Anthropos 55 (2): 161-175 | issN0587-5161 | E-ISSN2630-4082
Animal (Dis)Entanglement: Value-Form and Animal-Form
Marina Gržinic Mauhler
zrc sazu, Institute of Philosophy marina.grzinic@zrc-sazu.si
IMSH © 2023 Marina Gržinic Mauhler
Abstract. My thesis is that we should comprehensively and consistently examine the value of the animal taken and used as a commodity and think about the animal-form within the constellation of excessive killing of animals and mass disempowerment of their lives. In the article I dive into this topic and look at it from different angles because it is clear that ethics cannot greatly help us in this political endeavour to stop continued extermination and dispossession of animals. In Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009), Nicole Shukin begins by showing how capital, in its form of profit, is related only to destruction and valued by money and more money. Shukin analyses a material genealogy of animal traces that are, as she puts it, 'three early time-motion economies: animal disassembly, automotive assembly and moving picture production.' The main point is to go beyond fake morality and to show that historically the abuse of animals is always co-substantial to capitalism and its transformation that involves the modernisation of technologies.
Key Words: animal-form, animal-money, animal-object, racial capitalism, necrocapitalism
Živalska raz-/zapletenost: vrednostna forma in živalska forma
Povzetek. Moja teza je, da bi morali celovito in dosledno preučiti vrednost živali, ki se uporablja kot blago, ter razmišljati o živalski formi v konstelacij prekomernega ubijanja živali in množične abdukciie njihovih življenj. V članku se poglobim v ta sklop in ga obravnavam z različnih zornih kotov, saj je jasno, da nam etika pri političnem prizadevanju za zaustavitev nadaljnjega iztrebljanja in razlaščanja živali ne more veliko pomagati. V knjigi Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009) Nicole Shukin najprej pokaže, kako je kapital v obliki dobička povezan le z uničevanjem in vrednoten z denarjem ter s še več denarja. Nicole Shukin analizira materialno genealogijo živalskih sledi, ali kot pravi, »tri zgodnje ekonomije časovnega gibanja: razstavljanje živali, sestavljanje avtomobilov in proizvodnjo gibljivih slik.«
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.55.161-175
Marina Gržinic Mauhler
Bistvo je preseči lažno moralo in pokazati, daje zgodovinsko gledano zloraba živali vedno soodvisna od kapitalizma in njegovega preoblikovanja, ki vključuje modernizacijo tehnologij.
Ključne besede: živalska forma, žival - denar, žival - objekt, rasni kapitalizem, nekrokapitalizem
Introduction: The Place from Where We Speak
With reference to Cedric Robinson (1983)1 and Achille Mbembe (2003; 2019),21 have maintained for some time that we live in racial necrocapital-ism, where we can only examine the structure of capitalist reproduction in general, if we consistently racialize every concept, every relationship of production and reproduction, and the related structures and institutions, theories, and practices that contribute directly or indirectly to the maintenance of racial capitalism. If the time of modernity was a time of universals, and our most important parameters were time, space, and the subject, then the time in which we live is not 'another time.' Of course, the valences of these three lines remain, but if we think that they have acquired a free-floating status because they have evaporated in postmodern fragmentation, we will soon find that this is not the case. They can be taken apart and are in a free-floating form, but they are each reinforced, or rather intensified by an ornament or adjective 'necro,' 'financial,' and 'racial' when applied to capitalism. These modifiers serve to emphasize and intensify the contradictions inherent in capitalism at specific historical moments, including the present. The use of terms like 'necro-capitalism,' 'financial capitalism,' or 'racial capitalism' underscores the multifaceted nature of capitalism and how it intersects with other social, economic, and political dynamics. Each modifier carries its own implications and highlights different aspects of capitalist systems, whether it's
1	Cedric James Robinson (1940-2016) was professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (ucsb). Robinson 'challenged liberal and Marxist theories of political change, exposed the racial character of capitalism, unearthed a Black Radical Tradition and examined its social, political, cultural, and intellectual bases, interrogated the role of theater and film in forming ideologies of race and class, and overturned standard historical interpretations of the last millennia' (Kelley 2016).
2	Achille Mbembe (born 1957) is a Cameroonian philosopher, political scientist, and public intellectual. Mbembe is a professor of History and Politics and a researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (wiser) of the University of the Witwater-srand in Johannesburg. He is a contributing editor of the journal Public Culture, in which he published the influential article 'Necropolitics' (2003).
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the exploitation of death (necro-capitalism), the dominance of finance in economic structures (financial capitalism), or the entrenchment of racial inequalities within capitalist frameworks (racial capitalism). These terms are important because they testify to a financialized, pyramidal structure of what was once a postmodern fragmentation. This understanding is crucial for studying and describing capitalism accurately, especially in today's world where these dynamics continue to shape socio-economic relations.
When I recently read Shemon Salam's3 dissertation dealing with race and racism, he proposed a very similar thesis in his 'Limits of the Black Radical Tradition and the Value-Form' (Salam 2019). He suggests that if we are to talk about race and racism, we must racialize the value-form. Salam proposes the race-form to be taken as integral to the value-form of capitalist production. Salam's dissertation, soon to be published as a book, is therefore concerned with the study of race and racism through the analysis of the race-form inside the Marxist value-form under racial capitalism. This means that we must include the race-form as intrinsic to the value-form in any further analysis of the value-form.
Marx first introduced the concept of the 'law of value' in his polemic The Poverty ofPhilosophy (1955), in which he criticized the ideas of PierreJoseph Proudhon and drew on the economic theories of David Ricardo. The 'law of value' is a regulative principle that governs the economic exchange of products produced by human labour. It states that the relative exchange values of these products, usually expressed in money prices, are proportional to the average amount of labour required to produce them under the capitalist mode of production.
When Marx speaks of 'value relations,' he is not referring to the monetary price of goods or services, but to the intrinsic value that exists between the various products of human labour. This principle underlies much of Marx's economic and philosophical analysis. To put it simply, in capitalist production, the value-form is the socially necessary labour time for production of the commodity; the value-form represents the social relations of production.
3 Dr. Shemon Salam has been an activist since 2001. He has organized against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and has been involved in anti-racist struggles around us bases in South Korea, Islamophobia, and police brutality. He has been involved in Occupy Wall Street and organizing fast food workers in New York City. Salam researches the rise and fall of the Black Liberation Movement and class struggle in the 20th century. He is a lecturer in social thought and political economy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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Salam (2019, 261) states about the race-form and its relation to the value-form,
I open with David Harvey's4 diagram of the full circuit of accumulation of capital. This is the value-form in motion. Every part of society is incorporated into the value-form here including the human body and 'nature.' This full circuit does not just focus on the production process, but includes consumption, circulation, and distribution of value throughout society. Central to my argument is that the race-form is constitutive of value-form. This means that every flow, every process, every node is racialized.
Salam makes clear that every part of society is involved in the value-form, including the human, the body, and nature. I would like to propose something equally radical, the animal-form, with which to elaborate the category of the animal in capitalist production and reproduction and accumulation. My thesis is that we should comprehensively and consistently examine the value of the animal taken and used as a commodity and think about the animal-form within a constellation of excessive killing of animals and mass disempowerment of their lives. In Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, Nicole Shukin begins by showing how capital, in its form of profit, is related only to destruction and valued by money and more money. Shukin analyses a material genealogy of animal traces that are, as she puts it, 'three early time-motion economies: animal disassembly, automotive assembly and moving picture production' (2009, 90). The main point is to go beyond fake morality (which is another symptom of the Occidental epistemology) and to show that historically the abuse of animals is always co-substantial to capitalism and its transformation that involves the modernization of technologies.
In what follows, I will take these aspects apart and look at it from different angles, because it is clear that ethics cannot help us in this endeavour of continued extermination and dispossession of animals.
In traditional agricultural practices, animals played a crucial role in farm work, assisting human labour in various tasks such as pulling carts, and transporting goods. However, despite their indispensable contribution, animals were often regarded merely as tools or objects to be utilized for human benefit. In this context, the value generated by the work of
4 David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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animals was typically attributed solely to the time saved or the efficiency gained in human labour. In other words, the value of animal labour was measured in terms of its contribution to human productivity rather than being recognized as intrinsic to the animals themselves. The animal as such had only the status of an object - a commodity. What is important for us, however, is that 'the movement of value' could not take place without, as I put it, the animal-form. This suggests that the human animal, in the context of labour, is also the form through which the time of the worker is expressed. In other words, human labour is also measured and structured by animal time, which means nothing to animals.
For farmers who have invested their labour time in farming and agriculture, non-human animals, such as wolves, are not perceived as beings with inherent rights in the environment, but rather as sources of harm. This harm is measured in terms of labour hours invested in agriculture but now impaired, with no thought of the possibility of interdependence in organizing their shared life and survival. In an era of hyper-financialization, any loss or damage is seen primarily through a financial lens. Even emotional and affective responses are financed, leading to potential long-term problems for workers struggling to survive. On the other hand, non-human animals are portrayed as trying to survive without being controlled or exploited. However, if their survival is perceived as uncontrolled and non-capitalized, this is seen as a threat to capital and may lead to efforts to eliminate or remove them.
In the context of global capitalism, animals are often subjected to exploitation and mistreatment for economic gain. This exploitation occurs in various forms, including industrialized farming practices, deforestation, habitat destruction, and pollution, all of which contribute to ecological devastation; the capitalist drive for profit and efficiency has historically led to the over-exploitation of animals, as well as the destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems. Industrialized systems of animal exploitation are deeply rooted in capitalist modes of production and reproduction, which have evolved over time through processes of modernity and the spread of neo-colonial technologies. This implies that the exploitation of animals is not just a byproduct of capitalism but is inherent to its logic and structure.
It is imperative to link the causes of environmental disasters to processes of racialization, class and gender, and last but not least, to the political economy of capitalism. Vincent Mosco, in The Political Economy of Communication (2009), aptly notes what an intertwining of science
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and technology could do for such an analysis. Mosco (2009, 234-235) asserts,
Rejecting Socrates by trusting the mob and replacing Descartes's 'mind in a vat' with an interconnected world of people, ideas, animals, technologies, and everything else, is an enormous project. Like political economy, cultural studies, and public choice theory, sts [science and technology studies] rejects disciplinarity and the border police that accompany efforts to rein in ideas. In fact, what it calls actor network theory aims to understand the social life and relationships not only among people but also, and most importantly, between people, technologies, and what Haraway calls 'companion species,' or those creatures people have domesticated, hunted, and otherwise called animals and pets. In this respect, sts moves beyond even the most ambitious definition of political economy, which calls for the study of control and survival in social or even organic life. sts does not stop at social life because of the centrality of organic life, but it also wishes to energize technology. The latter is not just an inert mass, the computer on the desk, but a force that grows, retreats, and otherwise interacts with nontechnological actors in its network.
The cruel mistreatment of animals, on the one hand, considered domesticated and totally appropriated by the food industry and its multinational owners, and on the other hand, animals at the level of violent extinction as a result of total capitalist environmental destruction (more than 61,000 koalas and nearly 143 million other native mammals likely fell victim to Australian bushfires in late 2019 and early 2020, causing devastating losses in habitats across the country), entangled with dispossessed humans and non-human animals, must be linked to colonial history and racism on the one hand and class and gender and race on the other.
Racialized communities are disproportionately affected by environmental problems, including pollution and lack of access to healthy food. Animals in marginalized and racialized communities are maybe at greater risk due to limited resources for proper waste disposal and habitat protection.
Dinesh Wadiwel, in his seminal 2015 book The War Against Animals, talks about the contemporary industrialized chicken slaughter system that echoes the industrialized prison system. As Wadiwel (2015, 147) writes, 'The war on animals is located upon a violent form of continual appropriation, and an equally violent form of conversion of the lives
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of animals into value within a human exchange system; property and commodity cohabit as artefacts of war.' Wadiwel raises one important point and this is that in the privatization of sovereignty through capitalist private property, the violence of property is full and untouchable.
Traditional notions of masculinity and femininity influence attitudes toward hunting, owning pets, or participating in animal welfare activities. Women have always been associated with the role of nurturer and caregiver, which may also affect their interactions with animals. Although not often discussed, a connection can be made between sexuality and attitudes toward animals. Some lgbtq+ activists5 argue that social norms that dictate the binaries of gender and sexuality also reinforce the exploitation of animals. Some queer theorists have explored the connections between queerness and veganism, emphasizing nonconformity and empathy. People with disabilities may face particular challenges in caring for animals, but they may also offer very different perspectives of empathy and connection with non-human animals. In addition, the use of animals in therapy or assistance roles raises ethical questions about the treatment and rights of these animals.
Rereading
I propose a possible Marxist perspective of the category of non-human animals within financialized capitalist social relations. Under capitalism, everything, including nature and animals (non-human animals), is com-modified. Even if they are considered 'natural,' they are transformed into commodities for exchange and production. This is also true for nature, animals, or non-human commodities. The value form of commodities, including animals, is a result of this process of commodification. Some commodities, including non-human animals and nature, require an ideological framework to legitimize their status as commodities. This can include social norms, laws, and cultural beliefs.
In his 2020 book Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It), an analysis of the non-human animals that have been constantly abused and overused throughout the long history of capitalism by a systematic and thorough majoritarian, non-indulgent human agreement, Fahim Amir proposes a return of animals as 'zombie Marxism.'
Amir defines as zombie Marxism the historical collective revolt of the multitudes and animals (swine revolt) when they had to be removed from
5 For example, Vesna Liponik.
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New York. The pigeons also resisted, and the proletariat's love for the pigeons specifically referred to the proletariat training the pigeons in the same way the working class was trained in the factories for temporal precision and execution drill. The pigeons also disappeared when the use of their guano as fertilizer was replaced by nitrate, another modernization of capitalism and the chemical industry. However, I do not want to be misunderstood that my proposal to enter the animal-form does not exonerates Marxism, which has failed to see the abuse of nature in all kinds of products of non-human animals.
The birth of Fordism in 1913 was influenced by the rapid and efficient process of the slaughterhouse, where the animal's body is dismembered according to Taylor's ideas6 - but in reverse. The system Frederick Taylor invented is supposedly a 'systematic fast control of animal suffering.' If in the slaughterhouse the killing, dismembering, and packing of animals all consisted of tearing them apart, in the Fordist model of the assembly line it was the other way around - building assemblies. Consequently, Amir argued, the slaughterhouse is primarily a laboratory for industrial modernity (Amir 2020, 82). Amir shows that the Fordist assembly line starts from the rapid, massive ripping of the carcass of the meat industry.
The usage of animals in laboratory settings and its intersection with biopolitical concepts, started earlier, particularly during the late nineteenth century. During this time, the utilization of animals in experimental and biomedical research began to merge, creating a new biopolitical space. Jonathan L. Clark explained in 2014 that in the late nineteenth century, the experimental animal and bio-medical laboratory merged to form the new biopolitical space. This space, as described by Robert G. W. Kirk, saw the transformation of non-human animals into objects of biopower. In this space, as Robert G. W. Kirk (2017, 195) argues, the non-human animal was transformed into an object of biopower and 'enmeshed within biopower even when the biopolitical aim is ultimately the transformation of human life.' As biopower refers to the control and regulation of populations and individuals through biological means, such as healthcare policies, reproductive regulations, and scientific interventions. The interconnectedness of animal experimentation, biopolitics, and societal power structures, highlights how animals have been instrumental-
6 Taylorism is a management theory first advocated by Frederick W. Taylor in the late nineteenth century that uses scientific methods to analyse the most efficient production process to increase productivity.
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ized and subjected to biopower within laboratory settings, particularly since the late nineteenth century.
The biopolitical conditions and contradictions of animal destruction advanced by the occidental world are supported by the occidental citizen's monstrous biopower desire for greater pleasure through destruction and consumption. The result of these biopolitical efforts is not more life, but a necropower, as pure destruction, suffering, etc.; we cannot speak only of biopower, as non-human animals are used in the processes of calculation to change human life at the expense of their extermination as crude objects of capitalist industry and science.
Capitalist logic is based on the abstraction of commodities, including animals, leading to the creation of an abstract society in which exchange value becomes 'the central element of social relations.' The impact of global capitalism on ecosystems increases ecological vulnerability and makes animals more susceptible to captivity. Therefore, we must recognize the connection between consumer choices, demand for products, and their ecological consequences.
By categorizing the capitalist economy and examining the role of the commodity form within it, scholars like Mosco aim to provide analytical frameworks for understanding the dynamics of capitalist societies, including their environmental implications, animal commodification, and their massive exploitation.
Mosco even proposes the categorization of the capitalist economy and the place of the commodity form to distinguish between commercialization, commodification and objectification (Prodnik 2015, 260):
Commercialization could also be called marketization and it is the narrowest of the three processes. It refers to what is happening on the surface of the capitalist economy, so to say, on the transparently visible market: in the exchange process, the sphere of circulation. In communication studies, commercialization/marketization would for example refer to the relationship created between audiences and advertisers. Capitalist market necessarily encompasses a lot more than just exchange relations of this kind; as already pointed out, it, for example, presupposes commodification of labour that produces commodities and should therefore also encompass the production process. In this sense commodification, which is the main focus of political economy of communication, is a much broader notion. Lastly, objectification refers especially to specific process of dehu-
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manisation. [Georg] Lukacs7 for example used the word reification to denote how human beings and personal relations become thinglike. Not everything that is objectified is necessarily a commodity of course.
The animal-form as a particular manifestation of value engages with these forms presented by Mosco. The animal-form represents (over)com-mercialization (as animal-money), commodification (as animal-object), and paradoxically capital (as animal-form). Paradoxically, the animal-form can also represent capital itself, indicating animals' role in the accumulation and circulation of capital within capitalism. My analysis delves into the idea that within the context of capitalism, the concept of 'animal-form' can be further elaborated through various sub-forms, offering deeper insights into the position and treatment of non-human animals within capitalist systems.
Animals can be seen both as products of capitalist relations and as separate from them. This duality suggests that animals can occupy a unique position within the capitalist system. My point? If we consider recent nature, fighting back through an inexorable destructive force, as the result of ongoing capitalist devastation of the environment, in the form of 'mad nature' reappropriating its own flow, then the animal is at once constitutive of capital, and, one might say, a derivative of the commodity form under capitalism. Or, differently, the nature going mad is in essence the result of an unstoppable valorization, which typically represents the increase in value under capitalism, and is associated with destruction. In our analysis, valorization is nothing but the destruction of the environment, of non-human animals and humans. This means that the process of capital accumulation has destructive consequences, for the environment or animals. When animals are commodities, they are subject to the logic of capitalist exchange. However, when they function as 'counter-capital,' when the environment 'goes mad' (flood, tornado, tsunami), their role shifts, suggesting a more complex relationship. In this case, nature, when it shows its power, is something alien to capital.
Animal-money comes to the fore when it is decided to eradicate animals because they are harmful to agriculture or the extermination itself brings in money. Horses, for example, served various purposes in the capitalist system, from transportation and labour to sport and eventually the
7 See Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness (1971).
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meat industry. The course of their life cycles is linked only to the possibility of making money. This fragmentation suggests that animals can be viewed in multiple ways, each associated with different aspects of their existence within the capitalist framework and depending on how the historical momentum of capitalism repeats itself.
In the context of capitalist relations, nature and animals are viewed primarily as objects subject to control and exploitation for their use value. This view ignores the consequences of environmental degradation and implies that nature is seen as a free resource for capitalist exploitation. Animals are protected, artificially bred, and consumed in the capitalist system. Their value comes from the fact that they are barely valued, and they are included in profit calculations. This means that animals are seen primarily as commodities for profit. Animals historically played an important role in the reproduction of life in capitalist systems. This could refer to the fact that animals were used for agricultural purposes, transportation, and other functions that contributed to the survival and growth of the human population. Nature and animals are treated primarily as resources to be exploited for profit within capitalist relations, without consideration of their intrinsic value or the potential ecological consequences of such exploitation. This indicates a discrepancy between capitalist interests and the call for environmental consciousness. All stay purely rhetorical as in the background the lust for profit is unstoppable.
The animal is often considered an archaic or trans-historical form that has its history in pre-capitalist market economies appropriated for capitalist purposes, while disproportionate attention is paid to the commodity as constitutive of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. The analysis of the animal focuses on the fact that the animal has its roots in the commodity and as such functions as a formal expression of value. In this web of relations, different commodity forms must relate to each other, and value must pass between forms in order to reproduce the conditions of production and accumulate more value. Here, it is just a matter of extracting more value from what is devalued in terms of rights to life, reproduction, ecosystems, and autonomy and agency. It is important to see how different commodities relate to each other in a capitalist economic system. In this case, animals are treated as a variable within the capitalist value form. They are absolutely objectified, being used for industry and corporations and within the state regulation of the ecosystem only as money. A good example is the 2023 plan to completely eradicate the nutria on the Ljubljanica river, as these are designated an alien
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species that seriously disturbs the balance of the natural environment.8 This slaughter plan was heavily disputed.
Animals are also essential in connecting different temporal aspects within the practices of capitalist production and social reproduction. Animals have their own unique characteristics and functions, including being a medium of circulation, a measure of value, and an instrument of hoarding. Moreover, non-human animals are temporalized forms, meaning their value and existence are shaped by the duration of their circulation or life cycles. This perspective underscores the role of time in understanding the place of animals within the capitalist system, emphasizing the multifaceted nature of their representation within the system.
The Historical Role of Colonialism, Violence, Racialization
This involves not only placing the animal-form in the context of global capitalism and its political economy, but also considering the historical role ofcolonialism, violence, racialization, discrimination, and exclusion, particularly in relation to transatlantic slavery and its impact on capitalist accumulation.
Joshua Bennett's9 critical perspective highlighting the neglected proximity of race and the racialized Black community to animals in contemporary analysis is therefore a very important critique. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, in his book The Mobile Workshop: The Tsetse Fly and African Knowledge Production (2018), explains 'how the presence of the tsetse fly turned the forests of Zimbabwe and southern Africa into an open laboratory where African knowledge formed the basis of colonial tsetse control policies.' Moreover (mit Press Direct 2018), Mavhunga
restores the central role not just of African labor but of African intellect in the production of knowledge about the tsetse fly. He describes how European colonizers built on and beyond this knowledge toward destructive and toxic methods, including cutting down
8	Nutria originally come from South America and have been native to Slovenia since the 1930s, when they escaped from fur farms. Over the years, the number of nutria in Ljubljana and in the protected Ljubljana Marshes has increased. The nutria is also on the list of invasive alien species. The Slovenian Ministry of Agriculture has drawn up a plan to completely remove (kill) the nutria from the Ljubljana Marshes, which has met with strong public disapproval.
9	Joshua Bennett is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books ofpoetry and criticism: The Sobbing School (2016), Owed (2020b), and Being Property Once Myself (2022). See also Bennett (2020a).
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entire forests, forced 'prophylactic' resettlement, massive destruction of wild animals, and extensive spraying of organochlorine pesticides.
Neel Ahuja (2017, 237) writes about colonialism, which he develops in relation to postcolonial and biofeminist scientific studies:
Because colonialism is a large-scale process that has shaped human settlement across the planet, it has an intimate relationship to matter. In fact, the very idea of'matter' - physical objects making up the universe and its constitutive systems and elements - has developed in tandem with the spread of colonial forms of knowledge and settlement over the past five centuries. Modern colonialism involves the development of sciences that describe the material form of the universe as well as the biology of human, animal, and plant life. These sciences, along with capitalist industries that deploy them, have historically helped spread colonial worldviews that separate inanimate matter, the living biological body, human culture, and the spiritual domain into distinct spheres.
This fits well with another shift that leads to what Kelsey Dayle John defines as 'animal colonialism' in her 2019 paper 'Animal Colonialism -Illustrating Intersections Between Animal Studies and Settler Colonial Studies through Dine Horsemanship.'
John (2019, 42-43) explains that the concept of animal colonialism is necessary because it allows us to rethink how
to articulate the interconnected nature of Indigenous nonhuman animals, peoples, and lands, and the ways these relationships encounter and are tangled with oppressions confronted by various disciplines. I also center animals in colonialism to show that settler colonial erasures specifically assault animals, but also that animals resist and show humans how to resist. I use the word 'Indigenous' or 'Din.' before horses, animals, or land not as a way to show an-thropocentric dominance over nonhumans (that is to say, land is possessed by those of Indigenous heritage), but to designate these nonhumans as belonging to an Indigenous ontology that might not make the same divisions that the western world does (i.e. animal/human, alive/dead).
As Billy-Ray Belcourt notes in his 'Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought,' 'we cannot address animal oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming and sub-
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sequently dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy as political machinations that require the simultaneous exploitation and/or erasure of animal and Indigenous bodies' (Belcourt 2015,1). We are thus at the very beginning of this journey.
Conclusion
In this article, I have tried to focus mainly on the status of capitalism and the concept of the non-human animal. I have shown that discrimination against animals is not only related to other forms of discrimination, but that in global capitalism, which is not even that, but a racial necrocapital-ism, the animal and nature are simultaneously constitutive (intrinsic) and derivative of the capitalist system of production. I have explored how various forms of intertwined (connected) and disentangled (unconnected) exploitation, dispossession, and disposal enter into the complex relations and divisions between speciesism and other forms of discrimination. Finally, I have attempted to identify potential sites of common revolt that arise from the different ways in which the terms and concepts used in the analysis are conceptualized, how they are to be defined, and where they are to be located within a structural analysis.
Animals in necrocapitalism are considered as beings shaped by capitalism and existing within that framework. We propose a dual relationship: while animals can be fully reified (objectified) as animal-money, animal-objects, and animal-form within the capitalist system, they can also be considered as something distinct from capital. This highlights the complexity of the relationship between animals and capitalism, in which animals are both integral to capital accumulation and exist outside its boundaries.
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--.2020a. 'Joshua Bennett on the Use of Animals in the Work of Black
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