Education, animals, and the commodity form

What would biocommodities say if they could teach? This article investigates what kind of work education performs in biocommoditization processes. It makes two contributions to scholarship on commoditization. First, it integrates education into Marx's formula for the circulation of capital through the commodity form. Second, it provides a case study of veterinary education to develop Helmreich's unfinished worksheet of biocommoditization, that is, the adaptation of Marx's formula to biocapital accumulation (BCB'). With the material embeddedness of veterinary education in the animal commodity form as an empirical example viewed through a synthesis of Marxist and posthumanist analyses, this article works through each component of Helmreich's BCB' chain (animal material, animal commodity, animal capital), with particular attention to its interplay with educational practice. In the end, education emerges as a vitalizing guide among other organic and inorganic actants that channel student traffic into the animal economy. This channeling of student traffic is, however, complicated by an element of indeterminacy always already accompanying the education process as well as the transformation of biomaterial into capital.