By Kamran Nayeri, December 31, 2022
An industrial chicken farm
In Marx’s theory of exploitation, the focus is on the origin of profit as surplus value created in the process of production. The value of the final product λ produced in one production cycle by a capitalist firm is defined as follows.
M = C + V + S λ = M’
Where:
M = Invested money capital
C = Value of constant capital
V = Value of labor power paid as wages to the workers
S = Surplus value
λ = Value of the product
M’= Newly generated money capital
The capitalist firm starts with money capital(M) which is spent on the purchase of the means of production. Constant capital is that part of the means of production that do not undergo any change in its quantitative value during the production process, such as the raw material, auxiliary material and instruments of labor. (Marx 1867; Chapter 8) The value of various components of constant capital used up in one cycle of production is transferred onto the final product. Variable capital (V) is the value of labor power employed; that is “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.” (Marx 1867, Chapter 6) Thus, the source of capitalist profit is the surplus value the workers produce in the process of production (for a detailed discussion, see Shaikh 1990). Workers’ wages reflect the value of labor power but not the surplus value they produce during the production process. The capitalist firm pockets surplus value as profit upon the sale of the product. Thus, capitalist profit is p = M* - M.
The value of labor power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the worker or wages sufficient for the reproduction of the workforce. A key component in the workers’ consumption basket is food. A reduction in the value of food results in a reduction of the value of labor power, all other things being equal. Mechanization and industrialization in the meat industry have been part of this process to reduce the value of food necessary for the working class’s reproduction, hence contributing to a reduction of the value of labor power.
The poultry industry is an example of intensive mechanization and industrialization. According to the National Chicken Council, the dressed chicken, which retailed in the U.S. for $6.48 a pound in 1930 in today's dollar, now sells for $1.57 a pound: "Costs came down partly because scientific breeding reduced the length of time needed to raise a chicken to slaughter by more than half since 1925, even as a chicken's weight doubled. The amount of feed required to produce a pound of chicken has also dropped sharply." (Kristof, March 12, 2014) Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human by the age of two months would weigh 660 pounds! Among the scientific techniques used to raise farm animals in increasingly cramped spaces is the intensive use of hormones and antibiotics. (For a discussion of the misery of chickens raised by the food industry, see Farm Sanctuary, March 2004A). To appreciate the magnitude of the crime against a sentient being, in one year, in 2011, 58,110,000,000 chickens were slaughtered by the food industry.
Thus, Marx’s labor theory of value can be used to show that capitalist profitability is also dependent on the oppression and exploitation of chicken and other farm animals, as surplus value is indirectly increased by an increase in the oppression and exploitation of farm animals.
This raises a number of issues.
First, although Marx knew that all wealth comes from nature and that he fully anticipated rising productivity in the sector of the capitalist economy that provides for the consumption basket of the wage workers as in his critique of Malthus, he did not consider whether this increase will affect in the lowering the value of labor power hence it will increase surplus value in his discussion of sources of absolute and relative surplus value to acknowledge oppression and exploitation of nonhumans in the generation of surplus value.
His labor theory of value abstracts from the exploitation of nonhuman nature by assuming that the value of nonhuman components of means of production is given throughout capitalist production. In doing so, Marx accepts the value assigned to them by the capitalist market. As I have argued earlier, in the construction of historical materialism, Marx and Engels consciously set aside nature while acknowledging that writing history must begin with the natural context of human society. Not only they never developed historical materialism to situate society in its natural context, but Marx also carried the same anthropocentric approach in the development of his labor theory of value. Thus, ecosocialist theorizing must begin with developing a theory of society and history in which human society and its history are theorized as deeply rooted in nature. I have argued that Marx and Engels could not have done so because of a lack of sufficient knowledge about how humanity is deeply rooted in nature and how. That knowledge has emerged mostly since the mid-twentieth century mostly due to the development in anthropology, archeology, and biology. Thus, socialist and ecosocialist theories developed so far have remained anthropocentric and lacking in addressing anthropocentrism as the ideological reflection of alienation from nature and a root cause of the ecological crises.
Marx’s labor theory of value shares its anthropocentrism with classical political economists. “For Marx, labor is value. Value is nothing but the fragment of the total labor potential existing in a given society in a certain period (e.g., a year or a month) which is used for the output of a given commodity at the average social productivity of labor existing then and there, divided by the total number of the commodities produced, and expressed in hours (or minutes), days, weeks, or months of labor.” (Mandel, 1990, p. 11). “Value is therefore essentially a social, objective and historically relative category.” (ibid. p. 12) There is no discussion of the intrinsic value of nonhuman beings.
In recent decades bourgeois economics has been forced to pay attention to the value of nonhuman animals. In 2011, the European Union’s highest court issued a ruling to protect the Great Hamster of Alsace, also known as the European Hamster. The ruling on the Great Hamster is an acknowledgment of its value as the court assigned $24.6 million fine on the French government if the hamster population was lost, assigning the value of $30,750 for each individual hamster. The international standard for the average monetary value of human life was $50,000 in 2008. (Nayeri, June 15, 2011)
Sir Paratha Dasgupta (2021), the Indian-British economist, has just published The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, which is celebrated for its attempt to put a monetary value on nature that serve economic growth and has been impoverished by it. Dasgupta has estimated to maintain the present living standards will require 1.6 Earths! Of course, the framework of Dasgupta’s research, praised by many, including the United Nations, is anthropocentric: to make the capitalist system compatible with resiliency of life-sustaining ecosystems, not to stop exploiting nature.
Anthropocentric socialists and ecosocialists agree that they have the same aim, except they wish to replace the anthropocentric industrial capitalist system with an anthropocentric industrial socialist civilization.
However, this is incompatible with Marx’s vision of socialism as an unalienated society. One cannot get rid of alienation from nature by becoming the “lord of nature,” as Engels expressed in his vision of socialism in Socialism: Scientific or Utopian.
Ecocentric Socialism is the theory and practice of overcoming this contradiction in the socialist and ecosocialist theories.
Second, if nonhumans contribute to the surplus value in Marx’s theory, then it becomes impossible to quantitatively determine how much of it is due to the exploitation of wage workers and how much of it is from the exploitation of nonhuman nature. Following Marx, socialists have routinely credited all of the surplus value to the exploitation of wage workers both qualitatively and in its quantitative estimates. What is lost to them is the intrinsic value of nonhuman nature, whether they are living beings or parts of the ecosystem on which life depends.
As Mandel reminded us above, Marx’s theory of value is a historical category specific to the capitalist mode of production. As Luxembourg and Che Guevara reminded us, socialism is the withering away of the law of value and its replacement with communist consciousness and democratic planning. Ecocentric Socialism shares the same view, except it insists on the intrinsic value of all beings in nature and opposes monetizing and commercializing nature, and especially as it animates beings.
References:
Bureau of Labor Statistics. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Bicentennial Edition, Part 2. 2011; 2015.
Heinrich Böll Foundation. Meat Atlas: Facts and Figures About Animals We Eat. 2014.
Kristof, Nicholas. "Industrial Farming and Your Diet." The New York Times, March 12, 2014.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, Vintage, 1867/1977.
Shaikh, Anwar. “Surplus Value.” John Eatwell, Murry Milgate, and Peter Newman (Ed’s.), The New Palgrave Marxian Economics. 1990.
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