Labour

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This Chapter argues that there is value in moving away from describing animal labour through analogies to human labour processes (including human slavery); instead, understanding the distinct value role of animal labour power within contemporary industrial animal agriculture. This allows us to see some curiosities associated with animal labour power. One of these is that animals arrive at production as a hybrid of constant and variable capital. Further, against Marx’s suggestion that labour time reduces as fixed capital increases, we find instead a situation within animal agriculture where the expansion of fixed capital is accompanied by the massification of animal labour, which produces the capitalist demand to shorten animal lives in order to abbreviate the production cycle. Here, we also glimpse the distinct confrontation that exists between animals and capital: where the arrival of machines conventionally displaces humans (they lose their jobs as fixed capital increases), animals are instead confronted by fixed capital as a companion and an adversary. Here, it is argued that under capitalism, technology has arisen in antagonistic relationality with animals within industrial agriculture.