Capitalism, Carnism, & Consumption

Although Communist politics is at a low ebb, academic interest in Marxist theory remains high. This is particularly evident in the growing trend of using Marxian frameworks to understand a plethora of issues that would traditionally have been seen as beyond the scope of official Marxism. Recent years have seen the emergence of a subfield of animal ethics devoted to understanding and critiquing the exploitation of non-human animals within capitalism, with Dinesh Wadiwel's 2023 book Animals and Capital representing the most sophisticated application of Marxist economic analysis to the issue of interspecies oppression.

Within this work, however, there is a tendency for authors to echo Marx's conclusions, without paying full attention to his methods. For instance Wadiwel is amongst many who argue that the root cause of the domination of animals is the commodity form, despite the wildly different contexts under which human labour power and animal bodies are both commodified. In this presentation I will argue that a strict application of Marxist theoretical methods reveals that whereas humans experience capitalism as uniquely exploitative given the requirement that they realise the exchange value of their labour power, the oppression of animals stems from their status as use-values, and would thus remain unchanged under both capitalism and communism. This finding should serve to affirm the continued importance of Marx's Capital for understanding the place of animals within the economy, while also demonstrating that those committed to animal welfare must do the difficult work of advocating for the cause now, rather than reducing the problem of animal suffering to just another symptom of capitalism to be dealt with after the revolution.