Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel Copyright © 2024 Jishnu Guha-Majumdar This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 212–221. DOI: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 What Are Animals Worth? Jishnu Guha-Majumdar Review of: Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, Animals and Capital. Animalities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. xii + 316 pp. 3 b/w illus. £95.00 (hb). Jishnu Guha-Majumdar is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Butler University, Indianapolis, IN. Email: jguhamajumdar@butler.edu BOOk RevIew http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 Early on in Animals and Capital, Dinesh Wadiwel aptly notes that the text may be considered a sequel to The War Against Animals (2015). In that text, Wadiwel had decon- structed human-centred theorizations of war, sovereignty, and biopolitics. He demonstrated that one could not just “add and stir” animals into these categories, but that a consideration of non- human animal lives and deaths deepens and transforms our under- standing of those concepts. What The War Against Animals does for politics, Animals and Capital does for political economy. Wadiwel’s main task here is to illuminate the unique structural position that food animals occupy within capitalism. Doing so, he argues, has important ramifications for developing solidarity between food animals and marginalized humans that will strengthen both ani- mal advocacy and anti-capitalist praxis. Animals and Capital joins a growing literature that theorizes the rela- tionship between capitalism and what Wadiwel calls hierarchal an- thropocentrism. But Animals and Capital is unique in its pursuit of a comprehensive and systematic critique of (anthropocentric) political economy, as well as its theorization of food animals’ role in the pro- duction of capitalist value. By “systematic critique of political econ- omy”, I mean that Wadiwel’s primary purpose is not to do political economy per se — though he does to a substantive degree — but to transform anthropocentric understandings of the categories of po- litical economic analysis. By focusing on “capitalist value”, I refer to how Wadiwel interrogates the way capitalism uses nonhuman ani- mals to meet its primary drive: the production of surplus value. Food animals illuminate how the value-production under capitalism pro- ceeds in new and crucial ways that Marx and anthropocentric Marx- ists have not adequately theorized. As he puts it in Chapter 1, “[t]he question that has been missing is about value. Exactly how are ani- mals valuable to capitalism? Why have they been sought after as ob- jects of use value? And how does this value dictate and shape their relation to capital” (28)? Another way of thinking about Wadiwel’s approach is through a phrase that kept recurring to me as I read: Animals and Capital is Copyright © 2024 Jishnu Guha-Majumdar This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 211–221. DOI: 10.52537/humanimalia.19680 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19680 Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel | 213 Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) something like a preliminary Das Kapital for food animal production. Wadiwel takes up the critical tools bequeathed by Marx’s later work in order to take the spirit of Capital beyond itself. The result is a work that is extremely clarifying for understanding the path that anthropocen- tric domination has taken over the last century, and more importantly, opens up worthwhile further questions and avenues for analysis. In this review I want to explore Animals and Capital by dividing it into three parts: first, the Preface and first two chapters, which set up the basic methodological presuppositions for the rest of the text; then the middle chapters, in which Wadiwel performs his critique of po- litical economy with respect to the titular concepts. These are the heart of the text, in my view. Finally, I will focus on the shorter last chapter, where Wadiwel speculates on the political trajectory that his analysis may lead animal advocates towards. I will summarize each part and then critically engage with Wadiwel’s insights, focus- ing especially on his reconceptualization of labour and resistance and the political implications of his analysis. Methodology and Key Concepts The Preface frames Wadiwel’s three intended interventions. First, that the problem animal advocates must address is not “specie- sism” — an arbitrary prejudice — but the material and ideological conjunction of “hierarchical anthropocentrism” and capitalism (vii). Second, advocates ought to focus as much attention on produc- tion as they do on consumption. Not only do factory farms manu- facture food animals at a scale never seen before in human history, but they also “produce” humanity biopolitically by literally providing sustenance for a growing mass of human labour. The book’s third intervention is to go beyond “commodification” and property sta- tus as the main frame for understanding anthropocentric domina- tion. While important, this frame does not capture what is central to food animal oppression insofar as capitalism constantly commodi- fies various forms of life and sentience, human and nonhuman. More essential is their unique structural position as food animals, cap- tured not only by the physical implements of captivity but the drag- net of capitalist valorization. Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 214 | Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel In Chapter 1, “Value”, Wadiwel defines his understanding of capital- ism, articulates the main value-forms food animals take on for capi- tal, and situates Animals and Capital among other literature on Marx and nonhuman beings. Wadiwel defines capitalism as “an organ- ism and mechanism that seeks to extract value and accumulate it in the form of capital: the latter comprising a social relation which is invested in its own continual accumulation” (8–9). This definition emphasizes that domination proceeds less from one group — capi- talists in and of themselves — than an impersonal, inhuman system that ceaselessly seeks to reorganize every form of life it contacts for the purposes of value creation. Under capital, food animals appear in three value-forms. First, as consumption commodities — food — that enable the reproduction of human labour forces. Second, as raw materials to be worked upon by the agricultural production process. Finally — and perhaps most importantly for Wadiwel — as labour. Nonhuman animals are active agents in the production process (a claim elaborated upon in Chap- ter 4, “Labour”). Indeed, they are perhaps the most “significant la- bour force of capitalism” (14, original emphasis) given the sheer num- bers of animals produced in factory farms. Wadiwel argues that this third prong distinguishes his account from many contemporary ap- proaches to theorizing capitalism and nonhumans — namely John Bellamy Foster’s defence of Marx, Jason Moore’s ecological reformu- lation of capitalism, and Ariel Salleh’s ecofeminist account of capi- talism. Despite their resonances with his approach, he suggests they still tend to conceptualize nonhuman animals as resources for, rather than agents of, production. Chapter 2, “Materialism”, works through three methodological in- spirations (besides Marx): new materialisms, Afropessimism, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of capitalism. Wadiwel appre- ciates how new materialist theories emphasize materiality beyond the borders of human sovereignty, but worries that its emphasis on a politics of affinity and pluralism is insufficient to theorize the food animals’ antagonistic relationship to capitalism. He thus draws on Frank Wilderson’s work to theorize this antagonism. The rest of Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel | 215 Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) Wadiwel’s work consistently weaves between these two tendencies, sometimes theorizing nonhuman animals as having important com- monalities and opportunities for solidarity with other social justice movements, and other times worrying that certain articulations of human emancipation entail intensifying animal domination. Wadi- wel then uses Deleuze and Guattari to put a finer point on the rela- tionship between hierarchical anthropocentrism and capital. Cap- ital works by “liberating” and intensifying certain flows and desires, which enables it to take on pre-existing relationships of domination and fundamentally transform them in an “intoxicated and frenzied way” (56). The Critique of Anthropocentric Political Economy In the middle section of the book, Wadiwel practices the critique of anthropocentric political economy that his prior chapters the- orize. Chapter 3, “Commodity”, takes up the first two of the afore- mentioned value-forms imposed on food animals: consumptive commodities and raw materials for production. Through a rather complicated and brilliant reading of a footnote in Capital, as well as key texts by Luce Irigaray, Wilderson, and Jacques Derrida, Wad- iwel shows that the food animal functions both as a material and symbolic commodity. In the traditional process of commodification, the commodity’s use value becomes abstracted from its exchange value, which is determined in relation to an economy of other ex- change-values. But in the case of the food animal commodity, this system of value exceeds the rigidly economic sphere as it also con- firms human superiority in a discursive economy of meaning. As Wadiwel puts it, “the exponential and frenzied circulation of ani- mal-sourced foods for human satisfaction and pleasure establishes a continuing mirror that allows humans to see themselves — sover- eign, victorious — in the corpses which are fabricated” (71). Whereas this aspect of commodification concerns nonhuman ani- mals’ role in production, Wadiwel also considers the consumptive side of animal commodification. Here, capitalism poses a unique problem for animal advocates, because it gives human labourers the false promise of freedom through spending their wages on consumer Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 216 | Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel goods, and especially animal products. Late capitalism’s regime of cheap food metabolically intertwines human populations with non- human animal death. This creates problems for consumption-fo- cused ethical veganism (though Wadiwel does support certain forms of political veganism), because animal products “are saturated by the promise of freedom and its necessity, so that it would seem that giv- ing up animal-sourced products becomes akin to a loss of world or death itself” (85). Animal advocates, then, must contend with food animals’ dual role as elements of production and consumption. Chapter 4, “Labour”, might be the most central of these middle chap- ters, robustly developing the concept of food animals’ “metabolic labour”. Drawing upon anthropologist Les Beldo and feminist the- orizations of gestational labour, Wadiwel posits that capital targets animals’ microbiological processes for ceaseless growth and value production. Food animals are a unique type of labourer because they are both constant capital (that which transfers but does not add new value to the product, like machinery or raw material) and var- iable capital (that which adds new value to the commodity). Wadi- wel doesn’t quite use these words, but food animal labour appears as the endpoint of capital’s dream of totally unhindered labour ex- ploitation — capital optimizes every part of the food animal’s body and life to enhance its microbiological processes. A second key inter- vention concerns the way Marxists have conceptualized capital. Un- derstanding animals as labourers complicates the inverse relation- ship that Marx posits between human labour time and fixed capital as technology advances. Instead, with factory farming’s technical advances, human labour consistently fades away, while nonhuman animal labour increases and faces an increasing mass of fixed capital. Chapter 5, “Circulation”, describes the maritime transport of live ani- mals to be slaughtered in increasingly globalized markets, highlight- ing an important but underexamined aspect of the industry. It is the most empirical chapter, and I found some of the “smaller” details about global animal markets to be quietly devastating: for example, that 5–10 percent of animals get pink eye from the dust produced by cheap animal feed (146), and that cows stand for the entire duration Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel | 217 Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) of globe-spanning voyages because they do not feel comfortable sit- ting down (159). At a conceptual level, Wadiwel shows that consider- ing nonhuman animals as active agents in the production process explains why markets have tended to rely on animals imported from other parts of the world: food animals continue to labour on them- selves, making their relative labour cost rather low. This insight pro- vides an exception to Marx’s general “law” that circulation disrupts the time of production; because the site of animal labour is within their own bodies, production continues even during circulation. Chapter 6, “Resistance”, uses fish production to examine a theme latent but unexplored in prior chapters: the role of food animal re- sistance in their own production as animal capital. Wadiwel argues that the question “Do fish resist?” offers political potential blocked by traditional questions of sentience and suffering. Resistance, he suggests, depends less on proving intrinsic animal capabilities, which are already epistemically shaped by the violent systems con- ditioning animal behaviour. Taking a page from the “operaist” ten- dency in Italian Marxism, he argues that capitalist technologies of production betray a belief in fish resistance. What else are the hook, the purse seine net, and aquaculture farms but efforts to master the resistance of fish? Though a seeming total domination of food animals, this state of affairs reveals the way that nonhuman agency structures our world, and holds out faith that this resistance is prior to and exceeds the systems of domination that seek to capture it. Labour and Resistance One more chapter of the text remains, but I pause here to reflect on the important insights of this middle part of the text. Among the many brilliant arguments from these chapters, Wadiwel’s develop- ment of “metabolic labour” seems most central. I welcome consid- eration of this concept as a point of discussion for further analysis of anthropocentric capitalism, but it also raises a number of ques- tions. What is “labour” such that it covers the typical image of human labour, the “macrobiological” labour of nonhuman animals (things animals do that interact with the external world), and, finally, inter- nal, “microbiological” metabolic processes that contribute to animal Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 218 | Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel growth? What is necessary to classify something as labour, and what are the stakes of that decision? Wadiwel does partly answer each of these issues, but these answers raise further questions. Regarding what makes something labour, Wadiwel suggests this is the wrong question. Instead of asking “Do animals labour?” he says that a better question “is something like: ‘What is the use value of animal labour power to capital?’” (98, em- phasis added). I do think the latter question is helpful, but it still seems that determining the use value of labour power depends on some prior discussion of what makes something labour. Concerning the second issue — the stakes of calling something labour — Wadi- wel makes clear in an earlier chapter that doing so emphasizes non- human animals as active, rather than passive, agents in production. While I am obviously sympathetic to this standpoint, it isn’t clear to me that emphasizing animals’ metabolic processes accomplishes this goal. That is, if food animals’ active, labouring contribution is the fact that their bodies try to survive and grow, that seems a far cry from the sorts of worldmaking agency that this agentic move usu- ally celebrates. Here, an application of the new materialist insights from Chapter 2 might have proved helpful. However, this invoca- tion would pose problems for the text’s goal to theorize the unique structural position of food animals; one might just as well point to the metabolic processes of plants as indications that they, too, are combinations of constant and variable capital. A related issue emerges with Wadiwel’s discussion of resistance. I do think a focus on animal resistance is crucial, and I welcome Wadiwel’s application of operaism. However, I don’t think that re- sistance fully avoids the difficulties of other capacities like suffer- ing. Wadiwel says that one of the advantages of the notion of re- sistance is that it avoids debates over whether nonhuman animals have this or that capacity or neurobiological substrate. But as he notes later on, it is just as possible to write off fish resistance as mere instinctive reaction. In this case, too, we are returned to de- bates about sentience and capacity, because these decide whether the resistance shown is actually resistance. Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel | 219 Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) What unites these considerations is the slipperiness of questions about nonhuman animal agency. One value that suffering has — though not necessarily in its welfarist or utilitarian iteration — is that it focuses on a vulnerability that, as Jacques Derrida puts it in The Animal that Therefore I Am (2008), is a form of impower rather than the types of power and capacity that, as Wadiwel rightly notes, get mired in epistemologies shaped by violence. To be clear, the pur- pose of these questions is not to suggest that the concept of meta- bolic labour or focusing on resistance is unhelpful, or that suffering is a panacaea. To the contrary, there is interesting potential in the concept, but as presented I think there is room for further discus- sion and conceptual development. Politics In the shorter last chapter, “Dreams”, Wadiwel turns to the politi- cal implications of his analysis. He does not aim to be too program- matic here, allowing space for readers to adapt his analysis for poli- tics on the ground. He splits his interventions into three categories: framing, tactics, and goals. At the level of framing, Wadiwel suggests that the key demand of pro-animal activists ought not be a mere re- duction in food animal suffering, but for animals to have their lives back. Additionally, he repeats his call for animal advocates to fo- cus on production and not solely consumption. At the level of tac- tics, Wadiwel argues that veganism does have an important political role, but many forms of consumerist, market-driven veganism are unlikely to alter capitalism’s structure of production. Finally, at the level of goals, Wadiwel considers how traditional communist figu- rations of a democratic ownership of the means of production may risk intensifying domination of nonhuman animals. Instead, human and nonhuman solidarity might be sought through the lens of re- claiming time, which would lead advocates to calling to an end to work altogether, thus following the path of anti-capitalists like An- tonio Negri and Kathi Weeks. I found myself mostly in agreement with what Wadiwel says, but his emphasis on pursuing production-oriented strategies raised a number of questions. Wadiwel does not deny the value of many Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 220 | Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel demand-side interventions, noting that production and consump- tion are intertwined, but he does not fully explain the character of this intertwinement at the level of political advocacy. I think the work would have benefitted from articulating the relationship between the production and consumption with more depth, as strategies concerning consumption will always be a part of the animal advo- cate’s repertoire. For all the limitations of consumption-oriented movements, they do appeal to a sphere where people have direct control (a point which Wadiwel does recognize). More generally, although Wadiwel does spend time outlining exam- ples of production-focused advocacy, I still came away not fully cer- tain of what this type of advocacy looks like in an everyday way. He does give two illuminating, current examples: one from the Yuin na- tion’s resistance to Kangaroo culling in Australia, and another from the Mexican anti-speciesist organization FaunAcción, both of which take seriously the conjunction of colonialism and capitalism. How- ever, the text presents these examples mostly through their decla- rations of intent. These are no doubt important, but it would seem that a shift to jamming production makes especially pertinent the process by which declaration is collectively transformed into effec- tive on-the-ground organizing. Another question raised by this chapter is the extent to which Wadiwel’s analysis supports two very prevalent — at least in the US — pro-animal strategies: rescue operations, like those from Di- rect Action Everywhere, that break into factory farms and expose the conditions of production; and “lab-grown” meat. The latter, I suspect, would be more controversial, given the corporations and level of capital involved. Pro-market lab-grown meat advo- cates endorse this strategy for the supply-side reasons as well, but they explicitly endorse the power of the market and large corpora- tions to make this technology a commonplace reality.1 On the other side some anti-capitalists are more optimistic about lab-grown meat, arguing that it is an urgent priority for the left to socialize its 1 Nathaniel Popper, “This Animal Activist Used to Get in Your Face. Now He’s Going Af- ter Your Palate”, New York Times 12 March 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/ technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html Guha-Majumdar, Review of Wadiwel | 221 Humanimalia 15.1 (2024) production.2 If Wadiwel is correct and the productive sphere is key, then this latter approach seems most consonant with his analysis, but he leaves this question open. I don’t think Wadiwel is obliged to provide definite answers to all these questions within the scope of his already wide-ranging work, and it is a mark of its strength that Animals and Capital pushes these conversations forward. It helpfully enables animal advocates to bet- ter map out modern structures of animal domination and provides them with important conceptual toolkits for navigating them. As such, I highly recommend this text and consider it essential reading both for animal advocates and for any critic of capitalism. Both An- imals and Capital and The War Against Animals magisterially diag- nose the distinct character of the modern anthropocentric domina- tion of nonhuman animals. Together, they make a strong case that all those interested in social justice struggles ought to be interested in the struggle for animal liberation as well (and vice versa). 2 Jan Dutkiewicz, “Socialize Lab Meat”, Jacobin 11 August 2019. https://jacobin.com/2019/08/ lab-meat-socialism-green-new-deal https://jacobin.com/2019/08/lab-meat-socialism-green-new-deal https://jacobin.com/2019/08/lab-meat-socialism-green-new-deal