The Dairy Cow Labour Process: Notes from Marx’s Value Theory

Building upon the impulses in Deidre Wicks’ 2018 essay, ‘Demystifying Dairy’, this essay describes the labour of dairy cows from the standpoint of Marx’s labour value theory. I will firstly discuss current scholarship on animal labour, and its applicability to dairy cow labour, drawing in particular from my book Animals and Capital. I will discuss Marx’s concepts of absolute and relative surplus value, and their application to understanding the future evolution of industrial dairy farms which aim to make dairy cow labour ‘more efficient’ through a focus on reproductive efficiency, yield, and lifespan. As I describe, these processes place the lives of dairy cow labours constantly in relation to the threshold of death, as a condition of production.