In hisprincipal work, »Capital«, Marx defines »exploitation« as the appropriation bycapitalists of the surplus value produced by human wage workers. Animals arenot wage workers and do not produce surplus value. Is it therefore evenpossible to speak of »animal exploitation«?
Of courseit is! Marx uses the term »exploitation« in various other ways. It can express,for example, his political and moral denunciation of particularly brutaleconomic conditions. He also uses it to refer to relationships between groupsof capitalists. He evenidentifies »the planned exploitation of the soil« (Capital, Vol.1, 1976, p. 929) as afeature of societies with a capitalist mode of production. In otherwords, nowhere in his writings does Marx reduce the word »exploitation« to theappropriation by business owners of the surplus value created by human wageworkers in economic production.
Thedecisive consideration that leads us to use the term »animal exploitation« isthe fact that in bourgeois societies animals are used in the economy to producecommodities and for the accumulation of capital—for example, in the productionof meat, milk or research findings. In this context »exploitation« refers tothe specifically capitalist form of appropriation of the labour, body and lifeof animal individuals by profit-oriented companies.
However,animal exploitation is fundamentally different from the exploitation of theproletariat, which is based on the relationship between capitalists and humanwage workers. Unlike the latter, animals are not politically »free«. They donot sell their labour power as a commodity on the market, and thus their workis not value-creating labour. Instead, within capitalism animals areprivately-owned means of production.
We alsodistinguish capital’s economic »exploitation« of animals from political»domination« over animals through direct violence and by use of »civil«, i.e.political and cultural, means (laws, norms, ideas etc.). The former is thebasis of the latter. Capitalists subject animals to violence, for example inmeat production, not primarily because animals are animals, or because the meatindustry is run by people who enjoy exercising power over animals, but becauseprofitable meat production necessitates violence.
Weuse the term »exploitation« in relation to animals not in order to expand orabandon the classical meaning, nor to confuse the various forms ofexploitation. Rather our intention is to clearly define these forms,distinguish them from one another, and understand how they interact. Based onsuch a theory of exploitation, it becomes clear that the subject of liberation(the human working class) must not only engage in struggle for itself, but alsofor the objects of liberation (primarily nature and animals).
