Marcos leads readers through this world in graphic detail as he wrestles with the hypocrisy and hideousness of everything around, an empathetic sympathy brought on by the death of his own newborn. The story of this great transformation towards the normalization of cannibalism is told from the point of view of Marcos, a deeply depressed manager at one of Bolivia’s most reputable “special meat” processing plants. But market forces are quick to adapt as human beings are transformed into product, heads, protein, meat, livestock-all the euphemisms used by the current factory farm system take on much greater weight as humans are raised by breeders and sent to processing plants, their skins sent to tanneries, their carcasses sent to butchers, and the organic non-GMO varieties are provided to research laboratories and game reserves to be hunted. In the near future, an alleged pandemic has stricken livestock and rendered their meat inedible. It is the most disturbing work of fiction I have ever read. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is a masterpiece that exposes the grotesque horror of necro-capitalism and the banalities of social convention that sustain it. Their deaths are just the cost of doing business. The deaths of slaughterhouse workers, like those of the animals they carve up and process for grocery chains everywhere, is facilitated by a larger, systemic indifference to their plight. These multi-billion dollar companies are supported by the politicians whose campaigns they fund and the civil society groups they finance.
A predominately immigrant workforce, their status makes them vulnerable to the whims of highly exploitative employers who are often able to deploy one of our country’s most racist police forces-ICE-to keep the workers in line.
In 2020, one of the groups who were most vulnerable to disease and death were slaughterhouse workers. It’s a way of looking at how capitalism organizes segments of the population in ways that result in some groups of workers being exposed to extreme dangers and even death as a routine part of the production process. “Necro-capitalism” was a term I first learned in 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
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