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The Labor Process: How the Underdog is
Kept Under
Peter Dickens
“Marxism and the Underdog” is an impressive paper. It
usefully outlines the strengths and weaknesses of the Marxist
(what I would prefer to term “historical materialist”)
perspective on animals. As the paper rightly suggests, much of
Marx’s own work was predicated on the opposition between humans
and animals other than humans. Yet, as the paper also points
out, many of his concepts and critiques are useful for
addressing contemporary concerns. Among the most important
recent examples is Benton’s critique of liberal and
individualist “animal rights.” It is a perspective on Marx and
his assertion that much human rights discourse offers little or
no fundamental challenge to the patterns of economic, social,
and political power that pervade capitalist society. There is
little point in allocating rights to humans (and to animals) if
the kind of society in which they live systematically denies the
realization of these rights. I mention Benton here because his
important perspective on animal rights is not fully explained in
the paper under review here.
Over-Confidence
Yet we should not be over-confident about what might seem like
the on-going and inevitable recognition of the animals question
by historical materialism. For example, two recent well-received
books on historical materialism and the environment (Burkett,
1999; Foster, 2000) make no reference at all to animals as such.
“The environment” remains here almost tacitly and wholly equated
with the inanimate environment, with the wrecking of this
environment and the challenges of such wrecking to both
capitalism and socialism. These are excellent texts, but they
still are, therefore, somewhat stuck in strongly anthropocentric
ways of thinking. They do not consider the still relevant
question of the real continuities between humans and animals,
the need of the latter for proper recognition as independent
entities, or the vexed question as to whether human sympathy is
extended to all species alike.
The adequate incorporation of animals into historical
materialism, therefore, still needs fighting for. And this can
be done using some of the central concepts of historical
materialism. Yet this perspective can be of more use than this
paper perhaps suggests. Commodification, capitalism’s restless
search for value and the incorporation of nature of all kinds
into capitalist labor-processes, is at the heart of the
capitalist enterprise. Animals as well as human beings seen from
this perspective are not only, or simply, a “working class” on
whose labor the whole of human society is predicated. Their
biologically inherited powers of growth and reproduction are now
increasingly subsumed within, and indeed modified by, capitalist
social relations. They are being increasingly modified in
capital’s own image. Their bodies and powers of development are
being made an increasingly integral part of the
production-processin the food-production process.
Historical Materialism
Nonhuman animals, therefore, no longer are just slaves or beasts
of burden, but they increasingly are being made central as means
of production, ways in which surplus value is being realized by
applying human labor (in, say, the laboratory) to the animals'
powers of reproduction and development. It is often said that
new forms of In Vitro Fertilization and genetic modification are
ethically suspect, whether extended to humans or animals.
Moreover, increasing levels of private ownership and
commodification using these technologies also have legitimately
become causes of concern to critics. Yet an historical
materialist position makes clear what is happening at a deeper
level. These developments are just part of an attempt to make
new labor-processes out of reproduction. They are no less than
new ways of interacting with nature to generate surplus value,
again using human and non-human labor as a free input to realize
value and profits. The making of future generations is now a
labor-process. This is being achieved with all the social
relations, forms of commodification, and managerial control that
might be expected of a capitalist labor-process.
A second element of Marx’s historical materialism has hardly
been recognized by “green Marxism” and finds only passing
attention in the paper under review here. Yet it potentially is
important. This concerns human subjectivity, a matter that has
been taken up by a number of environmentalists, especially deep
greens. But an historical materialist perspective throws new
light on this topic. Marx’s vision of humanity’s interaction
with nature, as set out in Capital, was dialectical.
Labour is first of all, a process between man and nature, a
process by which man, through his own actions, mediates,
regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and
nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his
own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to
appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own
needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and
changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own
nature.
As humanity changes animate and inanimate nature and attempts to
reconstruct it in its own image, it simultaneously changes its
own human nature. In this process, not only are social
relations, formed in new kinds of labor-process, converting the
powers of nature to produce commodities but also, , critically,
new kinds of subjectivity are made. Typically, as Marx argued,
human beings are individualized and made to adopt a wholly
instrumental view toward one another and toward external nature.
Yet with the benefit of Freudian psychology and its fusion with
historical materialism in the work of writers such as Dean
(2002), we can envisage contemporary forms of human subjectivity
and identity as increasingly narcissistic. The growing
individualism of the workplace (including high levels of
self-employment and part-time work) backed by high levels of
consumerism, is now generating a new form of pre-occupied,
self-regarding, self.
Extension into Adulthood
A modern identity of this kind is an extension into adulthood of
more understandable childlike disregard for the needs of other
living beings. This kind of subjectivity envisages the physical
environment, animals, and other human beings as mere means of
serving our own, human, well-being and identity. Such a modern
narcissistic self leaves animals, and their need for a
separately recognized kind of identity, with little chance of an
independent existence. At best, they are limited to zoos and
wildlife parks, tethered and displayed for humanity’s paid-for
yet detached enjoyment. At worst, they are exploited in ways so
well recognized by many of the authors discussed in “Marxism and
the Underdog.” Something resembling Freud’s “anaclitic” form of
subjectivity (one which recognizes the independence of beings on
whom we still very much depend) urgently needs developing; one
which extends sympathy to animals as well as humans. And yet it
is difficult to see the making of such subjectivity without
major transformations to the labor-processes in which so many
animals are caught up. It will not be easily realized, as “deep
greens” in particular seem to suggest, by people’s simply
thinking differently.
Arguably, as this “underdog” paper suggests, a sympathy toward
animals is developing, at least among certain classes. But an
historical materialist perspective helps demonstrate why the
underdogs of all kinds (including the working class) are still
finding recognition and proper treatment so hard to achieve.
Note
* Peter Dickens, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
References
Burkett, P. (1999). Marx and nature. A red and green
perspective. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Dean, K. (2002). Capitalism and citizenship. The impossible
partnership. London: Routledge.
Foster, J. (2000). Marx’s ecology. Materialism and nature. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
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