Under the early capitalist system, genocidal invasions and the and other animals around the world continued. Spain ravaged what is now Latin America,… - David Nibert

The profound cultural devaluation of other animals that permits the violence that underlies the animal industrial complex is produced by far-reaching speciesist socialization. For instance, the system of primary and secondary education under the capitalist system largely indoctrinates young people into the dominant societal beliefs and values, including a great deal of procapitalist and speciesist ideology. The devalued status of other animals is deeply ingrained; animals appear in schools merely as caged “pets,” as dissection and vivisection subjects, and as lunch. On television and in movies, the unworthiness of other animals is evidenced by their virtual invisibility; when they do appear, they generally are marginalized, vilified, or objectified. Not surprisingly, these and numerous other sources of speciesism are so ideologically profound that those who raise compelling moral objections to animal oppression largely are dismissed, if not ridiculed.

The consequences of these decades of activity of the animal industrial complex, in conjunction with other , such as the military industrial complex, global international banking systems and global media conglomerates, have been cataclysmic. In Latin America, for example, subsistence farmers who resisted forcible removal from the land—displacement usually caused by the influx of international loans to expand ranching, feed-crop cultivation, and related enterprises—were subjected to violent repression and death by governments backed by the United States government and commonly by soldiers trained at the U.S. School of the Americas. Many subsistence farming families were forced to migrate to urban areas where they were transformed into proletarians and became vulnerable to transnational corporations seeking exploitable workers.

By the mid-twentieth century, elites had to find ways to surmount the natural limitations to the basic and destructive imperative of the capitalist system—the imperative for unending growth and expansion—in order to continue the accumulation of vast wealth. They turned to the ideology of neoliberalism in a renewed drive for laissez-faire policies, in which government largely withdraws from "interfering" with the economy, leading to nearly unrestrained profit-taking. While capitalists were able to fend off or minimize government interventions proposed to create or improve the quality of life for countless humans, they were quite focused putting the power of the state to work to aggressively protect and advance their interests (i.e., "corporate welfare"). Through deregulation, tax breaks and the squandering of taxpayer dollars, large corporations and elites have flourished while masses around the world face harsh austerity programs. And in the United States, enormous public resources are diverted into the military-industrial complex and twenty-first century invasions and warfare.