Posts tagged holidays

I try my best to operate outside of the structures of oppression that are currently provided by our society, the economy being one of them. So much of our “American way of life” is built on foundations of — and perpetuated by — oppression. From the class of people who are kept in poverty so that the wealthy have someone to clean their houses and do their nails, to the sex trade that ensures women (and their bodies) a commodity status, to the slaughter of animals so their flesh and fur can be sold on the market, it all seems so heinous that I don’t feel good about participating in any of it — not to mention how preposterous it is to me that we have to pay for basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. In that spirit, I am a vegan who grows and forages as much food as possible and is not often found in the faux-meat section of the grocery store. I encourage the growth of small barter economies (see also: the really, really free market; freecycle.org; and freegan.info) and any self-sustainability offered by your local climate (guerrilla gardening, anyone?).

My friend Drew recently passed along the following article about the oppressive qualities of our economic system, the trade in animal bodies as a thriving economy, and what the perpetuation of these systems means for oppressed animals and human animals. It’s a great read, and really got me thinking about how I can further step back from a consumeristic lifestyle. First step: not buying anyone a damn thing for the “holiday season,” because no one should be trampled and left for dead so that others can get a “good bargain” on things they don’t need.

Other suggested reading (get ‘em at your local library!):
- Global Woman by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty by Nancy Naples
- Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do It Ourselves Guide by Stacy Pettigrew and Scott Kellogg
- Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community by H.C. Flores

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From Bull Market to Bear Market: Why Animal Commodities Still Sell
by John Sanbonmatsu

On Wall Street, the “Bull” market has turned into a “Bear” market—capitalist argot for a market in which sellers crowd out buyers and in which the value of publicly traded corporate stocks falls. Whether rising or falling, however, the capitalist market always treats other living animals the same way, which is to say as symbols of exchange and as living commodities to be bought, sold, traded, killed, and consumed.

In September, at the very moment when world markets were falling sharply throughout the world (the Dow Jones suffered its biggest one day point decline since the 9-11 attacks), at least one investment sector remained profitable to über-wealthy investors: speculation in dead animal bodies, gussied up as High Art. In an article entitled, “Bull Market for Hirst in Sotheby’s 2-Day Sale,” a New York Times reporter wrote:

It was as if Sotheby’s here was a little oasis far removed from the grim news of the financial world. In less than 24 hours, giant tanks of dead sharks, zebras and piglet submerged in formaldehyde; glass cabinets filled with medical supplies, cigarette butts or diamonds; paintings of everything from dots to skulls—233 works by the British artist Damien Hirst—were snapped up at a brisk clip by collectors from all around the world.

One of Hirst’s works, “Pigs Might Fly,” described by the Times as “a piglet with dove’s wings in a gold-plated case filled with formaldehyde,” brought in $872,139. Another , “The Broken Dream,” of “a foal’s head floating in formaldehyde with a knife beside it” brought in $907,480. In the end, the two-day sale of Hirst’s art netted $200 million—about half the Gross National Product of the country of East Timor (population: 1.1 million). Maybe a foal’s head floating in formaldehyde isn’t really good art—aestheticians will quarrel–but no one can say it isn’t good business.

Nonhuman animals in fact remain one of the few universal symbols of exchange under modern capitalism. Human beings buy and sell other animals like slaves, display them alive in zoos and aquariums for their pleasure, kill and stuff them for the local Natural History Museum, buy and sell them as “livestock,” or turn their corpses into art (Hirst’s ersatz animal sculptures are merely the latest iteration of nature morte, the “still [dead] life” tradition handed down to us by medieval and early modern European artists). Even today, as we enter the most profound crisis in world capitalism since the 1930s, Wall Street continues to do a brisk business in Pork Belly Futures. First offered on the Chicago Merchantile Exchange in 1961 (as a way for hog producers to hedge against price volatility in the market), Pork Belly Futures allows capitalists to place bets on the number of living beings who will be commodified and slaughtered in the future. That is not exactly right, however. So vast is the market that the minimum unit of exchange is in fact counted not in individual beings (who, after all, do not count), but as a quantity of flesh–“40,000 pounds of frozen pork bellies cut and trimmed.” Shylock may not get Bassanio’s pound of flesh, but today’s wealthy investors (Gentiles, Jews, Muslims, Atheists) get their’s by the ton.

What about those who lack the resources to gamble on the future options market, or who can’t cough up a cool mill for one of Hirst’s formaldehyde-drenched piglets ? Try starting up your own pig business. Global Swine Exchange thrives to “assist swine producers as well as other livestock producers throughout the world in finding breeding stock…with superior genetic potential for existing, expanding, or beginning operations.” Or start even smaller: many companies sell live baby pigs online for individuals to feed, nurture, and murder on their own, for $110 each. However, raising a pig can be daunting. So the growing vogue among young urban professionals and suburban soccer moms these days is to raise chickens rather than pigs at home. Baby chickens are even cheaper–$2.12 each per head. You can also accessorize. The Omlet Company sells an “eglu” for your backyard– “a truly innovative, practical and fun way of keeping chickens.” (“Collecting fresh eggs from hens in your backyard not only ensures you get fantastic tasting eggs but you also get a good feeling inside from knowing exactly where your food comes from.”) And when the chicken no longer produces good eggs, or if you’re just tired of being an urban farmhand, why, just kill your animal–by decapitating her. You can buy a DVD to learn how to do that too (www.chickenvideo.com).

Few animal rights activists appreciate how much capitalism continues to be one of the main driving force behind the extermination and enslavement of other sentient beings. While humans have been enslaving other animals at least since the Neolithic Era, some 12,000 years ago, only in the twentieth century did nonhuman beings get reduced to pure commodities—to abstract quantities to be viewed and treated as mere things. Capitalism reduces all value to the value of exchange—to what can be bought and sold for profit. The barbaric practices we see today throughout the animal slaughter industry –unwanted baby chicks being suffocated alive in large garbage bags, or fed alive into crushing machines; pigs and cows being skinned or boiled alive, the extermination of the great fishes of the free oceans (through the euphemistically named, “over-fishing”), minks and foxes being electrocuted and gassed by the millions for their fur, factory “fish farms,” where salmon, talapia, and other captive species live out their short lives in tiny watery hells filled with thousands of other fish, eating and breathing their own feces, and on and on—are the necessary complement to the capitalist mode of production. Just as capitalism forces a “race to the bottom” in human workers’ wages, it places irresistible pressures at every point of the animal production system to maximize the unfeeling exploitation of animal bodies. For the only way to meet demand for flesh in a mass consumer society is to cut corners, speed up production, hire unskilled labor, and lower production costs. As for the animals trapped in such a system, they become objects to be manipulated at will, even on the genetic level, as though they were not living, breathing, feeling, thinking beings. The atrocities we hear about in animal agriculture reveal the essence of capitalism as such, which is fascism.

As the world capitalist economy now convulses and enters its greatest crisis since the Great Depression, the stakes for the other animals with whom we share the planet could not be higher. In the short-term, a global economic depression will indirectly reduce some animal exploitation. Depression will hurt some markets for animal flesh, as government subsidies for agribusiness face new pressures, and as people cut back on expensive “meats.” Investment in genetic engineering of nonhuman animals, especially for pharmaceuticals, will persist, but there will be less and less money available for R&D. However, global depression will also hurt animals in a variety of ways. As the ranks of the unemployed swell, so too will the animal shelters, as families find that they must choose between eating and keeping their nonhuman companions. Meanwhile, in the Third World, increasingly desperate farmers, displaced urban workers, and landless peasants will turn more and more to “scorched earth” consumption practices simply to survive in the face of regional and local wars, mass starvation, and social dislocation. (Pity the poor Mountain Gorillas of the Congo, whose lives, like those of millions of black human Congolese, count for nothing these days.)

In the long-term, however, the greater danger facing the other animals on our earth is not the economic downturn, but eventual stabilization and recovery of the world capitalist order itself. If the Obama Administration and other governing corporate and political elites succeed in stabilizing capitalism, enabling it to live to see another day, then we can look forward to another hundred years of ecological ruin and mass enslavement and killing of billions of other sentient beings. So long as other animals are seen and treated as commodities for the ceaseless production of more and more profit for the few, their fates will be sealed. The rate of animal and plant species extinction will continue to accelerate, as global warming and habitat destruction deprive them of the basic means of life. Meanwhile, the living Hell that is the American system of animal agriculture—what can only be called the “concentration camp” model of flesh production—will continue to be exported to all four corners of the globe.