The slaughterhouse as the blueprint for modern capitalism. Henry Ford learned mass production from slaughterhouses. A century later, our modern economy still resembles a meatpacking plant. The entire modern industrial system—from Amazon warehouses where workers have to pee in bottles to Tesla factories where Elon Musk tracks every movement—originated in one place: Chicago slaughterhouses, where capitalists first figured out how to turn living beings into perfectly controlled objects. This is not a metaphor. Henry Ford literally studied the “disassembly lines” where workers carved up animal carcasses and realized he could apply the same techniques to human workers building cars. As Ford wrote in his autobiography, the Chicago slaughterhouse was “the first moving line ever installed. The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef.”
Think about that. The assembly line, the foundation of modern capitalism, came from perfecting methods to slice up animals while—and this is the important part—preventing them from resisting. And once capitalists figured out how to turn animals into component parts (just a leg, just a throat, just a head), they realized they could do the same thing to human workers (just a hand, just an arm, just a cutting motion). Ideas of how to prevent human resistance came from first figuring out how to prevent animal resistance. …
We are just not listening. The biggest lie animal agriculture tells isn’t about “happy cows” or “free-range chickens.” It’s that animals are fundamentally voiceless—unable to communicate their own desires and choices. Even some animal advocates perpetuate this nonsense. This is, of course, obvious bullshit. Animals speak constantly, as researcher Eva Meijer has documented. Dolphins call each other by name. Elephants use different alarm calls for different threats. Ravens use referential gestures to direct other birds' attention, a capacity once thought uniquely human. Squid communicate through skin patterns that function as structured language. Read the full article on Current Affairs.
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