Animals always die when humans carry outagricultural activities. So, should we give up potato cultivation because Colorado potato beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) are inadvertently killed when the potatoes are harvested?
We hear objections like this onesurprisingly often, but that does not make them any less superficial. They areoften put forward by people who, if they are not just trying to justify theirown sausage consumption, are presumably able to distinguish between systematic, socially produced destruction on the one hand, and unintended harm on theother. The potato beetle argument doesn’t really aim at preventing the death ofthese small creatures, it rather serves an apologetic function: Because theindividual insect cannot always be saved, the meat industry should be allowedto exist.
The truth is that when humans work toproduce food, they necessarily enter into a »metabolic interaction«[Stoffwechsel] (Capital, Vol.1, p. 290) with nature. This occurs regardless ofwhether the work takes place in a capitalist society or in a liberated,communist one, and to some extent it is unavoidable that small animals areinadvertently killed in this process.
However, in capitalism the metabolicinteraction between humans and nature takes place under the direction of theruling class and is shaped according to the profit interests of that class.Every year, billions of animals are systematically appropriated as instrumentsand objects of labor in the capitalist production and exploitation process. Onfactory farms, during transport and in slaughterhouses, animals aresystematically made to suffer and die. Animals are also killed on a mass scaleoutside of the animal industry itself, for example as a result of the use ofagrochemicals to increase crop yields.
In short, there is a fundamental differencebetween unintended harm to small creatures, and animal exploitation andoppression on an industrial scale. To mention the inadvertent killing of potatobeetles in the same sentence as the capitalist production, exploitation andextermination of animals is purely ideological.
We, on the other hand, strive for a systemof agricultural production which will allow even unintentional harm to becontinuously minimized. So, on the path to a communist society, vegan organicfarming methods must be developed that regulate humanity’s metabolism withnature in such a way that the characteristics and reproductive needs of nature(including all animals) are taken into account to the greatest possible extent.
