Over the last century there has been an exponential increase in the number of land and marine animals utilized for human food supplies, with growing per capita human consumption of meat and dairy products. This expansion has reshaped the diets of most humans on the planet, and condemned trillions of animals to the horrors of intensive farming and industrial fisheries.
 

To an extent, what happened to animals over the last hundred years mirrors that of other commodities under capitalism such as televisions, cars, fashion, computers and water bottles: they have been overproduced as a means of making profit. Arguably this approach to economies now poses an existential threat to our planetary systems, as the endless drive to produce wealth takes its toll on the ability of the earth to reproduce and sustain life.

 

In this course, Dinesh Wadiwel walks through his 2023 book Animals and Capital. As Wadiwel will discuss, while our treatment of animals is certainly a moral catastrophe, it is also a structural problem, interconnected with our economic system. Each class in this course is designed to work through the key arguments of the book —understanding how to situate the treatment of animals and the emergence of the factory farm system, how a political economic approach to understanding markets is useful for understanding animals as both commodities and labor, and finally, how we might imagine transforming our economy and society to enable multispecies flourishing.

Instructor

Dinesh Wadiwel