Animals and Capital
Zoom presentation
Watch the video here
In his forthcoming book, Animals and Capital, Professor Wadiwel explores how an understanding of the value structure of our prevailing economic system is important for comprehending the rise of industrial agriculture and the evolution in human animal relations which followed. Capitalist agriculture reflects a biopolitical process of transforming animals into a means of subsistence for human populations, and a simultaneous economic process of creating animals as a "labor force" for value extraction. In this talk, Professor Wadiwel will focus on how Karl Marx’s value theory might tell us something about animal labor and help make sense of the development of the factory farm, which, he would argue, reflects a historically unprecedented "handshake" between capitalism and hierarchical anthropocentricism.
Dinesh is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies, School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Sydney. He has a background in social and political theory and is an expert in human animal studies and disability rights. Dinesh is author of The War against Animals (Brill 2015) and the forthcoming monograph Animals and Capital (Edinburgh UP 2023). He is co-author (with Matthew Chrulew) of Foucault and Animals (Brill 2016). Dinesh is a recent co-author of commissioned research reports for the Australian Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.