Rethinking Marxism

A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

ISSN: 0893-5696 (Print) 1475-8059 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rrmx20

Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating

Nonhumans, Exploitation, and Politics with ANT
and Animal Studies

Phillip Drake

To cite this article: Phillip Drake (2015) Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn: Animating
Nonhumans, Exploitation, and Politics with ANT and Animal Studies, Rethinking Marxism, 27:1,
107-122, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2014.980677

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.980677

Published online: 07 Jan 2015.

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 Rethinking Marxism, 2015
Vol. 27, No. 1, 107–122, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.980677

Marxism and the Nonhuman Turn:

Animating Nonhumans, Exploitation,
and Politics with ANT and Animal
Studies

Phillip Drake
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With the emergence of the so-called “nonhuman” turn in the arts, humanities, and
social sciences in recent decades, various intriguing and frequently dazzling articula-
tions of Marxian terminologies and insights have arisen. While these intersections
with Marxism are occasionally inharmonious, such friction can recast lines of inquiry
both within and outside Marxian traditions, enhancing analytical tools and altering
senses of purpose. This article stokes these productive tensions by articulating
Marxism with actor-network theory (ANT) and animal studies. In addition to using ANT
and animal studies to apply Marxian concepts like exploitation and alienation to the
nonhuman world, it considers ways that Marxism might contribute to nonhuman
studies by analyzing the dynamics of nonhuman exploitation, foregrounding the
historical productive processes that express social and ecological relations, and
promoting discussions about developing better political and economic systems. These
readings illustrate Marxism’s ongoing relevance to current nonhuman studies.

Key Words: Actor-Network Theory, Animal Studies, Ecological Marxism, Exploitation,

Posthumanist Marxism

With the recent “nonhuman turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, various
intriguing and frequently dazzling articulations of Marxian terminologies and insights
have arisen with innovations arising from studies of the nonhuman. Whether speaking
of eco-critique, animal studies, actor-network theory, theories of assemblage,
theories associated with speculative realism, or the numerous explorations of the
modalities of “matter,” each of these analytical perspectives has interesting ways of
provoking—and being provoked by—developments in Marxism. While these intersec-
tions with Marxism are occasionally inharmonious, such friction can help recast lines
of inquiry both within and outside of Marxian traditions by providing an enhanced set
of analytical tools and a renewed sense of purpose.
The present essay aims to stoke this productive tension both by observing the key
position of nonhumans in Marxism and by arguing for Marxism’s place as a vital
theoretical reference in current nonhuman studies. As various types of nonhumans have
increasingly occupied my own research and teaching explores the intersections between
nature and technology in both literature and environmental politics, I have noticed that

© 2015 Association for Economic and Social Analysis

 108 DRAKE

recent calls for papers and conference announcements related to nonhuman studies
offer little to no mention of Marxism. Yet as a theoretical tradition long concerned with
the identification and liberation of marginal beings ensnared in exploitative relations,
Marxism is as useful as ever in this global era in which exploitation is increasingly
widespread, interconnected, mediated, masked, and dispersed through a range of
biotechnological agents.
The first two sections of this essay articulate actor-network theory (ANT) and animal
studies with Marxism in order to map out several key points of conflict and accord and
to illustrate the many ways these theories potentially complement each other in
inquiry. I focus on ANT1 and animal studies,2 in contrast to other noteworthy theories
in nonhuman studies, primarily because I am familiar with them and find them useful
in my work and not because of any perceived deficit in other theories. ANT and animal
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studies also provide reasonable representations of several key impulses in nonhuman

studies: an attention to various manifestations of nonhuman agency, whether in
organisms, objects, technologies, or processes; a rejection of the transcendental
human subject who is external to socionatural entanglements; and an emphasis on
relational ontologies. While each theorization associated with nonhuman studies
offers specific variations on these themes, space restrictions and gaps in my expertise
supply practical reasons for staying with ANT and animal studies. For stylistic reasons, I
employ the expression “nonhuman studies” to describe my grouping of ANT and animal
studies, knowing that “nonhuman studies” means many things to many theorists.
The third part of this essay explores areas of complementarity between Marxism
and nonhuman studies, with a brief reading of Marx’s (1976) depiction of the
relationship between labor power and technological innovation from his chapter in
Capital on machinery in the factory. His descriptions of the reserve army of labor, of
the introduction of women and children into the factory, and of the transformations
in the qualities of labor power and of factory conditions reveal the malleable social
and ontological status of individuals when they are recognized, from the perspective
of capital, solely by their capacity to add value to commodities via their own labor
power. That is, through its abstractions the processes of capitalist production reduce
both humans and animals to instruments of labor power, drawing both into its own
mechanics. This reading of Marx through the lens of ANT and animal studies allows a
broader understanding of the dynamics of exploitation, while suggesting that the

1
Although actor-network theory involves a diverse set of concepts and theorists that are far
from uniform in their engagements, the version of the theory I present is most closely associated
with Bruno Latour and Michel Callon. Castree (2002, 116–23) summarizes several defining
perspectives: a recognition of the deep interconnectedness of nature and society; an emphasis
on connection that disregards local/global dichotomies; a notion of relational “symmetry” that
resists privileging human or social forces over other socionatural actors; a highly relational and
contingent notion of agency as always widespread and evolving; and a relational, performative
understanding of power.
2
In this essay I primarily employ Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe, whose well-
known works consider relationships between humans and animals, the recognition and ascription
of animality and humanity to others, and the profound aporias encountered when we consider
animal otherness.
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 109

Marxian concept of alienation—dismissed by many as tainted by humanism—may be

recuperated through its application to nonhumans.
Beyond using ANT and animal studies to draw out theoretical strands within the
Marxian tradition that harmonize with—and are relevant to—nonhuman studies, this
article contends that Marxian insights simultaneously enrich these two theoretical
traditions. A nonhumanist form of Marxism might address the perceived political
vacuum found in many of ANT’s canonical texts, particularly in Bruno Latour’s work. The
extension of Marxian concepts like exploitation and alienation into the nonhuman world
allows us to politicize ANTand initiate discussions that focus on developing political and
economic systems that promote greater freedom and contentment for humans and
nonhumans alike. Animal studies similarly benefits from Marxism’s historical perspect-
ive on the processes that both ascribe and deny human status. Where animal studies
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insists on exploring the dynamics of humanization, the violence and exploitation done
to beings whose bodies or behaviors are seen as inferior to humans, and the contingency
of articulations of social and ecological hierarchies, Marxism helps demonstrate the
ways these dynamics shift over time. A nonhumanist form of Marxism supplies animal
studies with terminologies and perspectives to better historicize the human subject,
which changes alongside historical, cultural, and economic conditions.
While noting alliances between Marxism and nonhuman studies, I do not mean to
disregard or flatten out important disagreements between various perspectives
within each theoretical tradition. Rather I observe these alliances in order to
promote new discussions and lines of inquiry that might better account for the social
and ecological crises of this era.

“We Have Never Been Human”: Actor-Network Theory,

Posthumanism, and Ecological Complexity

In an essay that explores both the tensions and shared theoretical impulses between
ANT and ecologically oriented versions of Marxism, Brian Gareau (2005) adapts Bruno
Latour’s well-known idiom to suggest that “we have never been human.” Gareau
observes ANT’s influence on the social and natural sciences, prompting experts to
“reconsider the human-centeredness of their work and rethink the roles of objects,
nature, and other non-human actors” (134). ANT recognizes agency as dispersed among
an array of human and nonhuman “actors” in interactive, causal networks (Latour 2004,
86). These networks express “symmetry” through the inextricable interrelatedness of
human and nonhuman forces, where human ideas, tools, and energies (including
collections of human actors, social logics, and discourses) bind with nonhuman forces
(e.g., environments, animals, and technologies) in triggering every action and event.
The principle of symmetry thus casts attention upon nonhumans, which are
typically masked in anthropocentric social theories. Suddenly tools, machines,
animals, humans, and environments align “democratically” as determined and
determining “socio-natural” hybrids, as “quasi-objects”; formerly “deaf and dumb”
nonhumans are “allowed to speak” in a networked community that generates
outcomes (Latour 2010, 487). Noel Castree (2002, 118) notes that ANTian perspec-
tives “describe a world far richer than the society-nature dichotomy can allow,
 110 DRAKE

because they stitch back together the socionatural imbroglios that that dichotomy
has rent asunder.” Gareau (2005, 140) suggests that ANT’s descriptive richness offers
an important “on the ground” perspective of the dynamics that lead to crisis and
social transformation in capitalism.
Gareau is not alone in observing the complicated yet potent lines of inquiry that
arise when ANT and Marxism intersect (for example, see Castree (2002), Kirsch and
Mitchell (2004), and Swyngedouw (2004)) and this intersection represents one edge of
a broad theoretical movement that aims to articulate Marxism with political ecology
(see, for example, Burkett (1999), Foster (2000), O’Connor (1998), and Loftus
(2009)). Each of these works provides a nuanced account of nonhuman socio-
nature3—whether understood as nature, resources, instruments, animals, or other
phenomena—engaging with Marxian concepts like “metabolic rift,” “contradiction,”
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and “praxis.” Where ANT and green formulations of Marxism differ most is in the
former’s political agnosticism and its deployment of a radical empiricism that
precludes accounts of beings and events that appeal to broad, contested terms like
“society,” “nature,” and “humans” without examining the actors and relations that
shape the very production and dissemination of these terms (Castree 2002). Given
this article’s interest in nonhumans, it is worthwhile to proceed by exploring the
implications of taking Gareau’s earlier statement seriously. If we have never been
human, what would our own nonhuman state of being mean to different historical
formulations of Marxism, and what might a Marxism without humans contribute to
ongoing work in nonhuman studies?
It is not accidental that I pose these questions in a journal known for its
elaborations of Althusserian antihumanism, as these accounts of the subject generate
space to consider nonhuman agency. For Althusser (2005, 209) the subject is always
“overdetermined” (adapting Freud’s well-known term), reflecting in “contradiction”
the subject’s “situation in the structure in dominance of the complex whole.” The
subject expresses neither a transhistorical essence nor a singular agency capable of
dominating or excising the self from “natural, social, economic, cultural, political,
and other processes.” The subject is always “determined and determining,”
constantly engaged with diverse, inextricable networks (Resnick and Wolff 2008,
566). And a genealogy of the antihuman subject can be traced in classical Marxian
texts: in the sixth of Marx’s (1978b, 145) “Theses on Feuerbach,” which defines the
human as “the ensemble of the social relations”; in Gramsci’s (1971, 352) Prison
Notebooks, where the human is a “series of active relationships (a process)”
composed of interactions with “other men” and “the natural world”; and in Hardt
and Negri’s (2000, 331) Empire, where the subject is a “hybrid and modulating”
product of procedures of biopower.

3
The notion of socionature arrives packed with many resonances. Following Swyngedouw (2004,
17–18), I employ the term to observe the inseparability of nature and society: The “world” is a
historical geographical process of perpetual metabolism in which “social” and “natural”
processes combine in a historical geographical “production process of socio-nature” whose
outcome (historical nature) embodies chemical, physical, social, economic, political, and
cultural processes in highly contradictory but inseparable manners. Every body and every thing
is a cyborg, a mediator, part social, part natural, lacking discrete boundaries and internalizing
the multiple contradictory relations that redefine and rework them.
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 111

This brief antihumanist genealogy reveals a subject who is generated through

environmental, cultural, and technological entanglements, a relational subject who
might also emerge in ANT. For example, Michel Callon (2007a, 142), whose work tends
to apply ANT to analyses of economic processes, describes the human as “a
distributed agency that goes beyond the somatic resources of the individual; it is
the variable outcome of a complex process of engineering. This agency can be
described more precisely as a socio-technical agencement4 consisting of material
elements, texts and discourses, competencies and embodied skills, routines and so
on.” Callon’s subject is also overdetermined, a production of interactions between
various social and natural processes; however, when faced with the messy task of
disentangling agencies for the purposes of inquiry, the observer “acts” by organizing
“actors” into networks as “black boxes,” or unified entities. The human emerges as a
“macro-actor” who is a “micro-actor seated on black boxes, a force capable of
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associating so many other forces that it acts like a ‘single man’” (Callon and Latour
1981, 299). Both posthumanist Marxism and ANT describe a relational subject who
emerges through activity, who is the hybrid product and producer of socionature, and
who is entangled with vast socionatural actors and networks.
This flattening of the subject, in Marxism via the processes of overdetermination
and in ANT through the principle of symmetry, repositions the work of analysis in a
theoretical/political context. While overdetermination helps Marxism shake free of
its associations with economic determinism, it quickly expands the scale and scope of
analysis, which Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff (2000, 7) describe nicely in their
account of overdetermination:

Causation and identity are complex unfoldings that yield themselves

differently to every analysis and every analytical moment. From this
perspective, each identity or event can be understood as constituted by
the entire complex of natural, social, economic, cultural, political, and
other processes that comprise its conditions of existence. None of these can
be eliminated or assigned prior or fundamental importance, though every
analysis singles out one or several for emphasis and investigation.

The processes of “singling out” threads of analysis from an “entire complex” of

conditions resonates with Latour’s (2010, 478) writings on the constructive character
of analysis, in which the researcher is an active agent who traces and arranges actors
and relations in networks that produce outcomes out of the vast causal connections
that extend through time and space—outcomes that help us understand the world.
Acts of gathering, ordering, and analyzing represent nodes of mediation that

4
Callon (2007b, 319) employs the idea of “agencement” to describe the arranging or fixing of
human and nonhuman actors—organisms, technologies, discourses, and procedures—as “het-
erogeneous elements that have been carefully adjusted to one another.” An agencement
“transforms a situation by producing differences” (Callon 2008, 38). Callon adopts the word
“agencement,” which is generally translated into English as “assemblage,” from Deleuze and
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. John Phillips (2006, 108–9) notes that Deleuze and Guattari use
both “assemblage” and “agencement” in the original French text; the former is used less
frequently and “certainly never in a philosophical sense,” as opposed to agencement, which “has
a very precise correspondence to the notions of event, becoming, and sense.”
 112 DRAKE

characterize inquiry’s double character. In ANT and in posthumanist versions of

Marxism alike, inquiry is always receptive and productive, determined and deter-
mining, and the researcher is always an actor within the field of inquiry.
Perhaps the greatest area of friction between ANT and Marxism lies in the political
attitudes and ambitions of each approach. In contrast to Marxism’s ethical imperative
to expose and undo exploitation in its many forms, ANT does not impose explicit
ethical or political demands upon its practitioners prior to their pursuit of ever more
accurate and refined representations of actors in relation. This ostensible political
indifference, combined with its demotion of the human subject within flat networks,
is understandably unpalatable to critics who are concerned with identifying and
overcoming exploitation. But as Latour (2005) is eager to note, although anthropo-
centric, asymmetrical accounts of events marginalize a host of nonhuman actors and
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relations, ANTian accounts are far from apolitical in their effect. ANT draws newly
“visible” actors into the socionatural fray as active participants in a symmetrical,
“common” world: “To study is always to do politics in the sense that it collects or
composes what the common world is made of. The delicate question is to decide what
sort of collection and what sort of composition is needed” (256). Once again resonant
with a Marxist conception of inquiry that binds analysis to political action (e.g., Marx
1978b), this “delicate question” gestures to the ethical and political interests that are
always expressed at the moment critique or “composition” occurs, even if these
interests paradoxically manifest via attempts at evacuating interests. Here, ANT
expresses ambivalence about action in the political moment, but it is not politically
indifferent, as ANT never transcends the politics of composition and analysis.
This ANTian politics of composition may seem feeble, particularly in the absence of
any ethical imperative to resolve social and ecological crises (Rudy 2005, 118). In
fact, a crude and excessive form of symmetry could be employed to mask
exploitation through appeals to extremely distant actors and networks. In another
project, for instance, I studied a mud volcano in Indonesia that has stirred national
controversy due to scientific conflicts over its cause. Some blame drilling beside the
crater, while others cite an earthquake that occurred two days earlier. Because
responsibility for assisting victims and funding the disaster management operations at
the disaster site was at stake, all stakeholders could appeal to contested science to
support their respective interests, which resulted in significant delays in the delivery
of aid (Drake 2013). In this case ANT would have illuminated the various actors and
interests that shaped the production of each scientific report in order to refine the
terms of dispute and prompt alternative questions about the premises of the
scientific dispute; however, ANT could offer little to the mud volcano victims in
terms of promoting either social justice or a swift response. While it may be
demanding too much of ANT to expect more than providing the tools and perspectives
to explore what “is well or badly constructed” in reports about the disaster (Latour
2005, 89), ANT’s political ambivalence often restricts its suitability for justice
movements.
Marxian terminologies and insights, however, might be employed to invigorate
discussions about an ANTian politics. Castree (2002, 116), for example, proposes
moving forward by “splitting the difference between a weak version of ANT and a
relational version of eco-Marxism,” noting that ANT and Marxism have been crudely
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 113

staged as “false antithesis.” Gareau’s (2005) suggestion that ANT could be mobilized
to improve our capacity to recognize the specific ecological modalities of exploita-
tion is also useful. Another strategy with promising potential involves critics
drawing Marxian concepts through ANT, like Swyngedouw (2006), who applies the
Marxian notions of “metabolism” and “circulation” to a Latourian conception of urban
assemblages, and like Kirsch and Mitchell (2004), who use nonhuman agency in actor-
networks to rethink Marx’s conception of “dead labor.” In addition to responding to
critics who dismiss Marxism for its humanism, each of these projects reveals alliances
and intersections between the two traditions that gesture toward inquiries and
discussions that might lead to new political formations.

Animal Studies and Marxism: Producing the Human

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In spite of ANT’s emergence as a key reference in studies of the nonhuman, the

recasting of the subject as an actor in complex socionatural networks threatens to
demote not only the importance of social relations in determining events but also the
ontological struggle over who or what qualifies as properly social. Theories emerging
from animal studies have been particularly useful to critics who explore the ways in
which communities establish the terms of social and ecological hierarchies as well as
the physical and discursive violence that is employed to secure these relations. Via
explorations of animal bodies and of being through a diverse range of disciplines,
animal studies intersects with Marxism in myriad complementary ways. Ted Benton
(1993, 59–60) argues, for instance, that “both socialist moral thinking and the
concern for the well-being of non-human animals can benefit significantly by being
put into critical relationship with one another.” Katherine Perlo (2002, 316) observes
that Marxism’s aspiration to liberate the “lowliest” of our own is driven by an ethic of
sympathy, which today can be applied to animals who have been rendered lowly in
contemporary culture and economic production. Ryan Gunderson (2011, 545–6)
examines Marxism’s ongoing relevance for understanding human and animal relations
by addressing Marx’s critical comments on animal welfare in Capital. Where some
have read these criticisms as symptomatic of a thread of anthropocentrist “species‐
ism” that stains Marx’s writing, Gunderson suggests that these lines have nothing to
do with the ethics of animal welfare; rather, they critique bourgeois ideologies of
superficial “reformism” that do nothing to alter real conditions of production.
In her well-known works that explore the modalities of being and relating between
species, Donna Haraway regularly observes Marxism’s influence in her project,
particularly Marxism’s capacity to expose the exploitation that occurs in capitalist
production. Despite this influence, Haraway (1991, 151) is also pointed in her
critiques of Marxist inquiries that presuppose a “unified” subject, that mask
difference through totalizing narratives of dominance and resistance (131–2), and
that fail to account for the various bodies and species networked together both in the
production of value and in the maintenance of socially necessary “bodily needs”
(Haraway 2008, 49).
As with ANT, each of these critiques express concern over the elevated status of the
human subject, who is typically synonymous with the Western liberal subject, in
 114 DRAKE

relation to other beings. In the well-known account of an encounter with his cat, of
standing naked and suddenly finding himself caught in the cat’s gaze, Derrida (2002,
374–80) challenges Descartes’s mechanistic characterization of animal life, which
distinguishes man from animal based on the capacity to respond—and not merely
react—to others. Derrida recognizes the cat as an irreplaceable individual with
unique experiences and understandings not only of the world but also of this
encounter with the author. In a deft analysis of Derrida’s experience and reflections,
Haraway (2008, 20) observes that the “key question” that emerges in Derrida’s
encounter with his cat is “not whether the cat could ‘speak’ but whether it is possible
to know what respond means and how to distinguish a response from a reaction, for
human beings as well as for anyone else.” This scenario prompts exploration not into
what animals ostensibly lack or are denied in anthropocentrism “but rather the
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death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the human” (79).

Cary Wolfe (2003, 6) similarly observes that the figure of the animal historically has
been used to establish “speciesist” ideologies that secure the human’s appreciated
status:

The figure of the ‘animal’ in the West (unlike, say, the robot or the cyborg) is
part of a cultural and literary history stretching back at least to Plato and
the Old Testament, reminding us that the animal has always been especially,
frightfully nearby, always lying in wait at the very heart of the constitutive
disavowals and self-constructing narratives enacted by that fantasy figure
called ‘the human.’

Not only have we never been human, but the “fantasy” of being human also hinges on
the ideological production of the subhuman animal, whose demotion concurrently
promotes the human.
These formulations in animal studies of the human as a fantasy figure resemble
Horkheimer and Adorno’s classic portrayal of humans as “pseudoindividuals.” For
Horkheimer and Adorno (1987, 203), reason provides the ideological foundation for the
processes of humanization establishing individuals as properly human: “Throughout
European history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction
to the animal. The latter’s lack of reason is the proof of human dignity.” Reason not
only secures the human’s eminence within Enlightenment narratives of progress but it
also reinforces these narratives, which ironically culminate in the dehumanizing
instrumentalization of individuals as workers, soldiers, and consumers: humans,
reduced to their socioeconomic functionality, become “pseudoindividuals” (118–26).
Reason is, however, always exchangeable with other ideologically charged concepts
that mark and secure the fantasy of the human’s ecological supremacy. As already
noted in the works of Derrida (2002) and Haraway (2008), the perceived capacity to
respond instead of react, and of being capable of judging response from reaction, has
an enduring historical potency. Physical characteristics (e.g., skin tone, hair texture,
and opposable thumbs) and behavioral traits (e.g., violence, emotion, and sexual
proclivities) are also employed as markers for distinguishing humans and nonhumans.
As many theorists have noted (e.g., Brody 1998; Singer 1989; Spurr 1993), it is no
accident that these characteristics have racial and gendered resonances.
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 115

Whether speaking of workers’ rights in the industrial era, the status of the
indigenous person in the colonial era, or the universal-global-liberal subject in the
contemporary “information age” of capitalism, configurations of humanness and
nonhumanness establish and naturalize both the relations between groups of beings
and the disciplinary methods used to reproduce these relations. Wolfe (2003, 8) notes
the violent implications of these slippery categories of human and nonhuman being,
which can be employed to rationalize “violence against the social other of whatever
species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference.” Here, the ecological
hierarchy between human and nonhuman beings attaches an ontological supplement
to social hierarchies. The domination of an individual or group in various social orders
(e.g., economic exploitation, political marginalization, and biopolitical discipline)
appears as a natural extension of an ecological order through which certain species,
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by virtue of their biological faculties, dominate others.

As a theoretical tradition long occupied with identifying and undoing exploitation,
Marxism supplies animal studies with concepts and perspectives for analyzing the
nonhuman’s marginal status. As witnessed in Marx’s depiction of mid-nineteenth-
century factory workers, as well as in Horkheimer and Adorno’s pseudoindividuals,
Haraway’s cyborg, and Hardt and Negri’s multitude, the character and dynamics of
human and nonhuman being are in constant flux. Animal studies, like ANT, is
extremely effective in exploring the processes of humanization and dehumanization,
but Marxism helps historicize these processes and draw connections to specific
cultural and economic phenomena.

Marx’s Marginal Creatures

Nonhumans have always been important to Marxism, even if their presence has been
muted or relegated by anthropocentric concerns.5 Recent developments in ecologi-
cally oriented Marxism have led to works that foreground the nonhuman beings and
forces involved in production. In his formulation of capitalism’s “second contradic-
tion,” for instance, James O’Connor (1998, 177) suggests that—in addition to
capitalism’s “first contradiction,” where crisis is based on an inability to realize
surplus profits arising out of overproduction—capitalism is vulnerable to a crisis of
underproduction through its degradation of natural resources and conditions of
production. John Bellamy Foster observes an evident ecological impulse throughout
Marx’s writing, which manifests in Marx’s regular references to nature, his interest in
Justus von Liebig’s work in agricultural science, and his theorization of “metabolic”
exchange. Foster (2000, 163) elaborates on Marx’s notion of “metabolic rift” to
describe “the material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from
the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence.” After tracing the
idea of “rift” back to the humanist formulation of “alienation” in Marx’s 1844
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Foster attempts to shake loose this humanism
by foregrounding the “solid and scientific” basis of metabolic estrangement, a term

5
Foster (2000, 9–10) provides a nice summary of criticisms against Marx for being
antiecological.
 116 DRAKE

which describes “the complex, dynamic interchange between human beings and
nature resulting from human labor” (158). Paul Burkett (1999, 26–31), a frequent
collaborator with Foster, argues that “metabolic rift,” the alienation of “workers from
natural conditions of production,” is at the source of the economic and ecological
crises facing the world today. Because social conditions shape the character of labor
power’s metabolic interaction with nature, a more sustainable (or less exploitative)
production of nature requires less exploitative social relations. Thus, for Burkett
ecological exploitation is always already woven into the structures of capitalism.
Foster and Burkett each repeatedly insist upon a synthesis of “red” and “green”
political concerns through a return to Marx’s own texts (see Burkett 2006, 24), which
contain many rich descriptions and analyses of the profound influence of nonhumans
in the ecological relations that underpin all productive activity. Marx shows a
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particular concern for nature, which appears in his writing as a deeply interactive
network of forces and conditions that make production possible, place limits on
productive potential, and shape the character of humans. In the first volume of
Capital, for instance, man “confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature”
and physically appropriates “the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own
needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in
this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (Marx 1976, 283). While this
passage is demonstrative of the deep co-constitutive interactivity between the
human and nonhuman in production, in other passages of Capital Marx conveys the
nonhuman as a dominant, often recalcitrant force in relation to human activity, which
would align with perspectives in both ANT and animal studies. All three volumes
contain repeated mention of the seasons’ influence in shaping and constraining the
conditions of production: the availability of raw materials and the capacity to work
varies throughout the year (e.g., Marx 1976, 232; 1978a, 185; 1981, 369). All three
volumes also regularly observe the impact of “wear and tear” on currency (Marx 1976,
223), labor power (275), machines (325), and railroads (Marx 1978a, 249), which
again describes profound and often costly nonhuman activity.
For the capitalist, one strategy of ostensibly reducing exposure to natural forces
that are recalcitrant to production is mechanizing the workplace, which introduces a
different modality of nonhuman force into productive relations. This relationship
between human labor and mechanized nonhuman force takes center stage in Marx’s
chapter on factory machinery in the first volume of Capital. At first glance, the
machine appears to complement human labor by taking over menial, “muscular” tasks.
The steam engine, for example, freed production from weaker and more unreliable
power sources such as horses (“the worst” motive force because “a horse has a head of
its own”), wind, and water, which are “inconsistent” and “uncontrollable” (Marx 1976,
497–8). Echoing this minimizing of “wild” nature, the increasing and intensifying
mechanization of the workplace aims to minimize the influence of the “hand of man”
in the raw material’s “passage from the first phase to the last” (502).
The only humans who experience the benefits of increased technological innova-
tion, however, are the capitalists, as machines come to dominate the productive
processes in the industrial factory. Marx’s description of these machines resembles a
techno-ecological network, a “chain of mutually complementary machines,” or a
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 117

collective working machine, which is now an articulated system composed of

various kinds of single machines, and groups of single machines … An
organized system of machines to which motion is communicated by the
transmitting mechanism from an automatic center is the most developed
form of production by machinery. Here we have, in the place of the isolated
machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose
demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its
gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its
countless working organs (Marx 1976, 501–3).

Each “organ” of each machine in this mechanical “collective” represents, in Latour’s

(2004, 2005, 2010) works, a “composition” of socionatural interactions involving labor
and materials. Each is a black box that acts in productive networks; as a composition
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of capital, dead labor, nonhuman materials, and nonhuman conditions of production,

however, each black box also expresses previous actors and relations.
These mechanical networks transform not only the conditions of production but
also the human. The “mechanical monster” devalues labor by reducing his physical
and intellectual demands, prolonging the working day, and intensifying daily labor
output (Marx 1976, 517–42). Soon the human is drawn into the factory’s mechanics:
“The lifelong specialty of handling the same tool becomes the lifelong specialty of
serving the same machine. Machinery is misused in order to transform the worker,
from his very childhood, into a part of a specialized machine. In this way, not only are
the expenses necessary for his reproduction considerably lessened, but at the same
time his helpless dependence upon the factory as a whole, and therefore upon the
capitalist, is rendered complete” (547). This depiction of machines altering the minds
and bodies of workers provides a detailed account of nonhuman agency exerting its
overpowering influence on a socionatural network.
But since the human is already a fantasy figure, this mechanization of the worker
illustrates one of many shifts within the nineteenth-century factory ecosystem. It is
worth noting, for example, that machines were not the only new arrival to the
evolving factory that devalued labor: there was also the entrance of women and
children. In the historical development of socioeconomic relations in the West,
masculine, “muscular power” was generally a privileged form of labor power, and
Marx typically refers to a male worker when writing about labor power. In the
premachine era, the value of labor was determined by the labor time necessary for
this male worker to maintain both himself and his family (Marx 1976, 518). As
machines entered the workplace to cheapen muscle power, each member of the
family had to earn their keep. And as the status of muscle power withered,
individuals whose labor power was previously either unrecognized (particularly with
women in the domestic sphere) or devoid of value (children) became intelligible as
exploitable subjects. This intelligibility not only intensified hardship for laborers—
coming not from the promotion of the status of women and children but by demoting
the position of men—but also reinforced their instrumental status.
Man’s status is always precarious when viewed through the abstractions of
capitalism, in which the capacity to add value to commodities by contributing
exploitable labor power is what distinguishes a human from a horse or a steam engine
 118 DRAKE

(Marx 1976, 307). But women, children, and everyone else who was not a Western
male were especially vulnerable to the social and ontological marginalization that
was reinforced by ideologies of economic efficiency and expansion. This social and
ontological demotion was perhaps best typified in the colonial setting, in which
previously self-sustaining native societies generally lacked the social, scientific, and
mechanical technologies to metabolize their resources for a global market. The
absence of these productive technologies reinforced racist ideologies that generally
understood deviations from Western orders of production as demonstrative of
deficiencies that were intrinsic to native life, in which the native was depicted as
ignorant, lazy, and animal-like (Adas 1989, 113–4). Through labor, natives might have
been able to add value to a commodity, but typically not on the scale and terms
necessary to secure their standing as exploitable labor—at least not initially. Through
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the lens of capitalist ideology, where the production of value is always positive, the
appropriation of land and resources from natives found not only economic justifica-
tion but also an ethical rationale. Conquest became understood as a “civilizing
mission” (200) in which, by reorganizing traditional societies and practices, Western
intrusion enriched and protected natives from their own barbarism (Fanon 2004, 149–
54). The profound effects of these abstractions cannot be overstated, especially
considering the effects of imperial practices in shaping societies, economies, and
spaces since the nineteenth century.
In the context of his chapter on machines in the factory, however, Marx appears less
concerned with critiquing the relative qualities of various beings’ labor power than
illustrating the ways that intensified technological conditions of production transform
labor power. As Marx (1976, 781) notes later in Capital, the “accumulation of capital …
comes to fruition … through a continuing increase of its constant component at the
expense of its variable component.” In other words, technological innovations in the
factory serve to de-skill “variable” labor power to the point where it becomes
“disposable,” which leads to the formation of “a surplus population,” the “industrial
reserve army” of workers. For the purposes of accumulation, the specific qualities of
workers and their labor power is less important than their capacity to be integrated or
“set free” according to market conditions (790). In addition to providing security to the
productive interests of capitalists who face threats from competition and evolving
markets, the reserve army forces workers to compete for jobs, which keeps wages low.
And as technology advances to de-skill labor, the reserve army enlists not only skilled
workers who had been released from their jobs but also unskilled workers whose
contributions were never before viable to the productive needs of industry.
While the creation of the reserve army for capitalism explicitly demonstrates the
demotion of workers’ social status, this demotion is also ontological. Marx never
suggests in this section that people in the reserve army are anything less than human,
but the quality of human being depicted suggests an abject state of being: “This
surplus population … creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation
by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements” (Marx
1976, 784). As much as the wording and the idea of “surplus” people haunts this
quotation, the reduction of individuals to “human material” once again illustrates
capitalism’s instrumentalization of beings. The progress of industry in the mid-
nineteenth century “depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 119

population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’” (786). As a “mass of human

material” or unskilled and “semi-employed hands,” the ontological status of human
being becomes virtually identical with that of a factory blade, hose, or pulley.
Marx’s depiction of various states of being and working, along with the conditions
that shape how we recognize a being or worker, is indicative of the status of
individuals as “boundary creatures,” using Haraway’s (1991) term. As capitalism’s
abstractions reduce man to a labor power drawn into industry’s mechanics, muscle
power begins to resemble horse power and machine operation begins to resemble
operational machines: both human/animal and human/machine lines of distinction
blur. There is a similar formulation of boundary creatures in the Communist
Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels describe the historical circumstances leading
to the emergence of capitalism, a mode of production that redefines the socio-
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economic conditions that establish not only who (the capitalist) exploits whom (the
laborer) but also who is excluded from formal productive relations altogether and is
identified “unstably at the boundary of the natural and social”—typically, women and
non-Westerners (131). The fact that innovations in the conditions of production can
suddenly upset structures of exploitation between capitalist and laborer—by
suddenly relegating the laborer to boundary status as reserve labor—once again
underscores the human’s fantasy character.
While animal studies helps reveal the ideological processes through which people
articulate narratives of humanness, Marx’s chapter on machines demonstrates the
precarious character of narratives secured by productive relations. And while Marx’s
own biases are not absent from his characterizations of boundary creatures—as
theorists engaged with issues related to feminism, gender, race, colonialism,
development, and ecology have long observed—his critiques aim always at the
emancipation of individuals from exploitative productive relations. By illustrating the
contingency of the laborer’s status while calling attention to the vast network of
nonhuman agencies involved in production, both animal studies and ANT present ways
of extending discussions about alienation and exploitation into the nonhuman world.

Conclusion

Inflected by ANT and animal studies, these readings from canonical Marxian texts and
more contemporary formulations ecological Marxism demonstrate Marxism’s ongoing
importance to nonhuman studies and also indicate ways that nonhuman studies might
invigorate Marxism. Nonhuman studies—again, represented here via ANT and animal
studies—can prompt Marxism to rethink agency and causality in order to factor in a
wider array of socionatural organisms and objects that produce, and are produced by,
socionatural relations. ANT helps animate the host of nonhuman actors—such as
capital, machines, and labor power—that influence the conditions of production in
Marx’s chapter on factory machinery. These contributions are more than descriptive,
however, as ANT expands the horizon of inquiry to consider instances of exploitation
that occur outside of capitalist/laborer relations. Animal studies also contributes to a
Marxian understanding of exploitation by calling attention to both nonhuman labor
and the processes that distinguish humans from nonhumans. And as Marx’s writing on
 120 DRAKE

changing factory conditions demonstrates, understandings of the human subject are

contingent upon changing historical and technological processes that forever
destabilize the fantasy figure of the human.
As this article repeatedly suggests, the intersection between Marxism and non‐
human studies is not unidirectional. In addition to nonhuman studies offering new
tools for examining Marxian concepts, these concepts offer durable and incisive
perspectives for exploring the qualities of various beings and relations that shape the
world. For ANT, the extension of Marxian concepts like exploitation and alienation to
the nonhuman world suggests the possibility of stronger political engagements that go
beyond the politics of masking and foregrounding agents in networks. A more
politicized version of ANT would more forcefully examine the vast exploitative
entanglements that occur in socionature and would consider the types of political and
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economic relations that might provide greater freedom and contentment to diverse
actors. The posthumanist Marxian notion of overdetermination could also contribute
to ANTian inquiry through the former’s emphasis on complexity and contingency, on
every cause simultaneously being an effect and moreover by its attention to the
beings and relations produced through historical, economic, and cultural processes.
For animal studies, Marxism historicizes the figures of the human and nonhuman,
offering concrete and well-vetted terminologies and perspectives for exploring the
dynamics of a being’s contested social and ontological status. Again, the concepts of
exploitation and alienation are particularly useful for understanding not only the
array of factors that influence how individuals live and relate to others in the world
but also the various formulations of power that influence these relations. In addition,
posthumanist Marxism’s notion of overdetermination gestures to the dynamic social
and ecological structures articulated in the production of human and nonhuman
subjects as well as the power expressed through these structures, which inflate and
degrade the status and activity of subjects. This intersection between posthumanist
versions of Marxism and nonhuman studies seems ripe for innovative analysis, as in
Roelvink’s (2013, 54) recent article that develops a politicized notion of species—as a
“political collectivity without essence”—in order to analyze humanity’s conduct
toward others and the myriad human qualities produced through these encounters.
As exploitation appears increasingly remote and abstract through the various
mediating institutions and technologies that operate in the contemporary world, it is
crucial to mobilize conceptual tools to account for our vulnerable others, whether
environmental, animal, or some other threatened being or object. To this end it
makes sense that critics continue to rethink concepts like alienation, class formation
and expression, the labor theory of value, and revolution alongside the ways
theoretical developments in nonhuman studies can animate these concepts. In the
spirit of works cited throughout this project—especially those of Castree (2002),
Perlo (2002), Gareau (2005), Rudy (2005), and Haraway (2008)—this article aims to
promote closer and more serious engagements between Marxism and nonhuman
studies, noting the possibility for developing new lines of inquiry and addressing
perceived shortcomings within each tradition. While observing areas of accord
between these traditions, it is important to recognize ongoing tensions that remain.
Rather than attempt to flatten out conflicts within and between these traditions,
I want to gesture toward the possibility of this friction sparking new discussions and
 POSTHUMANIST MARXISM 121

analyses aiming to improve social and ecological conditions today. The potential for
new discussions and lines of inquiry to emerge in the intersections between the two is
indicative of each tradition’s relevance and vitality in the contemporary era.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Mark Lycett and the University of Chicago Program on the Global
Environment for promoting projects and events that explore creative approaches to
political ecology. I also would like to thank John Rieder and S. Charusheela for their
feedback in discussions that eventually led to this article and the anonymous reviewers
for their generous comments on previous drafts. The usual disclaimers apply.
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