The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics

I once asked my four-year old daughter while she was drinking a glass of milk: “Where do you think milk comes from?” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect because she was notorious for her left-of-field answers to seemingly obvious questions. I must admit even I was surprised when she announced: “A truck, of course!” I was immediately struck by how quickly she had hit the nail on the head. She hadn’t been fooled by bedtime stories of farmers wearing checked shirts and straw hats, cows happily nibbling green grass in open fields, chickens wandering around the yard as the sun shines, pigs rolling in the mud, a two-storied farmhouse with its long porch filled with white rocking chairs and a cat asleep on the front steps. She knew exactly where milk came from, and it was most definitely not the fairytale picture of “Once upon a time in rural America …”

Ten billion land animals are raised annually in the United States for meat, milk, and eggs,¹ and this gargantuan production cannot be achieved without generating hybrids of machine and organism, or what Donna Haraway so aptly describes in her “Cyborg Manifesto” as the “cyborg machine.”² Haraway developed her theory of cyborgs to counter dualisms that rely on naturalized oppositions between men and women or nature and machine, proposing that politics demands we move beyond such dualistic thinking and the logic of dominance on which it is presupposed in order to realize fully the liberating potential of the cyborg. In response to Haraway, we need also to be mindful of the power relations distributing the cyborg throughout the social field and the hierarchies of power that such distribution processes create. Can this image of the cyborg retain its political position of disagreement within the status quo as the connection between livestock production, climate change, and environmental degradation enters mainstream politics? In other words, it is one thing to recognize that 18 percent of worldwide GHG emissions can be attributed to livestock production, the proposed solution to which is cultural (eating fewer animal products) and practical (more intensive farming), but this recognition does not address the myriad levels of violence in operation throughout the system of livestock production and the biopolitical configuration of the free-market economy.³

A politics might arise from the uncertainty that the image of the cyborg presents to human society, for the industrial food complex represents the antithesis of cyborg disagreement as it disciplines and regulates the creative pulse of material life and living labor, placing it in the service of capital accumulation. It does this in many ways. It plugs the bodies of animals into machines as a way to dominate them. It homogenizes land practices around the system of mass production. It has a monopoly over the reproductive cycle of animals raised for food. It forces farmers into the cycle of credit and debt, turning them into a compliant workforce. It trades workers rights against immigration law. And it institutionalizes food into an oppressive political arrangement that diminishes the creative commons that emerges as people come together to prepare food and share a meal together: the creative combination of color, texture, smell, and taste; food preparation as an expression of care and love for others; the rituals surrounding the decoration of the table; and the thanks collectively given by all at the table in appreciation for the food they are about to eat.

In the industrial food complex, there is no common life to be celebrated as the modernization of food production homogenizes how birth, life, nourishment, and death are encountered. Indeed, in this complex the commons is accessed through the political economy of living labor (animals and workers) and the biopolitical economy of material life. We can borrow an observation from Michel Foucault in “Society Must Be Defended” to see how the industrial food complex exercises the sovereign “power to ‘make live’ and ‘let die.’”⁴ For this reason, although it is important to recognize, as Foucault did in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, that biopolitics marked the onset of modernity, changing how the nation-state exercises power by turning life itself into the object of political control—an idea that Hardt and Negri put to work when they transform the Marxist struggle between labor and capital into a struggle between the common and capital—I would also like to urge some caution over the way in which the concept of biopolitics is put to work.⁵

I share Foucault’s position that the site of political struggle is ontological, but I would like to revive the Marxist problematic of how that struggle takes place. As I argued in chapter 3 in my discussion of the “population bomb” thesis as it is used in climate change discourse, it is politically important that we do not water down the struggle between capital and labor because today capitalism has managed access to the commons through reproductive and productive labor. And the same situation, I argue here, holds true in the animal industrial food complex.

Today four companies control 81 percent of the beef market, 59 percent of the pork market, and 50 percent of the poultry market in the United States.⁶ Neoliberal adjustments of the agricultural sector have seen the introduction of technologies and management systems that have placed every aspect of life in the service of capital accumulation. And the result is horrific. Two cases in point are revealed by the now notorious Mercy for Animals undercover videos. One video is of Ohio Conklin Dairy Farm operations in 2010.⁷ It documents some of the most extreme forms of abuse cows can be submitted to daily: being beaten by crowbars and stabbed by pitchforks, having their tails twisted until they snap, being kicked, being punched in the head, and so on. The other video is of Quality Egg Production in New England, one of the largest egg producers in the United States.⁸ It was shot between 2008 and 2009 and documents the cruelty that egg-laying hens encounter on battery farms: living in cages alongside rotting carcasses of other birds, trapped in their cage wire so they cannot access their feed or water, unable to spread their wings, suffering bloody open wounds and broken bones, being thrown live into trash cans, and dying a slow painful death after workers have grabbed them by the neck and twirled them in circles.

I am certainly not the first and I will probably not be the last to raise the red flags on the exploitative and violent treatment of livestock and birds. There is mounting criticism of animal cruelty, with debates over animal rights and liberation falling into one of the following three categories: some argue that the current situation is the result of treating animals as commodities; others connect patriarchal forms of violence to animal cruelty; and some maintain that we just do not seem to recognize that animals also have moral worth. None of these positions is wrong, and they all inform the argument that I am about to put forward. That said, however, the political trajectory they all offer is veganism. Modifying individual eating habits is understood to be either an act of solidarity for the plight of animals raised for food or an act of protest against the institutionalized violence perpetrated against them or both.

Nancy Fraser has correctly pointed out that a cultural change in mentalités does not necessarily translate into structural and institutional change. Indeed, she shows how privileging the cultural project of identity politics over measures to counter poverty and redistributive justice has had the unfortunate consequence of serving the interests of neoliberal capitalism.⁹ Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, the liberal focus on choice as an expression of individual freedom was put to work in crafting a political position that promoted individualism and personal responsibility in support of trickle-down economic policies. This connection has since justified massive cutbacks in government spending, the end result being that social welfare programs have been curtailed and public assets sold.

Part of the problem, as Fraser sees it in her analysis of second-wave feminism, is identity politics, which has resulted in the subordination of “socio-economic struggles to struggles for recognition.”¹⁰ After pushing the redistributive aspect of the feminist emancipatory project into the background, feminism has been ill equipped to tackle head on the astonishing inequity and poverty that has occurred since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher first began instigating an unregulated global free-market economy.

Figures on the distribution of wealth in the United States help place Fraser’s point in perspective. The term wealth refers to the marketable assets a person or family owns minus their debts. Economist Edward Wolff notes that the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households owned approximately 38 percent of total wealth in 1998, with the bottom 20 percent of households having zero wealth.¹¹ Since the Great Recession at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this distribution ratio has not radically shifted. That said, for 2007 the financial wealth of the top 1 percent was approximately 8 percent greater (42.7 percent) than their previous wealth in 2001 (34.6 percent). The term financial wealth refers to people’s net worth in owner-occupied housing minus their net equity. Even more interesting is that in 2008 for the 13,480 individuals/families earning $10 million a year, only 19 percent of that amount came from wages and salaries.¹² Put differently, the more wealth a person has, the less that person needs to work for his or her income.¹³ Meanwhile, negative net worth increased from 15.5 percent in 1983 to 17.6 in 2001, falling slightly to 17 percent in 2004.¹⁴

If we are serious about realizing a liberating project in the twenty-first century, there is an urgent need to start with a critique of neoliberal capitalism and then use this critique as a way to interrupt how the biopolitical economy and cultural mentalités inform one another. In this regard, combining the work of feminist animal-liberation advocates, such as Marti Kheel and Carol Adams, with that of those who focus on the political economy of meat eating, such as Bob Torres, is one way to expand upon and politicize the decontextualized arguments of leading analytic philosophers in the field, such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan.¹⁵

Peter Singer has taught us that human beings discriminate against animals on the basis of their species membership.¹⁶ He argues that the human preference to favor the interests of its own species ahead of the interests of other species is speciesist. In this way, the violent treatment of cows, hogs, and poultry is no different than other forms of discrimination, such as sexism or racism. Meanwhile, Tom Regan argues that animals have a moral right to be treated respectfully and that this right is not open to utilitarian negotiation. Regan’s egalitarian position leads him to conclude that animals have an inherent value, and so they deserve to be treated in a way that is respectful of this value.¹⁷ Singer and Regan thus offer compelling arguments in support of the moral value of animals. They prompt us to ask whether the interests and rights of animals are en par with those of humans. If their interests and rights can be proven to be equal to that of humans, as both Singer and Regan argue in their respective ways, then a valid argument in favor of human obligations toward nonhuman animals can be made. The moral injunction of vegetarianism stems from their shared conclusion that animals deserve moral considerability. For Singer, because animals feel pain, they are morally considerable. Meanwhile, Regan argues the same thing on the basis that animals have the capacity for self-awareness.

The limitation of Singer and Regan’s position, however, arises from the way their arguments presuppose an essentialist subject, one who is somehow free of its contextual determinants. The problem of prejudice or discrimination based on species membership that both Singer and Regan highlight is also at its core ideological. It points to a set of misplaced beliefs and values that fail to understand the inherent value of animals and their interests. Both authors remind us that human beings occupy a position of privilege vis-à-vis animals, and they offer tight arguments to counter the speciesist character of human nature. Yet their analytic methodology fails to recognize fully the social relations that structure how privilege is put to work.

A quick thought experiment suffices to make my point. Sue and Tom are dog “owners.” Sue treats her dog as a companion, an equal member of her household. She openly displays affection toward her dog, cuddling up to her at night and playing with her in the doggy park along with other dogs and dog owners. Tom raised his pit bull to fight, intentionally torturing, wounding, and maiming the animal in an effort to develop and fine-tune his fighting instinct. The dog is aggressive, unsocial, and unpredictable. The point of this thought experiment is to highlight the fact that both Sue and Tom are dog “owners,” yet the position of privilege they occupy vis-à-vis their dogs has produced very different outcomes. In Tom’s case, there is an invisible line connecting masculinity, power, emotional arousal, the violent treatment of animals, and sexist values that shape and inform the culture of dog fighting. The point here is that we cannot neatly extract a subject from its social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances.

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams examines the speciesism and misogyny characterizing the content of menus, advertisements, and popular slogans.¹⁸ She argues that female and animal bodies are objectified by a patriarchal value system that is inherently violent. She traces the cultural meaning of meat eating, masculinity, and virility as intertwined phenomena. Just as women’s bodies have been commodified and objectified, so, too, have the bodies of factory-farmed animals. The individual life of a woman or animal is rendered abstract as each is objectified. Adams invokes the concept of patriarchy as a gendered system of violence to describe the systems of oppression that both animals and women experience. From here, she asks: “Which images of the universe, of power, of animals, of ourselves, will we represent in our food?”¹⁹ She goes on to conclude that what we eat is a direct reflection of our politics, and for this reason the only truly ethical and feminist position to take is that of veganism.

Meanwhile, Marti Kheel draws attention to the way in which both Singer and Regan devalue personal relationships and affective ties, discounting empathy and care as morally significant criteria in ethical thinking. Kheel counters the masculinist paradigm of competition and independence by closely studying the patriarchal unconscious operating throughout the work of four leading holist philosophers—Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Holmes Rolston III, and Warwick Fox.

Kheel proposes that holism subordinates “empathy and care for individual beings to a larger cognitive perspective or ‘whole.’”²⁰ In contrast to the usual abstractions and rationalisms that typify environmental ethics and positions supporting animal liberation, she advocates an ethics of care and empathy. The important point she makes is that empathy for the individual is overridden when primary value is given to the abstract “whole.” Kheel defines the holist focus on abstract constructs as masculinist. It pits reason against emotion, reorganizing the complex interaction and interdependency of life through a hierarchical system of abstract values. She, too, is ethically committed to a vegan diet. For her, this approach provides an effective way to counter grand master narratives that propound masculinist views (competition, heroism, rationalization, and abstraction). In another respect, what she is proposing is a corporeal strategy: through the redistribution of the social field’s corporeality, the violence inherent to that field is interrupted and reconfigured. I do not disagree with her on this point; I think the strategy has the potential to cut to the core of how politics and ontology have been combined in the biopolitical economy. I would, however, like to see how this approach might be better positioned to produce disagreement in the larger social field and with respect to the objective forms of violence endemic to the political economy of capitalism.

Bob Torres has published a terrific analysis of the political economy of animal rights, Making a Killing, and I certainly sympathize with the social anarchist position he presents. He states from the outset of the book that sexism, racism, and our relations with animals are structured through a series of historical relations of domination that benefit one group of people or one species over another. Using Marxist theory to highlight the ideological and economic relations behind livestock production, Torres situates animal rights alongside gender, race, and class oppression. He draws striking parallels between the dehumanization of nonwhites, common to discussions over racism, and the “treatment of animals as mere things.”²¹

The main thrust of Torres’s argument is that capitalism has commodified animals. He maintains that animals produced for food are “superexploited living commodities” because they are the property of someone, they are commodities, and they produce commodities to feed the productive labor power of the capitalist system.²² In his conclusion, he, like Kheel and Adams, explains that the most effective way to contest animal exploitation and commodification is by becoming vegan. The corporeal nature of his politics, like those of Kheel and Adams, comes from using the affective potential of food in its connection with bodies and material life to challenge the dominant relations of power that manage the social field and common life.

So I return to the question of whether modifying one’s personal eating habits is enough to produce change at an institutional and structural level? Does this approach sufficiently engage with the objective forms of violence endemic to the industrial food complex and the inequities propounded by that system? More troubling, does equating politics with personal responsibility in this way unwittingly reinforce a basic constituent of neoliberalism—that individuals, not governments or historical forces, are personally responsible for their own successes and failures? One might easily see why Singer and Regan’s analytic approach is susceptible to this blind spot; the implication of their essentialist subject is that it is freed of its contextual limitations—a subject who is accordingly an independent entity in the world. But the situation with respect to the ecofeminist and anarchist vegans is not so clear-cut.

What is key here is that ethical food choices cannot be separated from the material conditions determining food production and modes of subjectification (race, class, gender, species). For instance, most vegans choose to eat soybean products.²³ Yet the transnational politics of soybean production is responsible for the razing of large parts of the Amazon rain forest that is facilitating the institutionalization of North–South power relations. Further, the principle at the core of veganism—the individual’s power to choose and take responsibility for what he or she consumes—has unfortunately already been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism in its principles of individualism and competition. As a politics of consumption, the vegan approach runs the risk of facilitating the culture of consumption that capitalism advances. In addition, the politics of veganism needs to move beyond the personal identity politics of individual food choices and the factionalism this view promotes by encouraging vegans to form alliances with other activist groups regardless of whether the individuals who make up these other social and environmental justice movements are vegan or not. The case of Lierre Keith immediately springs to mind.

Keith was a vegan for twenty years but found the diet unhealthy, prompting her book The Vegetarian Myth, in which she provides a critical and fascinating examination of the history of agriculture.²⁴ At the fifteenth annual Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco, a group of vegans accused Keith of being an animal holocaust denier, and thirty minutes into her book presentation, ironically right after she had announced we should not eat factory-farmed meat, they attacked her with chili pepper–laced pies that left her with sore eyes for a few days after the incident.

We need to push the structuralist analysis beyond a critical analysis of culture and personal identity politics. This task is both practical and theoretical. Practically speaking, it requires solidarities to form across disparate groups so that they are better positioned to engage critically with the material conditions of life and the biopolitical economy of material life. Meanwhile, the task for political theory is to use the struggle between the commons and capital that Hardt and Negri describe to inflect analyses of the struggle occurring between labor and capital without necessarily supplanting the latter with the former.

Marx recognized that when capital hits upon a limit, it either circumvents or appropriates it in some way. In the Grundrisse, he remarks: “But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.”²⁵

So what might be some of the potential blockages that the industrial food complex presents to capital? There are six: (1) production (leading to the uniformity of production); (2) labor (producing a compliant workforce through systems of surveillance and the securitization of material life); (3) risk (reorganizing and managing material life); (4) reproduction (regulating the material limits of a body and life); (5) knowledge (the privatization of public research); and (6) demand (reconfiguring taste and appetite). All of these strategies rely on separating the means from the end, objectifying life, and thereby managing every aspect of life, from sex to pregnancy, motherhood, lactation, sustenance, and death. This is the story of material life being reorganized into predictable, manageable, self-contained units of space and time.

After World War II, the strength of the meatpacking unions resulted in a master contract that meant by 1960 the average meatpacker’s wage in the United States was 15 percent higher than the average manufacturing wage.²⁶ A serious limit to capital thus lay with the trade unions that oversaw the institution of basic labor rights throughout the meatpacking industry, which in turn increased the cost of labor. However, by 2005 the median annual salary of meat and poultry workers had plunged to $21,320, more than one-third less than the median $33,500 that workers in all other manufacturing industries earned.²⁷ The industry overcame the rising cost of labor by deskilling the labor force, improving labor productivity, and vertically integrating the disparate elements of animal food production. The result was the fast-paced, highly organized, cruel, and dangerous system of the animal–industrial complex.²⁸

As the farm was industrialized, animals were moved from the outdoors to warehouse facilities, where there is no natural lighting, living conditions are cramped, disease and depression are high, and life is short. To stop birds pecking each other, farmers remove anywhere between one-third and one-half of their beaks; the pain causes some birds to stop eating, and they quite simply die of starvation. Broiler chickens live in chronic pain for 20 percent of their life, and their bones are so weakened as a result of their confinement that when they are removed from their cages, their bones are quick to snap. Male chicks born to egg-laying hens have no economic value and are either gassed, macerated alive, or thrown into trash cans. Piglets, weaned just ten days after being born, as compared to the natural thirteen weeks, are left with a longing to suck. They satisfy this urge by chewing on the tails of other piglets. The average natural life of a cow might be twenty years, but when the milk production of a dairy cow decreases at around five to six years, she is sent to the slaughterhouse. And the list goes on.

In addition to the cruelty animals are subjected to, workers in the animal–industrial complex are also at risk. Health and safety issues for workers abound. In 1990, the Health Hazard Evaluations of two poultry plants processing more than four hundred thousand birds daily, conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, found that 20 to 36 percent of workers had work-related cumulative trauma disorders. An Occupational Safety and Health Administration study from 1989 found that poultry workers were required to make more than ten thousand repetitions per shift, causing serious repetitive-motion problems.²⁹ The U.S. Government Accountability Office noted in 2005 that although injuries and illnesses in the meat and poultry industry had fallen from 29.5 injuries per 100 full-time workers in 1992 to 14.7 in 2001, the recorded rate was still one of the highest of any industry.³⁰ Others have pointed out that these figures present a distorted picture because many injuries and illnesses go unreported.³¹

Workers on the slaughterhouse floor are kicked or bitten by frightened and maimed animals; they are physically injured by the knives they use and from the repetitive tasks they perform; and they experience psychological trauma as a result of participating in and seeing mass slaughter on a daily basis. All of these factors provide incentive for workers to perpetrate extreme acts of cruelty against the animals.³² One male worker at Morrell hog slaughterhouse explained,

Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn’t done anything wrong, wasn’t even running around the pit. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe—a two-inch diameter pipe—and I literally beat that hog to death. Couldn’t have been a two-inch piece of solid bone left in its head…. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn’t stop. And when I finally did stop, I’d expended all this energy and frustration, and I’m thinking, what in God’s sweet name did I do? … People go into Morrell expecting respect and good working conditions. They come out with carpal tunnel, tendonitis, alcoholism, you name it, because they’re under incredible pressure and they’re expected to perform under intolerable conditions. Or they develop a sadistic sense of reality.³³

The prevalence of intentional torture and abuse of the animals by slaughterhouse workers has prompted researchers to analyze the relationship between the violent nature of slaughterhouse work and high incidences of crime, alcoholism, drug use, and domestic violence that characterize slaughterhouse communities.³⁴ For instance, Amy Fitzgerald has found the variables of unemployment, social disorganization, and demography that typify slaughterhouse communities do not fully explain the rise in “total arrests, arrests for violent offenses, arrests for rape, arrests for sex offenses, the arrest rate scale and report rate scale” in these communities.³⁵ In her sociological assessment, the violence endemic to slaughterhouse communities is an expression of the psychological distress slaughterhouse workers experience at work.

Given the low pay, physical risks, and psychological stress workers encounter in the meat, poultry, and dairy industry, it is unsurprising that the industry has high rates of worker turnover. This turnover creates another crisis for capital: a labor shortfall. Along with deskilling the workforce and making meat and dairy production more efficient, the concentration of the meatpacking industry in rural areas has isolated that workforce from strong urban-based unions, allowing companies to seek out a more vulnerable workforce. It has targeted those who have few employment opportunities and are reluctant to collectivize, more dependent, and easily intimidated: immigrant labor.

Meatpacking facilities were historically located at railroad terminals in urban areas close to where cattle arrived. In 1961, this situation changed when Iowa Beef Processors, Inc. (now Tyson Fresh Meats) located its meatpacking facility in close proximity to the feedlots in rural northwestern Iowa. Transportation costs were lowered as cattle no longer had to be transported to urban centers to be slaughtered and packed. Further, Iowa Beef began boxing meat close to the feedlot, which further lowered transportation costs because fat and bone were removed in preparation for packing. More significantly, union activity was weak, if not nonexistent in rural areas, which meant the master contract would no longer be enforced. The problem then became one of how to keep the unions out, and companies realized that the best way to achieve this goal was to employ migrant workers.

The North Carolina Company Police Act of 1991 (N.C. Gen. Stat. §74E-1) allowed companies to employ company police and guards who are “empowered to carry weapons, make arrests, and pursue ‘suspects’ off company property as long as an incident began on company property.”³⁶ In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB (535 U.S. 137 [2002]) ruled five to four that immigration law takes precedence over labor law. More specifically, the ruling held that because of the illegal status of undocumented workers, these workers were not able to turn to the U.S. courts and labor laws to seek back pay for lost wages after being illegally fired for union organizing. The combination of the Company Police Act and the Hoffman decision was lethal for U.S. meat and poultry workers. Undocumented workers were stripped of their rights, and the rights of other minority workers were further compromised. With immigration law trumping labor and human rights law, the floodgates for the intimidation of immigrant employees were opened. Recruiters went to great lengths, some of them illegal, to employ immigrant workers, and employment of undocumented workers in the meat and dairy industries increased.

In December 2000, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service raided a Nebraska Beef plant. More than two hundred workers were deported. In 2002, because all the witnesses had been deported, a federal judge dismissed the indictment of company managers and administrative staff for a criminal conspiracy to recruit and transport workers from Mexico after providing them with false documents to work at Nebraska Beef.³⁷

Using the Company Police Act of 1991, security forces at Smithfield Foods received “special police agency” status in 2000. On November 14–15, 2003, when immigrant workers protested the dismissal of coworkers by walking off the plant, they were assaulted and arrested by plant police. The case went to trial in September 2004. The packing company police and guards were found to have “physically assaulted employees exercising their rights” and to have “threatened employees with arrest by federal immigration authorities.”³⁸

As studies have shown, an added benefit for companies who use immigrant labor is that these workers tend to underreport injuries and work-related illnesses because of “language barriers, workers’ fear of losing their jobs, workers’ concerns about immigration status, incentive programs that reward low rates of absenteeism, and lack of access to health care.”³⁹ However, for even those workers who want to seek out medical advice, there is the added problem of geographical isolation. Health-care resources are already stretched thin in rural areas. Rural social services are placed under further strain when there is an influx of new residents; many speak English as a second language.

By isolating the labor force in rural areas and employing minority workers, the industry broke the strong arm of the meatpackers’ union. Employing workers from minority groups made for a more compliant workforce that was less likely to collectivize, complain, or quit their job. In this way, capital had overcome another serious barrier: the right of workers to collectivize and petition their employees for improved wages and working conditions. From here on, the market, not unions or government policy, set the wages of workers in the U.S. meat and dairy industries.

During the 1970s, domestic and international sales of U.S. farm products were booming. From 1970 to 1973, net farm income grew from $14.4 billion to $34.4 billion.⁴⁰ Trade barriers had been lowered, and the USSR was buying up U.S. grain. The sector needed to increase productivity and was encouraged to modernize and become more efficient. To meet growing demand and remain competitive, farmers borrowed heavily, speculating that their revenues would remain strong. But alarm bells were sounding on rural America’s horizon. In addition to the debt farmers took on, they paid inflated prices for land. From 1957 to 1977, the average per acre price of farmland grew 364 percent.⁴¹ After the restrictions on Federal Land Bank lending were lifted, a long period of upward growth in U.S. land prices ensued, attracting the attention of investors until a speculative bubble emerged (not dissimilar to the real-estate bubble that led to the economic meltdown in 2007).

The situation changed as demand for and the cost of U.S. farm products declined. On January 4, 1980, President Jimmy Carter embargoed U.S. grain products to the Soviet Union as a putative measure following the USSR’s military occupation of Afghanistan in December 1979. The global recession from 1981 to 1982 hurt the U.S. farm-export industry as agricultural exports fell 20 percent from 1981 to 1983. As a result, farm income fell. When interest rates rose, farmers were left with high loan repayments, and farm foreclosures grew. Faced with financial ruin, U.S. farm communities were hit hard, as attested to by the rising rates of divorce, alcoholism, and child abuse.⁴² The end result was what is now referred to as the “U.S. farm crisis” of the 1980s.

Farm foreclosures hit small farmers hardest, providing fertile ground for larger investors to capitalize off their hardship. Farmers were either driven from their land or forced to consolidate. This vertical integration of the food system changed farmers from independent operators and an important ingredient in the local food system and economy into passive subjects more dependent on the global market and contract farming.

Because dairy, hog, and poultry farming is capital intensive, most of this sector is leveraged. And one of the main reasons why farmers seek debt financing is to purchase real estate, which includes building, livestock, poultry, and grove development. In 2007, three-fifths of farmer debt were for real estate, with financing operational costs, machinery, and equipment following close behind. After a $26 billion increase, for 2007 total U.S. farm debt reached $240 billion. Interestingly, the number of farms using debt financing that year had fallen to 31 percent from 60 percent in 1986, but the debt in question was more “concentrated in fewer, larger farm businesses,” which seems to support my thesis that along with vertical integration comes individual farmer debt accumulation.⁴³

Another hurdle for capital came from the material limits of the reproductive body. As such, today the sex life of animals raised for food has been reduced to data, outputs, and statistics. Lactation, weaning, sex, pregnancy, birth, and the vital combination of energies, affects, and fluids have been transformed into an informational body whose material processes are mediated by capital. Put differently, the effects (offspring, food, and so on) and processes (care, mothering, nurture, and feeding) of intimacy have been placed in the service of capital accumulation. In this regard, the feminization of labor that Hardt and Negri identify in their analysis of the biopolitics of capital and the technical composition of labor specific to this phenomenon stretches across species.⁴⁴

Breeding-management programs keep detailed and timely records of animals’ reproductive cycles. In the move to make reproduction more efficient, there has been a shift away from “natural” to “artificial” reproductive technologies. In other words, surplus value arises from the biopolitical economy of immaterial labor as affects, semen, and knowledge work in tandem with the commodification of intimacy.⁴⁵ Artificial insemination has become a popular breeding-management technique. Sows can be artificially inseminated with semen collected from boars trained to mount an artificial sow. This system produces more uniform pigs and lowers production costs because fewer boars are used. In comparison to the old system, where all sows in heat were moved to an area where they were impregnated by the boars, artificial insemination takes less time. If the system is managed carefully, conception rates improve and resulting farrowing rates (birth of piglets) are strengthened when sows are artificially inseminated.

The management of the reproductive cycle does not end here. During the final stages of gestation and sometimes for her whole pregnancy (approximately 115 days), the sow is contained in a farrowing crate, and then once she gives birth, she is confined there until her piglets are weaned. Slightly longer and wider than the sow, a farrowing crate severely restricts her movements (she basically cannot turn around), which leads to muscular and joint weaknesses and sooner or later impaired mobility. Denied her innate behaviors, such as rooting and nesting, she suffers from chronic depression and frustration and develops behavioral disorders such as stereotypies (obsessive compulsive behavior) as a way to cope. The piglets access her breasts from a slatted floor, through which their feces and urine can pass outside the mother’s crate. Apart from higher rates of piglet survival (the restricted movement stops the mother from lying on the piglets), another reason why farrowing crates are used is to maximize the use of space.

In 2000, U.S. milk production had increased 45 percent since 1975.⁴⁶ Statistics show that just for the month of August in 2010, milk production in twenty-three major U.S. states totaled 15 billion pounds, and the milk produced per cow averaged 1,796 pounds.⁴⁷ Large-scale production of this kind is possible only because of widespread neoliberal structural adjustments to the animal agricultural industry. In place of the old farm model, where there were a variety of animal species and crops grown, today farmers have been forced to specialize their production. Measures have been introduced in order to improve efficiency (less labor), production, and output. They involve replacing laboring bodies (humans and animals) with new machinery and equipment such as milking machines, waste-handling equipment, and advances in milk storage and refrigeration, as well as with pharmaceuticals such as recombinant bovine somatotropin hormone treatment,⁴⁸ which is used to increase milk production, and new designs for animal “housing” and new feed systems.

Animals that are too old to reproduce and lactate are typically sent to the slaughterhouse, but with advances in scientific research the natural limits of the reproductive cycle are made more productive. In 1996, scientists produced the first cloned mammal—Dolly the sheep—a method that allows the limits set by the life cycle to be extended.⁴⁹ In 2001, a group of scientists under the leadership of Steve Stice from the University of Georgia at Athens used the genetic makeup of a cow that had grown too old to reproduce to clone eight full-term calves. The Steve Stice Lab proudly announces under the heading “What’s Hot in the Stice Lab” on its Web site that it was the “first to produce a clone from an animal that had been dead for 48 hours,” highlighting that this procedure opens new opportunities not only for preserving endangered species, but also for developing agriculture as well.⁵⁰ Proudly showcasing its power to make life and let die, the lab proclaims that it has produced fifty cloned calves and one hundred cloned pigs this way.

That said, cloning has a low success rate because many cloned animals suffer from immune deficiencies or organ failure. Further, as noted by S. M. Willadsen and associates, cloning calves by nuclear transfer can lead to large calves. “Large-off-spring syndrome,” as this phenomenon is otherwise called, not only endangers the health of the cloned animal but also puts the surrogate mother at risk.⁵¹ Yet in January 2008 U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists issued a report that strangely prompted the FDA to conclude “that meat and milk from cow, pig, and goat clones and the offspring of any animal clones are as safe as food we eat every day.”⁵² Despite the FDA’s confidence, peer-reviewed research paints a more uncertain picture.⁵³

The new technologies, pharmaceuticals, and management systems used in animal agriculture are the direct outcome of neoliberal research and development policies extending back to the early 1980s. The 1980 Bayh–Dole Act (Pub. L. 96-517, Patent and Trademarks Act Amendments), introduced during the Reagan administration, facilitated strong alliances between academia and commercial sectors.⁵⁴ In this way, the democratic potential of science—science by and for the people—was privatized. It is no surprise that Stice juggles two roles, one as a public researcher in a public institution and the other as an entrepreneur. Fifty-one percent of his time is as a scientist at the University of Georgia, a public higher-education institution, and 49 percent with ProLinia, a biotechnology company established in 2003.⁵⁵ Bayh–Dole expedited the commercialization of federally funded university research.⁵⁶

As the public sector–private sector alliance prospered, so too did a high-risk investment culture, both of which were in turn supported by neoliberal forces that had created a deregulated and finance driven economy that fed the alliance with investment capital. Massachusetts biotechnology firm Advanced Cell Technology Inc. speculated in 2001 that the market for cloned dairy cows and beef cattle might reach $1 billion. Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest hog producer and processor, entered into a Technology Development Agreement with ProLinia Inc. in 2000 after providing the biotechnology company with an equity investment of $1 million in support of research and development into cloning pigs.⁵⁷ The agreement sought to “commercialize ProLinia’s cloning technology by arranging for ProLinia to provide cloned embryos from Smithfield’s elite genetics for implantation into sows for gestation” as well as to develop “an embryo transfer Standard Operating Procedure” that would meet “industry biosecurity standards.”⁵⁸

On June 30, 2003, ViaGen Inc. announced it had purchased ProLinia along with its contract with Smithfield Foods and its scientific talent, intellectual property, and nonexclusive license to use nuclear-transfer technology (used in animal cloning) for agricultural purposes. ViaGen provides genomics and assisted breeding services and products to the animal agriculture industry. Excitedly commenting on the acquisition, ViaGen’s cofounder and president Scott Davis stated: “In the biotech business, it’s rare to find a single company that allows you to significantly boost your cash flow, fortify your scientific team and gain access to patent rights in one fell swoop. Acquiring ProLinia brings us all of these things.”⁵⁹

A decrease in or stabilization of demand can cause chronic problems for capital. If capital is value in motion, as Marx described it in the Grundrisse, then demand is a key ingredient to keeping it moving. Without demand, capital quickly comes to a screaming halt. Two factors influencing demand of animal products are the basic calorie needs of any individual body and changes in consumers’ purchasing habits (opting for other products).

In 2002, Americans spent approximately $115 billion on fast food. At the same time, more than 60 percent of adults and 13 percent of children in America were classified as overweight or obese.⁶⁰ This situation cannot be solved through more exercise, greater self-control, or working mothers’ rediscovering the kitchen again. There are other factors, such as the food deserts throughout poor urban neighborhoods, where only fast food is readily available; the cost of fresh produce as compared to cheap high-calorie food products sold by fast-food outlets, which offer larger portions at lower prices; as well as the aggressive marketing of high-fat food to America’s youth through gimmicks such as toys at McDonalds or as part of the U.S. School Lunch Program for poor students.⁶¹ Studies show that food with high sugar or fat content or both is highly addictive.

Not only is fast food unhealthy, but the marriage between technology, knowledge, and food production sometimes makes for a lethal combination. In 1993, Jack in the Box hamburgers were contaminated with an Escherichia coli strain that resulted in the death of four children and food-borne illness in 750 people. In 1999, after failing the U.S. Department of Agriculture Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point Systems test three times in just eight months, Texas-based meat processor and grinder Supreme Beef Inc. was forced to shut down its operations. One test showed nearly 50 percent of its beef was contaminated with salmonella. The company responded by filing suit against the Department of Agriculture in federal court. What resulted was a series of court cases that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Supreme Beef when the company argued that salmonella is a natural substance and therefore not subject to government regulation and that it is harmless if meat is properly cooked.⁶²

In 2002, ConAgra recalled 19 million pounds of beef from its processing facility in Colorado after E. coli was discovered in the meat. Today the E. coli problem is being solved by injecting meat with ammonia. More recently, in 2010, Purdue recalled more than 90,000 pounds of frozen chicken nuggets after traces of blue plastic were discovered in the meat.⁶³ Also in 2010, more than 550 million eggs were recalled after 2,000 people became ill from salmonella.⁶⁴

On the one hand, the body has a limit to the number of calories it needs on a daily basis. However, food products with high sugar and fat content overcome the material limit of daily calorie intake by making food addictive and by dulling the innate inclination toward consuming healthy food. Demand also goes into crisis when consumers no longer trust the quality of the food they buy. Michael Pollan succinctly notes: “A diet based on quantity rather than quality has ushered a new creature onto the world stage: the human being who manages to be both overfed and undernourished.”⁶⁵ Or as Raj Patel points out in Stuffed and Starved, the global system of food production and distribution has produced the alarming paradox of 800 million starving and 1 billion obese.⁶⁶ It is this contradiction that prompted Patel to conduct a compelling critique of the mechanisms of the free market, later going on to argue in The Value of Nothing that there is a real disconnect occurring between the price of food and value. He succinctly summarizes the problem with the following conundrum: if we factor in the human and ecological costs of producing a hamburger, then the real cost of a hamburger would be more in the vicinity of $200.⁶⁷

As frightened animals enter the slaughter process, they understandably kick, bite, shit, and collapse, and their muscles go into spasms. Meanwhile, human male bodies are put to work beating, shooting, stabbing, stunning, and slashing large, heavy, struggling animal bodies. Human female bodies work at quickly deboning, gutting, slicing, and boxing smaller dead animals; they are sexually harassed by male supervisors; and some miscarry on the production line because bathroom breaks are strictly limited.⁶⁸ In this context, men, women, and other-than-human animals equally urinate, excrete, and vomit. Bodies develop rashes; they ache, bleed, swell and are soiled, deafened, bruised, broken, and maimed. They are transformed and modified by high-fat and sugar diets and injected with bovine hormones. And the list continues.

These graphic descriptions highlight the political organization of material life: biopolitics. As capital organizes bodily affects, it is also a gendering, racializing (using immigrant labor), impoverishing (deskilling the labor force), and speciesizing process. Sociocultural norms of masculinity—strong, powerful, impenetrable, and muscular—distribute male bodies across the slaughterhouse floor. Sociocultural norms of femininity—detail oriented, patient, and careful—similarly organize female bodies along poultry assembly lines making precise rapid cuts.⁶⁹ Legislation inscribes bodies along racial lines and according to citizenship status, facilitating the exploitation of undocumented immigrant bodies. Bodies are put to work consuming the fatty, sugary, antibiotic-laden products of animal pharm, whose addictive properties transform the body’s psychic and physical makeup.⁷⁰ The breasts of female animals are hooked up to milking machines, their bodies are pumped with hormones so that they lactate excessively, leading to crippling pain as a result of chronic mastitis. The lives of other female animals are reduced to their reproductive functions, living an endless cycle of pregnancy, birthing, and feeding without ever experiencing intimacy with their fellow animals.

Capital organizes bodies into consistent subjects along the lines of class, race, gender, citizenship, or species. Capital spatially distributes these bodily organizations by inserting them into different locations: the slaughterhouse floor, the meatpacking conveyor belt, the feedlot, the farrowing crate, the isolated or impoverished setting of rural communities. When these elements are taken together, the entire system consumes 30 percent of the planet’s land surface.⁷¹ Through a process that distributes, manages, and organizes the sensible field of material life, the unpredictable nature of bodies is rendered habitual.

As Elizabeth Grosz has consistently argued in her work on feminist corporeality,⁷² bodily matter is a lively combination of organs, flesh, nerves, liquids, and bones, and as these elements form connections over time, they affect and are affected by their milieu. From here, habits form, memories take hold, and libidinal energies set into play a variety of material combinations. Throughout the animal–industrial complex, this organization and distribution of corporeal processes that make up the spatiotemporal configuration of the commons is mediated by capital to further capital accumulation. This is the biopolitical economy of capital. As Hardt and Negri assert, the “distinctive feature” of this kind of affective labor is that “paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of life.”⁷³

People’s attempt to solve the problem that livestock production poses for climate and environmental change—including land-use changes from deforestation to pasture degradation; excessive water usage; the production of 37 percent of anthropocentric methane gas, which has twenty-three times the global-warming potential of CO₂, not to mention ammonia emissions and nitrous oxide pollution—by advocating that livestock and agricultural production be further intensified but at the same time arguing for cultural changes in individual dietary choices seems to be putting the identity politics of vegetarianism and veganism to work for the wrong reasons. In fact, I fear that the political integrity of vegetarianism and veganism is being completely co-opted by the neoliberal principle of individual choice to further the biopolitical economy and the privatization processes of the free market, all the while masking the violence endemic to the livestock industry.