Marx’s non-speciesist concept of labour

Abstract

Human–animal scholars have repeatedly accused Marx of standing in the tradition of a Cartesian human–animal dualism. One central piece of evidence brought forward to substantiate the attack is Marx’s concept of labour. The present article, however, argues that Marx’s conceptualisation of labour is actually non-speciesist and recognises non-waged and other than human forms of labour as well without renouncing qualitative distinctions between them. For Marx, both useful labour and the historically specific capitalist form of social labour cannot be reduced to something peculiar to man. Useful labour encompasses a wide range of ways to transform nature. Due to the bourgeois social relations, capitalist social labour is instead limited to human productive wage labour, excluding numerous types of human labour as well as animal labour. Thus, his concept of labour proves that Marx is not just another ‘speciesist’ scholar in the long Western tradition of philosophy.

Keywords

capitalism Descartes human–animal dualism Karl Marx labour speciesism

The liberation of animals from their (super-)exploitation by ‘animal capital’ (Stache 2020b: 24) requires to understand the multiplicity of relations of exploitation and domination in contemporary capitalism. In capitalist society, as in each previous social formations, the historically specific forms of these relationships depend on the organisation of social labour understood as the social relation between humans and between humans and nature (Marx MECW 9: 211; Marx MECW 37: 805–806; Wolf 2018b).

The main objective in Marx’s central theoretical works from his youth until his death was to conceptualise and criticise the capitalist form of social labour. Social labour generally includes wage labour but also implies other forms of work. However, in its historically specific form of capitalist social labour from the standpoint of capital only productive labour is acknowledged to make it up. Animal work is one example, and the unpaid reproductive work by women is another.

However, Marx’s aim cannot be reduced to theory as an end in itself. By revealing the structure of the intertwined forms of labour, and according to qualitatively different forms of exploitation and oppression, Marx also pointed to at least three elements of class struggle which have different consequences for humans and non-humans according to their relations of exploitation and domination to capital. First, he demonstrated the need to revolutionise the bourgeois form of social labour to free humans, nature and animals. Second, Marx outlined the historically necessary (not in some way teleologically determined) subjects and objects of revolution, which are not identified along species but along class relations and are based on capital’s Achilles’ heel, value production. Here, he includes animals as objects, even though the focus is on productive labour, and those on the front row of original accumulation. Finally, Marx gave some hints (not more) on how to reorganise capitalist social labour in a just and sustainable fashion, taking into account the metabolism with nature (Marx MECW 37: 807) and the needs of other species (Marx MECW 3: 172). Thus, Marx’s concept of social labour in general and of capitalist social labour in particular can help to understand the function and role of animals in capitalist society, their status in anti-capitalist politics and the integration of animals in a socialist or communist organisation of social labour.

In light of the theoretical and political importance of Marx’s notion of labour, a widespread misconception in the pro-animal movements and within human–animal studies seems to undermine his central organising concept: Marx, it is often claimed, stands in a tradition of the subject–object dualism, which runs through the entire history of Western philosophy, and in which man and animals are posited as alien beings opposed to and unrelated with each other – animals as a part of unconscious nature, mere objects of human activity, and man as a subject with self-awareness.

More precisely, Marx is charged of being in line with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650) (Best 2014: 150; Mütherich 2008a: 5105), the 17th-century thinker who drove the modern dualisms to the extreme (see Descartes 2006 [1637]; Wolf 2007). In recent publications, especially in the emerging field of animal labour studies, the accusation of an underlying human–animal dualism is explicitly situated in Marx’s concept of labour (see, for example, Blattner et al. 2020: 1; Cochrane 2010: 96–100; Hribal 2012: 3–4; Noske 1997 [1989]: 76; Painter 2016: 328; Peterson 2013: 163, 168; Porcher 2014: 3; Porcher & Estebanez 2019: 22; Rosen & Wirth 2013: 26–27, 37; Sanbonmatsu 2011: 15–17; Sztybel 1997: 178). In this reading, Marx’s notion of labour rests on a dualistic distinction between humans and animals according to which he identifies labour as an exclusively human feature while animals are its mere objects.

If these allegations were in fact true, any attempt to theoretically or practically forge a link between Marxism and animal liberation, or even Marxism and the ecological movement in a wider sense, would be a pointless endeavour. Because, if Marx’s concept of labour was fundamentally flawed, as the criticisms of dualism suggest, the relationship between humans, on the one hand, and animals and nature, on the other hand, could not be conceptualised with his theoretical tools other than in a strict hierarchical and alienated fashion. In consequence, the exploitation and oppression of animals and nature would be theoretically excluded from Marx’s framework. In addition, interpreting animals in particular and nature in general as mere objects of labour [Arbeitsgegenstände; C.S./M.S.] would imply a complete exclusion of nature and animals from class struggle, even as objects for which revolution needs to be made. An uneven but ‘possible alliance with nature’ (Bloch 1995: 696) in socialism would be ruled out.

Against this background, it becomes evident why the discussion about Marx’s concept of labour and its presumed dualistic character is not a side issue. It rather concerns the theoretical and political core of Marx’s work and thus of Marxism. Therefore, we agree with Marx’s critics in human–animal studies who focus their attention and attacks on this key element of his theory. However, we dispute the alleged Cartesianism in Marx in general and in his concept of labour in particular.

Concentrating on the animal question, we argue in this article that Marx dialectically and historically differentiates between human and other species specific forms of labour. This means that he understands the differences between these forms as differences within a continuum developed over time and species. This can be shown in two ways.

First, Marx (MECW 35) generally regards today’s human labour as the result of an evolutionary development over ‘thousands of centuries’ (p. 513), connecting non- and pre-human forms with the present human form of labour via the historical development of varying social praxis of diverse species. Thus understood, labour as such is not something solely and distinctively human. It is something which comes into existence with the progress of evolution, not only with the appearance of humans, and which evolves further and thus is not peculiar to humans. We call this the evolutionary perspective.

Second, in Capital, but not only there, Marx describes what is socially considered to be labour in a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production and what is not. His depiction shows that by no means every type of human labour is socially recognised as labour in capitalist societies. Like animal and natural labour, various forms of human labour are excluded by the social relations, which make up social labour in capitalism. We call this the social-theoretical perspective.

In sum, we demonstrate that the boundaries of what is defined as labour are not at all necessarily identical with the species boundary of Homo sapiens neither historically nor in the contemporary capitalist social formation. Labour in Marx’s work is not an ontological, anthropological or speciesist concept, but a historical and social one (see Autorenkollektiv 1991: 203). The decisive factor for Marx’s concept of labour is not what species is involved, but the integration of humans and animals into the social relations created in a society, be it the capitalist mode of production or another.

In the remainder of this article, we intend to unfold our argument that Marx has developed a non-speciesist concept of labour along the two lines just mentioned. In so doing, we trace and spell out the overall logic of Marx’s concept in his writings with respect to the differentiation between various forms of labour. Of course, this is our interpretation of Marx’s writings because there is no other evidence handed down by Marx proving unambiguously that he had the intention to exclude or include animals’ work in his concept of labour or not than what we know by the Collected Works and MEGA². Thus, instead of projecting certain prejudices or reified Marx interpretations (may they be humanist, anti-, or post-humanist) on his writings, we investigate them retrospectively verifying if they necessarily exclude animals’ work or if they permit a reading that includes different forms of labour and especially animal forms.

We start by recapitulating the basic criticisms brought forward by authors in human–animal studies against Marx. We outline the charges that he makes use of a Cartesian human–animal dualism in general and, more importantly, in his conceptualisation of labour. The following two sections then comprise our major counterarguments which are based on Marx’s concept of the twofold character of labour. We begin with Marx’s understanding of useful labour, that is, abstracted from its social form, sketching his evolutionary perspective. In the subsequent chapter, we take a look at labour in its capitalist social form, demonstrating that labour is a question of historical specific social relations and not of species.

The accusation of dualism

In German-language human–animal studies, the sociologist Birgit Mütherich (2008a) probably levelled the accusation against Marx of being in the tradition of Descartes in its most sharp form. She writes that Marx followed ‘the Cartesian tradition of dualism, stylising the animal as the antithesis of the (New) Man’ (p. 5105). Similar criticisms abound in the English-language (academic) world. For example, Steven Best (2014), the pioneer of the total liberation approach and co-founder of critical animal studies in the Anglo-Saxon world, similarly places Marx in the tradition of ‘the dualistic, speciesist, anthropocentric, and hierarchical philosophies that informed Western thought from Aristotle and Aquinas to Descartes and Bacon to Marx’ (p. 150).

When they speak of ‘Cartesian dualism’ and Marx’s position in the history of Western thinking, Mütherich and Best refer to René Descartes, the 17th-century thinker who stands like almost no other for the most radical opposition of subject and object, mind and nature. No other philosopher founded his philosophy so radically on the dichotomy between nature and mind (see Wolf 2007).

Descartes understood nature, on one hand, and the human mind, on the other, as things which exist independently of one another. Nature is for Descartes (2006 [1637]) an ‘extended and unthinking thing’ (p. 48) (res extensa), which functions according to the principles of mechanics. The human mind, in contrast, is a ‘thinking and unextended thing’ (res cogitans) (p. 48). It exists as a ‘substance’ which is capable of conscious thought, independent of and separate from the human body, which Descartes (2006 [1637]) assigns as ‘corporeal substance’ (p. 48) to the realm of nature. Nature lacks everything which constitutes the human mind. Everything the latter is, the former is not. Neither can be derived from the other, having nothing in common; the soul, and thus that which makes humans in fact human, cannot be the result of any potential of matter, but is entirely independent of the body.

Animals, which, Descartes (2006 [1637]) believed, not only had less rational thinking capacity than humans since they belonged exclusively to the sphere of res extensa (p. 47), but none whatsoever, are directly affected by this, as the Marxist social scientist Dieter Wolf (2007: 26) stressed. As mindless mechanical automatons, they were for Descartes incapable of feeling pain. Descartes did not deny animals sensations straightforwardly. But because of their lacking capacity to think animal sensations are a mere function of their organs and thus do not matter for their treatment by humans. For this reason, Descartes had no reservations when humans dissected living animals in their search for inner connections or kill and consume animals. Federici (2004: 148, 158–159) reports that Descartes regularly visited slaughterhouses in Amsterdam to observe the dismantling of animal bodies and to dissect animal parts in preparation of one of his works. She also quotes a letter by Descartes in which he describes a vivisection on a living rabbit, cutting open its chest first and then its heart. Descartes’ theoretical approach harmonises perfectly with this kind of practice, and it is this kind of thinking that provides the optimal legitimation for all the suffering which humans are capable of inflicting on animals.

But let us return to Mütherich’s accusation: animals as the mindless and insentient opposite of humans, the only being capable of reason – is this really supposed to be the tradition of thinking in which Marx’s writings stand? It has to be said from the outset that from early on, Marx and Engels (MECW 4) not only explicitly reject Descartes’ ‘mechanical materialism’ as a form of ‘metaphysics’ (p. 125). Marx (MECW 35) also criticises that Descartes ‘saw with eyes of the manufacturing period’ when he defined ‘animals as mere machines’ (p. 393). Engels repeats this statement almost literally at least twice later on (see MECW 26: 370; MECW 49: 7). Furthermore, as Foster and Clark (2018) demonstrate, Marx ‘based his own criticisms of Descartes’ animal-machine notion’ on a ‘long-standing anti-Cartesian tradition within German philosophy’ (p. 5) they trace back to the philosopher Hermann Samuel Reimarus.

Despite these obvious hints at Marx’s and Engels’ take on Descartes’ philosophy, Marx’s works have often been the target of accusations of being built on the Cartesian dualism (see, for example, Noske 1997 [1989]: 73–76; Sztybel 1997: 177). The evidence for this is regularly Marx’s alleged concept of labour. This is supposed to demonstrate the stark distinction between nature and mind in the Cartesian tradition – and, therefore, that between humans and animals – underlying Marx’s theoretical deliberations, thus making his thinking unsuitable for the project of reconciling man and nature.

Marx’s thinking, as Rosen and Wirth (2013) state with reference to Marx’s depiction of the labour process in Capital,

is associated with a subject–object dualism in which humans (through labour) are the only subjects created in the image of God in life and on Earth, who shape the world through their labour, thus raising themselves above the sphere of ‘nature’. (p. 37)

(For related criticisms of Capital, see Noske 1997 [1989]: 76; Perlo 2002: 305.) Rosen and Wirth continue the arguments of Mütherich (2008b), who believes that she has discovered an ‘inferior idea of animals in Marx, based on the concept of labour’ (p. 5108). The alleged consequence for Marx’s thinking: on the basis of his concept of labour, Marx sets up ‘a rigid animal-human boundary’ (Rosen & Wirth 2013: 37), which is supposed to logically lead, as Mütherich (2015) writes, to non-human species being ‘necessarily massively devalued’ (p. 69).

The British social scientist Ted Benton argued along similar lines as Mütherich and Rosen and Wirth in his epoch-making essay Marx on Humans and Animals: Humanism or Naturalism. Benton (1993) is convinced that Marx formulated his ideas of ‘species-being’ (p. 26) (Gattungswesen) and alienation in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 based on an ontologically dualistic distinction between animal and human labour. With this, Benton coined a reading in particular of the concept of labour in Marx’s early works, which has enjoyed tremendous popularity until today among (critical) researchers in human–animal studies (for arguments that are based on Benton’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of labour, see, for example, Bachour 2020: 116–117; Best 2014: 93; Cochrane 2010: 96ff.; Murray 2011: 99; Painter 2016: 328; Peterson 2013: 163, 168; Sztybel 1997: 170–172, 183).

Andreas Hetzel, Professor of Philosophy at Fatih University Istanbul, goes one step further in his criticism of Marx. He asserts, ‘Marx and Engels remain, however, firmly rooted in the classic denigration of the animal in that they dispute the ability of the animal to perform labour which creates surplus value, and see it merely as a resource’ (Hetzel 2015: 262). And, unfortunately, theorists like Hetzel can rely on a remark of Adorno’s (2005 [1974]) when he referred to ‘the creatures whom Marx even begrudged the surplus value they contribute as workers’ (p. 228). (For similar positions, see Kallis & Swyngedouw 2017; Murray 2011; Wadiwel 2018; for an anti-critique, see Foster & Burkett 2018; Stache 2020a.)

A cross-species concept: labour as useful labour, abstracted from its historical specific social form

Although we disagree with the human–animalist authors’ positions mentioned above on their charges against Marx, we agree with them on focusing the reader’s attention on Marx’s concept of labour. This is what we will also do in this and the next section because the concept of labour for Marx is the key without which natural and human history, how they interact, the sequence of forms taken by human history and capitalist society cannot be understood.

Any attempt to grasp the full connection of nature, society and thinking must begin with the field in which humans have always begun to practically create this connection in their relationships with one another and with nature. This relationship with one another and with nature is social labour (see Wolf 2018b). Marx (MECW 9) already noted at the beginning of his theoretical development that in

production, men enter into relations not only with nature. They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections and relations does their relation with nature, does production, take place. (p. 211)¹

To unfold the meaning of Marx’s broad understanding of labour, it is necessary to examine more closely what he calls ‘the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns’ (Marx MECW 35: 51): the twofold character of labour. Marx first of all underlines the self-evident fact that every kind of labour which a human being expends results in a particular product. He terms labour expended in this way as ‘useful labour’ (MECW 35: 56). Every example of such useful labour, irrespective of the social context in which it was expended, has in the first place the general character of being human labour.

In societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates and in which, therefore, the connections between the individual types of labour expended by the society are mediated by the exchange of the products of such labour, the individual types of labour are related to each other by this general property. ‘Whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them’ (Marx MECW 35: 84–85). In other words, by selling and buying each other the products of labour, a connection between the labour expended for the production of each product is established. Labour, by virtue of its general property of being labour in the first place, can create value, since possessing value is an expression of the fact that the individual types of labour are expended for society, that is, are part of the overall labour of society; the measure of value expresses to what extent this is the case.

Let us now begin by examining Marx’s understanding of useful labour. In the seventh chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx first deals with labour as useful labour and analyses the general rules governing it. Even on this level, which by no means covers all aspects of labour in society, we already find some very interesting insights: labour, ‘a change of form in the material’ (p. 188), is for Marx (MECW 35) not something only peculiar to man. There is a unifying cross-species link between humans and animals characterised by the fact that all animals modify nature to satisfy their needs.

In addition, both humans and animals as natural beings share that they rely on external nature in various forms for their reproduction achieved by their forms of useful labour. Nature is not only for humans the ‘original larder’ and, in the case of those animals who use instruments, ‘the original tool house’ (Marx MECW 35: 187). Nature also provides ‘all such objects as are necessary for carrying on’ (Marx MECW 35: 190), the different labour processes in the animal kingdom, that is, the natural conditions of production. Thus, humans and animals are dependent on their respective metabolisms with nature as parts of the universal metabolism of nature – they oppose her as ‘her own forces’ (MECW 35, 189) – and on the relatively independent reproduction of nature. While Marx concentrates on the human labour process in his analysis in Capital, its depiction includes the basic and general determining relations of the human embeddedness in his ecology and thus documents Marx’s ecology. This implies, and Marx (MECW 35: 189) shows this with respect to animals as their instruments of labour, that humans’ reproduction can only work if diverse metabolisms of other species, flora and fauna, do. In other words, the species-specific human form of useful labour and labour process are interrelated and dependent on those of other animals. Suffice to say in this context that the twofold character of labour, according to which the labour process is at the same time the valorisation process of capital, leads to different rifts and reconnections of the dialectal relations between humans, animals and nature (see, for example, Burkett 1999: 69–98; Stache 2017: 448–470).

If we look more closely at his remarks on useful labour in the seventh chapter of the first volume of Capital, it becomes clear that Marx (MECW 35) assumes a differentiated scale within the continuum of forms of labour – understood as the reproduction of a species by satisfying its needs – which ranges from animal-like, instinctively driven forms of labour² up to work ‘in a form that stamps it as exclusively human’ (p. 188). However, at the same time, he acknowledges a qualitative difference since in the human case it is not only a change of form in the material but realisation of a pre-imagined purpose in the natural world.

There is a parallel in the Paris Manuscripts to this. Marx, to get to terms with capitalist social labour for the first time (Stache 2018: 26–28), differentiates between human and animal forms of life activity, depicting humans’ as conscious and animals’ as according to each species standards (Marx MECW 3: 276). Thus, Marx acknowledges differences in unity between forms of human and animal life activities (see also Fish 2020: 12–14).

In the light of recent behavioural research, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that only humans work realising pre-imagined purposes. As foresight and intentional change of nature seems to be Marx’s (and Engels’) main argument, we focus here only on this ability. German ethologist Norbert Sachser (2018: 151–165) points out that the tool making, innovating and applying behaviour of chimpanzees (for Great Apes, see, for example, Osvath & Martin-Ordas 2014: 5–6) and New Caledonian crows (see also, for example, Gruber et al. 2019 and for the case of ravens Kabadayi & Osvath 2017), to cite just two prominent examples, strongly suggest that they know what they are doing when they transform nature to their purposes. Sachser (2018) draws the conclusion without reservation that ‘certain animals are not only able to learn, they are capable of thinking’ (p. 243). Karsten Brensing (2017: 208–221), another German ethologist, generally argues the same, referring to the capacity of abstract and strategic thinking and social cooperation in varying foraging strategies of the same and other animals, including dolphins and orcas. Thus, at least these species work in a similar fashion to humans even though the former’s labour is different from the latter’s. In other words, today’s ethologist have proven what Marx (MECW 35: 188) could treat as a presupposition (sic!) in Capital, that is, to treat labour to be exclusively human is not applicable to all species. There are species which intentionally change nature to satisfy their needs but with different technologies. Admittedly, however, up to now no species – for better or worse, that is, with a view to liberating or with the potential to destroy the planet as we know it – has been able to modify nature to the extent that humans have (see Engels MECW 25: 330–331).

Marx describes human and non-human labour as being differentiated in two respects: on one hand, we are dealing here with different forms of labour which co-exist alongside one another as a result of different evolutionary lines of development. On the other, there are different forms of labour which follow on from one another sequentially within individual phylogenetic lines of development, as historical steps in a progression.

First, in the context of different forms of labour which coexist simultaneously, we find the famous example of the bee and the master builder from the seventh chapter of the first volume of Capital:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. (Marx MECW 35: 188)

Instead of interpreting this passage with emphasis on the difference, which we do not want to withhold, but which cannot be uphold rigorously in face of the above-mentioned insights of ethology (the cases of bees and spiders, though, are a different story we do not get into here), Marx also acknowledges the coexistence of different forms of labour. Both are forms of labour which have developed in different evolutionary lines and coexist alongside each other as the provisional results of these evolutionary lines of development (see also Marx MECW 3: 276 and Engels MECW 25: 459–460).

Alongside this contemporary differentiation of the forms of labour, Marx also underlines, second, the evolution of every single one of these ‘forms of labour’, comparing them with the example of the current human form of labour. The history of this does not only begin with Ancient Egypt or the appearance on the world stage of Homo sapiens, but goes back much further. It is something which arises in the course of evolution and, even more significantly, advances it in its turn. Marx (MECW 35) notes, ‘The productiveness of labour [. . .] is a gift, not of Nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries’. (p. 513) Thus, even though Marx discusses productive labour in capitalism in this part of Capital, he points out that the specific human socialisation of human labour has transformed labour into the current human form. Today’s form of human labour is the foundation for turning surplus labour of some humans into ‘a condition of existence for’ (Marx MECW 35: 513) other humans. Referring to the human–animal relation, Marx (MECW 32) acknowledges that human labour has developed like any other animal form of labour phylogenetically, noting the steps between contemporary human form of labour and its preceding historical forms have developed over very long periods of time, so that labour is ‘the result of a process of development’ (p. 427).

It is this phylogenetic dimension of useful labour which Engels scrutinises predominantly in his unfinished essay on The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (MECW 25: 452–464). Engels (MECW 25) remarks that the significant difference between a troupe of monkeys and human society is: ‘labour’ (p. 456). He also writes that labour begins with the making of tools (MECW 25: 457) which ‘no simian hand has ever fashioned’ (MECW 25: 453). However, Engels relativises these statements that sound like an absolute separation and places them in the context of the work’s evolutionary history of becoming different, which is the obvious subject of his essay. Thus, Engels says that the hand is not only the organ of labour, but also its product (MECW 25: 453), and that labour is ‘one of the essential stimuli under the influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that of man’ (MECW 25: 455). How could work have played this role if it was not already inherent in pre-human life forms?

Engels (MECW 25) himself highlights the gradual development saying, ‘The further removed men are from animals, [. . .] the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards definite preconceived ends’ (p. 459). Engels sees the ability to act in a planned, premeditated fashion ‘in embryo’ (MECW 25: 460) evolving throughout the animal kingdom. Therefore, it is only logical that Engels (MECW 25) denotes the ‘idea of a contrast between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body’ as ‘unnatural’ (p. 461).³ Thus, it would grossly misjudge the message and intention of The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man reading an idealistic dualism into it.

In Marx’s consideration of the differentiation of labour in their contemporary and phylogenetic dimension lies a third, implicit dimension: the contemporary differentiation of labour across the species barrier is at the same time a reflection of the evolutionary development of human labour. Just as no recent species can be the precursor of another recent species, no form of labour observed today can be the precursor of another recent form of labour. Nevertheless, a comparison of species-specific behaviours can reveal pointers to common roots. Human labour for Marx and, as demonstrated above, not less for Engels is not something which stands distinct from non-human labour as something different or even ‘made in the image of God’ (Rosen & Wirth 2013: 37).⁴ It rather differs from other forms of appropriation of natural phenomena as something which has become different through the development of history and society.

Descartes (2006 [1637]) still believed that those things which animals

can do better than us does not prove that they have any mental powers, for it would follow from this that they would have more intelligence than any of us, and would surpass us in everything. Rather, it shows that they have no mental powers whatsoever, and that it is nature which acts in them, according to the disposition of their organs. (p. 48)

Marx and Engels (MECW 5), however, already surmised in their early reflections that humans began ‘to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence’ (p. 31), a statement consistent with and a guide to read Marx’s dialectical treatment of the human–animal relation from the Paris Manuscripts to Capital. They differentiate human from animal societies on the basis of their respective social praxis and development over history, without omitting the common features between the species which continue to exist. For Engels, the most recent insights of biology in his time also left no room for any absolute differences of kind between humans and animals such as Descartes had asserted. Engels (MECW 40) remarked unequivocally in 1858 (1 year before Darwin’s Origin of Species was published!) in a letter to Marx that he was developing ‘a healthy contempt for man’s idealistic arrogance in regard to other animals’ (p. 327).

The passages from the seventh chapter of volume one of Capital discussed above are understood by many commentators to mean that Marx is referring here to labour – and not, as in the rest of his three-volume main work, to other economic questions. In the light of the concept of social labour set out at the beginning, however, this proves to be a huge misunderstanding. The fact is, that the subject from the first to the final words of Capital is labour – social labour as the relations of humans to each other and to nature (Wolf 2018b).

The seventh chapter only deals with labour in as far as it describes the behaviour of humans towards nature. For reasons of methodology, Marx refrains from bringing in all social aspects at this point. His focus is on the idea that labour is always and everywhere productive behaviour, with instruments and an object (Wolf 2007: 35, 38–41). A concept of labour shaped solely according to Marx’s arguments in the seventh chapter cannot help being an unhistorical and idealist one. That is not, however, due to Marx having a truncated or anthropocentric concept of labour.

It is important to emphasise that Marx’s remarks on the differentiation of labour in the seventh chapter, even looked at on this level of abstraction, disproves the idea that Marx posits an absolute distinction between human and non-human labour, since the former is defined as having become different in praxis – an insight which cannot yet be explained at the level of abstraction pertaining in the seventh chapter. In fact, Marx differentiates forms of labour within a continuum ranging from animal-like, instinctively driven forms up to the human form of labour. Indeed, the many different forms still exist simultaneously today, but they are the product of historical development and phylogenetically related to one another.

Finally, the judgement that Marx has developed an idealist concept of labour in the seventh chapter seems to be based on a historical abstraction or neglect of historical analysis. Marx wrote Capital in the first 7 years following the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. It was still far from being the conventional wisdom that ‘man sprang from the beasts’ (Engels MECW 25: 168), when Marx (MECW 41) did remark that Darwin had delivered the ‘justification for our views founded in natural history’ (p. 232). In other words, Marx was rather a pioneering social and historical materialist theorist in the field of human–animal relations, integrating a connection between animal and human forms of nature, than a follower of philosophical idealist traditions.

Labour in its direct social and capitalist form

Although Marx does not consider labour as something exclusively human, labour in the form in which it belongs to humans only is the subject of Capital. The reason for this, however, does not lie in some arbitrarily speciesist definition, but in the topic dealt with in the book – capitalism. It is not Marx who excludes animals from his conception of capitalist society. Society is structured in a way in which only human labour is recognised as labour since it only correlates the different kinds of labour expended by humans for each other in its products.

Marx does not deny recognition of being workers to animals, but, due to methodological constraints, he does not include them as wage labourers in his analytical remit. The Italian philosopher Marco Maurizi (2015) puts it the following way:

The exclusion of animals from the framework of this [Marx’; C.S./M.S.] analysis has nothing to do with a lack of regard for them [. . .]. Many of the accusations of anthropocentrism leveled against Marx by anti-speciesists fail to recognize that it is theoretically justified to underline the difference between human and non-human labour in an analysis of the mechanisms of capitalism. (p. 230)

It is therefore largely irrelevant whether the activities of animals within a society which produces in a capitalist way can be designated as labour in a generic sense or not. The role of animals in the capitalist process of production and circulation is not the result of some quality attributed to them – whether it is alleged to be negative, delimiting, denigrating or even consciously inclusive. The role of animals is a consequence of their objective integration within that process and their specific integration in terms of socioeconomic relations into the capitalist system of exploitation and domination (see Stache 2020b), which are different from those of wage labourers. In other words, Marx does not form concepts normatively, but is solely guided by the reality of society: animals are means of capitalist production, namely, as objects of labour (Marx MECW 35: 191–192), and as such a thing owned by the capitalist (Marx MECW 35: 195).

Among the objects of labour, Marx introduces a differentiation which, albeit including animals in production, is not developed in any very meaningful way apart from that. According to this, animals may be objects of labour found in nature in the extractive industries, for example, in hunting or fishing (Marx MECW 35: 191). They may also be, however, objects of labour filtered through labour, that is, products of transformation through human labour, namely, when they are ‘in their present form, not only products of, say last year’s labour, but the result of a gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence, and by means of his labour’ (Marx MECW 35: 191) – domesticated animals.

That labour is useful labour and has a directly social form, which is not necessarily any different from its property as useful labour, is at any rate a basic tenet of all human societies (Wolf 2002: 45–102). The requirement that it should have a social form follows from the fact that humans work for each other. How far it can be said of animal groups that they work for each other, and that their labour therefore also has a social form, is a question we will not deal with here.⁵ In human societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates, at any rate, the kinds of labour performed, since they are only correlated socially and thus set in relation to one another in their products, only gain their directly social form, not in their form as useful labour, but in their property as human labour in the abstract (Wolf 2002: 72–92). This fact can lead to different answers to the question as to whether or not human labour is expended for society in the first place – depending on whether the aspect of usefulness in labour, which is non-social, is considered or whether it is examined in its directly social form.⁶

Every kind of labour expended by a human is human labour. This seems to be a trite tautology. As soon as a human begins to realise her or his purposes in nature, s/he is performing labour in the sense given above as useful labour. But: ‘This method of determining, from the standpoint of the labour process alone, what is productive labour, is by no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production’ (Marx MECW 35: 191). For this reason Marx does not limit himself in Capital to setting out the factors driving the human labour process, but examines the social form of human labour.

The mere fact of expending human labour to make a product through forming natural materials is not in itself sufficient to create value. Because creating value is not a physiological, but a social property of labour.⁷ Under the conditions of the capitalist mode of production the direct social form of labour is human labour in the abstract, labour in its property of simply being human labour. With this property it creates value, which means for Marx nothing more than that it is recognised as being expended for society. With the caveat, however, that labour only creates value to the extent that it does not exceed the threshold of what is socially necessary to make a certain product. For ‘the total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units’ (Marx MECW 35: 49). However,

each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary (Marx MECW 35: 49).

Therefore ‘the labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time’ (Marx MECW 35: 49).

Marx illustrates this with the example of the English hand weavers at the time mechanical weaving was introduced:

The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value. (Marx MECW 35: 49)

From the social point of view, that is, capital’s in the case of capitalism, this is as if the hand weaver had not worked at all for half the time s/he in fact (as useful labour) worked. To that extent her or his labour was unnecessary, in terms of value, it is considered not to have been expended. It drops out of the aggregate total of human labour. If a commodity can actually be sold, depends on ‘whether or not the quantity of labour time contained in it proves to be the quantity of labour time necessarily required by society’ (Marx MECW 29: 308) for its production. In other words, if

this commodity has been produced in excess of the existing social needs, then so much of the social labour time is squandered and the mass of the commodity comes to represent a much smaller quantity of social labour in the market than is actually incorporated in it. (Marx MECW 37: 186)

In practice, this can be seen in bakeries. Bakery goods are sold at a lower price in the afternoon so that they do not have to be thrown in the trash (Kleine Zeitung, 2018). In this case, excess supply of commodities at the same time implies that more labour time than socially necessary is expended to produce them.

Returning to Marx’s example of the hand weaver, the humanness of her or his labour by itself was of no help to the hand weaver and is no help to the baker today in also gaining social recognition for it as labour and thus creating value.⁸ This fact does not contribute anything to answer the question of whether animals work. However, it does show that being human is not enough on its own to ensure that the work of the individual is also socially recognised as labour.

This is because from the perspective of capitalism, only productive labour is labour. The mere fact that human labour has been expended is not in itself sufficient to create, not only value, but also surplus value. The situation described above also applies in a society with the developed mode of capitalist production. The relevant factor here is the concept of productive labour. Marx already introduces it on the very first pages of Capital as a synonym for useful labour. ‘In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e. productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim’ (Marx MECW 35: 52). He later refers back to this when he writes,

If we examine the whole process from the point of view of its result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject of labour [Arbeitsgegenstand; C.S./M.S.] are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour. (Marx MECW 35: 191)

Labour is therefore productive in that it produces something.

And yet: ‘This method of determining, from the standpoint of the labour process alone, what is productive labour, is by no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production’ (Marx MECW 35: 191). When this process is considered as a whole, the concept of productive labour is modified in two ways: on one hand, it is expanded, since functions of the labour process which are not themselves directly involved in making of the product become productive activities. On the other, and this is very important in our context, the concept of productive labour is narrowed down (see Marx MECW 35: 510):

Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. (Marx MECW 35: 510)

In other words,

Labour itself, from this standpoint, is only productive in so far as it creates profit or surplus produce for capital. If the worker does not create profit, his labour is unproductive for the capitalist. To the extent that the worker does not do that, his work is unproductive. (Marx MECW 32: 174)

The mere property of humanness in labour is thus not sufficient to make it productive labour from the standpoint of the capitalist, that is, labour which creates surplus value.

Transferred to the work of animals, nature’s productions or humans’ work that they do not do as productive wage labourers, this reasoning has several implications. We confine ourselves to the case of animals and the question of value production here. But the general consequences are the same for the other two groups of agents as well (for an instructive approach to nature and value production, see, for example, Burkett 1999: 57–98).

Unlike human labour, animals’ work is excluded from potentially being value-producing from the very beginning in Capital because in the capitalist mode of production, only humans are potential wage labourers. Value production, as already indicated, is coupled to being a productive worker and vice versa. This is not because Marx intended or conceptualised it that way, but because the history of class struggle has led to the establishment of capitalist social relations in circulation and production of the social product in which only humans participate. Only the wage-dependent humans sell their labour power as a commodity on the market while they are politically free in the double sense that they do not personally belong to one specific master and, at the same time, do not dispose over any means of production to reproduce themselves self-sufficiently.

Animals are not capable of taking part in these relations. Even though some of them could act like human wage labourers, more importantly, they are integrated into the capital relation between capital and the proletariat via the ‘capital-animal relation’ (Stache 2020a: 12). The latter is an economically super-exploitative and a politically despotic relationship between capital and animals. Capital is able to economically appropriate animals’ work, their bodies and lives in capitalist production for free, while animals are not granted bourgeois liberties. They are not even free in the double sense of human wage labourers.

As we showed above, the special form of acknowledging productive labour as the only labour socially relevant in capitalism via the purchases and sales on the market leads to subsequently sort out which human wage labour was productive and to which amount. This implies that not even all human labour power sold to capitalists is value producing. All other forms of work, be it human, animal or natural, is not even potentially value producing because the according labour power is not sold as a commodity to capital on the market and thus, for capital, it is not recognised as socially necessary labour. These forms of work constitute free gifts to capital and in capitalist social structures of generalised commodity production as the dominant mode of production they might give some capitalists extra-profits. But these forms of labour do not create value and, accordingly, they do not generate surplus value or profits. It is this interconnection between the capitalist social relations, the socialisation of labour via the market and value production which scholars like Kallis & Swyngedouw (2017: 4–5) and others (see for a selection Stache 2020a: 13–15) fail to conceptualise correctly.

To theoretically deny those other forms of work to be value producing is not to say that they are unnecessary, are not valuable in a moral or political sense, or even in some cases that capital does not depend on them. It is rather to say that capitalist social relations are structured and reproduced in a way that they only a part of all expanded labour power in bourgeois society is recognised. If we want to dismantle all kinds of exploitation, super-exploitation, expropriation and robbery of labour power and products of work in the course of so-called primitive accumulations from which capital benefits, that is if we are willing to reorganise and redistribute all forms of labour justly and sustainably, no matter its origin, we need to replace capitalist socioeconomic relations with socialist ones. And these have to comprise more than those works which have been productive in the sense that they are producing value, surplus value and profits for capital so far.

Against this background, the view that ‘Marx even begrudged animals with delivering surplus value as workers’ (p. 228), as Adorno (2005 [1974]) writes, is incorrect. All the more so because ‘[t]o be a productive labourer is [. . .] not a piece of luck, but a misfortune’ (p. 510), as Marx (MECW 35) notes. ‘[T]he labour which cannot be utilised with profit and is thus incapable of purchasing, fall prey to the mortality figures’ (Engels MECW 42: 168).

Conclusion

In the present article, we started from the accusations against Marx brought forward by human–animalist scholars that his early and later writings are based on a human–animal dualism which makes them a part of the Western philosophical tradition going back to the philosophies like René Descartes’. Presumably, this dualism is condensed in Marx’s concept of labour, excluding animals and reducing labour to be a capacity of humans only.

However, in the last two chapters, we demonstrated that in Marx’s work, the boundaries of labour are not identical with the boundaries between species. Based on his distinction between useful labour and labour in its historic specific, capitalist social form, Marx differentiates between forms of labour in a continuum that ranges from even non-conscious animal forms to the value- and surplus value-creating, productive labour of wage workers in the capitalist social formation.

Referring to labour as useful labour, it exists in a form which is peculiar to humans as a species. This observation does not deny that forms of specific labour exist in animals and that the forms how to appropriate nature for their purposes are related in humans and animals. In fact, Marx distinguishes between human and non-human forms of labour as qualitatively different forms in the same continuum in his evolutionary perspective in three ways. First, Marx observes manifold human and non-human forms of useful labour exist alongside each other in our contemporary world. Second, he considers human labour, like forms of non-human labour, as the product of a phylogenetic development in history. Third, Marx’s concept of useful labour implies that he reflects the contemporary differentiation of labour as the result of the entire evolutionary history of labour. This means, even though the human form of labour is different today, it descends from pre-Homo sapiens and non-human forms.

With respect to labour in its direct social and capitalist form, the subject of Marx’s Capital, we showed that Marx’s concept of labour is neither anthropological nor anthropocentric in the last instance. It only deals with human labour solely because the concept of social labour in capitalism is derived from the real social relations on which capitalism is based and in which animals do not participate. These social relations are formed and reproduced exclusively by humans so far. Thus, it is not Marx’s concept of capitalist social labour which downgrades animals to means of production and objects of labour, the capitalist social relations and their ‘personifications’ (Marx MECW 35: 95), the capitalist class, do that (see Stache 2020b). This interpretation is supported by the fact that capitalist social labour does not comprise human labour as such. Rather, it only consists of productive human wage labour as value-creating and surplus value-creating labour. The human character of labour is not enough to make it value-creating and surplus value-creating labour. Being a human activity and being labour are not congruent. Like animal labour or natural transforming processes, they are therefore treated as non-value-creating work and their work as a free gift to capital.

In both cases, that is, useful labour and capitalist social labour, Marx’s concept of labour is non-speciesist. It is not built on an ideological human–animal dualism but on the social relational and natural differences between varying forms of labour which have developed over time due to different forms of human and non-human social and natural praxis. Therefore, Marx’s critical social theory does not stand in the tradition of Cartesian dualism. His work is not part of the Western self-referential fantasies of omnipotence, mistaken delusions of feasibility and incurable belief in progress.

Furthermore, Marx does not form a concept of labour. He is not guided by normative, moral or political standpoints, but solely by social and natural relational praxis in reality over time and beyond species boundaries. It is that which gives contradictory answers to the question as to any species-contingent delimitations on what labour is. Marx describes the historical development of human labour into what it is today as well as what is recognised or not recognised as human labour under the conditions of the capitalist mode of production. He generates these insights from his perception of social labour as behaviour towards other humans and towards nature. It is this which has formed the basis for Marx to part ways with philosophy and with it the contradiction between nature and mind, body and soul, thinking and being which determine it (see Wolf 2018a: 110).

Politically more important, though, Marx’s non-speciesist concept of labour is of inestimable value for Marxist animalism or animalist Marxism in at least two ways. Theoretically, it is an instrument to conceptualise, analyse and criticise the relationships of humans to each other and of humans to nature, including animals, how they are today. In other words, with Marx’s conceptual tool we can understand that the status of animals as means of production in the contemporary social formation is rooted in the capitalist social relations as specific relations of labour between humans and between humans and nature, including animals. That is to say, with the help of Marx’s concept of labour we can identify the actually existing structure between different forms of labour ranging from productive human wage labour to the work of animals and nature as the capitalist class structures them in its favour and to its profit. Thus, we comprehend the root cause of these forms of exploitation and oppression in capitalism, the material interconnection and interaction between them and their main driver and profiteer: capital.

With respect to the praxis of class struggle, Marx also pointed the way to the liberation of humans, animals and nature (see Stache 2020a) by his concept of labour, that is, by revealing the structure of the intertwined forms of labour, the according qualitatively different forms of exploitation and oppression and the main actor and profiteer of exploitation and oppression in capitalism. Without a change in capitalism’s socioeconomic relations by class struggle against the capitalist class, the purely functional status of animals will not disappear. That is why animal liberation has to be made a part of the socialist class struggle. Furthermore, the difference between human and animal labour as recognised by Marx and Engels also implies that animals will not play a role in liberation themselves as subjects of revolution. Animals have incredible capacities, even the most intelligent and creative humans envy. But animals are not able to change the human social relations to them or between the humans themselves. Therefore, animals are not subjects of class struggle. Finally, with respect to a future socialist society, Marx’s concept of labour and its inherent differentiation of labour forms imply that we have to arrange social labour in a historically new way, according to the contributions which each work makes to the universal development of society and to all its individual members, including animals, and to the sustainability of nature. Regarding animals, this has to start, obviously, with the social acknowledgement that various animals have worked and contributed a lot to the development and wealth of society in history and that they are ‘suffering, conditioned and limited creature’ (Marx MECW 3: 336) like humans, but different. In addition, a political form has to be implemented in which the systematic investigation, scientific debate and political representation of the animals’ needs and interests are obligatory to the cross-species socialist political collective. Unlike in contemporary state sponsored animal welfarism, the orientation should not be the minimum necessary for a so-called species-appropriate life but their overall flourishing. But most importantly, among lots of other things, a fair share of social labour will be needed for the dismantling of the animal industries, the closure of some of them, and particularly the conversion of food production to an organic and vegan one under democratic workers’ control, starting in the imperialist metropolises. Finally, a part of social labour has to be expended for establishing zapovedniks for nature and animals, that is, following the early Soviet environmental protection zones at least half of the earth’s surface should be converted into spaces in which humans do not interfere with animals, except maybe for research in form of participant observation but not for eco-tourism or related purposes (for a proposal see Vettese and Pendergrass 2022). It should be stressed here that a progressive half-earth project cannot be realized with the belief in competition, the free market or technological fixes like in E.O. Wilson’s influential vision (Wilson 2016: 205 -224). However, within a socialist society, that is, under socioeconomically and politically different conditions compared to today (Napoletano & Clark 2020: 43 -47) these zapovedniks could function as refuges not only for wild animals but also for those animals which have been at the hands of animal capital so far and deserve a decent rest of their lives.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Christian Stache

Notes

Author biographies

Christian Stache is an independent scholar who earned his PhD from the University of Hamburg, Germany. His first book Kapitalismus und Naturzerstörung. Zur kritischen Theorie des gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisses (Capitalism and the Destruction of Nature. Towards a Critical Theory of the Relation between Society and Nature; Budrich UniPress Ltd. 2017) was published in 2017. His fields of interest are Marxism, ecology, ecosocialism and human -animal relations.

Michael Sommer is an independent scholar based in Hamburg, Germany. Together with Dieter Wolf he published the book “Imaginäre Bedeutungen und historische Schranken der Erkenntnis. Eine Kritik an Cornelius Castoriadis” (Imaginary Meanings and Historical Limits of Knowledge. A Critique of Cornelius Castoriadis; Argument Verlag 2008). In cooperation with Susann Witt-Stahl he edited the anthology “’Antifa heißt Luftangriff!’ Zur Regression einer revolutionären Bewegung” (‘Antifa means air raid!’ On the regression of a revolutionary movement; Laika Verlag 2014). Most recently his essay “Anti-Postone: or, Why Moishe Postone’s Antisemitism Theory is Wrong, but Effective” appeared in English with Cosmonaut Press.

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