Marx is a controversial figure in critical animal studies (CAS). While the central categories of his political economy have proven invaluable for analysing what Barbara Noske calls the “global animal-industrial complex,” there is widespread suspicion that his “humanism” is incompatible with an animal studies that is for, rather than simply about, animals. This suspicion has its roots in Ted Benton’s influential interpretation of Marx’s early conceptualization of human suffering in terms of the alienated labour unique to capitalism. For Benton, Marx’s condemnation of the “dehumanization” characteristic of this form of labour rests on a human/animal dualism that obscures the kind of animal suffering that is of such concern to CAS. “The humanist philosophical framing of Marx’s concept of alienation,” he writes, “renders extension of that analysis beyond the human case literally unthinkable”. Worse still, Marx’s model of history as a “humanization of nature” is “no less anthropocentric than the more characteristically modernist utilitarian view of the domination of nature” and would therefore seem to legitimize the very animal-industrial complex through which animals are “humanized” and from which CAS seeks their liberation.
Marxists have recently gone on the defensive in the face of Benton-inspired criticisms. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark are critical of Benton’s focus on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and argue that, taken as a whole, Marx’s work demonstrates an awareness of human-animal continuity and a concern with the degradation of animals under industrial capitalism. Christian Stache argues that Benton’s reading of the Manuscripts is itself mistaken and that, even when applied to this early work, charges of anthropocentrism and speciesism are mis-placed. While I am largely sympathetic to both arguments, I am concerned that this rush to defend Marx from accusations of humanism runs two risks in particular. First, it may obscure the significant limitations for CAS of a form of humanism that, whether really characteristic of Marx or not, definitely has its origins in a particular interpretation of his work. And second, it threatens to reinforce the widely held but mistaken assumption in CAS that a Marxian humanism is per se inimical to a concern with animal suffering and liberation.
I therefore want to sidestep debates over what Marx really meant in his rather scattered discussions of animals and focus instead on distinguishing between two forms of Marxian humanism and locating the conceptual space occupied by animals in each. Drawing on Lucien Seve’s distinction between “speculative” and “scientific” humanisms, I argue that while the former does indeed render animal suffering invisible, or at least conceptually problematic, the latter does not, and in fact provides valuable conceptual tools for CAS. First, I outline the speculative interpretation of Marx’s humanism, emphasizing in particular its debt to Hegel on the questions of essence, alienation, and liberation. Second, I identify the limitations of this form of Hegelian-Marxist humanism for theorizing animals as anything more than raw materials awaiting “humanization” through labour. Next, I outline the “scientific humanism” that emerges clearly in the German Ideol-ogy and contrast it with the speculative conceptualization of essence, alien-ation and liberation. And finally, I identify the ways in which this scientific humanism provides for an appreciation of the unique life activities of non-human animals, the ways in which they suffer alienation from these activities in the animal-industrial complex, and the need to liberate them from this alienation.
Speculative Humanism in the Hegelian-Marxist Tradition
There are three terms central to any Marxist humanism: essence, alienation, and liberation. To be an essentialist is to make the claim that there is some-thing that distinguishes human beings as such, something that makes them the very beings they are. Alienation is the condition of being separated from this essence, a separation that Marxist humanists consider endemic under capitalism and one that involves suffering of some kind. The central task of any Marxist humanism is to reveal the origins of human alienation in the political economy of capitalism and assist people in their attempts to lib-erate themselves from it.
Speculative humanism rests on the assumption that a Marxist conceptu-alization of these terms is foreshadowed in Hegel’sefforts to overcome the subject/object dualism characteristic of Kant’s transcendental idealism. There is, according to Hegel, an inherent contradiction in Kant’s distinction between a phenomenal world constituted by the subjective mind and a noumenal world that, while existing in some sense, is not knowable. For Hegel, since “being” is itself a concept posited by the knowing subject, the claim that there is a mind-independent reality of any kind is meaningless. Simply put, the mind is constitutive of reality, and thinking is the process through which the subject (or Spirit) arrives at this self-recognition. It is not, however, a recognition that comes easily. At first in the form of abstract universals, Spirit is only the immediate awareness of a subjectivity in-itself. Self-recognition requires, first, that this subjectivity be externalized as Nature so that Spirit has an “object” in which it might see itself; and second, that this externalization ultimately take a form in which self-recognition is finally achieved, a kind of second nature in which the apparent “objectivity” of the first is ultimately transcended.
Essence, alienation, and liberation are thus for Hegel decidedly ideal terms. The essence of the world and everything in it is Spirit, a subject that externalizes itself in objects so that it may know that it is constitutive of reality per se. Alienation is the moment in the development of Spirit when it fails to fully recognize the world as an externalization of itself. And liberation lies in Spirit’s transcendence of this alienation as self-recognition in the world is gradually achieved. All of reality is thus conceived by Hegel as a dialectical unfolding of subjectivity in a world of objects in which Spirit first fails to recognize itself, and then progressively liberates itself from this alienation through positing objects that reveal the subjective essence of the world more clearly.
Human history holds a privileged place in Hegel’s system. While all objects are self-externalizations of Spirit, Nature proves too crassly “material” for Spirit to recognize itself. True, living organisms suggest more clearly the subjectivity posited in nature than do minerals and chemicals—and animals more clearly than plants—but it is the moment of alien-ation that dominates in Hegel’s philosophy of nature. Only in the self-externalizing activity of humanity—the only living organism conscious of itself—is the apparent “objectivity” of the world transcended so that Spirit is free to contemplate only itself. But even here alienation is at work, driving humanity toward ever clearer externalizations of its subjec-tivity. The social institutions of the family, civil society, and the state (Objective Spirit) give way to the properly spiritual creations of art, religion, and, finally, philosophy (Absolute Spirit).
The Hegelian-Marxist tradition displays much of this speculative ontol-ogy. While the emphasis on “labour” goes beyond Hegel in accounting for the full range of human creative activity, Hegel’s conceptualization of this activity remains. Sean Sayers’s description of “work” is a good example:
There are two aspects to this process [of working]. In the first place, by objec-tifying ourselves in our products, we come to recognize our powers and capacities as real and objective. Thus we develop a consciousness of ourselves. Second, by humanizing the world, we cease to feel that we are confronted by a foreign and hostile world. We overcome our alienation from the natural world and gradually, through a long process of social and economic development, come to feel at home in the world and in harmony with it.
This account of labour is in large measure simply an appropriation of Hegel’s account of Spirit’s self-externalization, only now it is the human species that externalizes its subjective powers and capacities in a world of objects, and history is conceived as the unfolding of this human essence. As Seyla Benha-bib argues, Hegelian-Marxists remain “loyal to Hegel’s philosophy of the subject: not only is objectification understood as self-expression through externalization, but the subject of this activity is said to be a collective singu-lar, the species itself” (1986, 56).
Recasting humanity in the role of subject requires a reconsideration of the object of Hegel’s dialectic as well, a task that has proven particularly vexing for those seeking a concept of “nature” within the speculative tradition. On the one hand, Hegel’s Objective Spirit is preserved, although now explicitly broadened to include all human products and understood as an externalization of human subjectivity, full-stop. On the other hand, the status of Hegel’s Nature, an object world both logically and temporally prior to humanity, becomes problematic. In Hegel, this natural world is Spirit in its otherness and therefore always already an externalization of subjectivity, albeit one in which Spirit is so immersed that it gives the appearance of objectivity. So, in their creation of a second nature, Hegel’s humanity ultimately reveals a truth that is there in the first; namely, that the world is constituted subjectively. However, unmoored from Spirit’s self-externalization, the only meaning the world can have for speculative humanists is the human subjec-tivity objectified in it. “We only really know what a natural thing is,” writes Alfred Schmidt (1971), “when we are familiar with all the industrial and experimental-scientific arrangements which permit its creation”. Hegel’s Nature is in this case either reduced to an inert, meaningless stuff—a nature “in-itself” that can have no meaning “for-us”—or tossed out entirely in favour of nature as a “social category”, or a “social product” all the way down.
Given this appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy of the subject, speculative humanism transforms the concept of alienation in two important ways. First, alienation is a squarely human phenomenon where the species fails to recog-nize itself in the products of its labour. As Benhabib puts it:
Objectification is an activity through which what is inner becomes outer and external. The purpose of this activity is to give adequate embodiment and expression to the potentialities of the individual. Objectification is self-externa-lization, and ought to be, but is not always, self-realization.
Second, the historical contradiction between the humanization of nature and alienation reaches a kind of climax in a capitalist mode of production. On the one hand, the constant revolutionization of the forces of production born of the search for profit makes for an unprecedented externalization of the essential creative powers of the species. On the other hand, these forces of production are private property and the products of labour take the commodity form, so the direct producers fail to recognize these essential powers as their own and instead attribute an objectivity to them that obscures their origin in the human subject, a problem of consciousness that Lukacs calls reification. “Marx’s critique of alienated labour,” argues Benhabib,
is only intelligible when it is assumed that labour is a mode of self-confirming externalization, and that under the domination of private property it becomes the complete opposite. The essence of labour is the self-realization of the individuals through the creation of objects, but the existence of labour is the complete denial of its essence.
Accordingly, liberation from alienation for speculative humanists requires transcending capitalism, a mode of production that both externalizes the species essence like never before and simultaneously obscures the fact that the world is indeed such an externalization. Despite this greater awareness of the political-economic obstacles to self-recognition, however, the model of liberation here remains loyal to its Hegelian roots insofar as “the vision of a demiurge-like mankind, producing externality, unfolding its capacities in this process, and destined to emancipation by appropriating its own alienated forces, dominates”. I’ll now turn to explore the conceptual pos-ition of animals in the speculative humanist framework.
Speculative Humanism and the Impossibility of Animal Liberation
Given the philosophy of the subject so foundational to speculative human-ism, the ontological status of animals is clear: they are part of nature and are thus objects rather than subjects. The subject position in the historical dialectic is occupied by humanity alone, a species that is uniquely concerned with externalizing its creative powers in the world so that it may recognize itself. Humanity is thus distinct from animals precisely because it is a subjec-tive species standing opposed to all others; therefore, these others can only be considered in their “objectivity.”
But what kind of objects are they? In Hegel, animal species emerge in Nature as objective embodiments of Spirit as it struggles to know itself. Indeed, animals provide the clearest evidence in nature that reality is subjec-tively constituted insofar as they possess a “soul,” by which Hegel means something like a principle of life which in the case of animals is their power of perception. However, in the absence of Spirit, animals can, at most, be considered part of an undifferentiated meaningless stuff waiting to be transformed through human labour. Deprived of a soul, the only meaning that animals can have is their potential to become embodiments of human subjective powers. On the other hand, insofar as they are in fact embodiments of this subjectivity, animals are part of second nature as well, part of a world of objects constituted through human labour.
Speculative humanism can therefore surely take animals into account, but only in the same way that it accounts for any other natural material trans-formed through human labour. Animals are objects of labour—raw materials transformed into food, clothing, and building materials of all kinds. They are also instruments of labour—technologies used to transform other materials into products (e.g. draft animals, biotechnologies). And as they constitute the primary means of production and products in the animal-industrial complex, speculative humanists can ask the same kinds of questions concerning their ownership and control they ask in the case of any non-animal means of production.
But there can be no question of animal alienation here. For speculative humanists, alienation is a condition in which a subject fails to recognize itself in the objects in creates. As objects, animals do not externalize them-selves (indeed, they have no self to externalize) and therefore have nothing from which they could be alienated. Now, they can certainly figure in the process of our alienation inasmuch as they are embodiments of creative capacities we might fail to recognize as our own. Since the animal-industrial complex is characterized by the same wage-labour and private ownership as any other system of capitalist commodity production, we are alienated from animals in the same way that we are alienated from the machinery character-istic of industrial labour processes in general. But it makes no more sense to speak of animals suffering alienation here than it does to speak of machinery suffering alienation. In both cases it is we who suffer alienation from exter-nalizations of our essence. These externalizations cannot themselves suffer any such alienation, and so speculative humanism renders animal alienation a theoretical impossibility.
In light of these assumptions, it is difficult to make any sense at all of the notion of animal liberation. Liberation is something subjects achieve through the appropriation of objects, and since animals are themselves objects, they cannot be liberated. Habermas is thus simply being consistent with the speculative humanism to which he is heir when he rejects the possibility of a Marcusian science and technology that would liberate nature. Such a project, he argues, mistakenly assumes that “instead of treating nature as the object of possible technical control … we can impute subjectivity to animals and plants, even to minerals, and try to communicate with nature”. And Adorno’s attempt to ground a notion of liberation in what remains “non-identical” with the subject isn’t much help either since, as Vogel points out, whatever there is about animals that might remain other than human subjectivity cannot, by definition, be known at all and therefore cannot give any substance to the notion of animal liberation. Of course, we subjects can always come to some consensus concerning the definition of animal suffering, and we could even agree to call the end of the animal-industrial complex “animal liberation.” But this would be an intersubjective accomplishment achieved through Habermas’ communica-tive action, not through a consideration of what might constitute liberation for animals themselves. We could also come to a consensus that it would be best to close down the Alberta oil sands, and while few would suggest this constitutes “oil liberation” it would make just as much sense given the assumptions of speculative humanism.
The only consistent meaning that liberation can have in this speculative framework concerns the self-recognition that we might achieve once we’ve transcended the system of wage-labour characteristic of the animal-indus-trial complex. The appropriation of animal means of production by the direct producers would expose them as the externalizations of our species powers that they are. We might speak of this as the liberation of animals from the commodity form, but this is really just the flip side of the human liberation from the alienation characteristic of wage-labour and does not itself suggest any alternative form of human-animal relations. “There remains at best,” admits Schmidt,
the vague hope, that men, having been reconciled with each other … will learn to a far greater degree to practice solidarity with the oppressed animal world, and that in the true society the protection of animals will no longer be regarded as a private fad.
The difficulty, however, is that speculative humanism lacks the theoretical resources that would allow us to identify what the practice of such solidarity would look like, or how we would protect animals, or what we would be pro-tecting them from. Fortunately for CAS, this is not the only humanism avail-able in the Marxian tradition. In the next section I outline this alternative humanism and highlight the ways in which it allows for a reconceptualiza-tion of essence, alienation, and liberation.
The First Historical Act and the Other Marxist Humanism
I’ll begin with two passages, the first from the German Ideology and the second from the “Theses on Feuerbach” of the same period, both of which confirm that Marx remains a humanist of one kind or another:
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or any-thing else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.
The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.
Clearly Marx is concerned here with the question of essence, the question of what distinguishes human beings from the rest of nature. And the answer to this question clearly has something to do with labour. From a distance, then, there may appear to be justification for the assumption that Marx is a specu-lative humanist even in this period.
However, a close reading of these passages reveals important differences between Marx and Hegel in the way the question of essence is framed. Marx does not assume here that human beings are “subjects” distinct from an “object” world, and then seek to find powers and capacities that define them as such—powers and capacities that would necessarily be “inherent in each single individual.” Rather, he assumes that human beings are of the genus animal, and the question of essence concerns the real, empirically verifiable process through which human beings distinguish themselves as a specific form of this genus. In other words, the human essence concerns something human beings do in the world, rather than in some subjective capacities they possess as individuals, and this something is, and must be, a specific form of something that all animals do one way or another. The ques-tion is what kind of animal is Homo sapiens, a question that brings Marx much closer to Aristotle’s than Hegel’s essentialism.
Marx’s answer to this Aristotelian question appears to be two-fold. First, human beings distinguish themselves as a species once they begin to “produce their means of subsistence” and are thus labouring animals. Second, this production is at the same time a production of the relations between individuals, an “ensemble of social relations” that define them as the very individuals they are, and humanity is thus a social labouring animal. The crucial point here is that the labour process, its products, and the social relations within which it occurs—what Seve calls the “social heritage”—are not externalizations of a subjective essence internal to the species, but are themselves the human essence; they are themselves what distinguish humanity as a species of animal. This means that “subjectivity,” rather than the origin of the material and social world, is itself to be explained with reference to a social heritage that is always and forever outside of, or as Seve puts it, “excentric” to, individual human beings. “Humanity,” Seve writes further, “is not a given, naturally present in each isolated individual: it is the human social world and each natural individual becomes human in being ‘humanized’ through his real life process within social relations”.
But how, given the absence of a self-externalizing subject, does scientific humanism account for the historical change characteristic of the human species? Clearly, if humanity only distinguishes itself through its social labour in the first place, the principle of movement of history must be sought in this process itself. Marx identifies two interrelated moments of the labour process, or what he calls the “first historical act” in the German Ideology:
Life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs … The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act.
Here we have a real, “objective” activity that has a principle of movement built right in, and thus needs no self-externalizing subject as a prime mover. Labour both satisfies and creates needs, new needs that in turn require new forms of labour to satisfy them. Humanity has a history, then, not because labour unfolds the subjective essence of the species in the world, but because the species’ essential life activity is itself characterized by a process of change that is a function of the relation between needs and their satisfaction. And of course this dialectical process of need satisfac-tion/creation always takes place within the context of the social relations between individuals, relations that are themselves transformed along with the labour process.
Scientific humanism thus provides for a view of Homo sapiens as a uniquely self-created species. As Marx was aware, and as we have only become more aware, the life activity of non-human animals is best explained in biological terms (e.g. as a phenotypic expression of a particular genome). However, as Marx was also aware, and as various theories of cultural evol-ution make clear in their own way (Laland 2017; Richerson and Boyd 2005), these biological terms are inadequate to explain the historical vari-ation characteristic of human technology, social institutions, and cultural products. They are inadequate precisely because, rather than expressing any sort of biological variation, human history is a non-genetic (but never-theless natural) process driven by human beings themselves as they trans-form their world to satisfy needs they themselves have created, producing anew their relations to one another, their institutions and their cultural forms in the process. Seve writes:
The real human essence, the human social heritage accumulating historically outside individuals in the form of alteration of nature through labour, accumu-lation of means of production, of social relations, of cultural products etc., appears to be a phenomenon without any comparison in the animal world.
And as human beings have their essence in their social life activity and its products, the labour process, rather than a means of individual self-expression, is better understood as the means by which human beings produce themselves in the first place.
Seve’s scientific humanism allows for a non-speculative conceptualization of the alienation characteristic of wage-labour. According to speculative humanism, human beings suffer alienation to the degree that they fail to recognize the “outer” products of their labour as externalizations of their “inner” essence, a failure that becomes endemic in a capitalist society where individuals are dispossessed of the primary means of their self-expression. But what can alienation mean if the human essence is never “inner”, but always already “outer”, or extrinsic to individuals in the form of a social heritage? Alienation in this case simply refers to the real, empiri-cally verifiable separation of individuals from this social heritage, a separation that is unique to wage-labour. While the social heritage is no less extrinsic to slaves and serfs that it is to wage-labourers, it is only the latter that are legally separated from the means of production so that they are “free” to sell their labour-power to those who possess it as private property. And as these are the primary means through which individuals produce themselves as the very material, social, and cultural beings that they are, their separation from them constitutes a dehumanization unique to a system of wage-labour.
Alienation, then, rather than a failure of self-recognition symptomatic of commodity production, is better understood as the basic ontological con-dition of a capitalist mode of production. It is only when individuals are legally separated from the labour process that this process is really, rather than merely formally, subsumed as a moment in capital’s self-expansion. Prior to this alienation of labour, attempts to trans-form the labour process inevitably encounter the resistance posed by those still in possession of their means of production. Surplus-value in such situations tends to take an “absolute form” secured through increases in the length of the working day and/or an intensification of labour. Once the labour process is itself the private property of a class whose interests lie in profit-making, however, a relatively constant trans-formation of the labour process becomes possible, and indeed inevitable, given the coercive competitive pressures exerted on firms when there are multiple producers of any given commodity. In this case surplus-value increasingly takes the “relative form” achieved through the kinds of techno-logical change and refinements in the technical division of labour that Braverman condemns as degradations. Thus, the shift to relative surplus-value through industrialization, the hallmark of a mature capitalist mode of production, is premised on the alienation of individuals from the labour process, their real separation from the human essence, so that it becomes a mere moment in the self-expansion of capital.
The model of human liberation that follows from this conceptualization of alienation differs from the emphasis on self-recognition in the speculative tradition. On the one hand, the transcendence of wage-labour and appro-priation of the social labour process would indeed constitute human liber-ation, a point on which all Marxist humanists would agree. However, the substance of this liberation lies not in a subject’s coming to finally see itself in the objective manifestation of its essence, simply because the social heritage is not conceived here as such a manifestation in the first place. Rather, the substance of human liberation lies in the members of a self-created species coming to create themselves directly. Of course to be living beings at all wage-labourers must sell their labour and participate in the labour process. But they participate in a process and produce material, social, and cultural products whose form is ultimately determined by a process of self-expanding capital that operates behind their backs. Trans-cending alienation would thus constitute a humanization of individuals in the sense that they would be free to produce themselves as human beings unmediated by capital. I’ll now turn to explore the implication of this scien-tific humanism for critical animal studies.
Scientific Humanism and Animal Liberation
First off, the scientific humanism outlined here does not exclude consider-ation of animal essences in the same way that the speculative tradition does. In the speculative tradition, animals are objects rather than subjects and, as such, devoid of any meaning save that which is attributed to them as social categories or embedded in them as social products. They don’t themselves have essences, and to suggest otherwise is to risk falling victim to the reification characteristic of a system of commodity production. However, the question for scientific humanists is not “what is the nature of the human subject?”—a question that reduces non-human animals to objects from the start—but “what kind of animal is humanity?”—the kind of question that can be posed in the case of any species of animal. Indeed, it is precisely this kind of question that animal ethologists answer in their rich empirical descriptions of the myriad forms of movement, food pro-vision, habitat construction, social interaction, tool use, emotional life, and play that define individual animals as members of their species.
It is worth emphasizing that there is nothing in this notion of essence that is incompatible with Darwinian biology. Darwin is often contrasted with Aristotle, for whom animals appear as fully formed “natural kinds” with eter-nally fixed essences (e.g. Clark 1988). We now know, of course, that animal species have evolutionary origins, that they emerge, one way or another, through a process of natural selection. However, just because dam building is an evolutionary adaptation in beavers, for example, rather than a property of an immutable natural kind, does not mean it is any less essential to being a beaver. In fact, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins encourages us to think of dam building, the dam itself, and even the lake that is created by the dam as phenotypic expressions of genes, and thus no less constitutive of a beaver’s nature than its tale. While Dawkins’ particular account of the origin of animal modes of life is of course open to debate, there seems little reason to doubt that animals have modes of living that are distinctive to them and this is all the notion of essence has to imply. As Zipporah Weisberg puts it in her defence of “creaturely essences”:
Respecting essence does not mean projecting fantasies of pure, untouched, unchanged, and unchanging nature, as posthumanists claim. Honouring essence means honouring the fact that each species has a particular set of …behaviours and needs that are specific to it.
That these needs and behaviours are evolutionary adaptations has little bearing on the question of whether they constitute a creaturely essence and what we might do to respect and honour it.
But what do we make of creaturely essences when so many of the animals around us are means of production in our labour processes? Domestication is often used as evidence of the “humanization” of nature. After all, Darwin himself distinguished between natural and artificial selection insofar as the former is a blind process of adaptation and the latter is directed by a con-scious human purpose. However, just because the evolution of an animal’s mode of life has been directed to satisfy our needs does not mean that it doesn’t have a mode of life. Chickens, pigs, cows and the rest are no less kinds of animals than beavers, and as such have modes of life that, if we care to take the time, can be identified through the same ethological methods that work “in the wild.” Karen Davis (2014) provides insight into the mode of life of rescued broiler chickens who have the good fortune of spending their remaining years in her sanctuary:
They socialize together, sunbathe, dustbathe, and dig in the earth with their claws and beaks the best they can. They will perch on a low branch or a bale of straw until it becomes too painful for them to make the leap. They plod eagerly out of their houses in the morning into the yard, ready for sun-light and fresh air.
That these chickens are “products” of selective breeding whose “purpose” is to be raw materials in the production of their own flesh for human consump-tion, does not mean that they possess no mode of life essential to them. To deny that an animal has an essence simply because its mode of life is subor-dinated to the satisfaction of our needs would seem to be the height of a “species narcissism” that legitimizes the very practices of domination that it should be the job of critical theory to uncover and seek to transform.
Indeed, using animals as means of production itself requires acknowledging and engaging with their essential life activities. Benton long ago revealed the limitations of an “instrumental-transformative” model for capturing the relation between labour and living means of production in agricultural labour processes. Rather than transforming a passive raw material into a product, agricultural labour is aimed at “sustaining, regulating, and repro-ducing” the “conditions for organic growth and development“ of plant life. And I argue elsewhere, labour processes centred on the use of animals as “living factories” don’t transform animals into products as much as harness their growth and development so that their life activities issue in products that satisfy our needs. The “humanization of nature” that is going on here is not that of a subject externalizing its creative essence in an object, but a social labouring species incorporating other species into its labour processes, a project that requires allowing them to be what they are, albeit under conditions designed to harness their lives to needs other than their own.
Now, insofar as we are really only interested in harnessing some,orone,of an animal’s life activities as a productive force, they suffer alienation from others. In the speculative tradition, since animals are objects rather than self-externalizing subjects, animal alienation is impossible. However, once alienation becomes a question of the separation of individuals from their mode of life, then such alienation becomes possible in the case of any animal species. The question is whether and to what degree our labour pro-cesses prevent an individual animal from engaging freely in the life activities characteristic of its species, a question that can only be answered through empirical investigation into specific labour processes and the ways they harness an animal as a means of production. Do chickens harnessed as living factories in the production of eggs sunbathe? Do chimpanzees harnessed as test subjects in the production of pharmaceuticals fish for termites? Does a calf harnessed as a raw material in the production of veal socialize, or graze, or do anything else that could reasonably be considered part of a cow’s mode of life? Or do these labour processes systematically alienate animals from vital parts of their mode of life in order to make others a means to the satisfaction of human needs?
Rather than merely a site of human self-alienation, a self-externalization of human creative powers in objects that stand opposed to us, the animal-industrial complex emerges here as a site at which to explore mutually rein-forcing human and animal alienation. It is a system of human alienation insofar as it is characterized by the same separation of individual workers from the labour process as any other system of capitalist commodity pro-duction. These individuals are alienated from the mode of life distinctive to human beings in the same way they are in the case of labour processes centred on non-living means of production. And just as is the case in any labour process that takes the form of private property, the alienation of labour in the animal-industrial complex allows for a relatively constant transformation of the labour process with new technologies, refinements of the division of labour, and the resulting degradation of labour.
Of course in the case of the animal-industrial complex the primary means of production are living animals and so a central site of technological trans-formation is the mode of life characteristic of these animals. The efficient use of chickens, pigs, and cattle as raw materials in food and fibre production requires their confinement and the instrumentalization of certain of their life activities and alienation from others. As Benton writes, these labour processes “impose massive constraints and distortions on the mode of life of species caught up in them. Their lives are sustained solely to serve purposes external to them, conditions and means for the acquisition and exercise of their species-powers are denied to them, and, more specifi-cally, their social needs and capacities are systematically denied and sup-pressed” (1993, 59). If “de-humanization” is taken to mean the systematic separation of human individuals from the essential mode of life of the species, then we need to start speaking seriously about de-chickenization, de-porcinization, and de-bovinization in the animal-industrial complex.
There are, however, important differences between human and animal alienation here, differences that derive from what is distinctive about the human essence. Unlike the mode of life of non-human animals, the social labour process develops excentrically to individual humans. This means two things. First, only the human species can be self-alienated because it is only when a mode of life is excentric to the individual members of a species that it can be appropriated by some individuals as private property separate from the labour-power of others. Animal alienation, by contrast, can only ever be imposed upon non-human species by human beings, and thus we are not only a uniquely self-aliened species, but also a uniquely other-alienating species. A second difference is that, since animal essences are intrinsic to the individual members of the species in a way they are not in the case of human beings, other animals must be incorporated body and soul into the labour process. Unlike wage-labourers, whose exploitation requires a legal separation of their labour-power from the labour process, animals must themselves take the form of private property so that their mode of life might itself become a site of technical innovation, from selective breeding, to debeaking, to genetic engineering.
Despite these differences, a non-speculative conception of animal alienation gives substance to the notion of animal liberation. Such liberation is meaningless in the speculative tradition because animals are not self-externalizing subjects. But if alienation, rather than a separation of subjects from objects, is really a separation of individual animals from their life activities, then liberation means the same thing for non-human animals as it does for human ones; it means transcending this separation so that individuals are free to be the very beings they are.
This notion of animal liberation is related to, but not reducible to, the traditional Marxian emphasis on human liberation through the transcendence of wage-labour. On the one hand, it seems clear that the transcendence of animal alienation within the animal-industrial complex is inconceivable. Harnessing an animal to the capitalist labour process subordinates its mode of life to the same requirements of efficiency that are imposed by competitive pressures on all commodity producers. Central to the efficiency of living means of production is the instrumentalization of certain of their life activities (laying eggs, producing milk, growing and developing into “meat”), which necessitates their alienation from others (relations, play, tool use etc.). Notions of animal welfare and demands for more humane treatment in such a system are limited insofar as they assume this alienation from the start. And of course even where the notion of animal welfare is broadened to include more than simple pain avoidance, neither we nor the animals themselves can escape the fact that a more “humane” kill floor is, nevertheless, still a kill floor. There is little wonder that CAS defines itself by its abolitionist stance toward the animal industrial complex, and there is a clear kinship here with the emphasis in Marxist humanism on the end of wage-labour as a requirement of human liberation.
On the other hand, animal liberation within a capitalist mode of pro-duction is possible in a way that human liberation is not. While the animal industrial complex has long proven to be an important site of accumulation, capitalism does not require the use of animals as means of production in the same way that it requires the exploitation of wage-labour. Indeed, it may be the case that we are currently witnessing a certain de-animalization of production in response to both the recalcitrance of animal means of production and the shift in consumer sentiment around animal cruelty. The current trend toward plant-based diets is an encouraging case in point; plans to genetically engineer headless chickens a discouraging one.
Of course the struggle for animal liberation will continue to confront sig-nificant obstacles inherent in a capitalist mode of production. After all, public sentiment can only go so far in a world where animal means of pro-duction are private property whose owners are legally entitled to use, abuse, and kill them in the interests of efficiency and profitability. And consumer trends are always uncertain and subject to backlash. For every veggie burger to emerge in the fast-food industry there would seem to be a meat lovers pizza to dash any hopes of progress. Arby’s recent marketing of “marrots” (meat-based carrots), the first in what it hopes is a long line of “megetables” is a striking illustration of the difficulties facing consumer-based activism. But the more fundamental obstacle to animal liberation may lie in the alienation of human and animal life that is the basic ontological condition of the animal-industrial complex. The ideo-logical expression of this system of alienation is indeed a failure of recog-nition—not in the sense that we fail to recognize animals as embodiments of our essence, but in the sense that we fail to recognize that they have essences of their own. To the degree that Marxists have embraced a speculative interpretation of Marx’s humanism, they have been complicit in this ideological obfuscation.
Editors’ Note
The full version of this article appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2022). To engage with its references and for purposes of citation, please visit the published version of this article on the Taylor & Francis website.