First of all, animals should not be used for work because :im-vegan: . But having said that... I see how human labor creates surplus value. And I think I understand why machines don't create surplus value. But what about animals that get exploited to perform work, say the mule that pulls a plow? Like humans, they require a "real wage" to sustain them i.e. food, shelter, and medical attention, right? And if the value of labor power of a day of a mule is say 2 hours (that's how much human labor is invovlved in making feed, etc), then if this mule works for more than 2 hours, are they not creating surplus value for the capitalist that claims to own them?
I honestly can't believe some of the big brain takes in here . All your fancy book learning and you can't see the solutions right in front of your face.
Any animal that does labor should simply be issued cash at the end of the work day.
Seeing eye dog? Give it cash Horse? Give it cash
Honey bees? put the coins in the hive
no since banks don't let dogs open account, they money would still belong to the employer since the dog could never cash the cheque.
Thats why it has to be cash.
Also the idea of seeing the pain in a bosses eye as he is forced to hand 400$ to a dog that just rips it up is very funny to me
or the money could be held in trust by a group that looks after the animals once they are too old to work
Bees are a great example of stolen surplus value. Taking their honey before a harsh winter can wipe out a whole colony.
edit: maybe its not a good example idk I'm pretty dumb
bees are also moved around a lot to polenize commerical farms which is bad for them and is a big factor in killing the bees
and also irradicates local pollinators, further compounding problems with needing non-native bees
where bees are the local pollinators they are also facing extinction though
Yes, in part due to industrial honey bees and the pathogens / diseases they tend to carry.
also because of pesticides. Basically agrarian capitalism and it's mistreatment of bees is making a serious go of killing us all
Domestic honeybees make more honey than they need, and hives in human care are protected from predation allowing the hive to continue to surplus honey. Why on earth would a bee keeper take so much honey that the hive can't survive the winter?? Bees are some of the least exploited agricultural animals, if a hive isn't happy they can just leave.
They actually can't leave, the queens wings are often clipped. Or the queen is kept in the hive away from the honey with a "queen excluder " mesh
They are either weird-ish means of production or labor, depending on your bend. For Marx means of production definitely.
Same argument about not utilizing full labor time of means of production can be made towards any industrial equipment - if it stays still, it doesn’t work and doesn’t transfer value.
but how you gonna give the animal the full fruits of it's labour? start giving the mule lobster dinners and like a Supreme donkey jacket or something? tiny bee lambos?
the mule's already being exploited imo as it's doing work it wouldn't do voluntarily, meat animals are obviously exploited.
if an animals needs are met though and it's happy doing whatever it's doing i think it's fine, it's needs are most often gonna be less than the 'value' it produces anyway and it wouldn't really have a use for the extra surplus anyway, cos it's an animal.
in many cases though animals are used to do work they would do volunterily such as sheep dogs herding and many horses enjoy being ridden
Only after being psychologically and physically tortured into accepting human riders
that's one way of training a horse to accept riders but it's not the only way to do it. It's used a lot as the other way involves caring for the horse and getting it to associate you with positive atmospheres and experiences which involves compassion and unfortunately some men think compassion is gay. It's like how you can train a dog by beating it but that's not the only way to train a dog
And horse riding can be bad for the horses body if done a certain way and without regard for the welfare of the horse but it isn't automatically
of course it is a human can tell where a horse is uncomfortable but capital can only view the world as numbers. Training and looking after an animal properly takes compassion and capital has none
Dogs and horses have been genetically modified for centuries to do those "jobs".
yes and no dogs and horses have liked running and attenion basically forever
they aren't but they do involve it. how the animal feels about things depends a lot on how their trained and treated
yeah if a horse is broken they will hate riding but if you train them by building trust and continue to treat them with care and compassion they will enjoy riding.
breaking a horse is just one particularly way of getting them to take a rider and it's an evil way of doing it
i'm not gonna make any blanket statements about animal domestication but i have no idea how anyone can learn anything about horse training and riding and think the animal is doing everything voluntarily lol
breaking horses is one way to get a horse to take a rider but there are other ways. You can train a dog by beating them and you can make a man work by whipping them but those aren't the only ways to do so
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yes they were entitled to the full value of their labour. my point was animals have no need or use for the surplus value created by their labour. like if a donkey pulls a plough to harvest more wheat or whatever than it can possibly eat, what's the use in giving all the wheat to the donkey? it can't eat it or sell it.
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i mean i agree they shouldn't be forced to participate, but it's the forced part that's wrong not because they are being exploited in a marxist sense.
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In the accounting of capitalism, animals count as capital with depreciation or maintenance costs in feed or whatever. Slaves also counted as capital and the correct response to slavery was still abolishment - being accounted for as labour or capital is not a moral distinguishment or an aspersion on how valuable or not valuable an animals work is. Much the same way you wouldn't count your tractors "labour" and production over maintenance as "surplus value" you also wouldn't account that way work animals.
Farm animals were some of the first "technologies" - I know I'm instrumentalizing here, but stick with it - and the first things we could do to increase the organic composition of capital was by introducing draft animals to farming or mules for mining etc. - it's also what they did by introducing slavery to cotton picking or whatever too.
For Marx in Estranged Labour there is a distinction between human and animal that he elucidates quite well to help distinguish between what Marx considered human labour and animal labour. You can read it here. The whole thing is an interesting read but here's some vital parts:
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.
For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses the relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.
In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty.
It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
In the most technical sense I suppose it could be (although I believe work animals tend to be viewed more as tools or machines in this sense) and the exploitation of animals is certainly a problem that should be addressed but I also think there's an important factor here with animals that doesn't apply to humans. What would they even do with that value? Cows can be smart, but they aren't going to get a brand new TV or take a vacation to Hawaii or anything beyond "yes me run in field me eat tasty grass"
It would make a bit more sense to me for animals that we can exploit something their doing without having to give them much in return. Bee's, already being mentioned, is a good example because of honey. Also, any pollinator.
I'm sure that there's smarter people that me who have a better answer for how livestock create surplus value. But from years of having livestock, you've gotta put a decent amount of time/energy/money into keeping them and what they provide that can be sold tends to be valued less and less by customers. So it does makes sense that there's "cash profit" made somewhere, it winds up being not a lot.
If we viewed the "profit" as the stuff the animals produced (or were turned into) and used directly, that would be much easier for me to understand as "exploitable surplus value".
