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With the recent nonhuman turn in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, various
intriguing and frequently dazzling articulations of Marxian terminologies and insights
have arisen with innovations arising from studies of the nonhuman. Whether speaking
of eco-critique, animal studies, actor-network theory, theories of assemblage,
theories associated with speculative realism, or the numerous explorations of the
modalities of matter, each of these analytical perspectives has interesting ways of
provokingand being provoked bydevelopments in Marxism. While these intersections with Marxism are occasionally inharmonious, such friction can help recast lines
of inquiry both within and outside of Marxian traditions by providing an enhanced set
of analytical tools and a renewed sense of purpose.
The present essay aims to stoke this productive tension both by observing the key
position of nonhumans in Marxism and by arguing for Marxisms place as a vital
theoretical reference in current nonhuman studies. As various types of nonhumans have
increasingly occupied my own research and teaching explores the intersections between
nature and technology in both literature and environmental politics, I have noticed that
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recent calls for papers and conference announcements related to nonhuman studies
offer little to no mention of Marxism. Yet as a theoretical tradition long concerned with
the identification and liberation of marginal beings ensnared in exploitative relations,
Marxism is as useful as ever in this global era in which exploitation is increasingly
widespread, interconnected, mediated, masked, and dispersed through a range of
biotechnological agents.
The first two sections of this essay articulate actor-network theory (ANT) and animal
studies with Marxism in order to map out several key points of conflict and accord and
to illustrate the many ways these theories potentially complement each other in
inquiry. I focus on ANT1 and animal studies,2 in contrast to other noteworthy theories
in nonhuman studies, primarily because I am familiar with them and find them useful
in my work and not because of any perceived deficit in other theories. ANT and animal
studies also provide reasonable representations of several key impulses in nonhuman
studies: an attention to various manifestations of nonhuman agency, whether in
organisms, objects, technologies, or processes; a rejection of the transcendental
human subject who is external to socionatural entanglements; and an emphasis on
relational ontologies. While each theorization associated with nonhuman studies
offers specific variations on these themes, space restrictions and gaps in my expertise
supply practical reasons for staying with ANT and animal studies. For stylistic reasons, I
employ the expression nonhuman studies to describe my grouping of ANT and animal
studies, knowing that nonhuman studies means many things to many theorists.
The third part of this essay explores areas of complementarity between Marxism
and nonhuman studies, with a brief reading of Marxs (1976) depiction of the
relationship between labor power and technological innovation from his chapter in
Capital on machinery in the factory. His descriptions of the reserve army of labor, of
the introduction of women and children into the factory, and of the transformations
in the qualities of labor power and of factory conditions reveal the malleable social
and ontological status of individuals when they are recognized, from the perspective
of capital, solely by their capacity to add value to commodities via their own labor
power. That is, through its abstractions the processes of capitalist production reduce
both humans and animals to instruments of labor power, drawing both into its own
mechanics. This reading of Marx through the lens of ANT and animal studies allows a
broader understanding of the dynamics of exploitation, while suggesting that the
1
Although actor-network theory involves a diverse set of concepts and theorists that are far
from uniform in their engagements, the version of the theory I present is most closely associated
with Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Castree (2002, 11623) summarizes several defining
perspectives: a recognition of the deep interconnectedness of nature and society; an emphasis
on connection that disregards local/global dichotomies; a notion of relational symmetry that
resists privileging human or social forces over other socionatural actors; a highly relational and
contingent notion of agency as always widespread and evolving; and a relational, performative
understanding of power.
2
In this essay I primarily employ Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe, whose wellknown works consider relationships between humans and animals, the recognition and ascription
of animality and humanity to others, and the profound aporias encountered when we consider
animal otherness.
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because they stitch back together the socionatural imbroglios that that dichotomy
has rent asunder. Gareau (2005, 140) suggests that ANTs descriptive richness offers
an important on the ground perspective of the dynamics that lead to crisis and
social transformation in capitalism.
Gareau is not alone in observing the complicated yet potent lines of inquiry that
arise when ANT and Marxism intersect (for example, see Castree (2002), Kirsch and
Mitchell (2004), and Swyngedouw (2004)) and this intersection represents one edge of
a broad theoretical movement that aims to articulate Marxism with political ecology
(see, for example, Burkett (1999), Foster (2000), OConnor (1998), and Loftus
(2009)). Each of these works provides a nuanced account of nonhuman socionature3whether understood as nature, resources, instruments, animals, or other
phenomenaengaging with Marxian concepts like metabolic rift, contradiction,
and praxis. Where ANT and green formulations of Marxism differ most is in the
formers political agnosticism and its deployment of a radical empiricism that
precludes accounts of beings and events that appeal to broad, contested terms like
society, nature, and humans without examining the actors and relations that
shape the very production and dissemination of these terms (Castree 2002). Given
this articles interest in nonhumans, it is worthwhile to proceed by exploring the
implications of taking Gareaus earlier statement seriously. If we have never been
human, what would our own nonhuman state of being mean to different historical
formulations of Marxism, and what might a Marxism without humans contribute to
ongoing work in nonhuman studies?
It is not accidental that I pose these questions in a journal known for its
elaborations of Althusserian antihumanism, as these accounts of the subject generate
space to consider nonhuman agency. For Althusser (2005, 209) the subject is always
overdetermined (adapting Freuds well-known term), reflecting in contradiction
the subjects situation in the structure in dominance of the complex whole. The
subject expresses neither a transhistorical essence nor a singular agency capable of
dominating or excising the self from natural, social, economic, cultural, political,
and other processes. The subject is always determined and determining,
constantly engaged with diverse, inextricable networks (Resnick and Wolff 2008,
566). And a genealogy of the antihuman subject can be traced in classical Marxian
texts: in the sixth of Marxs (1978b, 145) Theses on Feuerbach, which defines the
human as the ensemble of the social relations; in Gramscis (1971, 352) Prison
Notebooks, where the human is a series of active relationships (a process)
composed of interactions with other men and the natural world; and in Hardt
and Negris (2000, 331) Empire, where the subject is a hybrid and modulating
product of procedures of biopower.
3
The notion of socionature arrives packed with many resonances. Following Swyngedouw (2004,
1718), I employ the term to observe the inseparability of nature and society: The world is a
historical geographical process of perpetual metabolism in which social and natural
processes combine in a historical geographical production process of socio-nature whose
outcome (historical nature) embodies chemical, physical, social, economic, political, and
cultural processes in highly contradictory but inseparable manners. Every body and every thing
is a cyborg, a mediator, part social, part natural, lacking discrete boundaries and internalizing
the multiple contradictory relations that redefine and rework them.
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staged as false antithesis. Gareaus (2005) suggestion that ANT could be mobilized
to improve our capacity to recognize the specific ecological modalities of exploitation is also useful. Another strategy with promising potential involves critics
drawing Marxian concepts through ANT, like Swyngedouw (2006), who applies the
Marxian notions of metabolism and circulation to a Latourian conception of urban
assemblages, and like Kirsch and Mitchell (2004), who use nonhuman agency in actornetworks to rethink Marxs conception of dead labor. In addition to responding to
critics who dismiss Marxism for its humanism, each of these projects reveals alliances
and intersections between the two traditions that gesture toward inquiries and
discussions that might lead to new political formations.
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relation to other beings. In the well-known account of an encounter with his cat, of
standing naked and suddenly finding himself caught in the cats gaze, Derrida (2002,
37480) challenges Descartess mechanistic characterization of animal life, which
distinguishes man from animal based on the capacity to respondand not merely
reactto others. Derrida recognizes the cat as an irreplaceable individual with
unique experiences and understandings not only of the world but also of this
encounter with the author. In a deft analysis of Derridas experience and reflections,
Haraway (2008, 20) observes that the key question that emerges in Derridas
encounter with his cat is not whether the cat could speak but whether it is possible
to know what respond means and how to distinguish a response from a reaction, for
human beings as well as for anyone else. This scenario prompts exploration not into
what animals ostensibly lack or are denied in anthropocentrism but rather the
death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the human (79).
Cary Wolfe (2003, 6) similarly observes that the figure of the animal historically has
been used to establish speciesist ideologies that secure the humans appreciated
status:
The figure of the animal in the West (unlike, say, the robot or the cyborg) is
part of a cultural and literary history stretching back at least to Plato and
the Old Testament, reminding us that the animal has always been especially,
frightfully nearby, always lying in wait at the very heart of the constitutive
disavowals and self-constructing narratives enacted by that fantasy figure
called the human.
Not only have we never been human, but the fantasy of being human also hinges on
the ideological production of the subhuman animal, whose demotion concurrently
promotes the human.
These formulations in animal studies of the human as a fantasy figure resemble
Horkheimer and Adornos classic portrayal of humans as pseudoindividuals. For
Horkheimer and Adorno (1987, 203), reason provides the ideological foundation for the
processes of humanization establishing individuals as properly human: Throughout
European history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction
to the animal. The latters lack of reason is the proof of human dignity. Reason not
only secures the humans eminence within Enlightenment narratives of progress but it
also reinforces these narratives, which ironically culminate in the dehumanizing
instrumentalization of individuals as workers, soldiers, and consumers: humans,
reduced to their socioeconomic functionality, become pseudoindividuals (11826).
Reason is, however, always exchangeable with other ideologically charged concepts
that mark and secure the fantasy of the humans ecological supremacy. As already
noted in the works of Derrida (2002) and Haraway (2008), the perceived capacity to
respond instead of react, and of being capable of judging response from reaction, has
an enduring historical potency. Physical characteristics (e.g., skin tone, hair texture,
and opposable thumbs) and behavioral traits (e.g., violence, emotion, and sexual
proclivities) are also employed as markers for distinguishing humans and nonhumans.
As many theorists have noted (e.g., Brody 1998; Singer 1989; Spurr 1993), it is no
accident that these characteristics have racial and gendered resonances.
POSTHUMANIST MARXISM
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Whether speaking of workers rights in the industrial era, the status of the
indigenous person in the colonial era, or the universal-global-liberal subject in the
contemporary information age of capitalism, configurations of humanness and
nonhumanness establish and naturalize both the relations between groups of beings
and the disciplinary methods used to reproduce these relations. Wolfe (2003, 8) notes
the violent implications of these slippery categories of human and nonhuman being,
which can be employed to rationalize violence against the social other of whatever
speciesor gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference. Here, the ecological
hierarchy between human and nonhuman beings attaches an ontological supplement
to social hierarchies. The domination of an individual or group in various social orders
(e.g., economic exploitation, political marginalization, and biopolitical discipline)
appears as a natural extension of an ecological order through which certain species,
by virtue of their biological faculties, dominate others.
As a theoretical tradition long occupied with identifying and undoing exploitation,
Marxism supplies animal studies with concepts and perspectives for analyzing the
nonhumans marginal status. As witnessed in Marxs depiction of mid-nineteenthcentury factory workers, as well as in Horkheimer and Adornos pseudoindividuals,
Haraways cyborg, and Hardt and Negris multitude, the character and dynamics of
human and nonhuman being are in constant flux. Animal studies, like ANT, is
extremely effective in exploring the processes of humanization and dehumanization,
but Marxism helps historicize these processes and draw connections to specific
cultural and economic phenomena.
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which describes the complex, dynamic interchange between human beings and
nature resulting from human labor (158). Paul Burkett (1999, 2631), a frequent
collaborator with Foster, argues that metabolic rift, the alienation of workers from
natural conditions of production, is at the source of the economic and ecological
crises facing the world today. Because social conditions shape the character of labor
powers metabolic interaction with nature, a more sustainable (or less exploitative)
production of nature requires less exploitative social relations. Thus, for Burkett
ecological exploitation is always already woven into the structures of capitalism.
Foster and Burkett each repeatedly insist upon a synthesis of red and green
political concerns through a return to Marxs own texts (see Burkett 2006, 24), which
contain many rich descriptions and analyses of the profound influence of nonhumans
in the ecological relations that underpin all productive activity. Marx shows a
particular concern for nature, which appears in his writing as a deeply interactive
network of forces and conditions that make production possible, place limits on
productive potential, and shape the character of humans. In the first volume of
Capital, for instance, man confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature
and physically appropriates the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own
needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in
this way he simultaneously changes his own nature (Marx 1976, 283). While this
passage is demonstrative of the deep co-constitutive interactivity between the
human and nonhuman in production, in other passages of Capital Marx conveys the
nonhuman as a dominant, often recalcitrant force in relation to human activity, which
would align with perspectives in both ANT and animal studies. All three volumes
contain repeated mention of the seasons influence in shaping and constraining the
conditions of production: the availability of raw materials and the capacity to work
varies throughout the year (e.g., Marx 1976, 232; 1978a, 185; 1981, 369). All three
volumes also regularly observe the impact of wear and tear on currency (Marx 1976,
223), labor power (275), machines (325), and railroads (Marx 1978a, 249), which
again describes profound and often costly nonhuman activity.
For the capitalist, one strategy of ostensibly reducing exposure to natural forces
that are recalcitrant to production is mechanizing the workplace, which introduces a
different modality of nonhuman force into productive relations. This relationship
between human labor and mechanized nonhuman force takes center stage in Marxs
chapter on factory machinery in the first volume of Capital. At first glance, the
machine appears to complement human labor by taking over menial, muscular tasks.
The steam engine, for example, freed production from weaker and more unreliable
power sources such as horses (the worst motive force because a horse has a head of
its own), wind, and water, which are inconsistent and uncontrollable (Marx 1976,
4978). Echoing this minimizing of wild nature, the increasing and intensifying
mechanization of the workplace aims to minimize the influence of the hand of man
in the raw materials passage from the first phase to the last (502).
The only humans who experience the benefits of increased technological innovation, however, are the capitalists, as machines come to dominate the productive
processes in the industrial factory. Marxs description of these machines resembles a
techno-ecological network, a chain of mutually complementary machines, or a
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(Marx 1976, 307). But women, children, and everyone else who was not a Western
male were especially vulnerable to the social and ontological marginalization that
was reinforced by ideologies of economic efficiency and expansion. This social and
ontological demotion was perhaps best typified in the colonial setting, in which
previously self-sustaining native societies generally lacked the social, scientific, and
mechanical technologies to metabolize their resources for a global market. The
absence of these productive technologies reinforced racist ideologies that generally
understood deviations from Western orders of production as demonstrative of
deficiencies that were intrinsic to native life, in which the native was depicted as
ignorant, lazy, and animal-like (Adas 1989, 1134). Through labor, natives might have
been able to add value to a commodity, but typically not on the scale and terms
necessary to secure their standing as exploitable laborat least not initially. Through
the lens of capitalist ideology, where the production of value is always positive, the
appropriation of land and resources from natives found not only economic justification but also an ethical rationale. Conquest became understood as a civilizing
mission (200) in which, by reorganizing traditional societies and practices, Western
intrusion enriched and protected natives from their own barbarism (Fanon 2004, 149
54). The profound effects of these abstractions cannot be overstated, especially
considering the effects of imperial practices in shaping societies, economies, and
spaces since the nineteenth century.
In the context of his chapter on machines in the factory, however, Marx appears less
concerned with critiquing the relative qualities of various beings labor power than
illustrating the ways that intensified technological conditions of production transform
labor power. As Marx (1976, 781) notes later in Capital, the accumulation of capital
comes to fruition through a continuing increase of its constant component at the
expense of its variable component. In other words, technological innovations in the
factory serve to de-skill variable labor power to the point where it becomes
disposable, which leads to the formation of a surplus population, the industrial
reserve army of workers. For the purposes of accumulation, the specific qualities of
workers and their labor power is less important than their capacity to be integrated or
set free according to market conditions (790). In addition to providing security to the
productive interests of capitalists who face threats from competition and evolving
markets, the reserve army forces workers to compete for jobs, which keeps wages low.
And as technology advances to de-skill labor, the reserve army enlists not only skilled
workers who had been released from their jobs but also unskilled workers whose
contributions were never before viable to the productive needs of industry.
While the creation of the reserve army for capitalism explicitly demonstrates the
demotion of workers social status, this demotion is also ontological. Marx never
suggests in this section that people in the reserve army are anything less than human,
but the quality of human being depicted suggests an abject state of being: This
surplus population creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation
by capital in the interests of capitals own changing valorization requirements (Marx
1976, 784). As much as the wording and the idea of surplus people haunts this
quotation, the reduction of individuals to human material once again illustrates
capitalisms instrumentalization of beings. The progress of industry in the midnineteenth century depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working
POSTHUMANIST MARXISM
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Conclusion
Inflected by ANT and animal studies, these readings from canonical Marxian texts and
more contemporary formulations ecological Marxism demonstrate Marxisms ongoing
importance to nonhuman studies and also indicate ways that nonhuman studies might
invigorate Marxism. Nonhuman studiesagain, represented here via ANT and animal
studiescan prompt Marxism to rethink agency and causality in order to factor in a
wider array of socionatural organisms and objects that produce, and are produced by,
socionatural relations. ANT helps animate the host of nonhuman actorssuch as
capital, machines, and labor powerthat influence the conditions of production in
Marxs chapter on factory machinery. These contributions are more than descriptive,
however, as ANT expands the horizon of inquiry to consider instances of exploitation
that occur outside of capitalist/laborer relations. Animal studies also contributes to a
Marxian understanding of exploitation by calling attention to both nonhuman labor
and the processes that distinguish humans from nonhumans. And as Marxs writing on
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POSTHUMANIST MARXISM
121
analyses aiming to improve social and ecological conditions today. The potential for
new discussions and lines of inquiry to emerge in the intersections between the two is
indicative of each traditions relevance and vitality in the contemporary era.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Mark Lycett and the University of Chicago Program on the Global
Environment for promoting projects and events that explore creative approaches to
political ecology. I also would like to thank John Rieder and S. Charusheela for their
feedback in discussions that eventually led to this article and the anonymous reviewers
for their generous comments on previous drafts. The usual disclaimers apply.
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