recreational angling and bait worms, why southwestern Ontario became the ‘worm capital of the world,’ why dairy farmers rent their land, how capital investments are deployed, as well as the social composition of the labour force and their working conditions. The conjoined subsumption framework I propose in this dissertation provides a way to go “beyond the antinomies of posthumanist and political economy inquiry” (Barua, 2019) and engage in the open-ended associations of socio-ecological relations while following how capital surplus value is produced. No one set out to develop a profitable bait worm industry in Ontario; it emerged as an industry and took shape through the contingent socio-ecological conditions of production that constituted who worked (under what conditions) and who profited (with what investments). Despite the non-deterministic trajectories of commodifying living organisms, value relations continue to take form and discipline producers; in other words, the pursuit of surplus value is the glue that holds these disparate people, soils, and worms together.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".