From Factory Floor to Killing Floor: Marx, Critical Theory and the Status of the Animal

Abstract

Despite Marx and Engels' imperative to support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things, Marxism's relationship with animal rights activism is problematically vague. In this article, the author argue that absent the rejection of the exploitation of non-human animals, it is impossible to apprehend the full "web of domination" operating in the present. She frame the status of the non-human animal as a nodal point at which the domination of all living creatures, including humans, by and for capital becomes clear as a fixed aspect of capitalism. She also contest that any Marxian praxis that fails to encompass the status and claims on behalf of nonhuman animals artificially forecloses a fruitful space for struggle that can be used to agitate for change that stretches far beyond the treatment of non-human animals.