Where is our zoological Marx when we need him?
–Donna Haraway
Marx’s primary concern – theoretical, political, and moral – is human social life. On the few occasions when he mentions animals, he often uses them as a negative foil, the representation of a diminished existence that contrasts with the non-alienated lives to which humans should aspire. This has led some scholars to conclude that Marx was irredeemably anthropocentric and that his work holds little of value for animal ethics and advocacy. From this perspective, the zoological Marx is a contradiction in terms, and the answer to Haraway’s plaintive question is “nowhere.” However, others contend that Marx appreciated the value of nonhuman animals and that his ideas are directly relevant for animal advocacy. They see a fully formed zoological Marx, waiting to be discovered.
I will argue for a position between these two poles: Marx has much to offer to animal ethics, but he offers no clear-cut answers. If we want a zoological Marx, we must construct him ourselves. Fortunately, this task does not require that we resolve, once and for all, the debate over what Marx really thought about animals. A more productive approach is to explore how his work more generally can strengthen both critique and constructive theorizing about human-animal relations. In particular, I contend, the core Marxian categories of alienation, labor, and class make important contributions to animal ethics. Even though Marx does not directly address animals at length or even especially positively, a zoological reading of his work illuminates animal suffering and the ways that humans might help to liberate them.
Marx on Animals
For man the root is man himself.
–Karl Marx
Any approach to Marx’s ideas about animals must begin with the profoundly human-centered nature of his thought. Philosophy, Marx writes, must “set out from real, active men”. These active humans are embodied, historically situated, and relational. Marx rejects idealist claims that humans are defined by intrinsic qualities such as reason (for Descartes and Kant) or spirit (in the Hegelian sense). Instead, that what is important about people is “sensuous activity, practice”. Practices create relationships, social structures, and ideas, and they also define human nature, or species being. In particular, humanness is characterized by the ability to work freely, creatively, self-consciously, and collectively. This capacity grounds Marx’s approach to animals, whose activities he contrasts with those of people: “Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity,” because “the animal is immedi-ately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity”.
Thus free, conscious activity – possible though often distorted in human life – is impossible for nonhuman species. As Marx writes in the first volume of Capital:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.
Intentionality, will, and purposeful creativity characterize human prac-tices but are lacking in the apparently similar activities of nonhuman animals. Unlike a bee or a spider, the human worker “not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will”. Marx believes that animals, in contrast, “have no awareness of themselves as acting entities,” as Bertell Ollman puts it; they do not think, but “just do”.
This distinction between the unthinking, even unconscious activities of animals and the imaginative, creative, and intentional quality of human prac-tice is crucial to the theory of alienation that Marx lays out in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He frequently describes alienation as a reduction of humans to an “animal” condition. With the alienation of labor,
man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal.
Again and again, Marx describes nonhuman creatures as instinct-driven, uncreative, and unselfconscious – the mirror image of unalienated humans. This seems to reflect a dismissive, even contemptuous, view of animals, which poses a problem for socialist thinkers who want to develop a positive Marxist approach to animal ethics. Some of these thinkers deny the dualism, arguing that Marx took animal welfare seriously. Others accept that Marx’s view of animals is ambivalent, at the least, and look for other resources within Marx’s thought that can be helpful for animal advocates.
My argument here is closer to the second option: I believe that there is much in Marx’s work that can make animal ethics richer and more robust. However, this contribution does not emerge in any straightforward or immediate way from Marx’s own writings about animals. Scholars who hope to build a Marxist animal ethic must confront both Marx’s deep humanism and his sometimes condescending attitude towards other species. A number of thinkers have wrestled with the complexities of Marx’s thinking about animals and nature and laid the groundwork for additional analysis. In this essay, I build on their work to explore, in particu-lar, the ways that Marxist thinking about alienation, labor, and class can strengthen animal ethics. Before turning to this task, I provide a short over-view of major approaches in animal ethics, including apparent conflicts with Marxian thought.
Animal Ethics
Moral concern for nonhuman animals is far from new. Religious and secular thinkers from Seneca to the Buddha to Jeremy Bentham have criticized cruelty toward animals and called for more humane treatment. Systematic scholarly work on animal ethics is a relatively recent development, however, traceable to Animal Liberation, published in 1975 by the Australian Utilitarian Peter Singer, and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights, published in 1983. Although rights theory and utilitarianism remain the most prominent approaches, contemporary animal ethics encompasses a range of perspectives, including religious, feminist, and post-structuralist frameworks.
Rights approaches are especially influential, and most follow the general line of argument laid out by Regan. He contends that some of the traits that we value most in humans also exist in nonhuman animals, who thus have similar rights to respectful treatment. Regan and many other animal advocates find the language of rights powerful because they imply both objectivity and moral urgency. To attribute rights to nonhuman animals is to assert a parallel between their moral status and that of oppressed human groups and to assert that animals, like people, should not be treated merely as resources for others. Rights theories are fundamen-tally individualistic, assuming that value inheres in individuals and that they often need to be protected from other people and from institutions. Animals have value because of intrinsic qualities such as sentience, intelligence, or sociability and therefore must not be sacrificed for the greater good. Rights models assume an inevitable conflict between the individual and collective goods, in contrast to the socialist conviction that people are fundamentally social, relational beings.
Animal rights arguments are individualistic in part because they are extensions of theories that locate the value of humans in individual qualities. Animals have value to the extent that they share these characteristics. Because humans are prototypical rights bearers, the debate about animal ethics is largely an argument “about whether it is legitimate to extend the concept person metaphorically to include animals whose brains are not con-structed exactly like beings who we tend to regard as prototypical persons”. This approach emphasizes differences between people and other animals and finds some species more valuable than others because they seem more human-like. It also assumes that both humans and other animals have “some kind of timeless essence” or “inner core of subjectivity untouched by history,” in contrast to Marx’s insistence that people and animals are all “irreducibly enmeshed in a series of socio-historical processes and cultural relations that constitute us from the ground up”. Ted Benton develops this argument more fully, pointing out that “philosophies of animal rights and liberation, as extensions of a pre-dominantly individualistic, human-centred moral discourse, tend to put the primary focus of their source-traditions upon the moral status, duties, rights and so on of individuals”. They generally pay little attention to the institutional or social context in which rights might be fulfilled or violated. In contrast, ecological and socialist politics emphasize “holistic or relational modes of thought”, which advocates of animal (and some-times human) rights may actively oppose as threats to individual autonomy.
The other main approach in animal ethics, Utilitarianism, also extends moral concern to animals on the basis of traits they share with people. Peter Singer, for example, argues that sentience, or the capacity for pleasure and pain, is “the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal con-sideration.” Sentience is “a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way”. Most nonhuman animals share this capacity with humans and thus have the same interest in avoiding pain and deserve the same protections. Because animals are similar to humans in morally relevant ways, Singer contends, there is no justification for discri-minating against them on the basis of species, which is as arbitrary as race or gender as a basis for consideration. While Utilitarians disagree with rights theorists about important philosophical issues, they share a concern with the characteristics that grant moral standing to individual animals.
Just as many animal advocates identify qualities of individual animals as the source of their value, they also emphasize the actions of individual humans as the solution to animal exploitation. Often, these actions are based in people’s roles as consumers. Thus organizations such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) call on supporters to purchase “cruelty-free” products, adopt a vegan diet, and boycott circuses and zoos, for example. This attention to individual actions has become especially powerful as contemporary animal advocacy has focused on the use of animals in agriculture and biomedical research. While socialists would point out that these institutions are made possible by larger structures, animal ethicists rarely address social, economic, and political forces beyond those directly involved in animal exploitation. In addition, few explore the links, both theoretical and practical, between individual actions and structural change.
One exception is Gary Francione, who argues for the abolition of animals’ legal status as property. As long as animals are treated as property, he explains, their fate depends on the choices of individuals. They can be liberated, therefore, only by a transformation in their legal status. Although Francione highlights the legal foundation of animal exploitation, he does not systematically address social structures beyond laws pertaining directly to animals. A Marxist approach can deepen this argument by illuminating the links between the exploitation of animals and larger structures. The suffering of animals in factory farms, for example, does not depend just on individual choices to eat meat or on animals’ property status, but on a numerous institutions and processes that also exploit human workers, local communities, and ecosystems in the pursuit of profit for the owners. Marx helps us see gaps in both utilitarian and rights theories, insofar as they fail to address larger social, political, and economic structures that make possible the exploitation of humans and other animals. For this reason, in particular, a zoological Marx is worth constructing.
Marxist Thinking on Animals
Much contemporary scholarship on Marx and animals asks whether a synthesis or at least rapprochement is possible between socialism and animal liberation. Those who believe that this synthesis can be achieved fairly easily must still address Marx’s apparently negative opinions about not only the alienated nature of animal existence but also the animal welfare movements of his time. In regards to the latter, Ryan Gunderson asserts that Marx’s atti-tude towards animal welfare reflects not a lack of concern about animals themselves but rather “a critique of bourgeois hypocrisy and social refor-mism and should not be interpreted as negative comments against concern for animal cruelty itself”. While Marx did not consider animal welfare a priority, in other words, he was not actually opposed to it.
More significant theoretical challenges arise when we turn to Marx’s use of “animal existence” as a synonym for alienated human life, which implies both that nonhuman creatures have little value and that they have nothing in common with humans. Addressing this issue, Stache asserts that even though Marx “exaggerates the differences between humans and animals regarding the respective species’ labor processes or species-nature relations,” this does not reflect a generally dualistic or anthropocentric view of animals. This echoes Gunderson’s explanation of Marx’s criticism of early humane movements. In both cases, appears, Marx’s apparently negative attitudes can be explained as passing references used to build bigger, more important arguments. These explanations do not exactly prove that Marx had any posi-tive interest in animals, but at best they suggest that it is not entirely un-Marxist to think about animal welfare.
In a more positive vein, some scholars believe that although animals were not a primary interest for Marx, he did not dismiss them or see them as radically inferior to humans. For example, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark contend that Marx acknowledged and appreciated the “close kinship” between humans and other animals, based on their possession of common drives and capacities. Lawrence Wilde makes an even stronger claim that “Marx’s discussion of the difference between humans and animals is entirely free of prejudice against animals and certainly does not treat them as inferior or deficient beings”. The textual support for these claims is not extensive, and it may be over-stating the case to claim that Marx is entirely free of negative attitudes about other species. John Sanbonmatsu, for example, argues that Marx demonstrated an almost complete “lack of interest in the experiences of other beings with whom we share the earth”. And when Marx (and most other socialists) do turn their attention to other species, they see them not as sovereign subjects but as “material appurtenances of an abstract, hypotstatized conception of ‘Nature’”. Animals do not have value or interest in and for themselves, in other words, but exist merely as aspects of nature that serve as a background or foil for human experiences. Because Marx never saw animals as significant in themselves, Sanbonmatsu concludes, he “never questioned the ontological discontinuinity between humans and animals, nor the necessity or justice of unending human domination of other animals”.
Socialist scholars who consider Marx’s own attitude toward animals generally negative do not necessarily believe that contemporary Marxists must accept this approach. In fact, some argue, Marxist critiques of oppressive structures can and should address animal suffering. This leads Sanbonmatsu to ask whether it is even “possible to be a socialist without being an animal liberationist”. Regardless of Marx’s own attitudes, in other words, there may be no necessary conflict between socialism and animal welfare. In fact, there may be good reasons to join the two, because both are anti-systemic movements that challenge the basic structures of modern capitalist society.
This position suggests a conflict between the anthropocentrism that Marx expressed in many writings and the deeper implications of his philosophy. On the one hand, as Renzo Llorente writes, “a certain speciesism is constitu-tive of Marx’s (or at any rate the early Marx’s) own thinking.” However, this perspective is inconsistent with Marx’s “own commitment to a thorough-going materialism, which must acknowledge the kinship, with all its implications, between human life and other forms of animal life”. “A consistent materialism,” according to Llorente, “militates against the assumption of a radical opposition between human beings and all other species, an assumption that is normally one of speciesism’s essential premises”. Ted Benton also highlights these tensions, noting that while Marx seems to see a “thorough-going opposition between the human and the animal”, socialism also holds many resources for thinking about animal welfare and in particular for refining rights theory. This ambivalence reflects Marx’s efforts “to reconcile opposed intuitions about our relation to other species and the rest of nature,” as Benton puts it: “that is, to take account of what we share as ‘active natural beings,’ but at the same time to acknowledge the implications of the evolutionary emergence of a species with qualitatively new powers”. I agree with Benton that explorations of Marx’s thinking on animals cannot ignore his “two opposing intuitions”– that humans are intimately related to other animals but also unique among them. The way to understand, if not entirely resolve, this conflict is not to concentrate primarily on the places where Marx writes explicitly about animals, but rather in the context of broader themes in Marx’s theory.
Alienation
Alienation is both one of Marx’s most important categories in general and especially helpful for thinking about animals. The German word that Marx used, Entfremdung, means literally the quality of making something strange or foreign (fremd). More generally, alienation consists in the separation of things that should be united. Marx’s distinctive understanding of alienation encompasses four types: the separation of workers from the process of labor, from the products of their labor, from other workers, and from their species being (Gattungswesen). All four are produced by capitalist modes of production and ownership, due to the fun-damental problem that under capitalism
labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.
Under capitalism, therefore, both workers’ own labor and its products are not intimately linked to their actions and creative powers; rather, they stand over and against workers, contributing to their miserable conditions. When work is coerced and joyless, Marx continues, “the worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home”. Thus “life itself”–the sensuous activity that defines human beings –“appears only as a means to life”.
As noted earlier, Marx sometimes describes alienation as the reduction of the human to the animal. Under capitalism, humans cannot perform the crea-tive, conscious labor that should be their defining trait, but rather can only fulfill their “animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating.” In such circumstances, “What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal”. Marx’sdefinition of alienation seems to depend on the contradiction between fully human and reduced “animal” life. This presents at least two problems for socialists interested in animal ethics. First, it implies that Marx had a generally negative attitude toward nonhuman life, as a pathological and alienated version of human life, radically divided from fulfilled (non-alienated) human life by virtue of what it lacks.
A second issue, and one which emerges from this fundamental contrast between humans and other animals, is the apparent impossibility of applying Marx’s concept of alienation to animals. As Benton explains,
to characterize human alienation under capitalism as the reduction of workers to the status of animals, and their needs to crude, physical, animal ones, leaves no conceptual space to criticize the distortions, stunting, and denial of the needs of animals who are also caught up in capitalist relations.
Since alienation is Marx’s central moral category for criticizing capitalism, this may make it difficult to describe animals as an oppressed class.
Some socialist advocates of animal liberation, however, contend that the Marxian understanding of alienation can be experienced by nonhuman animals and can help us to understand the plight of animals under oppres-sive human regimes. According to Barbara Noske, animals can suffer all four types of alienation that Marx ascribes to workers. In factory farms and lab-oratories, animals’“products” are their own bodies or their offspring. “The relation between the production- and laboratory-animal and its own body has almost become grotesque,” she writes. “Its body often is the very cause of the animal’s misery. Perhaps we can speak of the body as ‘an alien and hostile power confronting the animal’?” Animals in these conditions are also estranged from their productive activities, which are appropriated by humans to be “put to use in one capacity only”. This parallels the monotonous actions which many human workers are forced to perform, day in and day out, in industrial production. Also like human workers, animals in factory farms and laboratories are often prohibited from having positive social interactions with other members of their species.
Together these types of alienation create a more general alienation from species life: “An animal’s species life encompasses just about everything: product, productive activity and the animal’s relation to nature and to its own society”. Noske thus challenges the usual interpret-ation of species being as exclusively human. Each species is distinctive in its own characteristic way, and each has a species being of its own, from which it can be alienated or not. Thus species being can link the oppression of humans to that of other species. Since nonhuman species also have characteristic “natural” or healthy ways of meeting their needs, they can experience alienation from their species beings, when they are forced to live in coerced and distorted ways.
This alienation is readily apparent in the reduction of animals under capitalism to the status of commodities. Their value is determined by their usefulness to humans as sources of labor or food, and they are reified into property that can be bought or sold (exemplified in the “stock market”). Marx himself did not develop this analysis, although he did note the parallels between abuses of human workers and animals and appeared to sympathize with the plight of cattle and other animals kept as property. Regardless of Marx’s interest in applying the cat-egories of alienation and commodification to nonhuman animals, contemporary scholars can use them as tools for understanding and denoun-cing human treatment of other species. More precisely, the claim that there is a contrast between current conditions of existence and life as it should be lived can undergird powerful ethical critiques, to which Marxian under-standings of alienation can contribute.
Labor and Practice
Marx’s conception of alienation is entwined with his thinking about labor, since alienation is caused, first and foremost, by the distorting conditions of work under capitalism. Marx defines labor as “human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is the necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature”. In labor, humans transform natural materials to create goods that people need and want, but labor is not just a means to an end. It is as central to personal identity as it is to material production. In work, and practice in general, people create them-selves as well as the objects of their labor. The fact that labor realizes human intentions and creativity distinguishes human practice from the work of animals, for Marx. Free labor includes its own intrinsic rewards, by expressing creativity and connecting people to each other, as well as meeting people’s needs. In addition, labor is deeply social, as a collaborative praxis, a contribution to a larger community, an appropriation of both natural and social resources, and a mediator of human relations to other people and to nature.
Marx describes labor as uniquely human. He draws a contrast between the creativity and purpose that characterizes human labor with the “mindless-ness” of animals’ activities, as seen above in the contrast between the spider and the architect. Contemporary scholars, however, can benefit from recent research on animal behavior that reveals that Marx, along with many other influential Western thinkers, seriously underestimated the sophistication and complexity of much nonhuman activity. Darwin, of course, is the notable 19th-century exception and inspiration for all that followed. Marx and Engels saw Darwin’s work as congruous with their own because it showed the material underpinnings of human capacities and social life. However, they did not explore Darwin’s arguments against human exceptionalism, such as his discussions of commonalities between humans and other animals and his contention that the distinctions between species are of degree rather than kind.
Contemporary ethologists have built on Darwin’s insights to compile abundant evidence that nonhuman animals not only appropriate resources to meet their needs but also make and use tools, adapt to changing material and social contexts, communicate desires and intentions, and establish intricate social relationships. Frans de Waal, for example, describes the social arrangements of chimpanzees as highly complex and even “political”. De Waal and other ethologists also show that many nonhuman species have sophisticated moral relationships, defined by categories such as justice, fairness, and compassion. In Marxist terms, we might say that the evidence shows that every animal has species-specific ways of meeting needs and requires particular social and environmental conditions to be able to do so with freedom and creativity. Under other conditions, they may still meet their physical needs but not express the mental, social, and emotional powers entailed in a fuller understanding of unalienated labor. This raises the question of whether human and nonhuman activities are so radically different that we can confidently limit both creative, social practice and its alienated counterpart to humans.
The possibilities of alienated and unalienated labor arise directly in relation to working animals such as horses and dogs, whose work is often – though perhaps not always – as coerced and joyless as that of the human proletariat. This has been the focus of most socialist discussions of alienated labor in relation to animals. However, it is also possible to under-stand work more broadly as the free, creative activity in which all animals, wild or domestic, engage in order to meet their needs, relate to their fellows, and express their creative capacities. Many nonhuman animals engage in practices such as hunting and foraging, finding or constructing shelters, migrating, courting, and raising young, all activities which have direct parallels in human life and which can be performed under conditions of alienation or not.
A fascinating way to explore the possibility of non-alienated animal activity is through contemporary research on play, which ethologists define as intrinsically rewarding (autotelic) behavior that is not “functional”. It is thus distinguished from “work,” which is by definition functional. “Work presumes necessity,” as Yi-Fu Tuan notes, “play freedom”. However, the two are not always easy to distinguish, for people or other creatures. Marx’s definition of labor involves elements of both work and play, since it is both a functional way to meet needs and an intrinsically rewarding way to express creativity and connect to other people. Many of the things that animals do also blur the boundaries between work and play. Just as humans hunt, fish, garden, knit, and cook for fun, nonhuman creatures wrestle, chase, hide, dig, and pounce even when not meeting any practical needs. Predators, for example, play by stalking imaginary prey or by teasing prey animals whom they have no intention of actually catching.
In order to distinguish between play and work in such instances, mere descriptions of animal’s behavior are inadequate, since the same action can have different meanings in different contexts. This parallels human life, in which the same physical behavior might be alienated or not, depending on the context. We cannot tell if a person’s labor is coerced or free simply by observing them baking a cake or repairing a car. We need to know much more about why they are perform-ing those activities, what led them to that situation, and what options they have. The same might be true of certain nonhuman actions, like a dog follow-ing a scent or a horse jumping fences, which can be performed freely or not. On the other hand, neither humans nor other animals are capable of free labor in certain conditions, such as captivity or slavery, physical coercion, social isolation, or emotional abuse. These circumstances distort the behav-ior that is proper to the species, paralleling human experiences of alienation.
More generally, we can talk meaningfully about alienation in animals because like humans, other species find some activities intrinsically satisfying and even necessary. Their species powers differ, not just between animals and humans but also among species and individuals. However, there is just as much difference between a satisfying and unsatisfying life for a cow, a horse, a dolphin, or a bat as there is for a human being. It is as inco-herent to say that an alienated person is living like an animal as it would be to say that a suffering dolphin is living like a human. Marxism can contribute to critiques of human treatment of other animals by pointing out the chasm between the potentialities of a creature’s species being and the reality in which we force them to live. Marx’s materialism is crucial here. It directs us to actual social and historical conditions of life, experiences, and practices, and thus makes invaluable contributions to any Marxist approach to animal ethics. Marx’s materialism also grounds, not coincidentally, his central analytical category of class.
Class
Classes are created by the practices of people interacting with others in the processes of production, as Marx explained in Wage Labor and Capital. In these processes,
human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite con-nections and relations to one another.
These connections and relations link some people, based on their common position in the labor process, while also dividing others. This creates classes, groups of people who share “common relations to labor and the means of production”. While class is created, first and foremost, by people’s “objective” position in the labor process, it also has subjective dimensions, based on the ways that people understand their own work, their prospects, and their relations to others. In other words, class exists both because of people’s objective conditions of life and because of the ways they understand those conditions.
It is hard to identify animals as a class in a subjective sense. While many animals do express their desires and preferences in ways that can be under-stood across species lines, such communications are easily dismissed by people with an interest in using the animals for their own benefit. At least some nonhuman animals can be seen as part of a class (or classes) in the objective sense, however, insofar as they occupy specific positions in social hierarchies created by humans and their labor, or their bodies or the pro-ducts of their bodies, are used to enrich others. This makes it possible to apply Marx’s critique of capitalism to animals – to read Marx zoologically – regardless of his personal attitudes toward animals.
If we think of animals as an oppressed class, they should be the subject of socialist concern. The same systems that exploit humans also exploit animals, in many of the same ways. If the socialist task “is to subject all institutions of power to ‘ruthless’ criticism,” as Sanbonmatsu writes, then
it is past time to ask ourselves whether it should not be part of socialist practice to care – and to care deeply – about the fact that other sensuous creatures live, feel, think, suffer and die in ways that bear an uncanny resemblance to our own.
The use of class as a category to understand and critique the suffering of animals is one of the most powerful contributions of Marxist thought to animal ethics and advocacy. It presents a basis for coalitions with animal advocates and for direct appeals to socialists, by connecting animal liberation to other movements for justice. If animals can be defined as the “lowest common denominator of suffering,” as Katherine Perlo puts it, then they can be inserted at the bottom of an existing theoretical structure, a sort of new proletariat with nothing to lose but their chains, which in many cases are physical as well as metaphorical.
Marxist class analysis reveals that the exploitation of workers is not an accident or coincidence but rather a necessary part of the larger structure. This corrects the liberal tendency to translate systemic violence into “a question of individual culpability and negligence,” as David Harvey argues. Harvey gives the example of a factory fire in which individual factory managers or owners are held responsible, thus obscuring the systemic factors related to the pursuit of profit – lax regulations, disempowerment of workers – that create situations in which such “accidents” are inevitable. The exploitation of animals parallels this situation, insofar as it does not rest on particular farmers or zookeepers or laboratory managers, but rather on social and economic structures in which humans use animals as mere means to their ends of profit, comfort, or entertainment.
While characterizing animals as an oppressed class akin to the situation of workers under capitalism can illuminate certain aspects of human-animal relationships, this parallel can also be problematic. One issue is that only certain animals can be understood as workers. Those who do work –mainly domesticated farm animals – can be seen to parallel “unwaged” humans such as “slaves, children, home-workers, [and] sex-workers”. This enables us to think in new ways about human uses of the labor and products of many domesticated animals. However, this analysis does not apply to all species, and it fails to address the ways in which even working and food animals might suffer for reasons other than their status as laborers within human institutions. In addition to an analysis based on animals’ position in the relations of production, animal ethicists and advocates need categories that consider animals’ oppression qua animals, such as anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism. This echoes some analyses of racism and sexism, which intersect with class but are not exhausted by it, as I explain below.
Another problem with thinking of animals as a class is that it lumps all species into a single undifferentiated mass –“animals” as opposed to “humans.” Animals differ too widely in their capacities, characters, and experiences to constitute a single class. Domesticated animals who spend their short lives on factory farms before being slaughtered experience quali-tatively different conditions of life than free-ranging wild animals, for example, even though both may be oppressed by humans. Between these two extremes, many variations exist both among and within categories. Species alone cannot define class, since zebras living in protected wilderness areas have vastly different conditions of life than those residing in zoos, as do chickens living in battery cages compared to those who roam backyard gardens.
Human workers also fall into many different categories, as Marx acknowledges, while at the same time he describes a stark dichotomy between workers and owners to clarify alienation, oppression, and the kind of change that is required. The same might be true of certain uses of animal as a single oppressed category in contrast to the privileged class of humans. While the use of a single term for all nonhuman animals obscures important differences, it can also underline the contradictions inherent in our relations and attitudes toward them. This high-lights what animals have in common – their exploitation and devaluation by humans – just as the term “worker” calls attention to the fundamental con-tradiction between those who own the means of production and those who must labor to earn their living.
The category of class thus points to the social, political, and economic structures that both divide people and oppress those at the bottom of the hierarchy. From this perspective, as Renzo Llorente asserts, there are good grounds for linking socialism and animal advocacy:
Not only is it the case that Marxists and animal liberationists both denounce and oppose domination, exploitation, and oppression; in their analyses, they draw our attention to structures and patterns of domination, exploitation, and oppression that often prove remarkably similar, just as they tend to reveal similar methods for obscuring or masking these injustices.
This links animal ethics and socialism by pointing to the fact that humans and other species are oppressed by the same institutions and can be liberated only by the destruction or transformation of these structures. It is not clear, however, that the end of capitalism would necessarily eliminate the mistreat-ment of animals. The same problem exists in socialist environmental philosophy: there is no guarantee that non-human nature would fare better under socialism. The end of private property and the profit motive would mark major steps toward less destructive treatment of both wild and domestic animals as well as ecosystems, but it is conceivable that they could still be exploited for the benefit of people in a socialist society. Anthropocentrism, in other words, may not be simply a side-effect of capitalism and thus may not vanish with the advent of socialism.
Frank Wilderson’s argument about the relationship between socialism and racism is illuminating. Marxism, he notes, “assumes a subaltern structured by capital, not by white supremacy”. He illustrates his argument by posing what he calls “the cow question”: “Would cows experience freedom at the mere knowledge that they’re no longer being slaughtered in an economy of exchange predicated on exploitation?”. The answer, of course, is that this is no freedom that any cow (or human) would desire. The end of capitalist institutions and relations of production would not guar-antee the end of racism or black suffering, any more than it would guarantee the end of animal suffering. While capitalism exacerbates the exploitation of animals (along with racism and sexism), it does not create any of these forms of oppression by itself. Rather than arguing that socialism in and of itself will automatically transform human relations to animals, then, it is more plausible to view socialism as a necessary though not sufficient condition for the liberation of animals. A zoological reading of Marx can show us that – and why – animals, like many human groups, suffer in specific ways as a result of capitalist forms of ownership and production.
Conclusions
If socialism is a necessary part of a robust critique of nonhuman as well as human exploitation, then we do indeed need “our zoological Marx.” In particular, we need the Marxist categories of class, alienation, and labor. First, class analysis helps us view animal suffering as embedded in social and economic structures. This attention to the systemic, structural dimensions of oppression is one of the most important contributions that Marxist thought can make to animal ethics (and human ethics). Moral phi-losophers often focus on the actions and attitudes of individual people, seeing their task as the effort to answer questions about how to live, how to define the good life, or how to develop virtues. A socialist critique under-lines the structural context of all these pursuits and the ways different insti-tutions make possible both alienated and non-alienated forms of life, for humans and other creatures. It can thus enrich, complement, and sometimes correct mainstream approaches to animal ethics and advocacy, providing a fuller understanding of what animals need, how and why they suffer, and what we might do to address these problems.
The concept of alienation, next, underlines the separation between healthy, natural ways of living in accord with the species being of each crea-ture and the unhealthy, alienated reality that many experience. Alienation clarifies the distinctive forms of oppression that nonhuman animals experi-ence, especially if the notion of species being is used to identify the forms of life that are natural and healthy for different kinds of creatures. A dolphin who lives in a concrete pool and eats frozen fish can be just as alienated as a factory worker who lives in a hovel and eats gruel. While both are meeting their basic needs for food and shelter, neither is living in a satisfactory way. They suffer alike from multiple forms of alienation due to their distorted relationships with other members of their own species, with their natural environments, and with their own activities and species powers.
Finally, by directing our attention to practices such as labor and play, a Marxist approach can illuminate the complexity of animal capacities and their subjective experiences, including suffering caused by human exploita-tion. All animals, including humans, engage in diverse activities to meet their needs. Even uniquely human activities, such as reading, writing, com-posing symphonies, or building weapons of mass destruction, are “rooted in the specifically human way of doing things which other animals also do”. Other animals also interpret their environments, commu-nicate with others, and defend themselves, in ways characteristic of their species and situations. All animals, for example, need food, and every species satisfies this need in characteristic ways – grazing, foraging, hunting, or fishing. The inability to pursue these ways can lead to pathologies under certain conditions. We should not view animals’ satisfaction of hunger as “mere feeding” in contrast to more complex human means of satisfying hunger. As Benton notes, this wrongly equates “the pathologically human with the animal”. A zoological reading of Marx rejects the notion that “living like an animal” is a reduced and distorted form of human life.
While a zoological reading of Marx contributes to animal ethics and advo-cacy, this reading can also enrich Marxist theorizing. In particular, challen-ging the use of nonhuman life as a negative foil shifts the meaning of alienation. The real contrast is not between humans and animals but instead between alienated and unalienated, or pathological and healthy, lives, and that this contrast that can be experienced by kinds of creatures. This more expansive reading of alienation can prompt us to consider not only how the human/animal contrast prevents us from seeing animals fully but also whether this binary is helpful for describing a flourishing, non-alienated human life. Marxist categories, especially practice, can help us reframe human life as animal life, highlighting not only differences but also the many commonalities between species, particularly shared needs and bodily practices. We may need the zoological Marx, in other words, not only to understand animals better but also to understand ourselves.
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.