Movements for socialism and animal welfare developed side by side throughout the 19th century, connected by their critiques of capitalist exploitation in an increasingly urbanized and industrialized world.

The potential for interspecies solidarity was lost, however, when the socialist movement aligned itself with the humanist tradition and viewed nonhuman animals merely as means of production and objects of the class struggle, rather than as subjects of it. The animal welfare movement, on the other hand, became associated with the bourgeois class and its pet animals, while industrial-scale animal exploitation was pushed out of sight, to the outskirts of rapidly growing cities.

Today, the consequences of the exploitation of nature and nonhuman animals are impossible to ignore. Yet a void still exists between mainstream Left politics and posthumanist thought—the former typically focusing on human class struggle, the latter critiquing anthropocentric ideology.

Labor Movement for All Animals re-writes the history of the labor movement from the perspective of multispecies politics. What does the story of capitalism look like if other animals are seen as part of the oppressed working class? What would the historical labor struggle have looked like if the animal welfare movement had been a part of it? What would the discourse on repairing our relations with the more-than-human world look like if it were based on anti-capitalist economic critique?

The exhibition launches a campaign for a multispecies labor movement, presenting posters, banners, and a Multispecies Communist Manifesto. It also includes an archive of the history of the multispecies labor movement in Finland between 1850–1950. The exhibition is accompanied by a public program, inviting activists and thinkers to discuss the commonalities and differences between today’s Left politics and the animal liberation movement.

The exhibition is part of Terike Haapoja’s art and research project [Against] Animal Capitalism. The project explores the role of nonhuman animals in the rise of capitalism and examines how the humananimal division is constructed in capitalist society. It foregrounds theories of labor, value, and mechanisms of production, cultivating a lesser-explored area within multispecies studies.Through this, the project develops conceptual tools to strengthen alliances between movements, working toward a multispecies Left politics.

The project is supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Kone Foundation.