In his forthcoming book, Animals and Capital, Professor Wadiwel explores how an understanding of the value structure of our prevailing economic system is important for comprehending the rise of industrial agriculture and the evolution in human animal relations which followed. Capitalist agriculture reflects a biopolitical process of transforming animals into a means of subsistence for human populations, and a simultaneous economic process of creating animals as a "labor force" for value extraction. In this talk, Professor Wadiwel will focus on how Karl Marx’s value theory might tell us something about animal labor and help make sense of the development of the factory farm, which, he would argue, reflects a historically unprecedented "handshake" between capitalism and hierarchical anthropocentricism.
