Toward Multispecies Justice: Unveiling Violence and Exploitation in the Animal-Industrial Complex

The Animal-Industrial Complex constitutes an enormously complex constellation of relationships between powerful institutions. The dynamic components of this apparatus are all impacted by a proliferation of social forms that ultimately reflect a socio-economic system that centralizes capitalist life: endless growth, competitiveness, and profligate consumption. Capitalism is an intrinsically violent enterprise marked by the human instrumental destruction and consumption of nonhuman animal bodies marked as commodities. In these pages we chart the violent expropriation of nonhuman animals as the key profit generating practice in select domains of the A-IC, but we situate it within the capitalist order. The A-IC emphasizes exploitative human-animal relations as partly constitutive of capitalism (itself often ignored by conventional theorists of capitalism) and provides heuristic focus for critical interdisciplinary animal research. Each chapter collected in this volume stands on its own as an individual study of associated phenomena. However, in this introduction, we aim to identify broad connections across the entire compilation that unmask inherent cruelties in the pursuit of perpetual profit. When referring to ‘capitalism,’ we are speaking of not just an economic system, but rather an entire social order, including an acknowledgement of the Capitalocene.