IN HIS 1865 CONFESSION, Karl Marx wrote that his favorite food was fish, but if he had applied his own theory of alienation to its fullest logical extent, he may have reconsidered that choice. 

Farmed animals experience alienation in much the same way human workers do. Rather than being free to connect with their authentic needs and pursue self-actualization through productive activity (whatever that may mean for their species), their entire existence is dedicated to the service of commodities from which they derive neither spiritual nor material benefit. Just as human workers sell our time, our bodies, our very life-essence to the soulless machine of capital and thereby become depersonalized cogs within it, non-human animals on farms are stripped of their individuality and reduced to units of production. The food they eat, the water they drink, the biological processes that keep them alive for the short while that they are allowed this privilege are reduced from sources of nourishment and vitality to routine maintenance. In the first of his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx wrote that "[T]he more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more value he creates the more worthless he becomes.” The physical deterioration of animals bred to produce dairy and eggs embodies this vampiric relationship in the most literal way imaginable, and the practice of killing animals for meat puts a gruesome twist on Marx's sentiment, expressed in the Second Manuscript, that "[The worker's] physical existence, his life, was and is considered as a supply of goods."  

What should be a natural solidarity between all working creatures is complicated (if not undermined entirely) by the fact that the majority of people, including leftists, regularly eat the flesh and secretions of animals. We are raised from birth to believe that eating meat, dairy, and eggs is "normal, natural, and necessary," and people who abstain are stigmatized as sanctimonious do-gooders. While I've never met an omnivore who is totally blind to the ethical issues with animal products (at least as they are currently produced), they find it all too easy to brush off these concerns when a cheeseburger or a plate of bacon and eggs is placed in front of them. As Marxist philosopher and activist Angela Davis puts it, “I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world.” People consume animal products in much the same way they do t-shirts and coffee mugs — as depersonalized commodities divorced from the labor and the suffering that produced them. While they abstractly understand that meat comes from dead animals, most are shielded from the process through which a living, feeling creature is transformed into a nameless hunk of bloody tissue, and many are entirely ignorant of the horrors that occur in the production of milk and eggs.   

The argument is often made that we do not need to desist from farming animals in order to free them and ourselves from the psychic prison of alienation and subservience to the commodity form. Well-intentioned leftists and progressives advocate for so-called ethical omnivorism, an approach which allows for animal product consumption on the condition that farmed animals are treated well and slaughtered humanely. They propose that buying meat, dairy, and eggs from small local farms is more ethical than purchasing factory-farmed products on the basis that the humans who raise and kill animals with their own hands relate to these animals on a more personal level than workers in concentrated animal feeding operations and mechanized slaughterhouses. This supposedly fosters a deep respect for animal life and compassion for animal suffering, which will necessarily result in less frequent and more humane killings. There is truth to the idea that small-scale, welfare-minded animal agriculture is far less alienating for humans than its mechanized counterpart and that animals bred and raised under such conditions live comfortable lives compared to their factory-farmed brethren. However, if we end the conversation there, we overlook the central crucial problem with animal agriculture — a problem that the end of factory farming cannot solve. 

The Deutsche Welle docuseries "The Great Meat Debate" highlights the core contradiction of humane animal agriculture in a segment covering perhaps the most ethical dairy farm in existence. Farmer Anja Hradetzky, a self-described "cow whisperer," eschews all the most repugnant practices associated with intensive farming. Her cows are never confined to restrictive stalls or hooked up to painful and unsanitary milking machines but are allowed to roam freely through bucolic pastures in all weather and are gently milked by hand. Contrary to standard industry practice of separating calves from their mothers at birth (which, despite the tremendous emotional distress it inflicts on the animals, is not prohibited even by the strictest standards of humane certification), mothers are allowed to nurse their young to fullness before any remaining milk is extracted for human use. Unfortunately, Anja is still beholden to the bottom line, so while her farm is a lovely place to be a cow, it remains so only as long as your body-machine can generate product. Anja is not a cruel person, and she clearly has no wish to end the life of animals to whom she evinces a profound emotional attachment, but she can still countenance the decision to do so for the same reason a human resources manager can countenance firing a beloved long-time employee with bills to pay and a family to feed. Regardless of her good intentions, the ultimate objective of her enterprise is not to sustain and nourish life but to extract profit from it. The segment concludes with a heart-wrenching scene of Anja tearfully shooting a beloved old cow in the forehead because her milk has, at long last, run dry.

The situation of animals on farms such as Anja's as opposed to that of intensively farmed animals can be compared to that of professional-managerial workers versus low-wage workers. Professional workers are undeniably better off — they receive better pay and benefits, their work is typically less physically demanding, and these conditions give them greater freedom to pursue self-actualization off the clock. Unfortunately, liveable wages and conditions are no antidote to profound alienation, a reality demonstrated by the self-defeating middle-class tendency to fill the aching, cosmic void in the psyche with consumer goods. The essential question is not, "Are my basic physical needs met?" or even "Am I living comfortably?" but "Am I totally and unconditionally free to connect with and pursue my full range of authentic needs?" While the average white-collar worker has greater freedom to do this than the average low-wage worker, they are still compelled to live in service to commodities that do not serve them, and they experience the same consequences of spiritual frustration and loneliness (albeit to a lesser degree). A free-range chicken or a pasture-raised cow who lives out their life on an idyllic farm before being lovingly killed when their productive capacity runs out is in much the same situation. While they have greater freedom than many of their species to pursue self-actualization, their life is still involuntarily dedicated to someone else's profit. They are bred into existence for the primary purpose not of living freely but of producing food for humans, whether by constantly laying eggs and producing milk until they expire or by being slaughtered in their prime for meat.

The argument for supporting so-called humane farms as opposed to buying the plastic-wrapped flesh of factory-farmed animals emerges from the human search for a less alienating mode of food production, but those who make this argument unwittingly reveal the true depth of their own alienation through their failure to consider the alienation of their fellow sentient beings. It may indeed be the case that were this the dominant paradigm for animal agriculture, far fewer animals would be bred into existence to be killed, that they would live better lives before being killed, and that the people who exploit and kill them would be forced to engage more seriously with the ethical quandaries presented by animal agriculture. However, this would still be a system in which the right of non-human animals to life and self-determination is subordinated to the desire of humans to use them for food. It would still be a system in which the bodies of animals are treated as units of production, a system in which their authentic value as individuals would be swallowed up by their constructed value as commodities.

Marx’s vision of communism was not simply of improved standards of living (a thought-terminating trap into which far too many socialists often fall) but of total human freedom to cultivate and embody our authentic essence. If we take the next logical step and extend that to include all sentient beings, we must conclude that the consumption of animal products is incompatible with this vision. The domination of humans over non-human animals, an illegitimate hierarchical relationship that deprives sentient beings of the fundamental right to exist for themselves, can not be allowed to persist in any society that cherishes liberty.

There is, as the saying goes, no ethical consumption under capitalism. Making the individual commitment to abstain from animal products to the extent possible, while honorable, will not unilaterally liberate animals nor ourselves from the chains that bind us. Making mindful choices about what (or who) we eat based on a recognition of the human and non-human labor behind our food, however, can help us to loosen the psychic chokehold of the abstracted commodity and bring us one step closer to our authentic needs. Capitalism has numbed us to our instinctive yearning to live not as atomized individuals but as parts of an integrated whole, spiritually connected not only with the people closest to us but with the entire global community of conscious beings caught up with us in the neverending entropic journey towards ultimate understanding. In recognizing the needs and experiences of others, human and non-human, we become better able to recognize ourselves, which is surely more nourishing than any meal of commodified flesh.