3012. How Chicken Nugget Became the True Symbol of Our Era

By Raj Paten and Jason W. Moore, The Guardian, May 8, 2018

The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget. Chicken is already the most popular meat in the US, and is projected to be the planet’s favourite flesh by 2020. Future civilisations will find traces of humankind’s 50 billion bird-a-year habit in the fossil record, a marker for what we now call the Anthropocene. And yet responsibility for the dramatic change in our consumption lies not so much in general human activity, but capitalism. Although we’re taught to understand it as an economic system, capitalism doesn’t just organise hierarchies of human work. Capitalism is what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. Indeed, the way we understand nature owes a great deal to capitalism.

Every civilisation has had some rendering of the difference between “us” and “them”, but only under capitalism is there a boundary between “society” and “nature” – a violent and tightly policed border with deep roots in colonialism.

First taking shape in the era of Chistopher Columbus, capitalism created a peculiar binary order. “Nature” became the antonym of “society” in the minds of philosophers, in the policies of European empires, and the calculations of global financial centres. “Nature” was a place of profit, a vast frontier of free gifts waiting to be accepted by conquerors and capitalists.

This was a dangerous view of nature for all sorts of reasons, not least because it simultaneously degraded human and animal life of every kind. What we call “cheap nature” included not only forests and fields and streams, but also the vast majority of humankind. In the centuries between Columbus and the industrial revolution, enslaved and indentured Africans, Asians, indigenous peoples and virtually all women became part of “nature” – and treated cheaply as a result. When humans can be treated with such little care, it’s not surprising that other animals fare even worse under capitalism, especially the ones we end up paying to eat.

Animals have been at the centre of five centuries of dietary transformation, which sharply accelerated after the second world war. The creation of the modern world depended on the movement of cattle, sheep, horses, pigs and chickens into the new world, reinforcing the murderous advance of microbes, soldiers and bankers after 1492. Capitalism’s “ecological hoofprint”, to use food scholar Tony Weis’s well-turned phrase, has become radically globalised ever since. In the half-century after 1961, Weis tells us, per capita meat and egg consumption has doubled, and the number of slaughtered animals leapt eightfold, from eight to 64 billion.

To those with a romantic view of where their food comes from, uncooked meat appears to be a raw ingredient rather than a processed one. Quite the opposite. Feed and oilseed crops form part of what Weis terms “the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex”. Markets for grain made it possible for meat not just to become cheap food, but also to back financial instruments. Futures contracts in pork bellies, for instance, in turn require the uniformity, homogenisation and industrialisation of the crops they transform. Raw meat in the supermarket is, in other words, cooked up by a sophisticated and intensive arm of capitalism’s ecology.

Where there’s profit, there’s every incentive to realise it efficiently. Modern meat-production systems can turn a fertile egg and a 4kg bag of feed into a 2kg chicken in five weeks. Turkey production times almost halved between 1970 and 2000, down to 20 weeks from egg to 16kg bird. Other animals have seen similar advances through a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations and global supply chains. The consequences of the sustained rise in meat consumption are a planetary affair too: 14.5% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.

The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to industrial agriculture’s bottom line. Nature is merely the pool from which animals are drawn and factory farmed, and the dump into which their, and our, waste disappears. The danger lies in believing the division between nature and society is real, in seeing “factory farming” as an environmental question and “factory production” as a social question. Social questions are environmental questions, and vice versa.

Chickens don’t turn into nuggets by themselves. Capitalists need cheap work. With the European invasion of the new world in 1492, that labour presented itself in the bodies of indigenous people. By the late 16th century, when Spaniards were desperately trying to revive silver production at the great silver mountain of Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, they began using the word naturales to refer to indigenous people. Through hard work and prayer, those indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, might find divine redemption through work and perhaps even, one day long in the future, entry into society as equals.

Work was never meant to be fun. Consider the etymology of the French travail and the Spanish trabajo, each a translation of the English noun “work”: their Latin root is trepaliare, “to torture, to inflict suffering or agony.” But the way work works has changed.

For millennia, most humans survived through more or less intimate relations with land and sea. Even those who didn’t were closely connected to the tasks and objects of labour. Human survival depended on holistic, not fragmented, knowledge: fishers, nomads, farmers, healers, cooks and many others experienced and practised their work in a way directly connected to the web of life. Farmers, for instance, had to know soils, weather patterns, seeds – in short, everything from planting to harvest. That didn’t mean work was pleasant – slaves were often treated brutally. Nor did it mean that the relations of work were equitable: guild masters exploited journeymen, lords exploited serfs, men exploited women, the old exploited the young. But work was premised on a holistic sense of production and a connection to wider worlds of life and community.

In the 16th century, that began to shift. The enterprising Dutch or English farmer – and the Madeiran, then Brazilian, sugar planter – was increasingly connected to growing international markets for processed goods, and correspondingly more interested in the relationship between work time and the harvest. International markets pushed local transformations. Land in England was consolidated though enclosure, which concurrently “freed” a growing share of the rural population from the commons that they had tended, supported and survived on. These newly displaced peasants were free to find other work, and free to starve or face imprisonment if they failed.

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This history is alive and well in the modern chicken nugget. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the US, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to poultry workers. It’s hard to find staff when, according to one study in Alabama, 86% of employees who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. To fill the gaps in the labour force, some chicken operators use prison labour, paid at 25 cents an hour. In Oklahoma, chicken company executives returned to a colonial fusion of work and faith, setting up an addiction treatment centre in 2007, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery. With judges steering addicts to treatment instead of jail, the recovery programme had a ready supply of workers. At CAAIR, prayer was supplemented with unpaid work on chicken production lines as part of a recovery therapy. If you worked and prayed hard enough for the duration of your treatment, you’d be allowed to re-enter society.

CAAIR’s recruits were predominantly young and white, but the majority of poultry workers are people of colour. Latinx immigrants are a vital force in US agriculture, and the delivery of their cheap work was made possible by class restructuring on two fronts. One, in the US, was a strong movement in the 1980s by newly aggressive meat-packing firms to destroy union power and replace unionised workers with low-wage immigrant labour. The other was the destabilisation of Mexico’s agrarian order after 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which resulted in flows of cheap immigrant labour – unemployed workers displaced by capitalism’s ecology from one side of the US border to the other.

A line on a map between two states is a powerful abstraction, one that has been used recently by the far right to recruit and spread fear, and for much longer by capitalists in search of ever cheaper and more profitable workers. Under capitalism, national territories, locally owned land and new migrating workers are produced simultaneously.

With migrant workers came elite fears of the itinerant poor. In 17th- and 18th-century England, this panic resulted in harsh laws against vagabondage, and the development of charities to ameliorate the worst effects of enforced destitution. 

Threats of imprisonment moved the poor into waged work, an activity that took the intelligence, strength and dexterity of humans and disciplined them to productive labour using another modern invention: a new way of measuring time.

If the practice of labour shapes capitalism’s ecology, its indispensable machine is the mechanical clock. The clock – not money – emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it’s easy to think that working for wages is capitalism’s signature. It’s not: in 13th-century England only a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages have become a decisive way of structuring life, space and nature owes everything to a new model of time.

By the early 14th century, the new temporal model was shaping industrial activity. In textile-manufacturing towns like Ypres, in what is now Belgium, workers found themselves regulated not by the flow of activity or the seasons but by a new kind of time – abstract, linear, repetitive. In Ypres, that work time was measured by the town’s bells, which rang at the beginning and end of each work shift. By the 16th century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds. This abstract time came to shape everything – work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the 16th century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks.

Spain’s conquest of the Americas involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the “lazy” native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock. Policing time was central to capitalism’s ecology. As early as 1553, the Spanish crown began installing “at least one public clock” in its major colonial cities. Other civilisations had their own sophisticated temporal rules, but the new regimes of work displaced indigenous tempos and relationships with the natural world. The Mayan calendar is a complex hierarchy of times and readings from the heavens, offering a rich set of arrangements of humans within the universe. Spanish invaders respected it only to this extent: they synchronised their colonial assaults to sacred moments in the calendar.

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As social historian EP Thompson observes in his seminal study Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, the governance of time follows a particular logic: “In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to ‘pass the time’.” The connection of specific activities to larger productive goals didn’t allow for time theft, and the discipline of the clock was enforced by violence across the planet.

Teaching the value and structure of capitalist time to new subjects was a key part of the colonial enterprise. One settler noted in 1859 that Indigenous Australians “now … have the advantage of dating from the ‘Nip Nip,’ or Settlers’ yearly regular shearing time. This seems to supply them with a mode of stating years, which before they had not. Months or moons then satisfied them.” But the regulation of time was also a focus of resistance. Another settler wrote in a diary: “This evening there was a grand Korroberry [sic, for corroboree, an exuberant, possibly spiritual, gathering] – I endeavoured to dissuade them, telling them that it was Sunday – but they said, ‘black fellow no Sunday.’” Why the resistance? Because they knew full well that their labour was the object of theft, that colonists were appropriating their work.

Fights over the regulation of time continue even now. On US poultry lines, there is a federal law limiting the speed at which birds are processed: 140 birds per minute. The industry is lobbying to eliminate the limit, so that it can compete with factories in Brazil and Germany, where the rate is nearer 200 bpm. Worries about higher rates of food contamination and worker injury are being outweighed by the certain profit from more dead chickens.

Capitalism has always experimented with every available kind of labour system simultaneously. A sugar plantation in 1630s Brazil, for example, would be easily recognisable as a modern industrial operation in, say, the Bangladeshi textile industry. Just as autoworkers on the line assemble simplified, interchangeable parts and fast-food workers manufacture standardised burgers, so did African slaves work specialised jobs in a simplified landscape of sugar monoculture.

Behind the modern factory, there has always been a layer-cake of exploitation. Managers of factories were salaried more than the workers, who worked with raw materials acquired through various kinds of peonage and natural resource exploitation, and all of them depended on free domestic labour, usually from women. The global factory depends on a global mine, a global farm, and a global family.

Hence the persistence today of slavery. One UN agency, the International Labour Organization, estimates there are 40 million people in slavery today, the majority of whom are women, many in forced marriages. Wartime work camps in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo supply the rare-earth metals such as tantalum that power the physical infrastructure behind the virtual economy.

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But just as management looks to find new ways to generate profit, so workers find ways to resist. Early capitalism’s great commodity frontiers – of sugar, silver, copper, iron, forest products, fishing and even cereal agriculture – were zones of experimentation in strategies of labour control in Europe and its colonies, and always spaces of conflict. Strikes, rebellions, negotiations and resistance characterised the application of capitalist work disciplines. Every resistance by labour was a new reason to bring in machines. Modern work regimes and technologies emerged from the crucible of experiments, strategies and resistances of early modern workers.

Worker unrest in factories and slave rebellions, past and present, are linked not just because they are expressions of resistance, but because they are protests against the ecology of capitalism. Every global factory needs a global farm: industrial, technological and service enterprises rely on the extraction of work and cheap nature to thrive. The apps on your iPhone, designed in Cupertino, California, might have been coded by self-exploiting independent software engineers, and the phone itself assembled in draconian workplaces in China, and run on minerals extracted in inhumane conditions in the Congo. Modern manufacturing relies on layered, simultaneous and different regimes of work. And in response to every act of resistance against it, capitalism has moved the frontiers of work yet again.

Hegemony over workers has been aided by cheap food, and the promise of a chicken in every pot. Cheap food has been central to the maintenance of order for millennia. But in the ecology of capitalism, that order has been maintained through planetary transformation.

Since the 15th century, some land has become the exclusive domain of specific kinds of crops and crop systems: fields of monocultures designed to bring in flows of cash. Other areas were reserved to house those humans who had been excommunicated from those lands, to be better placed at the service of capitalists in cities. It was always a socially unstable geography, with low industrial wages supported by lower peasant wages supported by free gifts from nature, women and the colonies. After the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries offered workers the promise of alternatives to exploitation, capitalist fears of urban uprising and communism reached fever pitch. To allay this existential dread, governments and foundations did not address inequality or exploitation. Instead, they funded the development of crops that would grow abundantly enough to provide cheap food and curb urban hunger.

That it was urban, and not rural, hunger that troubled policy makers is vitally important. Food and employment for people in rural areas – where most of the world’s hunger was concentrated – were of little concern. Hunger began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature. It’s here – in the bourgeois concern about that rule and its need for worker quiescence – that we find the origin of what came to be known as the Green Revolution.

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The aim was to breed varieties of cereals that might flow freely through urban areas. But the revolution wasn’t simply an agronomic transformation. It required more than magic seeds. In order for farmers to grow the crops, national governments had to subsidise the purchase of crops through agricultural marketing boards, to lay the infrastructure for irrigation, and to suppress political dissent around alternative food systems. The Green Revolution of the early- to mid-20th century was a package of reforms designed to prevent the revolutionary political goal of many peasants’ and landless workers’ movements: comprehensive land and agrarian reform.

If you squint, it’s possible to see the Green Revolution as a success. Globally, grain output and yields (the amount of output per unit area) more than doubled – between 1950 and 1980. India’s wheat yields shot up by 87% between 1960 and 1980, similar to what American corn farmers experienced in the two decades after 1935. A rising share of all this food was traded on the world market, with global grain exports increasing by 295% during the 1960s and 70s. If these are the metrics of success, then the political commitment to making food cheap through state subsidy and violence worked.

But the prodigious output did not reduce hunger. Wheat production in India soared, but the amount that Indians ate hardly improved. Hunger, particularly in an economy dependent on agriculture, doesn’t end if people remain poor: it doesn’t matter how much grain there is if you can’t afford to buy it. Indeed, it is a global phenomenon that from 1990 to 2015, prices of processed food rose far less than those of fresh fruits and vegetables, and that in almost every country today, the poorest part of the population can’t afford to eat five fresh fruits or vegetables a day.

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Although workers in countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) saw an increase in their share of national income after the second world war, that reversed in the 1980s. This was a direct consequence of anti-labour policies that scholars aptly call “wage repression”. Given consistently low wages in the neoliberal era, it makes sense to look at cheap food as cheap not merely relative to wage costs but directly in terms of price. When we do, it emerges as no accident that one foodstuff whose price has fallen dramatically is chicken in Mexico – a direct consequence of Nafta, technology and the US soybean industry.

Nafta originally excluded agricultural goods, but they were included at the insistence of the Mexican government, which wanted to “modernise” its peasantry by moving them from agriculture into urban circuits of industry. The strategy worked: 

Mexico’s campesino (“peasant farmer”) agricultural economy buckled, as evinced by the El Campo No Aguanta Más (“the countryside can’t take it anymore”) protests that spread throughout the country in 2003. Circuits of migration and pools of labour for US agriculture were the result. But at least the chicken was cheap.

Here we come to an important point about cheap food regimes: they guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well – as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest. Capitalism’s agricultural frontiers continue to press against the world’s peasants, who provide 75% of the food in large parts of the global south. But while the present is bleak, with agricultural frontiers pushing through Amazonia and displacing peasants around the world, in the 21st century a new wrinkle has appeared that will fatally undermine capitalism’s five century-long food regime: climate change.

The imagery of the frontier lends itself to thinking only about land. But the past two centuries have witnessed a very different kind of frontier movement: the enclosure of the atmospheric commons as a dumping ground for greenhouse gas emissions. In the 21st century, agriculture and forestry (which includes land clearance for cash cropping) contribute between a quarter and a third of greenhouse gas emissions.

This is inevitable, because they’re profoundly energy- intensive, and have become more so. That’s a big problem, because there are no more atmospheric commons to enclose, and no obvious way to keep the costs of climate change off capitalism’s ledgers. Nowhere is this clearer than in the faltering global farm, whose productivity growth has been slowing, just as it did for English farmers in the middle of the 18th century. Agro-biotechnology’s promise of a new agricultural revolution has so far been worse than empty – failing to deliver a new yield boom, creating superweeds and superbugs that can withstand glyphosate and other poisons, and sustaining the cheap food model that is driving the ongoing state shift in the world’s climate system.

Climate change represents something much more than a closing frontier – it is something akin to an implosion of the cheap-nature model, bringing not the end of easy and cheap natures, but a dramatic reversal. As a growing body of research demonstrates, climate change suppresses agricultural productivity. “Climate” refers to extremely diverse phenomena, including drought, extreme rainfall, heat waves and cold snaps. Soy, the paradigmatic neoliberal crop, has already experienced what agronomists call yield suppression as a result of climate change. How much remains a matter of debate, but many analyses land somewhere in the area of a 3% reduction in growth since the 1980s – a value of $5bn per year from 1981 to 2002.

Worse, climate change promises absolute declines. Each 1C increase in average annual global temperature is accompanied by a greater risk of dramatic effects on global farming. Agricultural yields will decline between 5% and 50% (or more) in the next century, depending on the time frame, crop, location and extent to which carbon continues to be pumped into the air at today’s prodigious rates. World agriculture will absorb two-thirds of all climate change costs by 2050. That means that both the climate and capitalism’s agricultural model are in the midst of an abrupt and irreversible moment of change.

There is little reason to imagine that climate change won’t break the modern food system. Worse, industrial food production is a breeding ground for pandemic disease, and reasoned analysis suggests that the kind of concentrated animal-feeding operations that bring us cheap meat will also bring viruses that could decimate the human population. Again, this is nothing new. Just as early-modern climate change and the plague brought about the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism, so we face a future in which climate change and a vulnerability to big systemic shocks augur a dramatic end for capitalism’s ecology.

We’re astute enough students of history to see that what follows capitalism might not be better. Around the world, fascism has emerged from liberalism’s soil. Yet precisely as capitalism’s bills come due, communities are both resisting and developing complex and systemic responses at capitalism’s frontiers. Around each of the seven cheap things that make capitalism possible – nature, work, care, food, energy, money and lives – there are movements that are developing alternatives. Whether in a globally reviving labour movement, in the Movement for Black Lives’ demands around food, reparations and local economic sovereignty, or the feminismo campesino y popular (“popular peasant feminism”) developed by the La Via Campesina peasant movement in Latin America to bring together concerns around food, care, nature and work, movements are both fighting and developing intersectional alternatives.

John Jordan, an activist and co-founder of the UK’s Reclaim the Streets movement, argues that resistance and alternatives are “the twin strands of the DNA of social change”. That change will need resources and space to develop. If we are made by capitalism’s ecology, then we can be remade only as we in turn practise new ways of producing and caring for one another together – a process of redoing, rethinking and reliving our most basic relations.

Adapted from A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel and Jason W Moore, published by Verso.

3011. Jacobin, Air-Conditioning, and Productivist Nonsense

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, September 1, 2018

Leigh Phillips

About 10 years ago, two young radicals showed up on Marxmail and soon found themselves clashing with old fogies on the list. One of them was the 19-year-old Bhaskar Sunkara who unsubbed from the list to get away from all the nasty digs against Barack Obama:

I’ll be in the DSA, in the cesspool of the Democratic Party, in the mainstream unions, where the working people are, until you comrades can prove me wrong and build a viable alternative for working people and then I’ll apologize and happily join you.

The other was Leigh Phillips, whose exact age I don’t know but he was most likely a Millennial based on the evidence of photos. Phillips began defending GMO on the list, a rather brave stance to take considering the animosity most of the Marxist dinosaurs on the list feel toward chemical/industrial agriculture.

Fast forward, to use a cliché I rather detest, a decade and now we see Phillips writing articles for Jacobin, the latest being one “In Defense of Air Conditioning”. Using Marxist formulations, he makes the kind of case you can read in Spiked Online. In 2006, during a heat wave in London like the kind that we have been suffering through this year, Spiked editor-in-chief Mick Hume wrote an op-ed piece for Rupert Murdoch’s London Times that stated:

Right, get your sun-addled brain around this vicious circle. Environmentalists and the authorities argue that the recent heat waves demonstrate the extent of man-made global warming. If that’s true, then we must need more air-conditioning to cope. But oh no, they tell us, that will cause -you’ve guessed it -man-made global warming.

Verily, they want us to suffer for our sins. The old puritans cautioned only that we would burn in Hell in the next life. The neo-puritans tell us we must burn on Earth in this one.

Air-conditioning and refrigeration do indeed account for a lot of energy. But then, they are technological cornerstones of modern civilisation. Much of the world as we know it would be uninhabitable without air-con. The booming growth of the American South in the past half-century, from the metropolis of Los Angeles to the space centre of Houston, has been possible only because air-con is ubiquitous there.

While Phillips does not quite have the sneering arrogance of Hume, he does say about the same thing:

In fact, if you think about it, the abstemious green options — lifestyle changes, anti-consumption, the retreat from material demands — seem rather compatible with austerity and neoliberalism’s four-decade-long march. If the liberal good guys are all telling us we already have too much, isn’t it that much easier for the bosses to tell us the same thing?

Well, they’re wrong. Nothing’s too good for the working class, including a nice, cool, air-conned bedroom on a blazing summer’s eve. To the tumbrels with the fans of ceiling fans!

You might ask yourself why Spiked, a libertarian cult around sociology professor Frank Furedi, and Jacobin would be making the same kind of arguments. I often wonder whether Bhaskar Sunkara might have a soft spot for the magazine they put out until it went bankrupt, the casualty of being on the losing end of a £375,000 libel case. A couple of TV reporters had sued LM for accusing them of fabricating a story about Bosnians being kept in concentration camp conditions.

The magazine, originally called Living Marxism and shortened to LM in the 1980s, was sold at a bookstore near Columbia. I used to glance at it from time to time, impressed by its state-of-the-art graphics as this photo would indicate. Could Jacobin be its heir, at least visually?

But when I got past the cover, the articles were a real turn-off. Defenses of GMO, fox-hunting, unprotected sex, fast cars, nuclear power plants, assimilation of native peoples, etc. It was enough to make you throw up.

Guess who once contributed an article to Spiked Online, the successor to LM? None other than our air-conditioning advocate Leigh Phillips. Titled “A Leftwing Case Against Environmentalism”, it repeats the standard libertarian horseshit found in Spiked and its American counterpart Reason Magazine but made more palatable by radical phraseology:

Today’s campaign against economic growth and overconsumption should have no place on the left. While its current austerity-ecology incarnation appears to many progressives as a fresh, new argument fit for the Anthropocene, it is in fact the descendent of a very old, dark and Malthusian set of ideas that the left historically did battle with. It is not that our species does not face profound environmental problems. Indeed, it is precisely because human society confronts such genuine ecological threats that the focus must be on the real systemic gremlins responsible for our predicament, not growth, let alone progress, industry or even civilisation itself.

Quite the opposite of all this misanthropy is what is imperative. There will need to be more growth, more progress and more industry, and, above all, we will need to become more civilised, if we are to solve the global biocrisis.

The air-conditioning article is now the eighth written for Jacobin by Phillips. They are universally in this vein, combining a gee-whiz attitude toward science and technology reminiscent of General Electric commercials on TV in the 1950s with the sort of crude productivist version of Marxism you will find in the Spartacist League and Furedi’s sect from 25 years or so ago before its libertarian turn.

Phillips recognizes that climate change is for real, even as Spiked finally does. To understand how he differs from the revolutionary left, it is crucial to hone in on this statement: “As the climate changes, we have to place as much emphasis on adapting to the warming that is already locked in as we do in mitigating its causes. And as part of this adaptation, we should view air-conditioning in most locations as a right.”

Adapting? Mitigating its causes? Maybe the right course of action is building a mass movement that can force the corporations to stop creating greenhouse gases as part of an overall movement to expropriate the expropriators. But don’t expect Phillips to have anything to do with doom-sayers like John Bellamy Foster or Naomi Klein. His affiliations should make it clear that his solutions are within the capitalist system.

Phillips is involved with the Breakthrough Institute, a think-tank founded in 2003 by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger. On their website you can find articles hailing fracking as a model for alternative energy development and nuclear power. The board of directors includes Reihan Salam of the National Review and Rachel Pritzker, from the Chicago billionaire clan that was one of the main backers of both the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns. So, you can see the six degrees of separation without trying too hard. Jacobin>Phillips>Pritzker>Democratic Party>Jacobin.

Phillips sees air-conditioning as a basic human right that the state should guarantee, something equivalent to health care, housing and education under socialism. Unfortunately, air-conditioning requires a different infrastructure than supplying aspirins or antibiotics. It is based on energy consumption that is creating the greenhouse gases that are heating up the world. Most people would understand that as a contradiction unless you are a latter-day Doctor Pangloss like Leigh Phillips.

He castigates a Washington Post reporter for questioning the wisdom of “Las Vegas, football in Phoenix” and other attempts to build unsustainable cities in the desert. He also defends the use of air-conditioning in shopping malls that Pope Francis included as one of the “harmful habits of consumption.”

After acknowledging the drawbacks to air-conditioning, including its huge appetite for electricity, Phillips believes that it is sustainable when alternative energy sources like nuclear power and hydroelectric dams are used. Of course, you might expect someone like Phillips to be a supporter of nuclear power but what about hydroelectric dams? Aren’t they okay? After all, “Ontario, British Columbia, and Québec have grids that are almost entirely fossil-fuel free (91 percent, 95 percent, and 99 percent clean, respectively), primarily from hydroelectric or nuclear power.”

My guess is that someone like Phillips is just as dismissive of indigenous peoples as his pals at Spiked are. For productivist freaks like Mick Hume and Leigh Phillips, what’s the point of living in “primitive” conditions. Tch-tch. So barbarian when you can move to a city in Ontario and live in an electrically heated apartment rather than in a seal-hunting village near the Arctic Circle.

In 2013, I wrote an article for CounterPunch titled “The Inuit in a Melting World” that described the environmental impact on both cities and countryside by these massive dams. I cited the press notes for a documentary about Inuits living on the Belcher Islands in Canada:

Hydroelectric mega-projects near Hudson Bay send power to many cities in North America. Spring runoff from wild rivers is held behind dams and released into the bays in the winter months when energy demand is highest.

This reversal of spring runoff disrupts ocean currents and influences the dynamics of sea ice ecosystems in the bay, reversing the seasonality of the hydrological cycle. Belcher Islands residents have noticed the effects for many years, but many concerns continue to go unaddressed.

Due to winter input of freshwater from reservoirs, sea ice freezes and breaks up differently. The dynamics of these critical sea ice habitats for eiders and other wildlife, such as polar bears, are now less predictable. A number of winter die-offs of eiders have been documented, while the larger scale effects are poorly understood.

Indigenous peoples living near the dams are also in danger of being exposed to mercury, a poison that is accumulated in large bodies of water impounded behind dams as the article “Future Impacts of Hydroelectric Power Development on Methylmercury Exposures of Canadian Indigenous Communities” points out.

Finally, hydroelectric dams are a major producer of greenhouse gases, a function of the vegetation at the bottom that accumulates just like mercury before being converted into methane. The Guardian reported that a billion tons of carbon emissions are produced each year. The critical literature on hydroelectric dams is extensive. I recommend Donald Worster’s books, most of all “Rivers of Empire”.

Worster takes aim at the mega-projects associated with the New Deal, a model for the kind of socialism Jacobin contributor Corey Robin identifies with. Most of all, Worster examines the unsustainability of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix whose air-conditioners are powered by the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. Author of a biography of John Wesley Powell, a 19^th century explorer who was the first to look closely at the Southwest, Worster describes the way in which such cities were made possible against all ecological wisdom:

In 1878, Powell published his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, which laid out a concrete strategy for settling the West without fighting over scarce water. Powell wanted to stall the waves of homesteaders moving across the plains and mountains. Instead, he wanted to plan settlement based in part on the cooperative model practiced in Utah by Mormon settlers, who tapped mountain snowmelt and the streams, lakes and rivers it created with irrigation ditches leading to crops. Powell wanted to organize settlements around water and watersheds, which would force water users to conserve the scarce resource, because overuse or pollution would hurt everyone in the watershed. Powell believed this arrangement would also make communities better prepared to deal with attempts to usurp their water.

“Any city — Los Angeles, for example — would have had to deal with these local watershed groups and meet their terms,” Worster says. “For Powell, the water would not be taken out of the watershed or out of the basin and transferred across mountains … hundreds of miles away to allow urban growth to take place. So L.A., if it existed at all, would have been a much, much smaller entity. Salt Lake City would be smaller. Phoenix would probably not even exist.”

Powell’s utopian vision also focused on self-reliance. Farmers would spend their own money, not government funds, on the dams and canals needed to get water to them, and their use of water would be tied to their land. They wouldn’t be able to sell their water separately to cities or syndicates. But that was all too much for a nation desperate to expand, says Worster.

“A number of Western congressmen said, ‘Oh wait, whoa, this is too radical. There’s too much planning in this. There’s too much regulation. There’s too much community control. This is not the American way.’ It would interfere with rapid development. It would interfere with free enterprise.”

John Wesley Powell was a prophet. That’s the kind of people our environmentalist movement of today needs, not people shilling for the nuclear power and hydroelectric dam industries.

3010. On Origins of the Labor Day

By Eugene E. Ruyle, Peace and Freedom Party, August 28, 2018

The first Labor Day observance in 1882 at Union Square in New York

As we enter the Labor Day weekend, many on the left will repeat the myth that Labor Day has no historical significance and is simply a “gift” from capitalist politicians to break up the international solidarity of American workers by providing an alternative to May Day. For many years, I accepted this myth, even while marching with my union comrades in the annual Labor Day Parades in Wilmington, California. Then I learned that the first Labor Day was in 1882, four years BEFORE Haymarket and eight years BEFORE the first international May Day in 1890. How, then, could it have originated as an alternative to May Day? A little historical research revealed a much different, and more complex, story.

Peter J. McGuire, father of Labor Day and May Day and founder of the International Brotherhood of Carpenters

This research showed that both Labor Day and May Day grew out of American labor struggles in the 1880s and, surprisingly, that the same man, Peter J. McGuire (1852-1906), who founded the International Brotherhood of Carpenters, is claimed as the “father” of both Labor Day and May Day! However, as the labor movement developed in the 1890s and into the 20th Century, different factions favored one rather than the other and began to pit the two against each other. But as Yale historian David Montgomery notes, “Little is gained by calling one holiday real and the other phony. We need to know what both have meant to workers.” Otherwise, an opportunity to educate the U.S. working class about its real history will be lost.

Let us, then, review the intertwined history of Labor Day and May Day within the general struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

The roots of Labor Day go back to the Middle Ages. During the French Revolution a special day in September was set aside as a labor holiday. In nineteenth-century North America, celebrations, picnics, parades, benefits, and demonstrations of various kinds were held to support shorter hours, to help strikers, and for other labor causes. There are reports of early Labor Day celebrations in Toronto, Canada, in 1872 and in Boston in 1878. The first Labor Day in Australia was celebrated in 1856. According to the research of Jonathan Grossman, however, the American Labor Day holiday grew out of the parade and picnic of the Central Labor Union of New York City on September 5, 1882:

The year 1882 was charged with excitement for organized workers in New York City. On January 30, thousands of workers packed Cooper Union in support of Irish tenants against their British landlords. Under such banners as "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/Where wealth accumulates, and men decay," union leaders expressed the unity of labor's cause throughout the world. Among the participants were Matthew Maguire, Secretary of the Committee on Arrangements, who read letters from labor unions from every part of America, and Peter J. McGuire, who "spoke eloquently for half an hour, retiring among continued applause,”

Maguire and McGuire, both members of the Socialist Labor Party Club of New York, had proposed the holiday to the Central Labor Union of New York. On Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882, about ten thousand workers took an unpaid day off and marched around Union Square in support of the holiday and celebrating labor’s international cause. It became an annual event that spread to other cities and states as the movement for a national Labor Day grew. Over the next decade, thirty states recognized Labor Day as a legal holiday so that workers would not have to lose pay in order to celebrate their achievements.

Legal limitation of the working day was an important part of labor’s achievements. Even before the Civil War, the ten-hour day movement had made significant gains. With the rise of industrial capitalism after the Civil War, the eight hour day movement began in earnest. In his chapter on “The Working Day” in Capital, Marx wrote:

Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.

Marx continues to write that on August 16, 1866, the General Congress of labour at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866), “to free the labour of this country from capitalistic slavery,” as the Congress put it, called for a law limiting the working day to eight hours, A few weeks later, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva, passed a similar resolution. Thus, with the leadership of the American working class, the movement of the working-class on both sides of the Atlantic set itself to the struggle for an eight hour day. Marx concludes:

In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.”

Later, Lenin would describe the importance of the eight hour day movement as a time when the workers, as a class, confronted the state as an instrument of the capitalist class.

The demand for an eight-hour day . . . is the demand of the whole proletariat, presented, not to individual employers, but to the government as the representative of the whole of the present-day social and political system, to the capitalist class as a whole, the owners of all the means of production.

Responding to working class agitation, Congress passed an eight hour day law in 1868. Federal authorities did not enforce it, however, so labor activists such as McGuire and his friend, Samuel Gompers, realized that it would only be enforced by direct action from the workers themselves.

Poster from the 8-hour day struggle

In 1884, at McGuire’s urging, the national conference of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the organizational forerunner of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), passed a resolution establishing May 1, 1886, as the day on which the workers themselves would institute the eight-hour day. May Day was already a day with deep historical roots and rituals such as the May Pole dating back to the Middle Ages. It was a day when workers would make their demands. The modern May Day dates from this action by the American labor movement.

The first May Day was a huge success, According to one source, “In all, the May 1 actions involved 340,000 working people. Of these, 150,000 won shorter hours without striking; 190,000 struck, and 42,000 of the strikers improved their conditions.”

The largest of the May Day demonstrations was in Chicago, where 80,000 workers went on strike, with another 45,000 in New York and 32,000 in Cincinnati. One of the largest strikes was in Chicago at the McCormick Reaper Works, where Pinkerton agents and the police harassed and beat locked-out steelworkers as they picketed. On May 3, the police attacked, killing at least two workers and wounding many more. The next day, a rally was called for Haymarket Square in Chicago to support the strikers and oppose police brutality.

The rally itself was peaceful, attended by families with children and the Mayor of Chicago himself. But as the crowd was dispersing, the police attacked. A bomb was thrown—no one to this day knows who threw it—and police began to fire indiscriminately into the crowd, killing several civilians and wounding forty more. One officer was killed by the bomb and several more died from their own gun fire. The aftermath is described by a writer for the Industrial Workers of the World:

Aside from the bomb thrower, who was never identified, it was the police, not the anarchists, who perpetrated the violence. Eight anarchists - Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg - were arrested and convicted of murder, though only three were even present at Haymarket and those three were in full view of all when the bombing occurred. The jury in their trial was comprised of business leaders in a gross mockery of justice similar to the Sacco-Vanzetti case thirty years later, or the trials of AIM and Black Panther members in the seventies. The entire world watched as these eight organizers were convicted, not for their actions, of which all were innocent, but for their political and social beliefs. On November 11, 1887, after many failed appeals, Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fisher were hung to death. Louis Lingg, in his final protest of the state's claim of authority and punishment, took his own life the night before with an explosive device in his mouth.

The remaining defendants were later pardoned by a new Governor of Illinois and declared innocent of any wrongdoing. A monument to the Haymarket Martyrs was dedicated in 1893, inscribed with the prophetic last words of August Spies: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Police repression had not killed May Day or the eight hour day movement,. In 1888, the AFL defiantly called for another national eight hour strike for May 1, 1890. When AFL leader Samuel Gompers learned that the International Workingmen's Congress would consider a similar eight-hour day resolution, he arranged for a representative, Hugh McGregor, to travel to the Congress and deliver a letter asking that they also adopt May 1, 1890 for their action. Inspired by the example of the American workers, the Paris Congress adopted the following resolution:

The Congress decides to organize a great international demonstration, so that in all countries and in all cities on one appointed day the toiling masses shall demand of the state authorities the legal reduction of the working day to eight hours, as well as the carrying out of other decisions of the Paris Congress. Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon for May 1, 1890, by the American Federation of Labor at its Convention in St. Louis, December, 1888, this day is accepted for the international demonstration. The workers of the various countries must organize this demonstration according to conditions prevailing in each country.

The first International Workers Day on May 1, 1890 was a success, with demonstrations in all the major European cities, including London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Brussels, Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, and Amsterdam, as well as in Cuba, Peru, and Chile, and in cities throughout the United States. In Chicago and New York, slogans included:

• Abolish Wage Slavery,
• No More Bosses—Wage Slavery Must Go.
• The 8-hour day is the next step in the Labor Movement, The Socialist CommonWealth is the Final Aim.

On May Day, 1890, in London, Frederick Engels was writing an introduction to a new edition of the Communist Manifesto, and included the following:

Today, as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’ s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed. If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!

Across the ocean, Gompers (who probably actually deserves the honor of being called the “father” of May Day), noted with satisfaction in 1891:

May 1st of each year is now looked upon by the organized wage-workers and the observing public as a sort of new Independence Day upon which they will every year strike a blow for emancipation and steadily weaken the shackles of wage slavery.

Although originally proposed to be a one-time affair, May Day soon became an annual event. For over a century, every year on May Day, workers on every continent honor the Haymarket Square martyrs and labor’s continuing struggle for an eight hour day.

The struggle to set aside the September Labor Day as a legal holiday never subsided, however. The labor movement has never been a single-issue movement and has always exhibited tensions between different tendencies. By the early 1890s, thirty states and many cities recognized Labor Day as a legal holiday for workers.

Responding to the demands of the labor movement, Congress legalized Labor Day as a national holiday in 1894, after a watershed event in American labor history. On May 11, 1894, employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago went on strike to protest wage cuts and the firing of union representatives. On June 26, the American Railroad Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, called for a boycott of all Pullman railway cars, crippling railroad traffic nationwide. To break the strike, the federal government dispatched troops to Chicago who violently suppressed the strike, killing thirty workers in the process.

In the wake of the ensuing massive unrest, Congress finally passed an act making Labor Day a legal holiday. No longer would workers have to take an unpaid day off to relax and celebrate their history. Like the weekend, Labor Day was brought to America by the organized action of the labor movement.

More than a dozen strikers were killed in the Pullman Strike of 1894

Both May Day and Labor Day are days of celebration for workers. Both grew out of the struggles of workers for the eight-hour day and better working conditions, and many of the same people and organizations were involved in the origin of both holidays. Unfortunately, conflicts between different tendencies within the labor movement have affected the history of these two labor holidays.

From the very beginning, the U.S. press has described the May Day demonstrators as “wild-eyed agitators” of the “European type,” “radicals, mostly socialists and anarchists,” with “accents and foreign mannerisms predominating.” The Labor Day parade, by contrast, is seen as “a demonstration of the honest American workingman,” “sober, clean quiet,” and “well-clothed and well-appearing men.”

The two workers’ holidays are indeed different. On Labor Day, workers can take a well-deserved day off and enjoy their achievements without having to fight the bosses and cops to do so. On May Day, workers themselves assert their power, without legal sanction, in defiance of the bosses, the state, and even union leaders if necessary.

Curiously, Labor Day was started by members of the Socialist Labor Party in 1882, but by the 20th Century, the SLP was denouncing it, saying that Labor Day “represents a gift handed to the workers free, gratis and for nothing by the capitalist politicians . . . meant as an antidote for labor's own May Day.” Conversely, May Day was started in 1886 by the American Federation of Labor, but by the 20th Century, the AFL would ignore May Day and its own role in starting it. Even today, the website of the national AFL-CIO does not mention its role in starting May Day, but many local AFL-CIO unions and federations do sponsor May Day events.

This is especially true since 2006, when May Day mobilizations in the United States made headlines for the first time in living memory. Millions of immigrant workers—documented and undocumented—took to the streets as Immigrant Rights groups and Latino organizations called a nation-wide one day strike and huge marches were staged across the country. Hundreds of thousands of workers marched in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland and throughout the nation and throughout the world.

For most workers around the world—and not only in the socialist countries—May Day is a legal holiday. Even the Catholic Church, in 1955, dedicated May Day to Saint Joseph The Worker, the patron saint of workers and craftsmen.

Labor Day, like the weekend, was brought to us by the labor movement. If Labor Day has become de-politicized, we need to re-politicize it. We can do so by honoring the 30 union strikers murdered by federal troops during the Pullman Strike of 1894. It is to them, not the capitalist politicians, that we owe this holiday.

As an example of how Labor Day can maintain a political message, the Los Angeles Long Beach Harbor Labor Coalition has organized an annual Labor Day Parade and Picnic since 1979, with up to 10,000 attendees representing over 100 unions. Each year a difference slogan is chosen, such as: “Protect the 8-Hour Workday” “Labor Produces Wealth,” “Unity Across the Border,” “Workers of the World Unite,” “The Labor Movement Gave Me the Weekend.” As I recall, free hot dogs and other snacks were handed out and there were speeches addressing the state of Labor, from its past to the coming future. No politicians, however, were allowed on the podium, if my memory serves me.

To conclude on a personal note: As a retired union member, my dues are still deducted from my pension check. Before I retired, however, I always marched with my union comrades at the annual Labor Day Parade in the harbor city of Wilmington and ate their free union hot dogs and beans at the Rally and Picnic. I also participated in the annual May Day rally and barbeque on the Cal State Long Beach campus put on by the CSULB Labor Coalition and paid a buck for their union hamburgers, chips, and a soda. Both workers’ holidays are important to me. The Los Angeles Long Beach Harbor Labor Coalition Parade and Picnic is possibly the best-organized and most radical Labor Day event in California, but other there are other events as well, which one can locate with a google search.

Labor Day and May Day—two holidays to honor the Haymarket Square martyrs, the union strikers shot down by federal troops during the Pullman Strike of 1894, and the thousands of workers continuing to be murdered by police violence. Labor Day and May Day are also two days to celebrate the achievements of the labor movement.

3009. On the Labor of Non-Human Animals

By Dinesh Wasiwel, Progress in Political Economy, August 28, 2018

Chicken Harvestor: Automation of chicken slaughter. 

The place of animals in relation to left movements has been highly uncertain. On one hand, there has been at least some historical ambivalence from the organised left around animal welfare as essentially a bourgeois pursuit, something that was reflected in Marx’s brief comments on the issue in Capital, Vol.1 (also on this see Gunderson 2011). There has also been a deeper problem in how the left has conceptualised animals within capitalism, particularly the question of whether animals labour, and how this is understood. Again, this problem has some fundamental roots within Marx’s philosophy: it is well known that the 1844 Manuscripts very clearly articulate a supposed fundamental difference between how humans and animals labour, attributing a capacity for conscious creative work only to humans.

A number of scholars have made admirable attempts to both challenge Marx’s anthropocentricism and imagine animals as labouring subjects, including Ted Benton, Donna Haraway,  Jocelyne Porcher and Kendra Coulter. I believe much of this work is in sympathy with recent green scholarship which has attempted to understand the relations between capitalism and nonhuman natures, such as the recent work of Jason W. Moore.

What strikes me as curious in surveying the small but growing work on animals, labour and their relation to capital, is the lack of analysis of the specific value-role of animals, not merely as commodities but as producers of value (i.e. labourers). I should say that I am less interested in the question “Do animals labour?” From my view this question misses something fundamental. The point of Marx’s analysis is to understand the value-role of labour within the context of capitalism. In other words, the important question is “What is the value of animal labour power?” Indeed, as Brian Whitener has recently pointed out, there is a need for a developed “animal labour theory of value”.

In my recent article in South Atlantic Quarterly I attempt precisely this sort of analysis of how animals might function as producers of value. While it may be tempting to begin this analysis by examining animals who are deployed within production as instruments of traction – such as the continued use of draught animals within small hold farming globally – my object of analysis is the much more complicated problem of human utilisation of animals for food.

It may be disorienting to imagine food animals as labourers. For example, how might we conceptualise a chicken kept in a small cage, intensively fed, and ultimately destined to be slaughtered for food, as a “worker”? However, recent theoretical developments in conceptualising labour offer some useful tools for thinking about this problem. Scholars such as Melinda Cooper and Les Beldo have theorised the body and its metabolism as sources of surplus. In addition, feminist labour theorists have explored how a work on one’s own body within reproductive labour functions within circuits of capital: for example Amrita Pande’s analysis of commercial surrogacy.

Building on this work, my argument is that we can understand the labour of food animals by comprehending the unique way capital positions these animals as neither just a raw commodity to be worked on, nor as purely a source of labour, but as a combination of both. That is, a combination of constant and variable capital. Understanding animals as this hybrid allows us to gain a fuller picture of what these animals mean to capitalism: they are a special  raw material that circulates (that enters production as one commodity and leaves as another) and can be relied upon to labour upon themselves through their own metabolic processes and thus produce value within production processes.

Thinking about animals as a hybrid of constant and variable capital gives us some useful insights into the lives of animals within capitalist production.  At least one promising aspect of this analysis is that it allows us to re-narrate the transformations in industrial agriculture that we have seen in the twentieth-century and beyond from the standpoint of both human and animal labour. The implications for human labour of the arrival of the factory farm are reasonably clear from the standpoint of Marx’s theory. Intensification of production and the increasing deployment of automated processes, aim at displacing human labour – that is increasing relative surplus value by reducing human labour time. But this story of the arrival of the factory farm requires more nuance if we are understand animals as labourers. While the industrialisation of animal agriculture aimed at a relative reduction in human labour time, it simultaneously expanded animal labour on a massive scale, since then an explosion in the production of animal products was necessary (on this expansion, see Weis). In this way, labour time was reoriented between species – human labour time is reduced, animal labour increases as animal products massively expand.

However the same drives towards expanding surplus value, whether in an absolute or relative sense, informed the transformation of animal labour that has been seen over the last century. Recently Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore have pointed out the specific history of poultry in industrial agriculture, and the success of producers in using selective breeding to reducing growing time and increase bird weight. We could understand these developments in industrial agriculture as driven by the need to reduce human labour time in production or reduce the costs of food for human workers (that reduces the cost of the means of human labour reproduction). However, a focus on animal labour shows us that capital seeks to seize all labour (human and non human) and increase its relative efficiency. For human labour this has often meant the deployment of technologies to reduce labour time, sometimes completely replacing human labour with automated processes. But the dynamics are different for animals as their labour is essential since they are also the product. They cannot be replaced. Instead, lives have been shortened in order to reduce the costs of animal labour and selective breeding has been used to increase the meat that can be yielded. The animal that used to be slaughtered at 12 weeks old now can be slaughtered at 6 weeks, and now weighs more than it ever did before, producing more meat for consumption.

A particular interest for me is trying to understand how animals as labourers resist and exert agency, and how this in turn shapes what production processes looks like. The expansion of constant capital, including machines, in intensive agriculture has displaced many human workers. However, it has created a different relationship between technologies and animals within agriculture. This is because human labour in animal agriculture was often about dominating and coercing animals to make them work (think of stockmen and stockwomen, whip in hand, herding cattle). New technologies which replaced humans would need to take over this specific coercive role. Thus the drive to improve the efficiency of human labour has informed attempts to create replacement technologies that must coerce animals and must deal with animal resistance. An example of such a technology is the chicken harvesting machine, which aims to “save” human workers (often highly exploited and precarious workers) the job of trying to catch chickens before they are sent to slaughter. This work is usually dangerous, since chickens do not want to be caught (see Quandt et al). The “harvesting machines” which are replacing human labour are designed to confront and deal with animal resistance to being caught. In a sense this tells us something about the unique structural position of animals under capitalism – they produce under conditions of domination, and efficiencies in production will aim not necessarily to replace them, but instead to more effectively counter their resistance in order to make them more productive.

In my view asking how animals are positioned within capitalism is useful for thinking about what the left project is and who it represents. A stronger analysis of the structural position of animals within capitalism may elucidate the links between human and non human labour and open up opportunities for a broader understanding of labour struggle that includes recognition of animals and the violence we expose them to. Certainly my hope is that we can produce a politics which challenges the way capital has come to dominate all life, human and non human.

* Thanks owed to Adam Morton for the edits on this piece and the continuing encouragement; the Past & Present Reading Group at the University of Sydney that has provided a wonderful space to think through ideas; and ex-political economy honours student Eliza Littleton, for many chats over the years.

Dinesh Wadiwel is a senior lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies at the University of Sydney, with a background in social and political theory. He is the author of the monograph The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and co-editor with Matthew Chrulew of the collection Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016). Dinesh is co-convener of the Human Animal Research Network (HARN) at the University of Sydney: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/harn/