What would Marx say about factory farming?

Sometime in the last century pigs went from being raised on farms to being grown inside factories. In the process, pork production has become a heavily concentrated industry. In 1965, for example, there were 53 million pigs in the U.S. spread across 1 million farms; today there are 65 million pigs on only 65,000 sites. In Spain, where I live, there are 25 million pigs: that’s half a pig per person or, for jamón Serrano-loving Spaniards: 2 legs per persona.

The more pigs the better, you might say: “eat and be merry!” Fine, I appreciate the sentiment, however, the conditions under which pork is produced and the environmental and health consequences of large-scale, industrialized meat production ought to make you reconsider your earlier enthusiasm and flippancy. Not to mention human and animal rights abuses, and, of course, swine flu: just some of the high prices of cheap meat.

I won’t bother going into further detail, since other people have already done a wonderful job of denouncing conditions in the meat industry: If you haven’t read Eric Schlosser´s Fast Food Nation you’re in for a disgusting treat. This short but scathing comparison of capitalist pig production and the piggish production of capital, is also highly entertaining: Capitalist Pigs: what the Wall Street meltdown and swine flu have in common. For a thundering condemnation of human rights abuses in the meat industry, see this report by Human Rights Watch: Blood, Sweat, and Fear. If you need visual confirmation, there’s a new HBO documentary on the subject: Death on A Factory Farm, or check it out on youtube:

So, I’ve been reading Karl Marx’s Capital with David Harvey. It has a kind of all-consuming effect on you. I’ve begun to see just about everything through a Marxian lens: “hey! That’s just like when Marx says…” which is probably starting to piss people off, but it’s been a lot of fun and, dare I say it, rather illuminating. I don’t feel any smarter or smug and superior—on the contrary—, but I am beginning to feel kind of intellectually empowered: like the opposite of going to vote for the European parliament. Things take on new shades of meaning. Questions abound. A sort of grim satisfaction arises from your new-found ability to put your finger on the daily injustices of the world around you. There’s this fancy new word that shares a pleasing assonance with diapers: dialectics.

One of the questions that have been bouncing around my head recently:

If a pig lives on a farm we call it an animal, if a dog lives in a house we call it a pet, if a man lives in a concentration camp we call him a prisoner, what then do we call a pig who lives in a factory?

A worker?

Marx says that labour is the only commodity capable of producing more value than it consumes: If it only takes 5 hours for a worker to pay for himself, the rest of his time on the job—say another 5 hours—is spent making money for the capitalist. He only gets paid for 5, but he produces 10. The trick is to reduce the time it takes the labourer to pay for his upkeep, and therefore increase the time he spends producing profit for the capitalist—because we all know that cutting-back on his hours is completely out of the question.

There are lots of interesting ways to do this: you can reduce his cost of living (through agricultural subsidies, cheap meat and animal feed, corn starch, Wal-Mart and Chinese labour, “free” trade, publicly-funded health care,), you can increase his productivity; lengthen his work day, etc. This is how profit gets created for the capitalist: in the factory, not in the market.

And how do you make a profit in the factory? That’s right: by screwing labour.

Are pigs labour?

They certainly get screwed (which would seem to almost qualify them as labour under the above definition). But let’s extend the analogy a little further: How long does it take to prepare a pig for market? Really, I have no idea (which is in itself rather disturbing). But, let’s say 300 days. Okay, so the pig works 300 days. We will pay him, say, $2/day x 300 days = $600, not bad for a pig, assuming that this amount corresponds to the cost of the pig’s basic necessities of life. What are a pig’s basic necessities? Well, he needs a place to live (rent), some potato skins and maybe a carrot peel (food), and the same for his family (reproduction). Being a pig is a fairly low-skilled occupation, so we can save money on his education and eliminate his college fund entirely.

But wait: this pig is a modern worker. Not only does he now work in a factory, he also lives in the factory. He doesn’t need to pay—and hence be paid—for his housing anymore. The sty has been converted into just another element of the means of production because the boss has offered to put him and his family up in a handy stall at work—how convenient! Just like in those cosy Chinese garment factories! (Except the garment workers are charged rent to sleep above their sewing machines). We don’t need to pay him for his leisure time either; he no longer has leisure time! The post-modern pig works a double shift (24 hour day!), so you needn’t pay 2 pigs to do the job of 1, and there’s no sleeping on the job, no night and day, because the lights never go out! Moreover, the pig saves time and calories because he eats, shits and pisses in the same stall in which he sleeps and works. Now Mr. Piggy costs the capitalist less per cold cut, but he still produces a pig at the end of the day: productivity gain!

So, the pig takes a pay cut.

And more. He once lived in a pretty little patch of mud in the country, where he could happily roll in his own shit. Now, having taken up shop in the factory alongside 1,000 or more of his brethren, he only costs the capitalist half of the $600 he used to cost him. Accordingly, his new salary is only $300, or $1/day. There are a number of reasons for this: 1) economies of scale: it now takes the (human) labourers less time to feed the pigs because they’re jammed into one place, and pig feed for 1,000 pigs can be more cheaply supplied, etc. etc.; 2) co-operation and division of labour: the pregnant pigs make babies in the making babies cages, and the babies make adult pigs in the baby pig bins, the male adult pigs make pregnant pigs (from behind the lady pig cages), etc. What is more, the communal energy summoned by cooperation has raised our pig’s spirits to new heights of productivity.

So, we have already realized a certain amount of savings simply by relocating the pig from the farm to the factory; however, this cataclysmic event must now seem so remotely buried in his past as to have acquired a near mythical status in the mind of the pig: “the farm” as paradise lost.

Pig as product vs. pig as labour:

Now, suppose that $1/day—which represents his basic upkeep—instead of getting paid to him, gets accumulated in him in the form of fat and meat and blood: kind of a fucked-up version of Hansel and Gretel. Our “fattened calf” (piglet) becomes in this sense more like a product of labour than labour itself. This is exactly what happens to any other product produced by labour. Take a baseball bat. The bat costs $25 at Canadian Tire. That $25 represents the accumulated cost of the raw material (wood, varnish): $10 + a portion of the cost of the means of production (bat-making machine, and the factory in which it operates): $5 + the labour of making a bat: ($10) = $25: the total cost of the bat. If the labourer is only paid $5, then the profit is $5 on every bat.

It’s easy then to see the pig as a mere product. As a product, the pig has accumulated in it the value of the raw material (food), means of production (factory), and labour (feeding, hitting, and slicing) that goes into its production. As labour, on the other hand, it adds value to itself by eating, breathing, shitting, sleeping, growing, etc. Now, if you can reduce the cost of some of these activities and begin to pay him only $.85/day instead of $1/day, you can begin to squeeze even more surplus value out of him. As we have seen with mad cow disease, it is possible to reduce the cost of feeding the poor fuckers even further by feeding them themselves (pigs in the pig feed), a pleasingly holistic cycle of food production. Of course, this is supposed to be illegal in America. But American pigs, like Volkswagens, are now being made in Mexico. Are, as Orwell suggests, some pigs more equal than others? It’s even easier to exploit Mexican pigs than American pigs, especially if the factory is in Mexico.

In a sense then, the pig is both product and labour: it both produces and is produced, has labour added to and accumulated in it, and adds value to itself.

Pork, on the other hand, is clearly a product; however, as a meat product—especially when it is carved up and sold in little Styrofoam trays at the supermarket—it is only the dead version, the carved-up incarnation of a once living thing: a pig. The animal is the process and the meat is the product; the pig in the factory is merely a living corpse: a breathing (whole) premonition of its final (butchered) product.

But, can products have rights? Is it possible to improve the working conditions of products? If you can treat an animal as a product can you treat a human as an animal? Do the workers who see the pigs lined up in their stalls recognize themselves in their porcine comrades? Do they see how their bodies have been turned into machines, how the pig, like the worker that is made into a mere appendage or organ of his tool, fixed at his workstation, mechanically reproducing his motions all day long at the mercy of the rhythm of his machine, has been dehumanized, even deanimalized?

We don’t see the pig at work, just the pork loin at the supermarket, like our clothes or our shoes, or any other product we purchase; we don’t know if this pig was a well-paid unionized worker or modern day slave toiling away in some Mexican factory for $.30 a day. It’s a significant problem, as my friend Dave pointed out: if we were forced to stomach the gruesome reality of a modern day pig farm on a daily basis, fewer of us would tolerate the continued dehumanization of labour and of animals. This distance between our food and its production has allowed us to commit untold atrocities both on the factory floor and on the ground in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo: the violent disconnect between the slaughterhouse and the dinner table is eerily re-enacted between the soldiers on the ground and on our television screens, between the bombs dropped from 30,000 feet and the horrible result 30,000 feet below.

Pigs—cheap pigs—are fundamental in feeding workers cheaply, and therefore in keeping wages low and profits high—until, of course, we realize that none of our workers can afford any longer to buy our products and we have to lend them heaps of money to keep the whole system going. Pigs, in a uniquely labour-like way, not only create value; they increase the productivity and lower the cost of the human labour working upon them and consuming them later at home in front of the television.

So, it’s not as simple as: we get cheap pork; the pig gets screwed. Cheap pork means cheap labour, which means more money for the capitalist. In other words: pig gets screwed; labour gets screwed.

The Bologna Process: repression and police brutality

If you don´t know what the Bologna Process is check out this website: Bologna Process Official Page. This website gives quite a good, succinct summary of the project to create a European Higher Education Area. I´ve attached some links below to some videos of recent anti-Bologna protests in Spain and the police response, as well as my take on it all (I think it´s BAD).

Owen.

There has been considerable criticism of the Bologna Process in Spain, which many consider to be an attack on the traditional conception of the university as an independent space of free and disinterested learning. Bologna is presented as a plan to increase student and graduate mobility by harmonizing degrees across Europe, which will require restructuring of degrees in Spain along the lines of the N. American system. It´s difficult to argue with more mobility and access to jobs across Europe (nobody does), and this is entirely the point: the Anti-Bologna movement does not disagree in principle with these ideas, rather in the manner of their implementation and the deeper institutional changes that they mask.

In reality, Bologna is an attack on the university as we (well, Spaniards anyway) know it; a sneaky attempt at privatization. The result will be a larger, more malleable European workforce, pumped out by universities that will no longer be at the service of society´s needs but the narrow economic interests of big business and the multinationals that will soon control them. Rising tuition costs and the steady marginalization of the humanities will only be the first and most obvious of the changes to come. The result will be an ever more integrated and precarious wage slave-force incapable of criticizing its own enslavement. That´s the idea, anyway.

The students and other citizens who are clear-eyed and courageous enough to see this and demand that it stop have given us considerable hope as well as ample evidence of the lengths to which this democracy will go in order to stifle dissent.

The links to videos of recent demonstrations attached below show students being ejected from university campuses, beaten, and detained by police. There is a video of a demonstration in which numerous journalists and other innocent bystanders were injured by the police. Predictably, the Bologna process has received poor coverage in the media, with explanations being short and vague, emphasizing hostility between university administrators and students without really explaining what the process implies. The media´s superficial treatment of the Bologna Process and the police´s harsh treatment of protesters should prove instructive when asking yourself which side of the struggle you are on. What could be so scary as to justify beating students off the grounds of their own university?

This link to ANECA (National Agency of Quality Assessment and Accreditation) explains the Bologna process nicely from the perspective of those charged with supervising the conversion of the Spanish university into a private enterprise, of students into "clients"-- Bologna directly from the horse´s mouth, as it were. See also this link to the LOU http://www.aneca.es/ingles/docs/lou_eng.pdf: the 2002 Spanish law that officially initiated the Bologna process in Spain and created the ANECA. You´ll have to sift through a fair bit of neoliberal jargon to get the point. Just remember: flexibility is precarity, competitiveness is insecurity, knowledge is ignorance. http://www.aneca.es/

Videos & Images:

La Rambla, Barcelona. Journalist, mother and 10 year old child not involved in protest attacked by police:


Students being thrown off campus of U. of Barcelona 18 March:

Protest against police brutality (80 wounded, including reporters, ie. the guy with the black bloody eye, and police):


Students being ejected from Palau Robert campus:

Demonstration against the police violence directed at journalists and photos of University of Barcelona protestors being beaten off the campus: http://www.publico.es/espana/210743/13/desalojo/palos/anti/bolonia

Some questions to consider:

-Is it possible for universities in different European countries to satisfy the demands of a continental capitalist economy (i.e. made-to-order workers) by adopting a homogeneous educational model, without sacrificing their own unique character, and while at the same time fulfilling their own society´s specific needs? Is it even desirable?

-Mobility for whom? Roughly 1% (150,000) of European students take part in the Erasmus exchange program every year. This is a significant but very limited chunk of the population. You might ask yourself how many students can afford to go abroad for a year, which students tend to be selected (usually those with decent marks)? Which students get the best marks in Spain? Usually the ones who can afford to have gone to private schools. Now, imagine that tuition rises significantly, and you can see the pool of potential Erasmus participants rapidly shrinking. If we expand our circle a little bit and think of all the people living precariously (usually illegally) in Europe and those who are prevented from even entering, we begin to see that mobility quickly losses significance when the term is a little more generously applied. This is, of course, assuming that mobility is really intended for students and not the workers they will become, either forced into jobs abroad or among the privileged few who will be able to move across Europe according to the demands of business.

-Mobility for what purpose? Aside from second language acquisition, the Erasmus program has been touted as a culturally-enriching experience that opens new perspectives for students and exposes them to different educational systems. If we adopt a universal, increasingly centralized and privatized university model, one of the more convincing arguments for mobility will have been eliminated. Erasmus will further degenerate into an international frat party for the privileged few.

-Is Bologna really necessary to increase mobility? Does it even have anything to do with mobility, or is this just a cover? Would mobility not be more meaningful in the context of a rich variety of European education systems and in a society that does not deny mobility to some while granting it to the privileged few?

-What is a university? Where did it come from, where should it go? Should its main purpose and function be to produce workers? Should it be wedded to or protected from private interest?

D.M.R. Bentley´s discussion paper´s on the nature of the university and the function of the humanities: http://www.canadianpoetry.ca/discussion_papers.htm

And for those of you who can read Spanish:

http://www.noabolonia.org/

Dossier informativo sobre el proceso de Bolonia:
http://pdfmenot.com/store_local/eeff88ad73e58833091e09af5c11bfdb.pdf

letter to the editor published in March 7 edition of the Toronto Star

thestar.com / Opinion / Threat or legitimate free speech?

Source: www.thestar.com

"For civility to mean anything it must apply in all universities, including those in Palestine and Israel, as well as our own privileged academic enclaves."

Of course they edited this key sentence out of my letter, but I suppose this shouldn´t surprise me: normally The Star doesn´t even publish my online comments, let alone letters to the editor in print. Unfortunately, by removing that line (which obviously hit just a little too close to the bone) they subtly divert the emphasis away from my criticism of the empty rhetoric of "civility" and "security" on Canadian campuses, to my indignation over general slandering of protestors. Bastards.

The full text of my letter to the editor:

The protests sweeping global campuses are a response to Israel's recent invasion of Gaza and its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. It's not about "student security and campus civility." What space can there be for Palestinian civility when their universities are closed or cut off by checkpoints, settlements or the creeping wall enclosing their land; when they are destroyed by Israeli missiles, their students killed and their civil and human rights daily curtailed?

For civility to mean anything it must apply in all universities, including those in Palestine and Israel, as well as our own privileged academic enclaves. Diverting the issue from the Israeli occupation, and urging professors to teach their students that the real issue is security and civility on campuses, makes a mockery of your idea of engagement. Obviously, violence has no place on campuses, which is why the great majority of activists opt for non-violent forms of protest. Lumping thousands of conscientious activists together with a few racists and hotheads by only mentioning "radical student hooligans" is unfair. If it's true that day after day we read about aggressive student protesters, maybe it is because they are angry; they certainly have every right to be.

Palestinians do not need to "try equating Israel with the now-defunct racist South African apartheid regime." Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and other prominent activists have already let us know that life under Israeli apartheid is much worse.

Owen Rafferty, Toronto

letter to the editor

Re: Canada´s Lone Gaza Vote
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/570481

By insisting on balancing our censure of Palestinian and Israeli actions, we contribute to the impression that this is a conflict between two more or less evenly matched states who share similar levels of responsibility for the ongoing violence. This is patently not the case. The Palestinians are stateless; they have been suffering under an illegal blockade for months, subject to abuse and interrogation by Israeli soldiers. To pretend that Israel invaded Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks is either extremely naïve or an outright lie. Israel has been slowly squeezing the life out of the Palestinian territories; this invasion is merely the latest and most violent example of an ongoing genocide.

The Star´s defense of Canada´s shameful vote against a UN resolution that condemned Israeli for aggression in Gaza, human rights violations, and targeting civilians, is pathetic. What else do you call it? We are witnessing the massacre of a captive civilian population. It is not a war, or a conflict as it is sometimes called, between two legitimate aggressors. If that were the case, Hamas would be justified in launching rockets at Israel; we would call these attacks self defense and not “terrorism”. Nor is it the selective assassination of Hamas political and military targets, as if murdering soldiers and politicians in another country could ever be justifiable, less still when their children and neighbours die in those attacks. The Israeli invasion of Gaza is state terrorism; it should be unequivocally condemned.

email exchange and statement re: Palestine

There are 3 separate articles in this post, taken from some emails exchanged with a friend of mine. They follow below in chronological order.

This is from a group email I sent on January 4, 2009:

Dear Friends,

We are told that the latest attacks on Gaza are perhaps "disproportionate" (Toronto Star), but that Israel has a right to defend itself, provoked as it was by Palestinian (Hamas) rocket attacks which broke a year-long ceasefire, that the attacks were directed at military targets and supply tunnels. This is part of the mainstream media´s ongoing effort to normalize the Palestinian-Israel situation: we are supposed to accept that living under occupation, effectively stateless, with access to food, fuel and other supplies radically reduced, when they are not cut off entirely, their elected government handicapped by sanctions, a creeping wall eating away at their land and freedom, that the Palestinians will only engage in "appropriate" levels of violence, that, instead, the Palestinians just can´t get this peace thing, stop acting like thugs and terrorists, and organize a peace treaty, they can´t even observe the terms of a ceasefire. This is supposed to be normal. Here are links to 2 websites with a different perspective:

http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/
http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml

"And it will all seem, in the end of the day, that they are somehow a response to something. As though the situation were not only acceptable- but normal, stable, in the period prior to whatever this is a response to. As though settlements did not continue to expand; walls did not continue to extend and choke lands and lives; families and friends were not dislocated; life was not paralyzed; people were not exterminated; borders were not sealed and food and light and fuel were in fair supply.But it is the prisoners' burden to bear: they broke the conditions of their incarceration. They deviated. But nevertheless, there are concerns for the "humanitarian situation": as long as they do not starve, everything is ok. Replenish the wheat stocks immediately.The warden improves the living conditions now and then, in varying degrees of relatively, but the prison doors remain sealed. And so when there are 20 hours of power outages in a row, the prisoners wish that they were only 8; or 10; and dream of the days of 4."

from: Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother
http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/

Owen .

This is a response I received from a friend of mine:

I'm just wondering (out of pure curiousity - not trying to be sarcastic here) what exactly you are trying to communicate to us in this message and what you are trying to accomplish by it. What exactly is the problem, who is mainly responsible for the problem (if this can be identified), where do you stand, and how do Israelis and Palestinians move forward? We are all aware that war sucks and that the media misrepresents people, places, and things. So, what next? An online petition?...I'm a little skeptical that mere awareness and consciousness-raising stands a chance against conflicts that have ancient origins...or maybe I'm just hungover and bitter, lol.

And this is my response:

I´m not sure exactly how to respond to your questions, or where to begin. I sent you, and many others on my contact list, this email because I was angry and sad at what has been happening this week in Gaza, and I was frustrated at the gross misrepresentation of these events and others in the media. After hours reading various independent media sites, I wanted to share some of these alternate stories of events with my friends in the hopes that they might find these links helpful and interesting, possibly even changing their opinions, while for others they will only confirm what they already know or refuse to acknowledge.

I agree with you that mere awareness won’t change the situation in Palestine & Israel, but awareness is the first step in taking action, and it is a good starting point in the face of our feelings of complete powerlessness. By informing ourselves carefully we can refuse to be on the side of the executioners. I think that if more people, I mean massive amounts of people, really understood what was happening in Palestine, then we could stand a chance against this inhumanity. The ancient origins of this conflict are largely irrelevant; what is preventing a solution is human actions (support of, or participation in, the occupation of Palestine, continuing propaganda in the media, U.S. funding of Israeli violence, etc.), and human actions can build a solution as well. This is encouraging because it means we—not history—can make change. We need to put pressure on our governments to change their actions. This is how civil rights were won (not granted) in the 20th century, how we won a minimum wage, and how the war in Vietnam was eventually stopped. It’s important to remember that we can intimidate our leaders; police beat up protestors for a reason: large numbers of people taking to the streets scare them, it means the masses are getting angry. At the moment I feel powerless, like sending you an email about Palestine is a meaningless gesture by a frustrated white kid whose friends are sick of his disenchantment with the world. But, maybe I won’t be so out of touch some months or some years from now. The politicians and bankers (usually the same people) should have reason to be scared. There’s an economic crisis of an unprecedented scale and extension, huge numbers of Americans have lost their homes, even as our governments spend billions destroying Iraq and Afghanistan. What happens if they take to the streets? Will they turn violent like protestors in Paris 2 years ago, like protestors last month in Greece? Will people begin to connect the dots?

What is the problem? Where do I stand?

The most immediate problem is that as Israel continues its land invasion of Gaza, more than 540 people have been killed and more than 2,450 have been injured. There is, of course, also the ongoing problem of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and all the barbarity, violence, and injustice that it implies. In the face of these facts, I stand on the side of the victims, who I take to be the Palestinians subjected to this terrible bombardment, living under Israeli occupation. This invasion is a massacre of a captive civilian population. It is not a war, or a conflict as it is sometimes called, between two legitimate aggressors. If that were the case, Hamas would be justified in launching rockets at Israel; we would call these attacks self defense and not “terrorism”. Nor is it the selective assassination of Hamas political and military targets, as if murdering soldiers and politicians in another country could ever be justifiable, less still when their children and neighbours die in those attacks. The Israeli invasion of Gaza is state terrorism; it should be unequivocally condemned. The occupation of Palestine is genocide in process.

Who is responsible?

Israel is directly responsible for this invasion; it is the Israeli military dropping bombs on Gaza. Israel is also responsible for the reprehensible treatment of Palestinians under “normal” (no bombs dropping on them) conditions, in which Palestinians are confined to shrinking portions of land, denied access to food, drinking water, electricity, medicine; prevented from participating in their elected governments, from carrying out their lives as they might like to, free from the constant threat of violence and abuse, etc. Other states, to varying degrees, are also responsible for the invasion of Gaza, principally the U.S.A. After Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 elections, the UN—under pressure from the U.S. and the EU—imposed sanctions on the Palestinians (always a good way to radicalize a population), withholding funds from Hamas—and effectively preventing them from governing the Palestinian territories—and refusing to recognize the Palestinian government (presumably because they didn’t like the results of the elections). Meanwhile, Israel incarcerated enough elected Palestinian representatives that the Palestinian parliament couldn’t achieve a quorum, and the U.S. began to fund Palestinian “contras” (Fatah dissidents), resulting in the brief civil war in June 2007 between supporters of Fatah and Hamas. These interventions in Palestine are inexcusable, however they are not unprecedented. One need merely take a brief look at the history of CIA interventions in Latin America to grasp the extent of US responsibility for the escalating violence in Gaza.

I’m not sure how there can be a way forward after this nearly unprecedented violence, however, asked before the most recent invasion I would have responded that the only possible solution would begin with the lifting of sanctions and the recognition of the Palestinian parliament, the recognition of the 1967 borders and the end of Israeli aggression. The continued occupation of Palestine is only possible because of the implicit support of the U.S. and the E.U., and therefore change must begin in Europe and America if there is to be a lasting peace in Palestine.