Capital, the Climate Crisis, and the Pig

To understand the climate crisis, you must first understand the pig

Man dominating nature is an old trope, one which many anti-capitalists and leftists have made much hay out of. Allegedly, the problem today is that man lives against nature instead of with nature. Man destroys nature, the source of his wealth, because of his desire for uncontrollable growth. The solution is that we must impose legal limits on corporations’ rule over nature while forcing them to treat their (often racially and socially) marginalized employees better. Only then can we answer the existential threat of climate change. 

As the global climate crisis boils our oceans, suffocates our skies, and darkens our horizons, we find ourselves in a planetary crisis the likes of which humanity has never seen before. Many in the West have rightfully condemned the continued despoliation of the earth wrought by global markets made ascendant.  

But the view of man dominating nature, no matter how well-intentioned, tells us nothing about the root of the problem. It is in fact an anti-radical idea precisely because it completely misses the root of the problem. It forgoes the particular for the universal. Man dominating nature has been a recurring theme in pastoral literature since at least Ovid. Yet obviously there is a problem particular to our time absent during the time of the Romans. The literary touchstone lacks the explanatory power for why we are living through a climate crisis right now.

We need an independent variable. Something that existed then and exists now. A factor we may compare across time to find the historical processes fueling our planetary crisis. In order to understand the problem of our age, we must understand the pig. 

The pig is no ordinary livestock. It’s a wiley animal, so wiley that all human communities have had to accommodate themselves to it on one level or another. The pig can jump four feet high, swim for miles, and solve its way through most simple enclosures.¹ Furthermore, its ubiquity across time makes comparison between snapshots of different eras quite productive. Seen through the pig, the problem is no longer simply one species (man) subjugating another (pig) but instead a particular set of social relations dominating both. Once we understand the problem of the pig, we will find that the problem of our age is not man dominating nature — but capital dominating nature.

Partnership of Pig and Peasant

The relationship between the different segments of medieval society to the pig demonstrates how human society changes itself in the process of transforming nature. During the early medieval period, the very process of domesticating the pig changed the very way humans governed themselves. According to Jamie Kreiner, entire legal codes were erected to deal with the pig. No crime in the sixth-century Frankish book of laws Les Salica has more provisions than that of pig theft.² Tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings like Æthelstan were deeply invested in developing protocols for when the pig inevitably outsmarts the farmer and wreaks havoc on his neighbors’ crops.³ The Visigothic kings and lawmakers who compiled the seventh-century Liber Iudiciorum “assumed that having a herd of animals belong[ing] to several owners could lead to confusion about who owned which animals, and they worried that this situation could be exploited by a herder intent on fraud.”⁴ There is less dominion than there is a fluctuating relationship undergirding a tenuous partnership between man and nature whose terms are always changing.

The medieval legal codes complicate our notion of man dominating nature — a notion which boils down our rich political-environmental history to one of undifferentiated mass dominating undifferentiated matter. A nobleman’s relationship to nature is different from that of a peasant. Under sixth-century Frankish king Clothar I, the Burgundian churches were granted immunity from pig taxes (decimae porcorum) while farmers still had to pay them.⁵ Noblemen monopolized forests as hunting grounds with peasants having to ask permission before setting their pigs off to eat.⁶

Clearly man-against-nature is not a simple subject-object relationship but one refracted through a complex set of ever-changing social relations and human institutions. During the medieval period the medieval peasant did not work as they pleased. The peasant owed taxes and rents and obligations to their lord as well as neighbors. Class society meant alienation from the means of production were present then as they are now, albeit in a more muted form.

Even kings could not do as they will. King Clothar Iwas only able to rule because of the concessions he made to the churches and noblemen within his domain. When one finishes demystifying and historicizing the medieval period, the facade of man dominating nature melts to reveal man and nature both dominated by broader social relations: social relations in which the lowest peasant and the greatest king are enmeshed, social relations which humans can change to a degree but which they were nevertheless subjected to. 

The medieval pig forces us to reframe our question from “Does man dominate nature?” to “In what ways is our contemporary relationship to nature different from before?” The first answer may be technology and that we’re finally able to plunder the earth without abandon. But that assumes that man through time has always been a free-floating atom desiring infinite wealth. This fundamentally liberal assumption erases the fundamentally different set of rules early medieval peasants played by. 

Peasants did not maximize production of singular commodities. Ancient agronomists encouraged low-frequency farrowing at one litter of piglets per year. Fifth-century Irish bishop Palladius advised that a sow nurse no more than eight piglets, advice that while less productive maximized the sow’s strength and fertility.⁷ Medieval peasants did this not because they were necessarily more moral than us but because they were producing for use rather than value i.e. profit. Most peasants cultivated crops and livestock for their survival rather than for sale on the market. 

Much of the surplus peasants’ produce went to their lord as rent, and whatever was left was either saved as a buffer for winter or sold on the market. Because the end of production was use, peasants paid painstaking attention to the physical properties of the world around them; if pigs were cultivated to maximize yield, that would endanger not only the pigs’ health but also that of the surrounding ecosystem, within which the pig played an important role.⁸ Peasants were maximizing production by preserving the ecological system to which they owed their wealth even if they did not maximize yield and focus all energies in pork production.

Capital and the Hog

The social relations governing modern-day agriculture are fundamentally different. Production is oriented towards value rather than use. The two entail very different processes of production: while use-values satisfy a finite number of wants, value is infinite. In the words of Lewis Mumford, “of all forms of wealth, money alone is without assignable limits. The prince who might desire to build five palaces would hesitate to build five thousand: but what was to prevent him from seeking by conquest and taxes to multiply by thousands the riches in his treasury?”⁹ The quicker the turnover, the more money made; more money means more to expand production; expanded production means quicker turnover; and so on. One can have enough pork, but never enough profit.

In the abstract, the factory is a social institution whose purpose is to produce as many commodities in as little time as possible. It arose out of a specific set of historical circumstances, social relations, and long-term processes culminating in late-eighteenth century industrial capitalism. Every facet of the factory has developed in accordance with producing as much as possible, as quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. 

The pig slaughterhouse is a case in point. In many ways the meatpacking industry was the cutting-edge of capitalist development. While Henry Ford pioneered the modern-day assembly line, he claimed to have actually taken his idea from the Chicago meatpackers’ disassembly line.¹⁰ Unlike the medieval pig, which although enclosed nevertheless lives outside within nature, the modern pig is isolated from nature so as to minimize any disturbances to the production process. All outside elements that may biologically contaminate or compromise the pig disassembly process are sealed beyond the factory floor.¹¹

The division of labor marks a crucial difference between the early medieval farmer and industrial laborer. Under feudal social relations, the farmer is responsible for the pig at all stages of life: birth, maturity, death. All steps of the process are united in one peasant. Under capitalism, the process is inverted. Many individuals are instead united into a single process. 

The inversion is clearest when studying the ways not just pigs, but men, are transformed by the factory. Ethnographer Alex Blanchette documents in Porkopolis how capital expands by transforming communities and nature to serve particular though evolving roles in the pork production process. Dover Foods, a giant pork processing plant, dominates the Great Plains town of Dover.¹² On the disassembly line Dover Foods meatpackers are physically transformed at the same time as they physically transform the pork. Their bodies morph as they perform the same micro-motions of cutting, slicing, or packaging dead pigs every second, minute, hour, and day: the whites of the fingernails eroded, muscular knots forming in strange parts of the back.¹³ Whole humans are reduced to a singular muscle motion as their bodies literally adapt themselves to a single function on the disassembly line.

Though their jobs are far cleaner than the meatpackers’, Managers and executives are not free from the domination of the pig. Like the medieval king, managers exercise power; but also like the king, the managers are subject to the social relations governing the production process and division of labor. Managers wear the Dover Foods insignia on their shirts even while attending football games, barbeques, and church.¹⁴ Although managers view their relationship to the pig as different from that of the meatpackers, they nevertheless also define themselves through the pig. When asked to define their role, managers claimed that “they work on the Herd” while meatpackers “work with the Herd.”¹⁵ While the prepositional phrase differs, the object remains the same.

The granularization of the division of labor — manifested through the architecture of the slaughterhouse as well as the organizational specialization of meatpacker and manager — is propelled by more profit, more efficiency, and more turnover. Granularization means the creation of jobs specializing in discrete phases of the pig’s life cycle: from insemination and slaughter to packaging. Not only is there a vertical integration, but horizontal as well, with workers specializing in different pig organs, muscle fibers, and fats. All this granularization in service of commodity turnover, which in turn alienates the meatpacker from the whole of the “commodity'': while dominated by the pig, meatpackers only work with smaller and smaller parts of the animal.

Part and parcel with the division of labor is a standardization of labor: a given worker in the production process performs the same labor on the same commodities. But a pig is not a standardized commodity. The solution isn’t merely to accommodate the production process to the pig, but to accommodate the pig to the production process. This does not just mean selectively breeding for desired traits; farmers have done that for thousands of years. It means standardizing the pig itself; to turn the pig into the Pig and enable more automation and lower labor costs.¹⁶ Specializing workers heightens the need for a standardized pig that will make this ultra-specialized division of labor possible. Not only must meatpackers physically adapt themselves to the demands of capital, but so too must pigs. 

The unceasing parcelization of the production process within the slaughterhouse that dominates both man and pig is driven by the need to realize higher and higher profit rates. As the pork market becomes more saturated, the production process more advanced, and the field more competitive, the drive to eliminate inefficiencies, cut costs, and expand markets becomes more grave. But as producers automate and invest more in fixed capital and machinery, allowing them to increase pork output with less labor, the value of pork lowers as more of it enters the market and prices tend downward. 

Today, these expansive pork processors swallow the ex-steel towns in the midwest and former mill villages in the south. Gas stations along the roads to these pig towns advertise that they’re “100% gas,” meaning they refuse to blend corn-based ethanol into pumps, which would increase the cost of animal feed.¹⁷ In Dover, Dover Foods “sponsor[s] every event. Radio DJs lauded the company’s reliable jobs, pay, and medical benefits. People shopping at Walmart wore the Dover Foods insignia on their t-shirts.”¹⁸ Nature is not merely reordered to “man’s” ends; both are transformed in the process of reordering the whole community towards the valorization of capital.

Pollution permeates the physical landscape and atmosphere as much as the pork plant permeates the town’s social fabric. The concentration of so many pigs into one physical site of production almost “pigifies” the air and the soil. Farmers and workers often refer to the air pollution as a consequence of the evaporation of literal tons of pig shit. Before the opening of the pork processing plant during the nineties, a “generation of grandparents wrote op-eds that developed vocabularies for enunciating the horror of breathing vaporized hog shit” by posing for photographs wearing gas masks and organizing community forums protesting the plant.

Man and Nature Alike Enslaved

The notion that our problem is one of man dominating nature poses our relationship to the natural world as one-sided, like that between a director and a corporation. But as Marx observes, man transforms himself through the process of transforming nature.¹⁹ A necessary requisite for human society is intercourse between man and his physical environment. This is true for all epochs. 

In the medieval period, despite their ubiquity, pigs were seen as only one important element of many within the ecological system. The medievals tended to view the world dialectically, with every element serving and being served by other elements, and all subject to the wider system, which was itself in a constant state of flux. Medieval philosophers like Claudius of Turin and St. Augustine did not view pigs purely instrumentally, i.e. as mere objects to satisfy want, but instead as living beings important for the regulation of any given environment.²⁰ After all, viewing the pig solely as a resource to be exploited and whose yield to be maximized could irreparably damage the local ecological metabolism.

Modern wage-workers' relationship to the land is practically inverted. In contrast to the early medieval peasant, only a very small number of laborers have everyday contact with the pig. But this “handful of communities and workers must endure elevated concentrations of swine” which perpetuates the feeling of domination by a singular creature, the pig.²¹

The hyper-productive and hyper-exploited few responsible for the production of our global pork supply see their lives as dominated by the pig in a way quite unlike the medieval peasant. Towns in the Great Plains and the southeast built around pork production view their ways of life through the butchered hog. “If it weren’t for the hogs,” said an elderly Dover resident, “there’d be nothing here. This would be a ghost town.”²² From hairdressers, art gallery directors, to breeding farm managers, Dover residents owe their lives not to a living master, but a dead thing: pig dominates man. 

This feeling is true both for the immiserated Guatemalan meatpacker whose working-day is defined by a 1-2 slice into a hog muscle ten times every minute and the well-compensated corporate executive who spends his time finding new markets for pork. Their waking days are dedicated to the hog, their lives dominated by it. 

This unending quest for profit — which drives the specialization of labor within the slaughterhouse, despoliation of the environment, and exploitation of the meatpackers — is not a product of individual greed. Profit and growth are necessary conditions for production; any firm that is not constantly growing is seen as failing. Environmental pollution and worker domination are not inherently determined by the imperative to grow and profit; after all, there is room for human agency and decency. But over time as markets become saturated and competition heightened, the ability to treat workers well and steward over the environment becomes more constrained.

Pork processors are not the only ones who vie for more and more growth. Every industry that has a stake in each stage of the pork production process must grow: construction firms, chemical manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, grocery store chains, and so on. As I demonstrate in my review of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis, all these industries produce to sell their commodities on an abstract market to realize a profit, which they invest to expand facilities to compete, and continue the cycle ad infinitum. Contra well-intentioned liberals and leftists, there is no controlling this process. Uncontrolled growth is a feature, not a bug, of the global capitalist system.

Thus we come back to the notion of man dominating nature. Abstract man does not dominate abstract nature. What’s true across time is that man and nature are in a dialectical relationship with one another that changes each. Social relations, not abstract homo economicus, are what dominate both; each person relates differently to nature depending on their relation to the means of production and with other people; although man can change his circumstances, he is nevertheless changed and constrained by those very same circumstances. 

Capital dominates man and nature, though of course this is not how either meatpacker and manager articulate their subjugation. Both see themselves dominated not by living and breathing elites residing in Congress or on Wall Street but by a dead hog. Which brings us to the great irony of our era: man is seemingly master of the dead hog: slicing, dicing, packaging, analyzing it — yet nevertheless feels alienated from and dominated by the hog. Of course, the hog is only a fetish for the deeper social relations that have brought man and hog together in the first place: capital. And the only way out of capital’s global subjugation of humanity is the world-historical double-movement: the backward-looking revival of the peasant commune, with production oriented towards use but consciously planned by the community as well as the forward-looking revolutionization of the means of production.

1. Jamie Kreiner. Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West. Yale University Press. 35.

2. Kreiner. Legions of Pigs. 138-45.

3. Kreiner. 40.

4. Kreiner. 97.

5. Kreiner, 109.

6. Kreiner, 111.

7. Kreiner, 95.

8. Kreiner, 45.

9. Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilization. University of Chicago Press. 24.

10. Alex Blanchette. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, & the Factory Farm. Duke University Press. 27.

11. Blanchette, Porkopolis, 47.

12. Throughout his ethnography, Blanchette uses pseudonymized names for the town (called Dover) and pork processing plant (Dover Foods) he shadowed for several years in order to protect the identities of his interviewees.

13. Blanchette, 185-189.

14. Blanchette, 7.

15. Blanchette, 54.

16. Blanchette, 17.

17. Blanchette, 10.

18. Blanchette, 7.

19. Karl Marx. Capital: Volume 1. Penguin Classics. 283.

20. Blanchette, 44-77.

21. Blanchette, 130.

22. Blanchette, 1.