State Capitalism as a Crisis of Imagination. Factory Farms in the Polish People’s Republic in the 1970s

Abstract

In this article I will discuss the first, failed attempts to introduce factory farming in Poland in the 1970s and locate them within historical changes in social meat-related imaginaries. My main hypothesis is that the spread of wide-scale meat consumption in Poland was a consequence of emulating Western, capitalist patterns of food production and its accompanying discourse. I argue that the logic of capitalism that dominated food production in the 1970s dramatically changed interspecies relations and promoted meat as something unlimited, available on a daily basis.