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.