Means of Production with Minds of Their Own: Food Animals, Abstract Labour and Surplus Value

This article critically examines the role of nonhuman animals in capital accumulation, with a particular focus on food animals in capitalist agriculture. Addressing debates at the intersection of Marxism and animal studies on the nature of ‘animal work’, it challenges the view that Marx’s analysis of capital accumulation is anthropocentric and rejects pseudo-Marxist reworkings of value theory which posit food animal ‘labour’ as a source of surplus value. It argues instead that whilst animals perform concrete work, producing use values which are appropriated by capital on a vast scale, this work is not rendered abstract labour and therefore does not generate surplus value. The article proposes an alternative three-fold framework for understanding food animals under capitalism: as sentient raw materials, as living instruments of labour, and as commodities in social reproduction. In this way it traces how the bio-physical work of animals is used both to increase the productivity and to reduce the value of abstract labour, which thus mediates surplus value extraction. It concludes with some preliminary reflections on the implications for socialist animal politics.