From Cattle to Capital: Exchange Value, Animal Commodification, and Barbarism

Abstract

In the past half-century, massive structural, geographic, and technological changes have occurred in livestock production. This 'livestock revolution' has raised considerable environmental, public health, and ethical concerns. The majority of analyses concerning the negative outcomes associated with these transformations usually condemn industrial technologies as the root of the problem. This article argues that the force behind technological developments in livestock production is to aid capital's blind drive for self-expansion and self-accumulation and is the source of the majority of contemporary food animal suffering. It analyzes (1) the paramount role of generalized commodity production in altering the welfare of food animals and (2) the potential of fundamentally improving human relations with food animals within the system of capital.

Animals, Capital and Sustainability

“…Our work has strong parallels to Gunderson's arguments about the negation of animal needs under the logic of capitalist production, especially his insight, drawn from Adorno (1966), that the domination of nature required for capitalist production is violent (Gunderson, 2013). 3 Our arguments are similar to those of Hribal on animals and agency and the resistance of animals to the labor process (Hribal, 2003(Hribal, , 2007.…”

“…Just as the dynamic of ever-increasing efficiency leads to making the tasks of the human worker more routinized, predictable and controlled by management, so the tasks of non-human animals engaged in the production process become more uniform and more tightly controlled. Animals are treated more like machines or raw materials with predictable characteristics for the production of biological products than as independent organisms with distinct characteristics (Boyd, 2001;Gunderson, 2013;Hart & Mayda, 1998;King, 2000;MacDonald & McBride, 2009). That is, animals have moved from being more or less like human labor in the production function to being more like manufactured or natural resources; the same process Braverman has documented for human workers.…”

“…Second, both human workers and animals often suffer in small and large ways, from boredom and alienation to experiencing injury, pain and even death as a result of the drive for efficiency. Gunderson makes this point about the cruelty involved in the rationalization of animal agriculture (Gunderson, 2013). So while an increased availability of goods and services may contribute to enhanced human well-being, at least in some circumstances, the increased suffering that may accompany increased productivity reduces well-being.…”

“…Now, experiments are underway for the in vitro production of foodstuffs including "animal" protein. As Gunderson notes, in the long run, this may change the conditions of animals in agriculture, reducing the need to treat animals as machines or raw materials (Gunderson, 2013).…”

“…This work has shown that our understandings of agriculture (Gunderson, 2013), identity (Jerolmak, 2013), technology (York & Mancus, 2013) and violence (Fitzgerald, Kalof, & Dietz, 2009), among many other topics, shift when we take non-human animals seriously (for additional examples, 1 Author contact: tdietz@msu.edu.…”