Conceptualising animal exploitation in capitalism: Getting terminology straight

Abstract

In the last three decades, the interchange between Marxism and critical human–animalism has gratifyingly picked up. Scholars use Marxist categories to analyse and criticise the exploitation and oppression of animals in capitalism. But the application of Marx’s original concepts often rests on fragile analogies and judgements. To conceptualise the exploitation of animals accurately and substantiate the common class struggle for humans and animals theoretically, the present article serves to get the terminology straight with respect to four interrelated topics. First, the common charge against Marx’s theory to build on a human–animal dualism is refuted by showing that he understands the relationship between humans and animals as a historical materialist, socio-practical and dialectical differentiation. Second, based on a relational understanding of the capitalist mode of production, I argue that animals are not wage labourers, slaves or super-exploited commodities. Rather, as nature in general, they are super-exploited and despotically oppressed by the capitalist class. This capital–animal relation turns animals into private property and means of production at the hands of capital. It also has significant consequences for a value theory of animal labour. Animals, third, do not create value or surplus value and they do not produce commodities. They produce products and these as well as their labour are appropriated by capital for free. Finally, fourth, I defend the transfer of the concept of alienation to animals in general. But animal alienation has to be derived from the form of social labour as in the human case and it has to include the estrangement from body and life as well due to the special form of animal exploitation in capitalism.