Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall by Thomas Fleischman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall by Thomas Fleischman Tatsuya Mitsuda (bio) Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall By Thomas Fleischman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. 296. In recent years, scholars of science and technology have noted the emergence of what have been variously conceptualized since the 1970s as "bioeconomics," "biocapital," or "biovalue." Such concepts are generally understood as describing the intensified union between the life sciences and profit-driven enterprises. Academics deploy these concepts as heuristic devices to make sense of a significant shift in modern capitalism whereby increasingly small biological materials such as cells, molecules, genomes, and genes, are being exploited for commercial use. Much of the literature analyzing the biopolitical economy also considers how non-human creatures have been drawn into this capitalization of life. Even though the overt financialization of the bioeconomy—creating "assets" as opposed to "products"—signals an original departure, Thomas Fleischman's ambitious new book, Communist Pigs, is a timely reminder about the roots of the bioeconomy: they can be traced back further in time, and observed not just in the capitalist West, but also in the communist East. Drawing on an abundant array of sources, including public documents from state archives, Fleischman's main aim is to revise the image of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a political, ideological, and economic basket case. To do so, he presents a nuanced analysis of the complex and contradictory factors that made it possible for three types of swine—industrial, garden, and wild—to thrive under socialism. The author skillfully places events and actors (pigs included) within a global framework. This allows him to draw arresting parallels between East and West and to reconstruct the flows of both capital and technology that transcended national and ideological boundaries in the construction of factory farms. The book's main argument is that since the capital underwriting mass hog [End Page 525] production came from Western creditors, the GDR was forced to continue exporting cheap pork at all cost to service its debts. This policy not only resulted in pork-deprived East Germans raising pigs on their small plots of land. Wild boars multiplied as the shift to industrial farming disrupted the ecosystem, leading to the kinds of protests that ultimately brought down the communist regime. For the readers of this journal, the most rewarding part of the book is its close analysis of how the industrial pig evolved, facilitated by technological knowledge that came from the United States to Europe via Yugoslavia. Ever since Antony Sutton's three-volume Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, published between 1968 and 1973, a significant body of work has built up showing how the Communist Bloc avidly studied industrial agriculture. Fleischman richly details how events played out in the GDR. At the massive slaughterhouse-cum-meat-processing facility in Eberswalde, porcine bodies were remade, retrofitted, and standardized to align with the dictates of modern industrial factory farming. As the author aptly notes, these industrial pigs were "technology made flesh" (p. 91). Fat, numerous, unhealthy, and environmentally damaging, these pigs were the result of deliberate scientific and technological interventions that reorganized their biological constitution and turned them into machines capable of efficiently converting grain into meat. Building on the recent "animal turn," Fleischman demonstrates how communist pigs could become actors entangled in social, political, and ecological change. Because of their innate biological trait to thrive in any kind of environment, the pigs—be they in the factory, the garden, or the wild—could easily frustrate humans' plans for them. Despite his stated focus on the three types of pigs, Fleischman at times veers off course, referencing other animals, chemicals, crops, or vegetables without necessarily clarifying their relevance to the main topic. Similarly, in his enthusiasm for emphasizing the role of international politics and global capitalism, Fleischman is prone to delving into details about other countries, once again without clarifying either their impact on communist pigs or drawing on comparisons to illustrate national differences and similarities. Putting such small quibbles aside, the book is packed with original insights. It represents a significant contribution to the...