The Capitalist Commodification of Animals

Brett Clark, Tamar Diana Wilson, Brett Clark, Tamar Diana Wilson

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781839826818
• eBook ISBN: 9781839826825
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

While animal suffering and abuse have taken place throughout history, the alienation of humanity from nature caused by the development of capitalism - by the logic of capital and its system of generalized commodity production - accelerated and increased the depredations in scope and scale.

The capitalist commodification of animals is extensive. It includes, but is not limited to:

• livestock production in concentrated animal feeding operations
• leather and fur production
• the ivory trade in which tusks are used for 'traditional medicines; or carved into decorative objects
• entertainment such as in zoos, marine parks, and circuses
• laboratory experimentation to test medicines, beauty products, pesticides, and other chemicals
• the pursuit of trophy hunting, sometimes on canned farms and sometimes in the wild
• bioengineering of livestock and of animals used in laboratories

The contributors to this special issue of Research in Political Economy provide insightful analyses that address the historical transformations in the material conditions and ideological conceptions of nonhuman animals, alienated speciesism, the larger ecological crisis that is undermining the conditions of life for all species, and the capitalist commodification of animals that results in widespread suffering, death, and profits. This book is a must-read not only for political economists, but also for researchers interested in animal studies, environmentalism, and sustainability.

PART I

THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO THE COMMODIFICATION OF ANIMALS

IT'S NOT HUMANS, IT'S ANIMAL CAPITAL!

Christian Stache

ABSTRACT

It is widely accepted among critical human–animal scholars that an absolute ontological distinction between humans and animals, the human–animal dualism, is an ideological construction. However, even some of the most radical animalists make use of a softer version of it when they explain animal exploitation and domination in capitalism. By criticizing the reintroduction of the human–animal dualism through the back door, I reopen the terrain for a historical–materialist explanation of bourgeois animal exploitation and domination that does not conceptualize them as a matter of species in the first place. Rather, with reference and in analogy to ecosocialist arguments on the greenhouse effect, it is demonstrated that a specific faction of capital – animal capital – which uses animals and animal products as means of production, is the root cause, key agent, and main profiteer of animal exploitation and domination in the current mode of production. Thus, the reworked concept of animal capital presented here differs from the original, postoperaist notion introduced by Nicole Shukin since it is based on a classic sociorelational and value theoretical understanding of capitalism. According to this approach, animals are integrated socioeconomically into the capitalist class society via a relation of superexploitation to capital, which can be called the capital–animal relation.

Keywords: Critical human–animal studies; human–animal dualism; animal exploitation; critical social theory; Marxism; animal capital

INTRODUCTION

In his famous book The Jungle (1906), American novelist Upton Sinclair conveys an impressive overview of what happened to both workers and animals in the slaughterhouses of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially, Sinclair struggled to find a publisher, but, once published, the book was widely read. It is well known by now though that Sinclair, a member of the U.S. socialist party and vegetarian, was partly disappointed by the public reactions to his book. He bemoaned, as Shreeya Sinha (2016) writes in the New York Times, that

…his readers had missed the point by focusing on the health risks created by unsanitary stockyards and meatpacking facilities rather than on the dehumanization of workers and the brutal treatment of animals.

“I aimed at the public's heart,” Sinclair said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (Sinha, 2016).

Sinclair's discontent is indeed understandable. He rightfully insisted that his book has more to contribute than underpin the public's (self-)interest in healthy food, which is undeniably an important political issue if taken seriously. But by unfolding the fictional story of Lithuanian immigrant worker Jurgis Rudkus and his family Sinclair goes far beyond that: he paints a picture of the abyss of capitalism through the prism of meat production and distribution – a picture from which critical human–animal scholars and Marxists can still learn today.

Sinclair relentlessly portrays the horrible labor conditions of proletarians working for big companies like Armour, Swift, or Morris and pushing bourgeois alienation to its extremes. He depicts the hire-and-fire-policy against rebellious workers, the sabotage of union efforts, the unfathomable everyday struggles to meet the score, and the exhaustion of bodies and minds leading to life-changing injuries. Sinclair describes in detail how wages are kept low, workers are ripped off by estate agents, and families break apart, while also having a clear grasp on the fragmentation of the working class. His protagonist is a Lithuanian immigrant worker who meets others of his kind and their African-American colleagues in the shallows of the slaughterhouses, doing the dirtiest work of all. Rereading The Jungle today, one finds undeniable and striking parallels to the conditions of the working class in today's hot spots of the meat industry in Brazil, the United States, Germany, or China.

However, Sinclair does not leave it at addressing human suffering and exploitation of workers for the profit of huge corporations. Investigating Chicago's abattoirs undercover for several weeks, he also keeps his eyes on what critical theorist Max Horkheimer (1978, p. 66) once termed “the animal hell in human society.” The pigs, cows, calves, bulls, and steers are not just animals for Sinclair, that is the natural material the laborers have to work on. The author soberly, but not indifferently, acknowledges that the working class is not and has never been alone in the basement of capitalist society. He depicts the sweat, blood, and despair of the animals, which are beaten up on their ways to their slaughter. Sinclair does not omit anything.

Near the end of the book, Sinclair's protagonist realizes the double exploitation at the hand of the meat industry's captains. On the one hand, the capitalist production process destroys the bodies and lives of the proletarians, extracting their labor power. On the other, animals are imprisoned, their bodies controlled, their labor power exploited and finally slaughtered. Without denying the qualitative differences between the two forms of exploitation within the same process, Sinclair shows that both wage laborers and animals are exploited for the purpose of making profits with animal-based commodities.

Thus, Sinclair grasps the particular sociorelational and procedural constellation of the capitalist meat industry. First, the human capitalist class is the agent of exploitation of the human working class and of animals. In addition, the relentless valorization of capital by the same human ruling class is the objective of a social praxis and the root cause for animal exploitation at the same time. By showing this, The Jungle is a literary portrait of what I want to call animal capital, which differs from Nicole Shukin's (2009) concept of the same name (more on this below). Sinclair was one of its avant-garde thinkers. In fact, his fictional narration is analytically more precise in its assessment of these problems than many conceptualizations of animal exploitation and oppression by scholars today. For most of the latter, even in critical human–animal studies, blame humankind (as a species collective) for animal exploitation and for benefiting from it. This misconception exists not only in the social sciences but also in progressive fiction like Jean-Baptiste Del Amo's (2019) recent and otherwise wonderful Animalia.

In this essay, I discuss why the widespread idea of an abstract opposition between humans and animals is not just wrong where it is used to describe, obscure, and justify animal exploitation and oppression, but also when it is employed to criticize and explain them. Following this explication, I shortly examine Nicole Shukin's postoperaist concept of animal capital, which determines the understanding of the term so far, and I give some reasons why I dismiss it. The rest of the chapter is then dedicated to outlining a historical–materialist concept of animal capital based on Marx's magnum opus Capital. Additionally, I draw throughout the chapter on analogies to current ecosocialist debates and notions. The aim of developing a new concept of animal capital is to sharpen the analysis of animal exploitation and oppression in capitalism. This will help to determine more precisely who the animal rights and liberation movement must fight (animal capital) in order to achieve its objectives (liberate the animals from exploitation and oppression).

THE HUMAN–ANIMAL ABSTRACTION IS JUST WRONG

At least among critical human–animal scholars, it is common sense that an absolute ontological distinction between humans and animals, the human–animal dualism, is an ideological construction (see, for example, Derrida, 2008, pp. 13–14, 32–33, Mütherich, 2003/2015, pp. 53ff; Noske, 1997, pp. 40–160; Singer, 1975/2002, pp. 185–212). The founders of modern critical social theory, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, already made fun of this separation in their critique of Bruno Bauer's fellow Szeliga. They polemicize against Szeliga's Hegelian idealist abstractions from all differences between animals and between humans, turning the concrete material animals and humans into incarnations of the abstractions “the Animal” and “the Human,” respectively (see Marx-Engels Collected Works, 1975, Vol. 4, pp. 75f). German pro-animal journalist Matthias Rude (2013, p. 12) argues that the human–animal dualism helps to obscure, distort, and justify animal exploitation and oppression in capitalism.

However, when critical animal scholars leave the terrain of ideology critique (or related methods) in their attempts to explain animal exploitation and oppression, the human–animal dualism regularly returns through the back door: It is “humans” as a species who are made responsible for animal suffering, and “humans” as a species who profit from animal exploitation and oppression.

For example, Australian social scientist Dinesh Wadiwel (2018a, p. 539) assumes that there is an “antagonistic relationality between humans and animals” in capitalist production. In his impressive work The War against Animals, he claims in an even more drastic fashion that “our systems of violence towards animals” constitute “a war” (Wadiwel, 2015, p. 3). Leaning on German military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz, he explains that a “war is ‘an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will’” (Wadiwel, 2015, p. 16). In Wadiwel's argument, it is humans who compel animals to fulfil humans' will. According to Wadiwel (2015), this requires a “continual adaption and reworking of systems of domination to most effectively capture the agency, escape and vitality of animals and maximise human use value.” The war against animals is waged, in Wadiwel's analysis, by a form of biopolitical sovereignty, which “might be understood as a mode of human domination of animals” that applies intersubjective, institutional, and epistemic violence (Wadiwel, 2015, p. 21). Under these premises, property in animals is considered to be “an articulation for human victory in appropriation” (Wadiwel, 2015, p. 23). He concludes, “We eat, hunt, torture, incarcerate and kill animals because it is our sovereign right won from total victory” (Wadiwel, 2015, p. 29).

However innovative Wadiwel's approach may be, he is certainly not the only one to oppose humans and animals in such a fashion. U.S. sociologist and leading critical human–animal studies scholar David Nibert (2002, p. 3), for example, states in his path-breaking book, Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation, that the “primary focus” of his publication “is human oppression of other animals.” Through the lens of a revised “sociological theory of oppressed groups,” he considers animals to be a group oppressed and devalued by humans as are other human “oppressed groups” (Nibert, 2002, p. 16). Thus, he analyzes the interrelated oppression of humans and animals. In his introduction to the two massive volumes of the anthology Animal Oppression and Capitalism he edited, Nibert (2017, p. xii) further argues that “[h]umanity's systematic killing of other animals…did not begin until males created weapons and began hunting other animals.” The “corruption of human society was powerfully furthered 10,000 years ago, when humans began to capture and confine other animals and control their reproduction.”

Critical theorist John Sanbonmatsu raises arguments in a similar vein. In his effort to make a case against speciesism as a system of power and “a mode of production,” he considers speciesism to be “the system by which human beings dominate, exploit, and kill other conscious beings for their purposes.” “With the advent of capitalist relations,” he proceeds, “the last cultural and practical fetters to total human dominion fell away” (Sanbonmatsu, 2017, pp. 1–2). Sanbonmatsu (2017, p. 3, emphasis in the original) argues that speciesism is “undoubtedly the more fundamental” mode of production in comparison to capitalism because “domination and control of other species is the precondition for all capital accumulation” and because “our species life, our identity as a species, is organized around this dominion.” Capitalism, he concludes by recycling a quote of V.I. Lenin dealing with imperialism, “is the highest form of speciesism” (Sanbonmatsu, 2017, p. 3). At this state “the underlying nature of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals remains one of naked commercial exploitation” (Sanbonmatsu, 2017, p. 10).

These three critics are far from the only ones who rely on an abstract concept of humans as a species for explaining the exploitation and oppression of animals. Other scholars such as German radical sociologist Birgit Mütherich (2003/2015, p. 72), social anarchist Bob Torres (2007, pp. 1, 55, 71), and liberal animal right supporters, such as Gary Francione (1995, pp. 4, 21, 25, 33–34, 46), as well as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2011, p. 95), make use of similar conceptualizations. Bourgeois ethical approaches are no exception, as they are mostly based on abstract philosophical categories. Peter Singer (1975/2002, pp. xx, xxiii, 185), for example, speaks of a “tyranny of human over nonhuman animals” and “the rule of the human animal over other animal,” which are founded “on a long history of prejudice and arbitrary discrimination” of animals as different species. German moral philosopher Hilal Sezgin (2014, pp. 219ff, 221) refers to a related concept of speciesism, stating that the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Research in Political Economy
• Editorial Advisory Board
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• The Capitalist Commodification of Animals: A Brief Introduction
• PART I THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO THE COMMODIFICATION OF ANIMALS
• PART II CASE STUDIES OF THE COMMODIFICATION OF ANIMALS
• PART III ARGENTINA'S WORKING CLASS
• Index