Marxism and Chicken Sheds

The overwhelming majority of us are economically compelled to sell our labour power for a set period of time in return for a wage. The conditions under which we work are seldom of our choosing, and the things we produce do not belong to us. They remain the property of the employer. In advanced capitalist societies we are separated out in an ever more complex division of labour. The production of "useful things" is increasingly displaced by work with less tangible outcomes. To this sector belongs banking, finance, marketing, journalism, services, retail, education, etc. In these circumstances, the social distance between producer and product, established by the private ownership of the means of production, is widened even further as more and more sections of our class are drawn into "unproductive" activity. The process of and conditions under which commodity production takes place are probably more hidden and mysterious than has ever been the case.

What has this got to do with Hugh's Chicken Run? All will become apparent. Our eponymous crusading cook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, has a bee in his bonnet about supermarkets. In Axminster, the home of his River Cottage restaurant, the high street has been emptied of butchers and grocers by the local Tesco. After asking around why so many people shop there, he discovers the obvious: convenience and low cost. To his mind, this is unfortunate for two reasons. It gives the supermarkets tremendous power to dictate our diets, and, being a small-scale free-range chicken farmer, the pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap ethos brings terrible suffering to animals who are a mainstay of British meat consumption. For example, the two for five pounds special offer on whole chickens is made possible by breeding large numbers of edible chickens in a very short period of time (egg to slaughter in 39 days). Consequently this method sees birds packed together in very large numbers - industry regulations allow for 17 chickens per square metre. They shuffle about in their own waste, never see daylight, and are known at times to turn to cannibalism, but these appalling conditions are necessary to keep the supermarkets supplied with vast quantities of cheap chicken.

Appalled by this abuse, Fearnley-Whittingstall wants to see intensive chicken farming replaced by free range production. Part of this involves weaning Axminster residents off their cheap chickens and getting them onto premium, free-range birds. He puts his favoured bird on the canteen menu at Axminster Power Tools, the town's largest employer. He claims the results are impressive: a normally empty room was full with workers, and the largest ever profit was turned in. Not bad, but it's more likely they came to see their celebrity chef rather than the "superior texture and taste" of free range. He also organises a group of residents off the working class Millway Estate to set up their own free range chicken run so they can understand how chickens end up on their dinner plates.

The second part of his scheme involves a close examination of factory farming. Unsurprisingly, no local farmer will grant him access to their own operations, so he decides to set up on his own to prove his point. The experiment proceeds with one side of the shed turned over to intensive techniques, and the other free range. The former sees 2,500 chicks exposed to lamp light for 23.5 hours a day (the industry recommendation) and confined indoors; while the 1,500 free-rangers can potter about in the run outside if they so fancy and enjoy more space. Very quickly he comes up against some of the brutal realities of the industry. When one chicken develops a swelling on its knee joint, it gets its neck broken. Cost/benefit analysis callously deems its continued existence an uneconomical waste of seed. To underline this, the programme ends with a shot of a small heap of dead days-old chicks, lying at the bottom of a wheelie bin. How the experiment develops will be screened tomorrow and Wednesday on Channel Four.

From the standpoint of the consumer, chicken appears as if by magic on the shelves because commodity production is "invisible". But Fearnley-Whittingstall is convinced if intensive farming of chickens is exposed, people will change their buying habits. He's not the first, and certainly not the last to travel this road. Exposing a commodity's "biography" is a standard tactic of activist groups, writers, NGOs, "concerned" celebrities, and so on. High profile examples in recent years would include Naomi Klein's exposure of highly exploitative sportswear production in China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and elsewhere for top brands like Nike, Adidas, Reebok, etc. NGOs and other activists have climbed on the bandwagon and forced these firms to demand certain standards of their suppliers, though adherence to them has been patchy. Although raising awareness of commodity biographies has caused some large corporations serious embarrassment and may have helped radicalise a few people here and there, nevertheless production continues under more or less similar conditions and sportswear continues to fly off the shelves.

So it will be with chickens. Even the shock value of Jamie Oliver's upcoming programme on slaughter and processing won't make much difference. True, some of the audience will be shocked into buying free range birds, and others might give up on meat altogether. But ultimately Fearnley-Whittingstall's on a hiding to nothing, and not only on grounds of cost (a couple of Millway chicken run project volunteers were quick to note a £7 chicken is not an option for most working class people, a point our Hugh is oblivious to, despite it being repeated on several occasions throughout the documentary). The problem comes back again to the nature of work in a capitalist society. The ensemble of commodities appear disembodied and ready-made not just because each worker occupies their particular niche within the division of labour and is only connected to commodities produced by others through the cash nexus; but also because of the private ownership of production. As a worker does not own and has no control over the fruits of their labour, more often than not they will be indifferent to its fate in so far as its subsequent trajectory does not impact upon them. If indifference exists here in the workplace, it is difficult to show anything but indifference toward the origins of commodities produced by others elsewhere unless, again,that impacts directly on the worker as a consumer.

Sadly for Fearnley-Whittingstall and chums, consciousness raising will not have the desired mass effect. Theirs ultimately is a pious wish, to make humane the inhumane character of capitalist production. This is not to say propaganda of this character does not have its place, indeed it does - as part of a mass movement aimed at fundamentally changing the nature of the system - but by itself, it becomes yet another good cause whose price puts it beyond the means of most working class people.