Animal and plant labor, part III

 

Part III: Why does it matter?

Before I go on to plant labor – complete with quotes from Luke 12:27 and Buenaventura Durruti – there's the question of why any this matters. So you can describe animals as doing labor if you define your terms in a certain way: why should this matter to anyone?

It matters because the classic European leftist imaginary is all about work. It doesn't matter that newer (or older) imaginaries exist that aren't so focused on producerism: the left was dominated by Marxist ideas until the fall of the USSR, and the neoliberal era after that has suppressed any widespread adoption of anything else. For better or for worse, when many people on the left think of what defines the left, the answer has to do with the working class. Since Marxism is basically a 19^th century ideology, it has no ecological understanding, and has a false model of value in which all value comes from human work. No socialist state informed by the Marxist tradition has ever done better than capitalist states have in ecological terms.

It's not necessary to argue against Marxist ideas directly: these have more or less died out as living technical ideas for most of the population. What's left is a kind of folk Marxism. Psychologists now say that Freud was wrong about many important things: this doesn't stop generally literate people from thinking about the conscious and unconscious, the superego, ego, and id, the Freudian slip, the father complex and so on, or the more pop culture versions of these ideas like “daddy issues”. In the same way, people who adhere to class forms of the left rather than identity forms will immediately come up with ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest.

I'm one of these class-form people myself: as an anarchist, I've seen what happens when people claim leftism on the basis of identity but otherwise have a liberal politics. Neoliberalism runs on that kind of thing. So it seems to me to be imperative to re-use or recycle folk ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest into a form that can address the most important problems that we have as a civilization: our ecological limits. To do that, it becomes necessary to see animals and maybe even plants as workers, to feel solidarity, to understand that there is a common interest between them and ourselves.

This is a long-standing part of the anarchist lineage. In the Eurocentric tradition it goes back to works like Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, published in 1902. As such it is nothing new, but rather represents a kind of 20^th century that should have occurred but did not, either in the capitalist west or the Marxist east. For real 21^st century ideas we'd probably do better to turn towards Indigenous anarchists. But I myself am a product of the Euro tradition, and this is all I can write about.

Animal and Plant Labor, part II

 

Part II. Do animals work?

When people discuss this, they generally attribute work that an animal does that's supervised by a human as something that only counts as work because a human being is directing it. So, horses pull plows, provide transport, were used in war and so on but in this view they are generally understood as tools or adjuncts to human beings who are working – as capital, in other words. Dogs do what we might call emotional labor (and assist in the hunt) in the same way. Because I don't want to argue about this, I'm not going to address labor by domesticated animals.

For wild animals, our ideas of what labor is tend to match what we do in our civilization. So, for instance, models of animal labor from the last couple of centuries involve building things: beavers and dams, spiders and webs, birds and nests, bees and honeycombs. They don't involve packs of wolves doing the work of going out on the hunt and bringing down prey, because in our civilization we no longer often go out in hunting groups as a form of work occupation. So for now I'll only write about animals who build. The immediate objection is that animals are doing this instinctively, while we think about it, so our activity counts as work and theirs doesn't.

I suggest that this is not as large or as binary a difference as some people believe. To start with, Taylorized forms of human work have been developed that involve human beings doing simple, repetitive motions over and over on an assembly line: no one doubts that they are working, even though any opportunity for thought has been purposefully excluded. But this would be answered that human adaptability can be used to have people do repetitive motions that are not instinctual, but instead changeable and appropriate to the situation – of earning pay via wage labor, in this case. That leads me to my main argument, which is that both humans and other animals find their opportunities for routine work limited by their environment.

You can't define work as something that only geniuses or extraordinary individuals do. For most of us, it's limited by what is available: beavers build dams based on the wood that grows nearby, birds use leaves or human litter, bees build into the confines whatever hollow exists. Humans have extraordinary capability for language, culture, and the development of technology, and this creates a social environment that acts much like their physical environment. When beavers go into a new region, you'll see beaver dams appear: when humans do, you'll see characteristic human structures as defined by the physical resources available, their culture, and their technology.

I don't expect everyone to be convinced by this, although at least we are past the days in Europe when animals were considered to be a kind of machine. People these days at least consider that animals have emotions, feelings, and (in some cases) tool and language use, or a form of creativity. At any rate, I will consider labor to be strenuous, purposeful activity that a living thing does in order to live. By this measure, animals do work.

Animal and Plant Labor, part 1

"Air, virgin soil, and natural meadows are not static piles of things lying in bins. They are the result of ecological processes, which means that they are the result of unremitting labor. It's just animal and plant labor rather than human labor."

In what sense do animals and plants do labor? People have talked about the first but generally only as an adjunct to human labor, and very rarely conceive of the second. I'm interested in this as part of a questioning or re-centering of the fundamental ideas of leftist thought, which are still based on Marx's writing as folk ideas.

I wrote a number of Twitter threads about this during the years in which I was on Twitter: I'm going to see whether I can rewrite them as a somewhat more coherent set of blog / Mastodon posts. They never would have been written at all without the sense that someone was reading and replying to them.