3615. How the Anthropocentric Industrial Capitalist Civilization Exploits Nature

By Kamran Nayeri, December 31, 2022

An industrial chicken farm

Many socialists, particularly Marxists, focus their attention on the exploitation of the working class. In fact, Marx's theory of exploitation of wage workers (theory of surplus value) is a specific application of Marx's and Engels's theory of society and history, historical materialism. In his speech at Marx's burial, Engels credited Marx with two theoretical contributions: Historical materialism (with Engels himself) and the theory of surplus value. The latter is developed in Marx's Capital.  

In Capital volume 1, Marx shows how the origin of industrial capitalist profit is surplus value created in the production process. In Capital volume 3, he also demonstrates how the process of capitalist production and the distribution of surplus value provide land owners with rent and financial/merchant capitalists with interest.  What Marx himself and Marxists so far have ignored is that Marx's analysis can be used to show how the exploitation of nonhumans contributes to the creation of surplus value and capitalist profit and, in fact, helps sustain the capitalist economy and society. 

 

Let me provide a sketch of my argument.  Following Marx in Capital volume 1, the value of a capitalist firm's final product (λ) produced in one production cycle is defined as follows. 

                                C + V + S  =>  λ  where:
                   

                    λ  = The value of the product

                    M = Invested money capital (C + V)                     

                    C  = The value of constant capital

                    V  = The value of labor power paid as wages

                    S  =  Surplus value created by the application of labor power during                                                              production

                    M’ = New money capital gained upon selling the final product

                    p  = M’ – M, the profit gained upon selling the final product

                    

                    It is assumed that S = p. 

The capitalist firm starts with money capital M spent on purchasing means of production divided by Marx into constant capital and variable capital. By constant capital, he denotes that part of the means of production that do not undergo any change in their quantitative value during the production process, such as the raw material, auxiliary material, and the instruments of labor. (Marx 1867; Chapter Eight) The value of various components of constant capital used up in one production cycle is transferred to the final product without change. On the other hand, variable capital is the value of labor power employed; that is, "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description." (Marx 1867, Chapter Six) Thus, the source of capitalist profit is the surplus value the workers produce in the process of production (for a detailed discussion, see Shaikh, 1990). Surplus value is equal to unpaid labor time, as shown in the diagram below:

 

        The working day

                                                                            A                             B                                 

                                                            [<---------------><--------------->]

     

     A = The part of the working day necessary to produce a new value equivalent to                                       the workers’s wages.

     B = Unpaid surplus labor time.

 

 

Thus, workers' wages reflect the value of labor power but not the surplus value they produce during production. The capitalist firm pockets the surplus value as profit upon selling the product. Thus, capitalist profit is p = M’ - M. 

 

But what is the value of labor power? It is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the laborer paid as wages. A key component in the worker's consumption basket is food. A reduction in the value of food will result in an equal magnitude reduction of the value of labor power, all other things being equal. Mechanization and industrialization of the meat industry have been part of the process of reducing the value of food necessary for the working class's maintenance and reproduction, hence contributing to a reduction of the value of labor power and a corresponding increase in surplus value.  Thus, reducing the value of the nonhuman nature that workers consume will increase surplus value, expanding capitalist exploitation from the social realm to the natural realm. 

 

To take one example, according to the National Chicken Council, dressed chicken which was retailed in the U.S. for $6.48 a pound in 1930 (in today's dollar), now costs $1.57 a pound: "Costs came down partly because scientific breeding reduced the length of time needed to raise a chicken to slaughter by more than half since 1925, even as a chicken's weight doubled. The amount of feed required to produce a pound of chicken has also dropped sharply." (Kristof, March 12, 2014) Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human by the age of two months would weigh 660 pounds! Among the scientific techniques used to raise farm animals in increasingly cramped spaces is the intensive use of hormones and antibiotics. (For a discussion of the misery of chickens raised by the food industry, see Farm sanctuary, March 2004A). To appreciate the magnitude of the crime against a sentient being, in one year, in 2011, 58,110,000,000 chickens were slaughtered by the food industry.  

 

There is a similar drop in the unit cost of other food items in the working class consumption basket, such as eggs, butter, milk, and steak, all taken from farm animals. However, a similar drop can be observed in plant-based food items like flour, potatoes, oranges, coffee, and sugar (Bureau Labor of Statistics, 2011, 2015).  

Thus, Marx's labor theory of value can also be used to show capitalist profit also come from the exploitation of nonhuman species and inanimate nature as well as the labor power of wage workers. In particular, surplus value is increased by increasing subordination, oppression, and exploitation of farm animals. 

 

The magnitude of the oppression and exploitation of farm animals will find no match in even the worst atrocities committed by a group of humans against another group of humans. Just consider these statistics: In 2011, more than 58 billion chickens (more precisely, 58,110,000,000), nearly 3 billion ducks (2,917,000,000), and more than a billion pigs (1,383,000,000) were slaughtered for food worldwide. Other farm animals killed for food numbered hundreds of millions each: 654 million turkeys, 649 million geese and guinea fowl, 517 million sheep, 430 million goats, and 296 million cattle (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2014, p. 15).

 

Yet, no Marxist current has ever raised their voices or acted accordingly against these historically horrific conditions. How is that possible? 

Indeed, the bulk of humanity has turned a blind eye to this as well. I have argued elsewhere that this is rooted in anthropocentrism as a manifestation of alienation from nature. The situation is analogous to the slave-owning societies including in the United States, the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Zionist colonial settlers who established Israel by murdering and subjugating Palestinians; in each case, the oppressors and exploiters turned a blind eye to the crimes again humanity by dehumanizing their victims. What is common to all these cases is that the oppressors alienated the oppressed as less than human in moral standing. This ideological prop, called racism in some cases or antisemitism in the case of Nazis, is necessary for such historical atrocities to happen. Alienation from nature and its ideological reflection, anthropocentrism, is similarly required for the domination, control, and exploitation of nature in search of wealth and power. 

 

Of course, to realize and empathize with the oppression and exploitation of farm animals and the rest of nature does not require Marxian theory. The very fact of their subjugation as domesticated animals must give any open-minded individual pause. Many who have rebelled against these horrific conditions have not been socialists. 

As I suggested above, working people must have every sympathy and empathy towards the farm animals which they either raise and murder for the meat industry or consume themselves as food.  In fact, working people must realize that their oppression and exploitation are only possible because the rest of nature has been dominated and exploited since the dawn of civilization.  In fact, they and the rest of nature have been exploited for the wealth and power of the ruling classes for 5,000 years. 

We must also revise our view of the post-capitalist society. The Marxian theory of socialist revolution depends on the assumption of state power by the working class dismantling the capitalist state and beginning the transition to socialism. There is nothing in Marx's writings or any of the theories of transition to socialism that would break with the oppression of farm animals or gives up domination and control of nature to expropriate wealth. The goal is to distribute such wealth equally among the working people. But if all wealth comes from nature, a wealthy socialist society can only be envisioned as one expropriating nature. In fact, the Marxist literature on sustainable development is, in essence, nature managed by the socialist society for its own anthropocentric reasons. In this view, human exceptionalism is the prevailing view of our place in the world, not as a part of it but as its apex. 

 

Thus, human emancipation requires animal liberation and, more generally, the elimination of alienation from nature. These will require not just a socialist revolution but also a cultural revolution to replace anthropocentrism with ecocentrism as society's environmental ethics.  

 

References:

Bureau of Labor Statistics. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Bicentennial Edition, Part 2. 2011; 2015. 

Heinrich Böll Foundation. Meat Atlas: Facts and Figures About Animals We Eat. 2014.

Kristof, Nicholas. "Industrial Farming and Your Diet." The New York Times, March 12, 2014. 

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, Vintage, 1867/1977.

Shaikh, Anwar. “Surplus Value.” John Eatwell, Murry Milgate, and Peter Newman (Ed’s.), The New Palgrave Marxian Economics. 1990.