Marxist Animalism

[Anonymous]

Not about eating meat, which was done in prehistory too (with humans being more scavengers than hunters, btw), but about the concept of ownership, of property, which livestock were.

The idea of owning other humans then follows – chattel = cattle – and the entering of this idea into language too.

[Anonymous]

Animals and primitive communism.

When we talk of the relationship between humans and other animals, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that humans are animals too. As we trace back our origins as humans, our ancestry merges with those of other primates. Hominids emerged about 25 million years ago, from which evolved various species of apes including, about 250,000 years ago, homo sapiens. Dental and other evidence suggests that like most modern species of apes, these hominids were primarily vegetarian.
Humans do not have the sharp teeth, retractable claws or digestive systems common to carnivores.
Although early humans, like other hominids may have sometimes scavenged meat killed by other animals, diet was probably based almost entirely on plant foods.

The hunting of larger animals for food, with the increased importance of meat in the diet, may have become more significant when humans encountered colder conditions in which plant foods were harder to come by, particularly in the last Ice Age. Large scale hunting brought with it a more rigid sexual division of labour, as the mobility required effectively excluded women who were pregnant or nursing young children.

Hunting also saw the earliest traces of the transformation of free human activity into something resembling work. This is partly because hunting requires more effort: ‘On average 240 calories of plant food can be gathered in one hour, whereas, taking into account the high failure rate of hunting, it has been estimated that one hour of hunting produces only 100 calories of food’ (Ehrenberg).

More importantly foraging could be undertaken by the whole community and fully integrated with other social activities such as singing, chatting and childcare. Hunting on the other hand depended on stealth and silence, and tended to become the specialised task of able-bodied males.

Even once hunting had become established, It is certainly not the case that all early humans ate meat all of the time. The popular image of bloodthirsty primitives slaughtering their way through the animal kingdom is nonsense. The notion of ‘Man the Hunter’ whose ‘principal food is meat, and his principal occupation hunting’ has been criticised as ‘largely a reflection of the interests and preconceptions of nineteenth-century Western male anthropologists and of the status of hunting as an upper class pastime in nineteenth century Europe’ (Ehrenberg).

So-called ‘hunter gatherer’ societies should perhaps be called forager societies as the gathering of plants, nuts and grains was in most cases far more fundamental than hunting, and accounted for a higher proportion of the regular diet. In most modern foraging societies, plant foods gathered primarily by women account for 60-70 per cent of diet (Ehrenberg).

Different communities across the world would have had different ideas about animals, and different ways of treating them, but we can deduce something about their beliefs and practices from cultural artefacts left behind (e.g. cave paintings), and from similar communities that have existed until recently.

For most of the time humans have existed, they ‘lived in relatively autonomous and scattered groups, in  tribes’.

Their way of life was essentially communistic. There was no buying and selling, no wage labour, no state and no private property: ‘Goods were not produced to be consumed after exchange, after being placed on a market… The community distributed what it produced according to simple rules, and everyone directly got what it gave him… Activities were decided (actually imposed on the group by necessity) and achieved in common, and their results were shared in common’ (Dauvé & Martin).

In these societies, the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world was completely different to the modern one. The most significant fact about animals in so-called ‘primitive communism’ is that they do not belong to anybody. There is no private ownership of land, trees, or animals, and no domestication. While some animals may be hunted, all animals run wild and free. People only take what they need from nature, and where animals are hunted it is on a limited basis.

In any event there would be no point in indiscriminate mass killing of animals, as the community would have no means of using or storing the surplus, and no market on which to sell the surplus. Communities typically live in a harmonious relationship with their environment; it is their home and their provider and it is not in their interest to destroy it, by for instance, exterminating animal species.

Animals are not viewed as commodities, but are regarded with a mixture of awe, wonder, respect and fear. Instead of being seen as subordinate species, they are seen as separate beings sharing the world with humans. Often communities adopt a particular animal as their ‘totem’; animals may be regarded as ancestors or protectors of the tribe, and may even be worshipped.

[Bijou Drains]

Not about eating meat, which was done in prehistory too (with humans being more scavengers than hunters, btw), but about the concept of ownership, of property, which livestock were.

As presumably were the fields in which the grain was grown and the vegetables which were harvested. As to the use of the word Chatell having any impact on this, it was derives from old Norman French, which developed many, many years after the agrarian revolution.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Bijou Drains.

[Bijou Drains]

Not about eating meat, which was done in prehistory too (with humans being more scavengers than hunters, btw), but about the concept of ownership, of property, which livestock were.

As presumably were the fields in which the grain was grown and the vegetables which were harvested. As to the use of the word Chatell having any impact on this, it was derives from old Norman French, which developed many, many years after the agrarian revolution.

[Anonymous]

And is the same word, and meaning, as cattle.

The psychology was long well established, therefore. The Romans used the word caput (head) for slaves and livestock, and we still say so many head of cattle.

The Normans too, indeed, used chattel equally for serfs and livestock. Whatever language or time, the word used applied to human and nonhuman. Species was irrelevant if you were property.

The point being, that the degrading of nonhumans to property naturally degraded humans to property too. The concept of rule is born.

Ite, quod demonstratum est.

[Anonymous]

Animals as wealth.

After domestication animals, or at least some species, no longer ran free. Now they could belong to somebody: Adam Smith noted that along with crops, herds of animals were the earliest form of private property (Thomas). This property was not just used to produce food and clothing; it was also a form of wealth. From the earliest stages of domestication ‘Meat consumption was the conspicuous display of dominant ruling power. The more cattle slaughtered, cooked and eaten, the greater the man’ (Spencer).

Domesticated animals were a fundamental form of wealth ‘which could be accumulated and handed on from one generation to the next…. as one family accumulated more cattle, or acquired better ploughs the gap between their wealth and that of their neighbours would increase progressively… A distinction between rich and poor, which is insignificant in forager societies, develops’ (Ehrenberg).

As well as being maintained as an embodiment of wealth, animals not needed for immediate consumption could be traded with other property owners and even be used as money. In this early stage of the market, as Marx observed in Capital, ‘The money-form comes to be attached… to the object of utility which forms the chief element of indigenous alienable wealth, for example cattle’.

As animals became the property of groups or individuals they could be not only bought and sold, but stolen and fought over. While the development of hunting required the organisation of part of the community as a killing machine, the transformation of this into a war machine to systematically kill other humans may have arisen ‘when for the first time people owned a resource which it was both worthwhile and fairly easy to steal’ (Ehrenberg).

[Anonymous]

And with livestock comes the classing of non-exploitable carnivorous animals as pests, and the path of alienation from the natural world is entered upon.

And no, this is not a sudden phenomenon, but gradual.

[Bijou Drains]

The point being, that the degrading of nonhumans to property naturally degraded humans to property too. The concept of rule is born.

I think the link you make is exaggerated and unproven, you use the example of Norman French and Latin as linguistic proof, yet civilisations developed property and developed the concept of rule before either of those languages was used and in parts of the world far from the development of those languages.

you say – “Adam Smith noted that along with <i>crops</i>, herds of animals were the earliest form of private property”

Which supports my argument that if humans were non carnivorous they would have still grown crops and the concept of property would have still developed. Your overall theory that the domestication of animals was the root cause of the alienation of humans from nature and the source of the development of private property is at best tenuous and at worst complete bollocks.

Even if your theory was true, the development of propertied societies was a positive development in terms of the development of the means to create a Socialist society. Meat eaters can therefore be thanked for the positive impact they have had in the development of the means of production to the point where a socialist society is possible, let’s have a big round of applause for the meat eaters!!!!

[PartisanZ]

Even if your theory was true, the development of propertied societies was a positive development in terms of the development of the means to create a Socialist society. Meat eaters can therefore be thanked for the positive impact they have had in the development of the means of production to the point where a socialist society is possible, let’s have a big round of applause for the meat eaters!!!!

I’m off for a bacon butty to celebrate and get my strength upfor the class struggle.

[Anonymous]

Slavery.

 

Many of those put to work in early civilisation were slaves. Once it is taken for granted that animals are mere objects provided for the use of humans the introduction of slavery simply involves assigning to certain groups of humans the status of animals. As Marx notes ‘under slavery, according to the striking expression employed in antiquity, the worker is distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale [speaking implement] from an animal, which is instrumentum semi-vocale [semi-mute implement], and from a lifeless implement, which is instrumentum mutum [mute instrument]’ (Marx, 1867).

In the modern period, racist ideology defined black people as more animal than human, legitimising slavery. Slaves were treated as animals, having to endure ‘terrible conditions under transportation, the removal of children and the separation of families, branding with hot irons, the wearing of collars and chains and even medical experimentation’.

Slaves were sold at markets modelled on livestock markets, with one contemporary noting that slaves were handled at markets ‘as we handle beasts’, tested for their fitness and strength and so on. Unruly slaves were sent to ‘nigger breakers’ to be crushed in the same way that ‘horse breakers’ were used to domesticate wild horses. ‘These techniques were not new, they had been developed over the last few centuries on farms, in livestock markets, in abattoirs and… laboratories’. (Meat and dairy produce: symbols of male power, sexual dominance and racial discrimination, 1997).

Similarly, ‘Animal domestication furnished many of the techniques for dealing with delinquency: bridles for scolding women; cages, chains and straw for madmen’ (Thomas). We could probably add prisons to this list too, and more recently the use of cattle prods in torture.

[Bijou Drains]

“Meat and dairy produce: symbols of male power, sexual dominance and racial discrimination, 1997”

That has to get the prize for the most contrived and ridiculous title for  in the last fifty years. Which soppy git wrote that?

[Anonymous]

I agree the title is absurd, and obviously the work will be in many regards, but it is only given as the source of the quote, which I do not see as invalid.

These extracts are not by me, anyway.

[Anonymous]

Cows, Cowboys and Indians: Primitive accumulation and animals.

The animal industry, in particular cattle and sheep farming, has been central to the spread of capitalist social relations throughout the world. Marx argued that for capitalism to develop, there has to be a process of brutal dispossession which he called ‘primitive accumulation… the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’. Capitalism requires that all the means of production (including the land) belong to capital, and that the majority of the population are reduced to proletarians – people who can only survive by selling their labour in return for a wage.

In pre-capitalist societies, these conditions do not exist. The land either belongs to nobody or it is divided up into small plots, with most people having their own plot of land which they either own or can use, and/or access to common land. People who can grow their own food have no need to earn money to buy food, and given the choice most would not take a job in a factory. For this to change, peasants have to be forcibly deprived of land through ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery [and] murder’- ‘this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in blood and fire’ (Marx, 1867).

The historical evidence suggests that not only is capitalism dependent on ruthless primitive accumulation, but primitive accumulation relies upon the animal industry. In England, the process of ‘forcibly driving the peasantry from the land’ and enclosing common land started as early as the late 15th century. But what was it that motivated the nobility to undertake this?

Marx is clear that it was ‘the rise in the price of the wool’, which made it profitable to transform ‘arable land into sheep walks’. People were driven from their homes to make way for sheep, leading Thomas More to write at the time of a curious land where ‘sheep… swallow down the very men themselves’.

This process was accompanied by the clearance of forest, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period, ‘An ideology of meat-eating (ennobling the heart, enriching the blood, encouraging the soldiers) played its part in the formation of the eighteenth century person…The growth of London meat consumption has been linked to the development of scientific breeding practices, the extension of turnpikes and highways, the draining of marshes, the cutting down of forests’ (Linebaugh). As well as opening up grazing land for animals, this was also aimed at clamping down on the forest-dwellers, many of them squatters living ‘free from the normal social constraints of church and manor courts’ (Thomas).
The Highlands of Scotland were virtually emptied of people in the nineteenth century, as the inhabitants were forcibly removed to make way for sheep, and later deer as the Highlands were turned into a hunting resort for the rich. The Highland Clearances were resisted, but evictions were enforced by the military.

The genocidal colonisation of the Americas also featured the replacement of indigenous people with profitable animals, starting with Columbus who brought the first cattle and horses to the ‘New World’ in 1494. Hollywood’s myth of the epic struggle between cowboys and Indians might not be historically accurate, but it does express a basic truth. The dynamic for the dispossession and extermination of native peoples was often the wish to replace them with cattle

.Ironically some of the victims of earlier dispossession helped in this process. For instance in Patagonia, Araucanian Indians were rounded up and slaughtered in the 1870s, making way for cattle grazing. Some Scots helped in this slaughter, ‘exiled in the Highland Clearances, torn cruelly from their homeland and tossed on to the high seas, they fetched up in the Falklands, then took part in another brutal clearance at the other end of the world’ (Wangford).

Cattle grazing was not the only aspect of the animal industry important to colonisation. In north America in particular the fur trade was important, as shown by the crucial role of the Hudson Bay Company. According to Fredy Perlman, in the late 18th century ‘Fur is Europe’s oil. The French Empire in America revolves around fur. The nascent Russian Empire in Siberia is a fur trappers empire’.

Primitive accumulation was not driven by a historically inevitable manifest destiny. There had to be an immediate economic incentive to dispossess those living on the land, and this was provided by the profits to be made from animals. In this sense the animal industry was the starting motor of primitive accumulation, without which the subsequent gains for the ruling class (the creation of a proletariat, access to mineral wealth etc.) may not have been realised.

[Anonymous]

Surely you are not going to deny that the main aspect of the enclosures was the conversion of arable (crops) to pasture (grazing)?

[Anonymous]

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IbXeAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=jack+conrad,+cattle+and+class+society&source=bl&ots=8Rn9Tda7zm&sig=ACfU3U0F1z40xfM9VAJfUQxt5KAHo-VfNg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwit7cflhILqAhUWQEEAHQLZBRwQ6AEwAHoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=jack%20conrad%2C%20cattle%20and%20class%20society&f=false

[Anonymous]

Humans are herbivores

[Author]

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