Further Than the 18 Theses Go: A materialist response to the Alliance for Marxism and Animal Liberation

The 18 Theses on Marxism and Animal Liberation, published by the Bündnis Marxismus und Tierbefreiung, attempt something most of the Marxist left refuses to attempt: a serious political-economic engagement with animal exploitation. The piece argues that neither Marxism nor animal liberation is complete without the other — that anti-speciesist movements need historical materialism to explain why animals are exploited, and that Marxists need to recognize animal exploitation as integral to the capitalist system they oppose. The impulse is right. The critique of what the theses call "metaphysical anti-speciesism" — the various currents within the animal rights movement that can describe speciesist ideology but cannot explain its material basis — contains real insights. And the insistence that Marxists cannot simply shrug off animal exploitation as a bourgeois distraction is overdue.

But the essay's own positive argument stops short of where the materialist analysis can go, and the reasons are not incidental. They stem from a shared source: the theses try to graft animal liberation onto an orthodox Marxist framework without asking whether that framework is adequate to what it is being asked to do. The result is an argument that simultaneously claims too much and too little — too much, because it asserts that historical materialism already contains the tools needed to explain animal exploitation; too little, because the explanation it actually offers reduces animal exploitation to a derivative consequence of the capital relation, when it is in fact part of the material foundation on which class relations are built.

What follows is not a dismissal of the theses. It is an attempt to show that both Marxists and animal liberationists can get further than the theses take them — and that the outlines of a more fundamental framework are available if we are willing to push the materialist analysis past where orthodox categories stop.

What the theses get right

Three things in the 18 Theses deserve recognition.

First, the critique of the dominant currents in the animal rights and animal liberation movement (Theses II–VI) is largely correct. Singer's utilitarian moral philosophy, Francione's legal criticism (as the theses characterize it), and the post-structuralist anti-speciesist current can each describe how speciesist ideology functions, but none of them can explain why animals are exploited, in whose interest, or through what material mechanisms. They operate at the level of consciousness, discourse, and legal norms — important terrain, but insufficient for understanding the political economy of animal exploitation. The theses are right that a movement stuck at this level will keep asking people to change their thinking without being able to explain why the thinking exists in the first place.

Second, the Maurizi formulation in Thesis IX — "We do not exploit animals because we deem them to be inferior, rather, we deem animals to be inferior because we exploit them" — is genuinely good. It captures the materialist insight that ideology follows from material relations rather than the reverse, and it applies this insight to the human-animal relation in a way that cuts through a great deal of confused debate. Anyone who has spent time in animal liberation circles will recognize how much of the discourse remains trapped in the idealist assumption that speciesism is a prejudice to be overcome through better arguments, rather than an ideological reflex of material exploitation.

Third, the theses are right that the Marxist left's dismissal of animal liberation as moralism or bourgeois sentimentality is intellectually lazy. The standard objection — that animals cannot be the subject of their own liberation and therefore do not belong in the revolutionary project — is a non sequitur. The theses correctly point out (Thesis XV) that the analysis of capital does not by itself generate the political decision to fight against it; that decision requires a moral and political commitment that goes beyond what the analysis alone can demonstrate. If this is true for the struggle against wage slavery, then the objection that animal liberation cannot be "deduced" from the analysis of capital proves nothing about whether it should be part of the emancipatory project.

So far, so good. The question is whether the positive account the theses build from here goes far enough.

The pivot point: Thesis XI and the definition of exploitation

The argument turns on Thesis XI, and this is where the tension in the framework becomes visible.

The theses argue that animals "do not produce surplus value and are not part of the working class," and that their exploitation "corresponds to what Marx describes as exploitation of nature" — not exploitation in the value-theoretic sense. The authors then try to rescue the situation by noting that Marx did not limit exploitation to surplus value production, and that slaves also did not produce surplus value yet were clearly exploited.

But the framing has already done its work. By accepting the surplus-value framework as the primary analytical lens and then treating animal exploitation as a secondary, analogous phenomenon — exploitation of nature rather than exploitation proper — the theses end up reproducing the very move they need to avoid. They use a theoretical category developed to analyze one specific form of exploitation (wage labor under capitalism) as the definition of exploitation as such, and then treat everything that doesn't fit the category as derivative.

This determines the entire structure of the argument. Because the theses start from the capital-labor relation and work outward, animals can only appear as additional victims of a system whose core dynamic is already fully specified. The exploitation of animals becomes something capitalism does, rather than something class societies are. And the call for animal liberation becomes an add-on to the revolutionary project — a further demand to be included alongside the existing programme — rather than something the analysis of exploitation already requires if taken to its logical conclusion.

Going deeper: exploitation as energy extraction

A more adequate materialist analysis needs to start further back.

All organisms depend on energy. Endosomatic energy is energy produced within the body — eating, metabolizing, moving. Exosomatic energy is energy produced outside the body. But exosomatic energy comes in two fundamentally different forms, and the distinction between them is critical.

The first form is energy from non-living sources: fire, wind, water, fossil fuels, nuclear fission. The second is energy from other living beings — above all other animals, including other humans. What matters here is not consuming other organisms as food, but putting their bodies to work. Domesticating animals, enslaving people, and organizing wage labor are all ways of converting the endosomatic energy of other living bodies into exosomatic energy for your own use.

The distinction matters because living sources of exosomatic energy have their own needs and capacities. A coal seam does not experience its extraction and can neither resist nor cooperate with it. Miners and the draught horses they work alongside do.

Class exploitation, at its most fundamental, is the organized extraction of endosomatic energy from living bodies for the benefit of those who control them. This is true whether the form is slavery, serfdom, wage labor, or industrial animal husbandry. The specific social and legal forms differ — property relations, surplus extraction, the reproduction of class positions — but the material logic does not. The slaveholder, the feudal lord, the factory farmer, and the capitalist all arrange social relations so that other organisms' bodies become sources of exosomatic energy for them.

From this perspective, the orthodox objection — that animals cannot be exploited in the relevant sense because they do not sell their labor power and therefore do not produce surplus value — reproduces the circular reasoning that operates in every form of class exploitation. Defining a group out of the category of "the exploited" by appeal to a legal or theoretical status that the exploiting class itself established is not analysis. It is the exploitation performing its own justification. The claim that chattel slavery was not "really" class exploitation because slaves were legally classified as property rather than as free sellers of labor power rests on the same move: it takes a juridical category created to facilitate extraction as evidence that the social relation doesn't qualify as extraction.

The question is not whether animals constitute a class in the Marxist sense. It is that the organized extraction of endosomatic energy from living bodies is something more fundamental than class: it is the material substrate on which class relations are built. Class exploitation among humans is one historically specific way of organizing that extraction. Industrial animal husbandry is another. If the framework identifies this logic as the foundation of what it opposes in human class relations, consistency requires it to account for the same logic when applied across species.

What this reframing changes

This shift in analytical starting point has several consequences that the 18 Theses cannot reach from within their framework.

It reverses the relationship between animal exploitation and class society. The theses treat animal exploitation as something capitalism produces. The historical record suggests the opposite direction of causation. In much of Eurasia, the systematic exploitation of animals preceded and massively accelerated the systematic exploitation of humans. The domestication of herd animals — sheep, goats, cattle, beginning roughly 10,000–12,000 years ago — was the first large-scale organization of living exosomatic energy. Controlling groups of animals meant controlling storable, inheritable, self-expanding wealth. The archaeological record strongly links the unequal control of domesticated animals to the emergence of wealth inequality and eventually social stratification. A major 2017 study of 63 archaeological sites found that inequality rose dramatically with the advent of herding, and that Old World societies — which had access to large domesticable mammals — developed significantly greater inequality than New World societies.

Animal exploitation is not a side-effect of class society. It is part of the material foundation on which class societies were built. A framework that treats it as derivative of the capital relation has the history backwards.

It exposes the productivism the theses don't recognize in themselves. Thesis XIV argues that animal liberation is now both possible and necessary because "the current level of the development of productive forces" makes it so. This is productivism with ecological awareness bolted on. It implies that animal exploitation was historically understandable — a regrettable but necessary stage in the civilizing process — and that we have now progressed far enough to move beyond it. The theses' own discussion of Marx and Engels on humans "working their way out of nature" through social labor (Thesis VIII) carries this framing uncritically, presenting the domination of nature as the engine of civilization. The energy framework rejects this. The exploitation of living bodies was never justified by developmental necessity, and framing it that way already concedes the productivist logic that treats the intensification of endosomatic energy extraction as an acceptable price for material development — the same logic that justified forced industrialization in the Soviet Union.

It reframes the relationship between ideology and material relations. The theses argue that speciesist ideology is an "ideological reflex" of material exploitation (Thesis IX), and they are right to insist on this against the idealist currents in the animal liberation movement. But the theses' own analysis of ideology remains thin. The framework of meritocratic reasoning — the logic through which any form of class exploitation is rationalized — shows that speciesism is not merely an ideology that happens to accompany animal exploitation. It is the limit case of the reasoning form that legitimizes all class hierarchies: the point at which the denial of need-universality, which elsewhere operates as tacit practice, becomes explicit doctrine. Nearly everyone who has interacted with another animal knows that they experience and value their lives. Yet the categories through which we classify them — as property, as livestock, as resources — are categories created by the exploiting class to facilitate extraction. Using those categories to argue that the exploitation doesn't count as exploitation is the same move that was used to argue that slavery wasn't "really" exploitation because slaves were legally classified as property.

Speciesism is where this reasoning form operates with the least friction, because it is where social conditioning has been most effective and the institutional machinery most pervasive. This makes it not a peripheral concern but a central one: if you cannot learn to recognize the circularity where it operates most completely, you will find it correspondingly harder to recognize it operating in the domains of gender, race, nationality, and class.

More to learn from the thinkers they criticize

The theses' treatment of the three anti-speciesist currents (Theses II–VI), while partially correct, moves too quickly past insights that deserve more engagement. This is especially true of Francione.

The theses group Francione with Singer and the post-structuralists as part of "metaphysical anti-speciesism." But Francione's actual argument — that the property status of animals is constitutive of their exploitation, not merely reflective of it, and that the legal framework actively enables economically efficient exploitation while securing political compliance — is closer to a materialist analysis than the theses acknowledge. The theses even reproduce a version of this argument in Thesis IV ("the juristic status quo enables an economically more efficient exploitation of animals and fosters the required political compliance of civil society") before dismissing Francione's framework as "legalistic" and "subservient to bourgeois illusions about state and law."

This deserves a closer look. Francione does not regard the legal system as a positive frame of reference for progressive politics — he argues that the property status of animals must be abolished entirely, not reformed within existing legal frameworks. His analysis of how legal categories constitute rather than merely reflect exploitation is precisely the kind of insight that a materialist framework should take seriously and extend, not dismiss because it was developed outside the Marxist tradition.

Equally, the theses do not grapple with the unity-of-oppression insight at the level where it is most powerful. They correctly argue (Thesis V) that the post-structuralist version of intersectionality often confuses "the question of the qualitative interrelation between different types of oppression" with "their political-normative assessment." But the theses' own alternative — that historical materialism can explain each form of oppression by reference to its function within the capitalist mode of production — does not go far enough either. What is needed is not a ranking of oppressions or a functional account of how each serves capital, but an identification of the common material logic that operates across all of them: the organized extraction of endosomatic energy from living bodies, rationalized in each case by the circular attribution of inferior status to those from whom the extraction is taking place.

What both movements tend to avoid

The theses assert (Thesis XIII) that "the oppressed, exploited classes and animals have the same enemy," and that "the class struggle for the liberation of animals is the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat" (Thesis XVIII). I understand the impulse, but I think this formulation is too clean — and that the analytical framework the theses themselves use should make them suspicious of it.

The difficulty that neither orthodox Marxists nor most animal liberationists have adequately addressed is that many workers have real material stakes in animal exploitation. This goes well beyond the obvious case of workers employed in animal agriculture. Cheap animal-derived food is a material subsidy to the working class. Cultural practices tied to animal use — from hunting to cuisine to sport — are woven into the competing solidarities (national, ethnic, regional, religious) through which most people organize their social lives and meet their needs for identity, participation, and belonging. The institutional roles through which workers engage with animal exploitation are sustained by the same logic of moral compartmentalization that sustains their participation in other exploitative arrangements: the separation of social life into distinct institutional domains, each with its own norms, in which the moral implications of one's actions are contained within the domain and do not spill over into the rest of one's life.

The theses' framework makes this difficult to see, because it treats animal exploitation primarily as something the ruling class orchestrates and workers execute under compulsion. Thesis XI states that "wage labourers perform the oftentimes violent appropriation in practice" and that "they execute, under capital's command, the production of surplus value." But workers are not merely executing orders. They derive real use values from animal exploitation, and the material incentives sustaining their participation cannot be wished away by identifying a shared enemy. A movement that does not reckon with this will keep producing appeals to solidarity that cannot compete with the material and social rewards of the existing arrangement.

The reason competing solidarities — nationalism, sectoralism, religious communalism — outcompete class solidarity is that they address a broader range of human needs than class-based organizing typically does: not only subsistence and protection, but also identity, participation, affection, and belonging. They do this imperfectly and at great cost, reproducing internal hierarchies and restricting solidarity along non-class lines. But they do it, and class-based movements mostly do not. Any serious project of animal liberation — or human liberation — must build forms of collective life that address the full range of what class-structured institutions fragment and neglect. Telling people to abandon their stakes in existing arrangements without building something that addresses the needs those arrangements currently meet is not revolutionary politics. It is, ironically, the very moralism the theses identify in the anti-speciesist movement — now operating within the Marxist framework itself.

Conclusion: consistency, not addition

The 18 Theses ask Marxists to add animal liberation to their programme and ask animal liberationists to add Marxism to theirs. I want to suggest a different framing. The argument is not that two incomplete movements should combine their demands. It is that a materialist analysis of exploitation, if pursued consistently, already includes animals — and that an animal liberation movement that does not understand the material structures of class rule will keep producing moral appeals that cannot compete with the institutional machinery that produces animal exploitation.

The organized extraction of endosomatic energy from living bodies is the material substrate of class domination. A society that abolishes this extraction for humans but maintains it for animals has not changed the underlying logic — it has drawn a species line through it. The institutional and ideological infrastructure required to treat living beings as raw material for energy extraction does not stay neatly contained on one side of that line. It is available for redeployment whenever political conditions shift. The link between animal exploitation and human oppression is not merely moral. It is structural — and a politics that cannot see this is a politics that has not yet understood its own foundations.

The theses are right that Marxists and animal liberationists need each other. But what both need is not the other's existing programme — it is a framework that starts from the material reality of exploitation and follows the logic wherever it leads, without drawing lines where the analysis becomes uncomfortable. That is what a genuinely materialist anti-speciesism would look like. The 18 Theses open the door to it. I hope this response helps push through it.

The framework sketched here — including the energy-based analysis of class exploitation, the concept of meritocratic reasoning, and the analysis of competing solidarities — is developed more fully at beyondmeritocracy.info.