The Animalization of the Proletariat

By Percy Gauguin - Species and Class, August 29, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The animalization of the dispossessed has been the very process by which the dispossessed became dispossessed. To reduce another to a bestial status is the establishment of supremacy over that other.

The condition of animality is essentially the lacking of humanity. The human who is treated as inferior is not fully human, and therefore lies somewhere between humanity and animality. This hierarchical mechanism is a form of predatory relations constituted within society, or the relations of nature transferred into social relations- not the reproduction of nature on social terrain, but the institution of a separate nature within society. This humanized nature, originating from nature but diverging from it, imposed itself upon ‘original’ nature and made it indistinct from it, thereby conflating human social relations with the natural order spontaneously arising between life forms in an idealized form. Animalization has been one of its underlying historical processes that has established inferiority and superiority between people, which then condensed the signification ‘animality’ as a distinct concept in opposition to ‘humanity’. This continual reproduction of animality throughout time has perpetuated the divide between humans and other species because humans themselves are divided into ‘social species’, or classes.

And so the species-relations between humanity and its livestock appear as the reflection of inter-human relations, reproduced in a distilled manner. The imperative of capital is to relegate each individual to the status of a meatbag which will generate, or at least not be an impediment to, profit. In the mass concentration of animals into bestial death camps proletarianization is reproduced in a very raw manner: the hyperexploited animal is merely a disposable unit situated in the accumulation of alienation. The hamburger fuels and provides alienated pleasure (e.g. McDonald’s) to those whose labor fuels the accumulation of capital and the even greater alienated pleasures of the capitalist class. The idea that animals suffer greatly under the industrial farm system is still extremely alien to many people, and oftentimes a matter of complete indifference and contempt. How can the proletariat’s proletariat become an object of solidarity when workers have no conception of even themselves? The pivot on which capitalism hinges is the individual ego that disregards all life that is situated beyond its egotistical view. The destruction of the slaughterhouse can never be accomplished within capitalism because capitalism is by nature always a world where the predatory instinct is sanctified.

What this double proletarianization points to, moreover, is that the proletariat consumes itself as it embodies the contradictions of capitalism within its own being. Through sanctioning the factory-farming of animals the industrial ontology of capitalism is itself sanctioned. The unquestioning devouring of meat no matter what sort of productive processes begot it belies an indifference to the very web of life. This is not a question that only intellectuals bother about in mindnumbing tomes that no one but other intellectuals read. The social and natural ecosystems which we are ceaselessly in communion with are becoming even more severed from us than they have ever been, and to blind oneself to their reality is to become a passive receptacle of capitalist civilization. Food cultivation- of both animals and plants- is undergoing a rapid transformation that is adhering increasingly to a nauseatingly capitalist logic. Our complacency with any type of diet is a complacency with the capitalist system- it is only because animals are alive that we place so much emphasis upon veganism and animal liberation.

But it is not our desire to replace meat-factories with colossal rice patties, and veganize the proletariat. To ‘veganize’ the proletariat would be almost to undo the ideology and practice of veganism altogether. It is the factory as an industrial category which we seek to destroy- because only meat, whether human or non-human, is herded into the factory, for the sole sake of one class over another. The insurrection against capitalism is an insurrection against classes, and the movement of communism is ultimately the championing of the individual within a free society. As long as class systems pervade humanity, the mass slaughter and subjugation of animals will always be a fundamentally class-based issue. Communization is the process which disentangles humanity from its countlessly false links and separates those who are willing to inflict pain on fellow beings and those who are not. The animalization of others in a revolutionary world can only be the action of individuals and groups, but within capitalism it is a systematic process that degrades and marks us all.