Biopolitics is normally conceptualized in terms of how "life" for the modern human subject is increasing controlled by liberal disciplinary apparatuses. Yet the exercises of supremacist sovereign power over life and death are most chillingly undisguised when we consider the ways the life worlds of land, air, water, plants and animals, and Indigenous peoples are reconfigured into natural resources, chattel, and waste: statuses who capitalist "value" does not depend on whether they are living or dead but only on their fungibility and disposability. (p. 14-15).

For example, in modern animal industrial processes, the carcass is valued just as much as, if not more than, the breathing animal. The business of chicken "farming" involves the separation of birds into parts with exchangeable value, extractable value, or disposal value: skinless, boneless white meat offers premium profit per ounce; parts not fitting an American appetite are frozen and dumped with undercutting prices in poorer countries; viscera go to rendering plants to become pet food or fertilizer; feathers return as animal feed or plastic fortifiers; beaks are routinely pared off of live birds to prevent damage before slaughter. (p. 15, our emphasis).

Fungibility is exchangeability. Fungibility also means getting anatomized into exchangeable parts to be stored, shipped, sold, combined with other parts for a new product, or decomposed entirely for elimination. When parts are worth more than the whole, the living being ceases to exist as a meaningful unit. Fungibility means that "life" is reduced to just another state of matter, to plug and play into machines of re/production. Chickens grown like vines into cages; cattle are planted in boxes of mud where they are watered, fertilized, and fed growth serum. In modern animal industrial processes, the "livestock" are already in a state of living death. (p. 15).