Socialists and Animal Rights - Odt
Socialists and Animal Rights - Odt
Socialists and Animal Rights - Odt
By Jon Hochschartner
Despite government repression of animal activists, in many ways there
has never been an easier time to be vegetarian or vegan. One can find
a wide selection of food without animal products in the most unlikely
of places, such as small towns of upstate New York, where typical
accoutrement is not tie-dye but NASCAR caps. The national vegan
population is increasing rapidly, doubling between 2009 and 2011,
according to a Harris Interactive poll. And yet the socialist left
remains particularly inhospitable for those concerned with animal
domestication.
This hostility goes back a long way. As Dr. Steve Best points out,
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels "lumped animal welfarists, vegetarians,
and anti-vivisectionists into the same petite-bourgeoisie category
comprised of charity organizers, temperance fanatics, and naive
reformists." Leon Trotsky railed against those opposed to
revolutionary violence, scornfully describing their ideology as
"vegetarian-Quaker prattle."
Things aren't that different today. Paul D'Amato, a writer for whom I
otherwise have a good deal of respect, took on the animal question in
a Socialist Worker column which reads as little more than uninformed
trolling.
"Does a mountain lion that kills a deer have a right to a trial by a
jury of its peers?" He asks ridiculously. "Should cows have freedom of
assembly, speech and religion?"
He acknowledges he is speaking with tongue in cheek, but insists
"there is a point to it." D'Amato goes on to recount Adolph Hitler's
animal protection efforts, because, you know, animal activists are
actually closet Nazis.
Things are hardly any different on the anarchist side of the aisle.
For instance, log onto the LibCom.org forums, which are maintained by
London-based libertarian communists, and ask, as I have, the otherwise
nice folks what they think of vegetarians or vegans. And you'll see
the British didn't get their reputation for beef-eating for nothing.
And yet animal activists have always been part of progressive change.
John Oswald, for instance, was a Scottish vegetarian who was a member
of the Jacobin Club, took part in the French Revolution, and died
she held that it was impossible for men to be happy while animals were
miserable."
And yet, search her memoirs for the term 'vegetarian' and you will
find nothing. As a very young child, Michel was traumatized by the
sight of a decapitated goose. "One result was that the sight of meat
thereafter nauseated me until I was eight or ten," she wrote, "and I
needed a strong will and my grandmother's arguments to overcome that
nausea." This of course suggests she consumed flesh and her memoirs do
not immediately mention a later-in-life change in practice.
She also wrote, "Instead of the putrefied flesh which we are
accustomed to eating, perhaps science will give us chemical mixtures
containing more iron and nutrients than the blood and meat we now
absorb." This could be interpreted as anticipating the in-vitro meat
now being developed. But it could also be read as a reflection of her
belief that animal-derived foods were nutritionally necessary or
superior in her era.
While it seems clear where her sympathies were, I'm unsure if Michel
was a vegetarian.
Examining the species politics of Socialist Party USA
By Jon Hochschartner
Socialist Party USA is the only nationwide anti-capitalist organization which
addresses the treatment of animals in its political platform as far as I'm
aware. Groups such as the International Socialist Organization, the
Industrial Workers of the World, Solidarity, Democratic Socialists of America,
and Communist Party USA, among others, don't offer the most tepid
welfarism in their unity statements.
Socialist Party USA is a multi-tendency organization, made up of state and
local groups from Wisconsin to Mississippi and New York to California. It
claims to be the successor to Socialist Party of America, the organization
led in the early part of the 20th century by Eugene Debs.
The very final section in Socialist Party USA's 2013-2015 platform is
dedicated to what's termed 'Animal Rights,' but would be identified as
animal welfare in protectionist circles. The first sentence in the brief section
states, "The Socialist Party recognizes the rights of animals to live free from
unnecessary pain and suffering, and the responsibility of people to protect
those rights."
are the same ideologies that must be confronted and undone in the
process of ending capitalism and building a better world."
Additionally, Peck said, the worst animal abuse occurs on factory
farms, the same spaces where the most severe exploitation of human
workers and degradation of the environment also take place. "Given
these facts, I think it is right for revolutionaries, and
revolutionary organizations, to challenge the system of animal
exploitation," he said.
Peck is hopeful that a sizable portion of the ISO membership would
join an animal-liberation tendency. "In the branch, about a fifth are
vegan or vegetarian," Peck said, adding he believed that percentage
would join the tendency. "I don't know the landscape in other
branches. I suspect the numbers are similar in other urban branches."
Still, Peck might have his work cut out for him in forming a tendency,
as the organization's rules don't explicitly condemn or condone their
formation. While there has been a lively discussion of the need for
caucuses and factions within the group, he said, there has been little
talk of tendencies. "We see caucuses as organizations of members who
are part of a specially oppressed group, and we see factions as
temporary formations to agitate for a political position," Peck said.
"Most members see factions as probably necessary at times but
inherently hostile. A tendency on the other hand would not be hostile
to the main politics and practice of the organization, but nonetheless
advocate a minority position."
Vegan Angela Davis connects human and animal liberation
By Jon Hochschartner
While Angela Davis is well known for her progressive perspectives on
race, gender, and class, less well known are her views on species,
which are quite forward-thinking. The great socialist scholar, it
might surprise some to hear, does not consume animal products.
"I usually dont mention that Im vegan but that has evolved," Davis
said at the 27th Empowering Women of Color Conference, according to a
transcript available at RadioProject.org. "I think its the right
moment to talk about it because it is part of a revolutionary
perspective - how can we not only discover more compassionate
relations with human beings but how can we develop compassionate
relations with the other creatures with whom we share this planet and
discuss it for fear the left is at the moment so weak it can't bear the
additional stigma. Whether this realpolitik is justifiable in today's
conservative climate, I don't know. But it has been unhelpful for me and I
imagine many others.
The potential of leftists with mental health problems having their politics
pathologized is quite real. I experienced this during the breakdown that led
to my diagnosis with OCD intrusive thoughts. To be fair, this was done less
by mental-health professionals and more by my family, who believed they
were acting in my best interest.
To understand this, one must know a little bit about scrupulosity, which is
often described as "OCD plus religion." The classic sufferer might repeat a
prayer thousands of times a day in the hope of thinking or saying it in just
the "right" way. The Catholic Church has long been aware of this destructive
phenomenon of hyper-morality and one could speculate that significant
figures, such as the founder of the Jesuits, who confessed petty sins
unceasingly for hours and couldn't bear to step on pieces of straw that
formed a cross, as he feared doing so was blasphemous, were sufferers.
As our society has become more secular, psychiatrists are beginning
to diagnose obsessive adherence to non-religious ideological systems as
scrupulosity. And here's where it gets complicated. I believe at times I have
been pathologically scrupulous in my commitment to socialism and animal
rights. Now, this might give you the impression that I am or was some kind
of perfect progressive. But that would be inaccurate and represent a
misunderstanding of how OCD works.
First, scrupulous obsessions often focus on completely meaningless things,
as shown by the example of avoiding the crossed straw. Second, OCD
sufferers often avoid what triggers their obsessive thoughts because the
mental and behavioral compulsions associated with them are simply too
exhausting.
For instance, most people would assume that those who engage in cleaning
rituals have immaculate houses. This isn't always the case. Sometimes their
hygienic compulsions become so burdensome they will allow their living
spaces to degenerate into squalor rather than engage their obsessions.
"If something dropped on the floor I couldn't pick it up again," one poster
on OCDForums.org relates. "If I did pick it up I went into cleaning
compulsions."
In a similar way, at various times in the past I have avoided politics
altogether, often moving intentionally in reactionary directions, because I
knew from experience that engaging with progressive thought could bring
In "The Eternal Jew," a racist, 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Jewish people are
explicitly compared to rats, a species upon which humans place particularly
little value. "Where rats appear, they bring ruin by destroying mankind's
goods and foodstuffs," the narrator intones. "In this way, they spread
disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They
are cunning, cowardly and cruel and are found mostly in large packs.
Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious,
underground destruction - just like the Jews among human beings."
In 2013, a white 911 operator in Texas compared African Americans to
animals on social media. "Call after call are black people fighting and
screaming and hitting each other and they want to yell at me and treat me
like shit," the operator wrote. "Black people are outrageous! They are more
like animals."
The writer Samuel Johnson, who died in 1784, reportedly compared
women's participation in public life to animals unnaturally mimicking
human behavior. "A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind
legs," Johnson said. "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done
at all."
Arguing in favor of forcing women to carry pregnancies to term after 20
weeks, in 2012 a Georgia state representative implicitly compared women
to livestock. "I've had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive
delivering pigs, dead and alive." The male lawmaker said. "It breaks our
hearts to see those animals not make it."
In "The Principles of Scientific Management," an influential 1911 monograph
by Frederick Winslow Taylor in which the techniques of modern capitalist
exploitation are outlined, Taylor repeatedly compares human workers to
domesticated animals. "Now one of the very first requirements for a man
who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so
stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental
make-up the ox than any other type," Taylor writes. "The man who is
mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to
what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character."
More recently, for instance, in 2012, Terry Gou, the chairman of Hon Hai,
parent company of the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer
Foxconn, compared his workforce to animals and suggested he could learn
management techniques from the director of the Taipei Zoo. "Hon Hai has a
workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also
animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache," Gou said.
The struggles for human liberation and animal liberation are linked, if only
because dominant human groups employ speciesism to justify the
exploitation or oppression of subordinate human groups that society deems
"animal-like." By bettering the conditions of animals, we better the
conditions of humans.
Take the subject of class. Progressives are well aware that raising the wage
of the lowest-paid workers will boost the income of higher-paid workers as
expectations for 'fair' compensation rise. Conversely, progressives know
that lowering the wage of the lowest-paid workers will drag down the
income of higher-paid workers as expectations for 'fair' compensation fall.
The same relation can be seen when one looks at the treatment of animals
and the treatment of humans. As expectations rise for what constitutes
'fair' treatment for animals, the supposed lowest of the low, expectations
for what constitutes 'fair' treatment for humans will also rise. In contrast,
the 'dehumanization' of human groups is made possible by the low status of
animals. The sooner the anthropocentric left recognizes this, the better.
The tragicomic history of the OWS Animal Issues group
By Jon Hochschartner
Lately, I've become interested in the possibilities of animal-rights activists
forming sub-groups within broader left-wing organizations and movements.
Today, I will recount the story of brave souls attempting to do just this and
failing in spectacularly-hilarious fashion. Without further ado, I present the
tragicomic history of the Occupy Wall Street Animal Issues working group.
The group met only nine times, according to the New York City General
Assembly. One would be stretching the definition of the word to describe
some of these attempted gatherings, for which the minutes were faithfully
documented, as "meetings."
The group first met on February 1, 2012, well after Occupy Wall Street was
evicted from Zuccotti Park and the movement was on its way to
irrelevance. Eight people attended this inaugural meeting, which started
half an hour late. A heated debate quickly broke out regarding the costs
and benefits of a horizontal-organizational model, as the group argued
whether to make everyone an administrator of what one must assume is
their mailing list.
"Johanna responds that she wants to feel free to e-mail information and that
how the group is choking with bureaucracy and she doesnt experience this
with any other group and things are more flowing and freer," the minutes
state. "Ruth disagrees and expresses concern about changing this policy so
that everyone could be an administrator. "
But the dispute doesn't end there. "Dan agrees with Johanna and expresses
that the spirit of OWS is not to have hierarchies, and that everyone should
be an administrator," the minutes state. "Adam replies that is not a
question of hierarchies but of making sure things are organized and safely
reliable."
This leads one member to threaten to quit. As the minutes say, "Johanna
replies that if she is not going to have the freedom to get things done, then
she is going to have (to) leave the group." After being interrupted by a
passerby asking for potato chips, the meeting was closed.
The group's third gathering, on February 15, did not go well either. The only
one in attendance, Adam was listed as the meeting's facilitator and note
taker. "Adam walked around 60 Wall Street looking for people looking for
the meeting. He found no one," the minutes state. "Adam left."
Turnout for future gatherings was better, but not by much. The fifth
meeting, for instance, boasted only three attendees. If the minutes
available are complete, months passed between the fifth meeting and the
sixth. Listed in attendance at the sixth gathering was a "LOUD coffee
grinder," which one guesses made talking difficult. There was no facilitator
for the meeting, as presumably the tiny group had given up the pretensions
it was necessary.
While the results were sadly humorous, those in the OWS Animal Issues
should be applauded for attempting to inject anti-speciesist politics into
broader leftist movements. Let's hope that future attempts will be more
fruitful. There is evidence that formations of the anthropocentric left can be
pushed in progressive directions by what are assumably minority, proanimal voices within them. Socialist Party USA, for instance, calls for the
ban of the fur trade and animal testing for product development. Though
these are obviously piece-meal proposals, if put into practice they would
benefit millions of animals every year.
Does socialist critique of terrorism apply to animal activists?
By Jon Hochschartner
The animal rights movement has long been divided between militants and
position ignores that many human groups, such as infants or the severelymentally disabled, cannot fight for their interests either and must rely on
the human masses to do so for them.
Still, if Trotsky is right, and terrorism discourages collective action by the
human masses, when that is what's required for real change for animals,
one must conclude terrorism is a dead-end. On the other hand, one could
also argue that collective action by the human masses on behalf of animals
is so unlikely in the present era that individual terrorism is the best for
which we can hope.
In his article, however, Trotsky goes on to highlight how little terrorism
achieves, besides increased police repression. "The smoke from the
confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered
minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel
of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows
more savage and brazen," Trotsky writes. "And as a result, in place of the
kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment
and apathy."
Trotsky's point regarding increased police repression is undeniable in the
context of the animal rights movement to anyone who has read the work of
writers such as Will Potter on the Green Scare. Further, as Trotsky says, the
wheel of systemic exploitation is generally unaffected by terrorism.
Slaughterhouses and laboratories are generally rebuilt. While the nonhuman lives saved by terrorism should not be ignored, animal activists
frequently seem to mistake the use of terrorism as the symptom of a robust
movement, when in fact it's the opposite. Resorting to such desperate
actions represents an inability to garner the mass support needed to create
real change.
To be clear, I'm not prescribing solutions in this article. I'm merely
suggesting animal activists move beyond abstract debate regarding the
morality of political violence to a concrete discussion of its effectiveness. To
do this, we needn't reinvent the wheel. Let's learn what we can from other
movements that have grappled with the issue of terrorism. Some of the
lessons won't be applicable, but many will.
Elisee Reclus: the vegetarian communard
By Jon Hochschartner
Elisee Reclus, the French anarchist and geographer, was a proselytizing
vegetarian who held progressive views of other animals. Serving as a militia
member, he was an active participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, a
Reclus died in 1905 at the age of 75. "It is reported that his last days were
made particularly happy by news of the popular revolution in Russia,"
according to Camille Martin and John P. Clark. "He expired shortly after
hearing of the revolt of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin."
Could a meat-eater advocate for a vegan society?
By Jon Hochschartner
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the emphasis animal activists place on
the assumed need to practice personal veganism so as to advocate public
veganism. In its most basic form, the question that has been rolling around
my head boils down to whether it should be acceptable for a meat-eater to
advocate for animal liberation, a phrase I use to mean, as Ronnie Lee does,
"an end to all persecution, exploitation and killing of other animals by
human beings or for us to reach a situation that is as near to that as
possible."
While this issue has been rattling around my head for some time, a few
readings and experiences have recently brought it to the fore.
One of these thought-provoking readings was Norm Phelps' book "Changing
the Game," particularly those sections which dealt with the distinctions
between movements that focus on private morality and those that focus on
public policy. He listed regressive campaigns such as prohibition, the war on
drugs and the anti-abortion movement as belonging to the former, while
highlighting progressive campaigns like the civil-rights movement, secondwave feminism and the LGBT struggle as belonging to the latter.
"The public generally sees animal rights as belonging to the private
tradition," Phelps wrote, after pointing out the population of vegetarians
and vegans in the United States has not grown or shrank over at least the
past dozen years, fitting with the pattern he established of movements
associated with the private tradition failing. "They believe this in large part
because we place so much emphasis on personal dietary decisions and
comparatively little emphasis on institutional and societal attitudes toward
animals."
Another of these readings was an interesting article called "Animal
Liberation and Marxism," in a recent issue of the Weekly Worker, a
publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In a section of the
article, members and supporters of Assoziation Dmmerung, an animalliberation group informed by the Frankfurt School, were asked about the
importance they place on the 'prefigurative' nature of personal veganism.
While all defended the prioritizing of personal veganism, for the most part
they did so less strongly and for different reasons one might expect. None
of them, for instance, did so because they believed a product boycott was a
feasible way to end or limit animal exploitation, so far as I could tell. Susann
Witt-Stahl summarized what seemed to be the majority's defense of
personal veganism as primarily necessary for unbiased thinking.
"If you accept our ideas yet continue to eat meat, it is also true that you
remain trapped in a process of self-alienation," Witt-Stahl said. "You cannot
eat animals if you truly perceive them as tormentable bodies. If you eat
animals, you will inevitably have a different relationship to them: they are
just things, objects to you - not beings that strive for happiness or at least
want to avoid suffering."
Finally, one of the experiences that brought the question of the importance
of personal veganism to prominence in my mind was attending a recent
lecture by Rod Coronado at Skidmore College. For those not aware,
Coronado is something of a legend in the animal-rights and environmental
communities for sinking Icelandic 'whaling' ships and releasing mink from
research farms, among other things. I had heard a few years back he had
given up veganism, but thought perhaps he had adopted it once again, as
he was launching a speaking tour that was heavily promoted in the animalrights community and included stops at the 2014 Animal Liberation Forum.
This wasn't the case. I asked during the question-and-answer section
whether he was vegan and he said he wasn't.
While I briefly toyed with the possibility of centering this essay around
Coronado, I quickly realized he was not an adequate test case for whether
practicing personal veganism was necessary for advocating public
veganism because I was doubtful he saw animal liberation, using the
definition supplied by Ronnie Lee, as an end goal. My understanding was
that he approved of pre-industrial methods of exploitation of animals by
humans.
Ultimately, I'm still very confused about how I feel about the issue. For
instance, what would the historical equivalent be, in another movement, to
a meat-eater advocating animal liberation? Would it be an 19th-century
abolitionist who used slave-produced goods? My brief research suggests the
majority of abolitionists did not seriously engage in boycotting. Or would it
be closer to an abolitionist who owned slaves?
Moving to the worker's movement, with which I am more familiar, would the
equivalent be a socialist who used goods produced in sweatshops? Well, as
a socialist I can say that most comrades I've come across tend to view such
"Of all these societies the most bothersome, the most hypocritical, the most
nauseating is the anti-vivisection society," Lafargue wrote. Interestingly,
however, Lafargue had many of the same criticisms of welfarist
organizations that modern animal advocates do. "All of these societies are
speculations," he wrote. "A certain number of influential members
(presidents, secretaries, agents, inspectors, etc) are lavishly maintained on
the funds intended for beasts."
Lafargue continued on, taking anti-vivisectionists to task for their supposed
pretentiousness. "Pigeon shooting, where thousands of tamed pigeons are
wounded and mutilated for the amusement of a few imbecilic aristocrats, is
highly approved of by the anti-vivisection society," Lafargue wrote. "Several
of its most influential members are big pigeon shooters." Whether these
accusations are true I'm unsure. But either way, such gotcha anti-veganism,
by which I mean criticism of failures or inconsistencies in animal advocates'
personal practice, is inherently ad hominem. It's used to ignore the merits
of non-human advocates' policy proposals.
Lafargue bemoaned what seems to be public oversight of animal testing,
strangely suggesting that this government regulation was capitalist
inspired. "The society of anti-vivisectionist animals of England has pulled so
many strings that it has obtained from parliament a law prohibiting
physiological experiments on living animals without permission from the
police," Lafargue wrote, disbelieving. "This is how the bourgeois treat their
illustrious men. They degrade them to the point of putting them under the
control of the cops even in the laboratory."
Much of Lafargue's argument rested on a dubious dichotomy between
political work on behalf of animals and political work on behalf of the
human working class. Animal advocates, "feel themselves to be closer
relatives of beasts than of workers," which, according to Lafargue, was a
reflection of their supposedly uniformal ruling-class station. And yet if this
were true, why so often was capitalist exploitation justified by comparing
the human proletariat to domesticated animals? Challenging speciesism
undermines a common ideological rationale for class domination.
Paraphrasing an English factory inspector, Lafargue wrote that "there exist
two kinds of experiments: one practiced by physiologists on a few animals,
the other practiced on thousands of men by speculators." As an example of
the latter, Lafargue wrote that "two years ago a manufacturer of rice
powder in London, Mr. King, falsified his merchandise with clay and
arsenical dust." Human infants who were exposed to the powder died of
poisoning. Lafargue seemed to suggest that animal advocates, who were
opposed to vivisection, were not outraged by this. My guess is Lafargue was
attacking a straw man here. But even if he wasn't, his accusation that
animal advocates' sympathies were reductionist could easily be flipped to
apply to him. Where perhaps anti-vivisectionists were blind to class
injustice, he was blind to species injustice. After all, the "few animals" he
blithely described as vivisected in the name of anthropocentric science
likely had a higher level of consciousness than the human infants poisoned
by rice powder.
Ultimately, if indifference to animal exploitation is inherent to socialism as
conceived by the likes of Lafargue, it's not a socialism I want to have
anything to do with. Animal liberation and the class struggle are linked, if
only because capitalists employ speciesism to justify their exploitation of
the human masses.
Chomsky envisions vegetarian future
By Jon Hochschartner
Noam Chomsky, the renowned socialist intellectual, believes that human
society will eventually transition to vegetarianism due to concern for
animals. Chomsky's academic influence is hard to overstate. According to
the Chicago Tribune, in 1993 he was "the most often cited living author.
Among intellectual luminaries of all eras, Chomsky placed eighth, just
behind Plato and Sigmund Freud."
Also in 1993, Chomsky made the prediction in an interview with Z Magazine
co-founder Michael Albert, according to archival-website Third World
Traveler. "I don't know if it's a hundred years, but it seems to me if history
continues--that's not at all obvious, that it will--but if society continues to
develop without catastrophe on something like the course that you can sort
of see over time, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if it moves toward
vegetarianism and protection of animal rights," Chomsky said. "In fact, what
we've seen over the years--and it's hard to be optimistic in the twentieth
century, which is one of the worst centuries in human history in terms of
atrocities and terror and so on--but still, over the years, including the
twentieth century, there is a widening of the moral realm, bringing in
broader and broader domains of individuals who are regarded as moral
agents."
While Chomsky said he was not personally vegetarian, he believed the
issue of eating animals and vivisecting them was an important one,
"Experiments are torturing animals, let's say," Chomsky said. "That's what
they are. So to what extent do we have a right to torture animals for our
own good? I think that's not a trivial question."
foreleg. The risky surgery cost $7,000 money that Welch, a hairdresser
and single mother, did not have," DeGioia wrote. Ultimately, Americas
received surgery and survived, but only after Welch was forced to sell her
belongings on eBay and received donations from Canine Cancer Awareness
and a mysterious benefactor. Most companion animals and their human
guardians are presumably not so lucky.
Now, I should say, that I agree with the vegetarian socialist Henry Stephen
Salt who believed that in the future domestication as a whole, including the
domestication of companion animals, would and should be rejected. "The
injustice done to the pampered lap-dog is as conspicuous, in its way, as
that done to the over-worked horse, and both spring from one and the same
originthe fixed belief that the life of a brute has no moral purpose, no
distinctive personality worthy of due consideration and development, Salt
argued, writing in 1892. In a society where the lower animals were
regarded as intelligent beings, and not as animated machines, it would be
impossible for this incongruous absurdity to continue.
Still, within the context of current-day domestication, public non-human
healthcare would improve the quality of life of millions of companion
animals in this country alone. Progressive groups should emphasize the
socialization of veterinary care in their platforms. This would attract animal
activists to a leftist coalition at next to no ideological cost, as genuine
progressives will support the socialization of significant industries
regardless of how it might help non-humans.
In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, in this moment when
leftists seem to be converging for the first time in a generation, animal
activists need to think about how we fit into broader progressive struggles.
What demands can we put forward that might be supported by other leftists
who might not yet be on board with the entire animal-liberation project?
I've seen this discussion begin to play out in a number of different outlets.
Writing in Socialist Worker recently, for instance, animal advocate Alan Peck
offered four short-term demands that he believed anthropocentric
progressives should support. "We should demand an end to the most cruel
and environmentally destructive farming practices," Peck wrote. "We should
demand the repeal of the fascist Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. We should
demand an end to massive subsidies for animal agriculture. And we should
demand that all people have access to an affordable, healthy plant-based
diet."
This seems like a good start, to which I add socializing veterinary care. I
encourage other animal advocates to begin asking themselves this
question. In the short term, what aspects of the animal rights program can
we influence broader progressive organizations to adopt?
What can animal activists learn from the free produce movement?
By Jon Hochschartner
Animal activists who view the practice of personal veganism as a
prerequisite to advocating public veganism should know the history of
similar perspectives and tactics in other movements at other times.
Because animal activists so often associate their struggle with that of
abolitionists of human slavery, it's perhaps most worthwhile to focus on the
free produce movement.
According to Lawrence B. Glickman, the free produce movement
"encouraged consumers to avoid slave-made goods and to purchase
products made by 'free labor.' Consciously adopting the strategies of British
anti-slavery sugar boycotters of the 1790s, free produce supporters became
active in the United States in the 1820s."
The first free produce store opened in Baltimore in 1826, but eventually
over 50 stores were situated in eight other states. "Most stores sold clothing
and dry goods but some also offered free labor shoes, soaps, ice cream and
candy," according to Glickman.
To avoid slave-produced goods, free produce stores often imported sugar
from Java, Malaysia and Mexico. This, writes T. Stephen Whitman, "led to
higher priced and often lower-quality goods. Efforts to obtain free labor
grown cotton and coffee encountered similar problems. In short, purchasers
of free produce had to acknowledge that they paid higher prices than for
slave-made commodities."
The institution of slavery was not threatened by this individualistic,
consumer-based strategy. "There is little evidence that slaveholders or their
political representatives paid much attention to (the free produce
movement) and no evidence that it had a discernible economic impact on
them," Glickman writes.
By the 1840s, many abolitionists who had previously supported free
produce were changing their minds. "The World Anti-Slavery Convention of
1840, held in London, rejected a call for its supporters to endorse free
produce, and other anti-slavery bodies followed suit," according to
Whitman.
The famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison eventually opposed the free
language, the Irish republican and socialist James Connolly, for instance,
had this to say regarding the subset: "The Fabian Society recruits itself
principally among the astute bourgeoisie, whose aim it is to emasculate the
working class movement by denying the philosophy of the class struggle,
[and] weakening the belief of the workers in the political self-sufficiency of
their own class."
Salt upheld animals' right to live, so long as they did not pose a genuine
threat to humans, in a way that distinguished him from many of his
welfarist contemporaries.
"Even the leading advocates of animals' rights seem to have shrunk from
basing their claim on the only argument which can ultimately be held to be
a really sufficient onethe assertion that animals, as well as men, though,
of course, to a far less extent than men, are possessed of a distinctive
individuality, and, therefore, are in justice entitled to live their lives," Salt
wrote. "It is of little use to claim 'rights' for animals in a vague general way,
if with the same breath we explicitly show our determination to subordinate
those rights to anything and everything that can be construed into a human
'want.'"
As an agnostic, Salt believed many ideological justifications for animal
exploitation could be traced to religious sources. "The first [rationalization]
is the so-called 'religious' notion, which awards immortality to man, but to
man alone, thereby furnishing (especially in Catholic countries) a quibbling
justification for acts of cruelty to animals," Salt wrote.
Like many animal advocates today, Salt believed our diction helps buttress
non-human exploitation. "A word of protest is needed also against such an
expression as 'dumb animals,' which, though often cited as 'an immense
exhortation to pity,' has in reality a tendency to influence ordinary people in
quite the contrary direction, inasmuch as it fosters the idea of an
impassable barrier between mankind and their dependents," Salt wrote.
"Even the term 'animals,' as applied to the lower races, is incorrect, and not
wholly unobjectionable, since it ignores the fact that man is an animal no
less than they. My only excuse for using it in this volume is that there is
absolutely no other brief term available."
Salt rejected the notion that there was a dichotomy between struggling for
the political benefit of animals and struggling for the political benefit of
humans. "It is an entire mistake to suppose that the rights of animals are in
any way antagonistic to the rights of men," He wrote. "Let us not be
betrayed for a moment into the specious fallacy that we must study human
rights first, and leave the animal question to solve itself hereafter; for it is
our Christendom in which man reeks his savage and sensual will on the
lesser animals," the unnamed writer said. "Indirectly it is a story of the
moral abattoirs of politics, economics, society, religion and the home,
where the victims are of the species human, and where man's inhumanity
to man is as selfish and relentless as his age-long cruelty to his brothers
and sisters just behind him in the great procession."
In calling for public vegetarianism, Veritas tried to give a sense of the
overwhelming scope of animal exploitation. "This author uses the squeal,
or, rather, the wild death shrieks of agony of the ten millions of living
creatures tortured to death every year in Chicago and the other tens of
millions elsewhere, to pander to the old brutal, inhuman thirst of humanity
for a diet of blood," the anonymous writer said. "The billions of the slain
have found a voice at last, and if I mistake not this cry of anguish from the
'killing-beds' shall sound on until men, whose ancestors once were
cannibals, shall cease to devour even the corpses of their murdered animal
relatives."
It's very possible Fernihough has access to information that I don't, that
suggests Veritas was in fact Emma Goldman. Given my politics, I would love
this to be case. But sadly I think it's more likely Fernihough made an error of
attribution, something that happens to all researchers. There is nothing
published under Goldman's own name I've come across that suggests she
might have been sympathetic to animal rights. Like all public figures of a
certain stature, this wouldn't be the first time Goldman was incorrectly
quoted. Her most famous saying, "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution," of
which there are many slight variations, is apocryphal, according to Alix
Kates Shulman, for instance.
Vegan socialists need their own publication, unifying term
By Jon Hochschartner
In a recent article for the Weekly Worker, a publication of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, Maciej Zurowski suggested that Assoziation
Dmmerung, a Marxist animal liberation group, establish a publication
centered on the intersection of species and class.
"I would suggest you write more theory, or perhaps set up a publication
where people can follow your debates," Zurowski said. While this
suggestion sounds as if it was made with a certain degree of
condescension, I think it's nevertheless good advice. Unfortunately, the
representatives of Assoziation Dmmerung, who seem in many respects to
be at the cutting edge of vegan socialism, dismissed the idea.
declared a chimp and win entry to the soft life of a zoo animal! Not only are
the guards friendly, but ones enclosure has been designed with far more
psychological forethought than the average office or cubicle."
The article's tone was satirical, so it's unclear to what degree, if any, she
believed animals held captive in zoos have it easy or enjoy situations
preferable to human office workers. But that she might have thought this,
and it's not clear from the piece, is troubling. Either way, her humor traded
on speciesism to stoke class resentment, a strategy for economic justice
that should be opposed by animal advocates. Further, from a socialist
standpoint, the jokes propagated what Marxists call 'false consciousness,' in
that they directed proletarian anger away from capitalists, the genuine
exploiters of the working class, and toward animals and those humans who
defend them.
Not much later in the article, Ehrenreich returned to the same comedic well.
Again, it's unclear to what degree she was kidding as she suggested the
rightful order of society has been tipped upside down and captive animals
enjoy a better quality of life than humans. "Once apes achieve these
protections, American humans are going to want them too," she said. "I'm
thinking food, shelter, and medical-veterinary care."
Some animal advocates criticize campaigns for ape personhood as
anthropocentric, given they focus on those species most similar to humans.
This criticism is of course true, but it ignores that change generally happens
incrementally and the lowest-hanging fruit is always achieved first.
Additionally, such criticism doesn't recognize the possibilities a small hole in
the legal barrier dividing humans from animals might open up. These efforts
deserve the support of anti-speciesists and leftists like Ehrenreich. That she
didn't take a position on the issue, besides using it to make unrelated points
regarding capitalist injustice, is particularly frustrating given the knowledge
she demonstrates in the article.
"We share 99 percent of our genome with them, making it possible for
chimps to accept human blood transfusions and kidney
donations," Ehrenreich said. "Despite their vocal limitations, they
communicate easily with each other and can learn human languages. They
use tools and live in groups that display behavioral variations attributable
to what anthropologists recognize as culture. And we may be a lot closer
biologically than Darwin ever imagined. Last May, paleontologists reported
evidence of inter-breeding between early humans and chimps as recently
as 5 million years ago."
Continuing, Ehrenreich makes a compelling case against what could be
of Guevara are the only ones to which I have access. "Compassion fills our
soul at the thought of the poor animal that will die gloriously to further a
cause it doesn't understand," Guevara said, before attempting to link
American animal advocates' outrage at Laika's treatment to their
government's support for the murderous regime he was fighting. "But we
haven't heard of any philanthropic American society parading in front of the
noble edifice asking clemency for our guajiros, and they die in good
numbers, machine-gunned by the P-47 and B-26 airplanes...or riddled by
the troop's competent M-Is. Or is that within the context of political
convenience a Siberian dog is worth more than a thousand Cuban
guajiros?"
Painting with a broad brush, Guevara seems to suggest those Americans
who opposed Laika's exploitation supported their governments efforts to
repress the Cuban people. I have no idea to what degree this is accurate.
Guevara was presumably correct there was a large amount of political
expediency involved in American animal advocates protesting Soviet
testing, given the United States' space program was exploiting non-human
subjects as well. Perhaps these activists were equally vociferous in their
protest of their own government's experiments, but I doubt it. Ultimately
though, none of this is relevant to the question of whether the Russians
should have killed Laika to serve their interests. Guevara's defense of
animal abuse seems to have rested entirely on the fallacious argument we
know commonly as "two wrongs make a right," which, as we all learn as
children, is not the case.
Decades later, another of the scientist's involved in Laika's killing expressed
remorse for what he had done, albeit still within the speciesist framework
that the experiment might have been justifiable had the Soviets gained
more from it. Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us, Oleg
Gazenko said. "We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time
passes, the more Im sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the
mission to justify the death of the dog.
In search of the vegetarian Bolshevik
By Jon Hochschartner
Numerous sources suggest vegetarianism was banned in the Soviet Union.
But one must assume this wasn't immediately the case, as a prominent
member of the Bolshevik Old Guard, meaning one active prior to the
1917 revolution, was a vegetarian. Whether his dietary choices were
due to solidarity with non-human animals or some other reason is
unfortunately not clear.
critically about what [Karl] Marx saw as the revolutionary potential of the
working class, it seems that using 'working class' to describe non-human
laborers can obscure some key differences between humans and animals
and the forms of exploitation each experiences," Torres said. "While Hribal
argues that animals do indeed struggle against capital, their struggle is
necessarily qualitatively different than the global proletarian revolution that
Marx hoped for in his understanding of the working class. Animals cannot
unite and break the chains that compel them to labor; their resistance to
capital is necessarily more limited, if only by the singular and absolute
power that humans wield over animals."
To me, the appeal to what Marx intended or meant rings rather hollow. If
Marxism is a living ideology, and not a dead dogma, it must be open to the
kind of bold reinterpretation which Hribal attempted but ultimately failed to
deliver. Torres was correct however when he argued Hribal's definition of
the proletariat obscures the difference in revolutionary potential between
human and animal laborers. Perhaps Torres' placement of animals within
Marxism came closest to the mark: "As neither exactly like human slaves or
exactly like human wage laborers, animals occupy a different position
within capitalism: they are superexploited living commodities."
Unfortunately, I don't have the in-depth knowledge of socialist theory
necessary to contribute to this conversation in a meaningful way. I was
recently introduced to an aphorism by the socialist "Big Bill" Haywood that
while I don't have the scar tissue implied, and have in fact blindly
trudged through the first volume of Marx's magnum opus sums up the
common-sense, verging on anti-intellectual approach to socialism I find
most appealing. "I've never read Marx's 'Capital,' but I have the marks of
capital all over me," the Wobbly leader quipped, upholding the value of
experiential education. However, in this case, to redefine animals in an antispeciesist manner within socialist theory, I'm afraid an encyclopedic
knowledge of the ins-and-outs of Marxism will be required to be taken
seriously by anthropocentric socialists.
Sue Coe: vegan-socialist illustrator
By Jon Hochschartner
The contemporary British artist Sue Coe, whose work and public statements
strongly condemn both capitalism and animal agriculture, is by all
indications a vegan socialist. If an interview with the illustrator conducted in
2005 by Elin Slavick, now only available on an obscure blog, is to be
trusted, Coe was reluctant to define her class politics, leaving that to
others. However, I believe it's quite safe to say she is a socialist, in the
broadest possible sense of the word, meaning one who supports public
humans against animals. The test would make room for the depiction of
these, so long as the work includes editorial signals the practice is wrong.
Some readers may rankle at the idea that games should take a
position, however subtly, on anything, let alone unnecessary violence
against animals. But like it or not, games transmit value systems. Even
games that are infamous for their supposed nihilism, like the "Grand
Theft Auto" series, do. While the criminal franchise revels vicariously in
the wrongness of its protagonists actions against other humans,
it's generally clear their actions are wrong. In contrast,
unnecessary violence against animals in video games typically isn't
portrayed as problematic. Unlike, say, shooting pedestrians in "Grand Theft
Auto," unnecessary violence against animals in video games generally isn't
a knowing transgression of moral boundaries. This needs to change.
Editorial signals that unnecessary violence against animals is wrong can be
communicated in a number of different ways. Some games, such as the
"Fallout" series, include a morality meter, which, based on a player's ingame actions, will assign players an ethical status that will effect how their
character is treated. More often though, value systems are transmitted
through plot, dialogue, character development and other methods. Most
obviously, one knows the villain's actions are wrong because of his or her
role in the story. Editorial signals, however subtle, that unnecessary
violence against animals is wrong are limited in form only by artists'
imaginations.
That would be the test in a nutshell. To pass, any work that features
unnecessary violence against animals would have to include some kind of
editorial signal the practice was wrong. Further, unnecessary violence
against animals does not include defense against an immediate,
unavoidable threat. Editorial signals can be conveyed in a variety of ways.
But some additional factors must be added that have so far been left out for
the sake of simplicity.
For the test's purposes, the definition of violence would need to be
expanded to include confinement and involuntary labor. Otherwise, for
instance, the "Zoo Tycoon" series, which centers on unnecessary
confinement of animals, could potentially pass so long as, within the
context of confinement, minimal welfare needs are met.
Some animal activists might believe the depictions of unnecessary violence
against animals requiring negative editorial signals should include not just
the actions themselves, but the human-desired results of these actions,
such as meat, leather or eggs. Ideally, this would be the case. But my initial
as food reform on the one hand, and on the other, in strong protest against
the cruel methods of experimental research. Both these are in close unison
with the demands being made by women."
As I've mentioned in other articles, Stalinist Russia was hostile to
vegetarianism. In 1930, Despard toured the Soviet Union in what one must
assume was a trip carefully choreographed and managed by her hosts.
According to Adam Hochschild, "She found everything to be splendid: the
diet was good, children privileged, education enlightened, orphanages firstrate, and the courts wise and generous." Despite her support for Stalinism
and the British Communist Party, which was under the sway of the Soviet
Union, one can't necessarily assume Despard had given up her
commitment to prefigurative vegetarianism in later life. According to James
D. Hunt, she was Vice-President of the London Vegetarian Society in 1931.
Despard died in 1939 at the age of 95. According to the Communist Party of
Ireland website, she had been declared bankrupt two years prior, "her
finances exhausted from her philanthropic and political activities."
I'm scared of networking with pro-animal socialists
By Jon Hochschartner
I'm vaguely fearful of connecting with the anti-speciesist left on social
media like Facebook, as I am of connecting with other explicitly political
contacts with different ideological focus. Because like all such subcultures
there will no doubt be a high degree of personal point scoring, through callouts that carry the implicit threat of excommunication, motivated less by
sincere consciousness-raising than intragroup rivalries. And that's a
problem.
As a writer who goes by the pseudonym Saturnite points out on his socialist
blog, Spread the Infestation, relationships are essential to the development
of progressive movements. "A study by Doug McAdam of the University of
Arizona focused on the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement,"
Saturnite said. "McAdam looked for different reasons why 75 percent of the
participants stuck with it and 25 percent of them dropped out. The most
important factors turned out to not be their level of political sophistication
or their emotional commitment. The critical telling factor was, when
participants were asked to write a list of all the people they personally knew
in the movement, the dropouts had the shortest lists, and the holdouts had
the longest. People stayed because they had a larger amount of real
relationships with other people."
Obviously real-life relationships, as opposed to online ones, are preferable
I'm not racist than that's a permanent state that I don't need to mind and
do constant upkeep on...All of us as good people need to get more
comfortable with telling each other that we've got something stuck in our
teeth as it were, when it comes to these race issues."
Carpenter was Fabian animal advocate
By Jon Hochschartner
Edward Carpenter was a socialist and early gay-rights activist, who
practiced prefigurative vegetarianism and advocated on behalf of animals.
It should be said that Carpenter's brand of socialism, Fabianism, was
despised by many revolutionaries of his era, such as Leon a Trotsky, who
regarded it as overly reformist.
"The reformists who are fighting against a proletarian class consciousness
are, in the final reckoning, a tool of the ruling class," Trotsky said in
1925. "The day that the British proletariat cleanses itself of the spiritual
abomination of Fabianism, mankind, especially in Europe, will increase its
stature by a head." Whether Carpenter's gradual approach was, in the final
analysis, worse for the working class than Trotsky's Bolshevism, which I
would argue inadvertently laid the groundwork for Stalinism, I'm unsure.
Writing in 1889, Carpenter admirably condemned capitalism and vivisection
in the same breath. In doing so, however, he seemed to take a
problematically condescending view toward non-European people, and
made presumptions about ancient Egyptian attitudes toward animal welfare
for which I'm unsure there is any basis. "On the whole we pride ourselves
(and justly I believe) on the general advance in humanity," Carpenter said.
"Yet we know that to-day the merest savages can only shudder at a
civilisation whose public opinion allowsas among usthe rich to wallow in
their wealth, while the poor are systematically starving; and it is certain
that the vivisection of animalswhich on the whole is approved by our
educated classes (though not by the healthier sentiment of the
uneducated)would have been stigmatised as one of the most abominable
crimes by the ancient Egyptiansif, that is, they could have conceived such
a practice possible at all."
It should be noted that Carpenter was not particularly strict in his
prefigurative vegetarianism. Writing in 1899, he confessed, "I have yet
never made any absolute rule against flesh-eating, and have as a matter of
fact eaten a very little every now and then - just, as it were, to see how it
tasted, or to avoid giving trouble in Philistine households, and so forth."
In his 1920 criticism of the Catholic Church, Carpenter again returned to the
issues of capitalism and animal testing. "The Church," he said, "which has
hardly ever spoken a generous word in favor or defence of the animals;
which in modern times has supported vivisection as against the latter;
Capitalism and Commercialism as against the poorer classes of
mankind...such a Church can hardly claim to have established the angelic
character of its mission among mankind!"
In an essay published the next year, titled 'A New Morality,' Carpenter
outlined his own inclusive worldview. "Make this the basis of all teaching,"
Carpenter said. "Let them learn as they grow up, to regard all human
beings, of whatever race or class, as ends in themselvesnever to be
looked upon as mere things or chattels to be made use of. Let them also
learn to look upon the animals in the same lightas beings, they too, who
are climbing the great ladder of creationbeings with whom also we
humans have a common spirit and interest."
How did Wright feel about animal testing?
By Jon Hochschartner
It's difficult to assess the species politics of Richard Wright solely based on
his account of direct participation in vivisection. Near the beginning of the
Great Depression, the Black writer and communist assisted in animal
experimentation after being assigned by a relief agency to work in a
Chicago hospital.
Wright was a member of the United States Communist Party for
approximately a decade, beginning in the early 1930s, according to Annie
Zirin. Among other forms of activism, in 1936 he took a job as Harlem editor
of the Daily Worker, a CP publication. Wright would publicly break with the
party, Megan Behrent said, "as [Joseph] Stalin's horrors became known, and
as the CP, under orders from Stalinist Russia, abandoned the fight against
racism in the U.S., a struggle that had won the party the support and
political allegiance of the likes of Wright."
In his acclaimed autobiography, Wright described the hospital at which he
was working as one of the biggest and wealthiest in Chicago. "I cleaned
operating rooms, dog, rat, mice, cat and rabbit pens, and fed guinea pigs,"
he said. As a boy, Wright dreamed of being a medical researcher, and
perhaps satiating this childhood interest, he asked questions of the
vivisectors regarding the tests. His queries do not appear critical.
"I wanted to know if the dogs being treated for diabetes were getting well; if
the rats and mice in whom cancer had been induced showed any signs of
responding to treatment," Wright said, with seeming enthusiasm. "I wanted
to know the principle that lay behind the Aschheim-Zondek tests that were
made with rabbits, the Wassermann tests that were made with guinea
pigs." The doctors he asked dismissed his questions in a racist manner.
Wright described his involvement in testing with cold detachment, perhaps
the inevitable result of consistent exposure to such violence.
"Each Saturday morning I assisted a young Jewish doctor in slitting the
vocal cords of a fresh batch of dogs from the city pound," he said. "The
object was to devocalize the dogs so that their howls would not disturb the
patients in the other parts of the hospital. I held each dog as the doctor
injected nembutal into its veins to make it unconscious; then I held the
dog's jaws open as the doctor inserted the scalpel and severed the vocal
cords."
And yet this appeared to have a deep effect on Wright. "Later, when the
dogs came to, they would lift their heads to the ceiling and gape in a
soundless wail," he said. "The sight became lodged in my imagination as a
symbol of silent suffering." Indeed, Wright used the animals' plight as a
metaphor for that of his black coworkers. Speaking of the latter, he said,
"Perhaps there was in them a vague psyche pain stemming from their
chronically frustrating way of life, a pain whose cause they did not know;
and, like those devocalized dogs, they would whirl and snap at the air when
their old pain struck them." And yet was this just a literary device? Not
much later he distances his coworkers and himself from animals. "He did
not regard me as a human being," Wright said of a white authority figure.
"The hospital kept us four Negroes...as though we were close kin to the
animals we tended." Given the frequency with which speciesism was and is
used to justify vicious racism, it's more than understandable Wright felt the
need to create such distance.
Later, Wright recounts a physical altercation between two of his coworkers
that created chaos in the laboratory. "The steel tiers lay jumbled; the doors
of the cage swung open," he said. "Rats and mice and dogs and rabbits
moved over the floor in wild panic. The Wassermann guinea pigs were
squealing as though judgement day had come. Here and there an animal
had been crushed beneath a cage." Hoping to avoid discovery, Wright and
his coworkers haphazardly threw animals into enclosures and frantically hid
others' dead bodies. The anecdote is written in what seems to be a slightly
comedic tone that unfortunately minimizes non-human lives and suffering.
But it seems clear in this case Wright was not motivated by conscious
animus toward animals. Rather, using grim humor, he sought to highlight
his desperate panic, and that of his coworkers, which resulted from Black
However, use of and support for hybrid and electric vehicles, and using
public transportation when possible, is responsible behavior. People
opposed to sweatshops may indeed prefer to refrain from buying products
from Nike and similar brands and shop for fair trade and union-made shoes
and clothing."
Nibert seemed to suggest that veganism was necessary to feed the global
human population. "While more than a billion people on the earth are
currently hungry and malnourished, over 70 percent of the earths
agricultural land is used for the creation of animal products," he said. "As
the human population races to more than ten billion, and as climate change
advances, a transition to a plant-based diet is essential in order to feed an
increasingly hungry and thirsty world." Questioned whether he thought dire
poverty was a result of scarcity, rather than an unequal distribution of
wealth as socialists traditionally argue, Nibert appeared to backtrack. "The
fact that so much of the worlds agricultural land is in the hands of the
Animal Industrial Complex leads to food scarcity," he said.
Asked to weigh in on the debate between Jason Hribal, who sees animals as
part of the proletariat, and Bob Torres, who views domesticated nonhumans as superexploited living commodities, Nibert was noncommittal. "I
can see some truth in both positions," he said. "Other animals have been
exploited as laborers for centuries, while also being treated objectified and
treated as property."
Lucy Robins Lang and the St. Helena Vegetarian Cafe
By Jon Hochschartner
Shortly after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the anarchist Lucy
Robins Lang and her husband began the process of opening a vegetarian
restaurant that would become a hub for socialists of different stripes in the
city by the bay. In another example of the pitfalls of the anti-speciesist left
establishing a political identity based around lifestyle choices, there is no
evidence I'm aware of that the couple's vegetarianism had anything to do
with non-human solidarity.
After arriving in San Francisco, the pair became friends with a vegetarian
who introduced them to other practitioners in the Bay Area. Among these
"was Darling the Nature Man, who refused to not only eat flesh but also to
wear garments made out of animal matter," Lang said. "Winter and summer
he lived in the hills on the outskirts of San Francisco, wearing only a strip of
linen around his loins." One wonders if this is exaggeration on Lang's part,
prefigurative politics taken to extremes, mental illness, or some
combination of these.
Another local vegetarian who they met was the famed novelist and socialist
Jack London. "London not only converted us to vegetarianism but
persuaded us to establish a vegetarian restaurant," Lang said. According to
her, the writer encouraged them, arguing, "You'll do all right...People are
always taking up new ideas, and the only vegetarian restaurant in town was
burned down." But London's vegetarianism, whatever motivated it, was
short lived. By the time the couple opened their restaurant, the novelist
"had abandoned vegetarianism and was living on raw meat," Lang said.
Lang and her husband named their restaurant the St. Helena Vegetarian
Cafe after the St. Helena Sanitarium where Lang had received lessons in
vegetarian cooking. "We rented part of a big shack on Market Street,
papered the inside with a warm, red-flower pattern, and hung up racks of
newspapers and magazines in imitation of the European cafs," Lang said.
"While gangs of fishermen, dock workers, longshoremen, stokers, and
sailors thronged the bars and brothels of the waterfront, we of the radical
tribe sat over our chaste dishes on crisp linen, discussing the revolutionary
parties of all the European nations."
It should be mentioned that, at least in retrospect, Lang was very much
aware of her group's disconnect from the working class, jokingly referring to
the restaurant as an "ivory tower." Still it was a hub for Bay Area socialists.
"Our restaurant was one of two centers for the radicals of San Francisco,"
Lang said. "The other was the Liberty Book Store, which was operated by
Alexander Horr and William McDevitt, the former an anarchist single taxer,
the latter a Marxian Social Democrat. The Liberty Book Store carried only
the literature of social protest, and the proprietors would argue hotly with
any customer who was indiscreet enough as to ask for a novel."
According to Richard Steven Street, "Many of the first California Wobblies
could be found frequenting such hangouts as the big shack on Market
Street known as the St. Helena Vegetarian Cafe, haunted by IWW member
Edward Morgan, 'a dreary apostle of pure reason,' who liked to harangue
people as they arrived for lunch." The cafe burnt down on November 17,
1909, not long after it was built. According to the San Francisco Call, the fire
resulted from "defective wiring on the rear of the building."
Lang's vegetarianism did not last either. In her memoir, she recounts eating
flesh "heartily" later in life. One must assume some prototypical socialist
animal liberationists walked through the doors of the St. Helena Vegetarian
Cafe, but unfortunately their passing does not seem to have been recorded,
so far as I can tell.
those whose species politics are to the right of ours. On the contrary, we
should constantly be attempting to pull our reformist allies toward a more
progressive position on animal exploitation. But our criticism should be
comradely, so much as possible. Within reason, we should be a loyal
opposition, because we recognize that small sects, however correct their
positions may be, are ineffectual. Our guiding strategy should be to make
our coalition as numerically large as possible while retaining its progressive
character.
West advocated animal-exploitation reform
By Jon Hochschartner
Cornel West, the public intellectual and honorary chair of the Democratic
Socialists of America, has advocated incredibly mild reform of animal
exploitation in the past, which one hopes he sees as a short-term demand
rather than an end goal. He is perhaps best known for his 1994 book 'Race
Matters.'
In late 2003, West wrote to the parent company of the KFC, the fast-food
giant, regarding animal abuse. "I am disappointed to learn from my friends
at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) that KFC has refused
to take steps to eliminate some of the most egregious cruelty to chickens in
the industry," West said. "PETA informs me that members of KFCs own
animal-welfare advisory panel have approved a list of simple guidelines for
animal welfare that would eliminate some of the worst abuses that these
animals suffer, yet KFC higher-ups have refused to implement them."
In his letter, West seemed to have all of the information needed to draw
revolutionary conclusions regarded animal exploitation. "Although most
people dont know chickens as well as they know cats and dogs, chickens
are interesting individuals with personalities and interests every bit as
developed as the dogs and cats with whom many of us share our lives," he
said. "And of course, they feel pain just like we do."
It's unclear if the demand he made of the corporation was intended as a
stepping stone to greater change or an ultimate goal. One hopes it's the
former. "As a person who is concerned about all injustices," West said, "I am
asking you to direct KFCs suppliers to stop breeding and drugging animals
so that they collapse under their own weight or die from heart failure and to
phase in humane gas killing, a method of slaughter that protects birds from
broken bones and wings, electric shocks, and even drowning in scalding-hot
tanks of water."
Perhaps shining further light on West's species politics, West responded to a
collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling methods with which it
was carried through," he said. "Having in its hands both the power and the
industries, the bureaucracy could have regulated the process without
carrying the nation to the edge of disaster. They could have, and should
have, adopted tempos better corresponding to the material and moral
resources of the country."
Socialization efforts were not helped by the gossip which spread through
the countryside."There was much confusion among officials and peasants
about what collectivization really meant and wild rumors held that it
heralded the Antichrist, Apocalypse, a return to serfdom, a sharing of
women, and foreign invasion," Mary E. A. Buckley said.
Viola quoted a few peasants who gave a sense of the mood among their
class at the time. "It's all the samesoon everything we own will be
socialized. It's better now to slaughter and sell the livestock than to let it
remain," said one. Another peasant, whose motivation was more explicit,
said, "We will not enter the collective because [we] know our property will
be used by the poor. Better that we, in an organized way, destroy our
horses, burn our property, than to give it to those sluggards."
Spira was socialist anti-speciesist
By Jon Hochschartner
Many socialists and anti-speciesists might not be aware, but one of the
most celebrated animal activists in recent memory was a veteran of the
Trotskyist movement. According to Peter Singer, in twenty years, Henry
Spira did "more to reduce animal suffering than anything done in the
previous fifty years by vastly larger organizations with millions of dollars at
their disposal."
Spira's involvement in socialist politics apparently began in his
adolescence. "Henry went with his friends to classes on socialism organized
by Trotskyists," Singer said. "He began reading [Leon] Trotsky and V.I. Lenin,
as well as the early Russian Marxist, G.V. Plekhanonv." His views began to
change, and among other things, he stopped observing Jewish religious law.
"He began to see injustice not as a matter of the greed or sadism of
particular individuals, but as something more systemic," Singer said. "He
became a socialist, sharing Trotsky's view that Stalin had derailed the idea
of a real socialist revolution."
Spira soon became a supporter of the United States' Socialist Workers Party,
for which he would be blacklisted and subjected to government surveillance
in the 1950s. Spira covered labor struggles and the Civil Rights Movement
for the SWP's newspaper 'The Militant.' He wrote for other socialist
publications about the Cuban revolution, which he witnessed firsthand.
Later, he would take part in reform efforts within the National Maritime
Union.
Spira would eventually leave the SWP, it seems, primarily because he saw
the organization as out of touch with the working class. His exit appears to
have been motivated by a disillusionment with the group's cultishness
rather than socialism more broadly. "They would explain everything by
going back and finding a quote from Trotsky or from Lenin in order to
explain things, as opposed to explaining how things were in the real world,"
Spira said. "They were basically just living in their own universe as opposed
to making real life connections."
Beginning in the 1970s, after being exposed to Singer's work, Spira got
involved in animal defense efforts. "Spira first gained notice in 1976 by
leading a campaign seeking an end to the American Museum of Natural
History's research on the impact of castration and other forms of mutilation
on the sexual behavior of cats," according to Barnaby J. Feder. "When the
research was halted in 1977, animal rights activists hailed the campaign as
the first in more than a century of antivivisection efforts in the United
States and Europe actually to result in an end to any animal testing."
Soon after, Spira organized a coalition of groups to oppose the use of Draize
and LD/50 tests in the cosmetics industry. "The animal testing campaigns
played a major role in forcing hospitals, government laboratories and
universities to establish review boards to make sure that experiments used
alternatives to animals test-tube cultures, for example where possible
and to make sure that animals were not unnecessarily abused when they
were used," Feder said, obviously describing reformist change. "Spira also
negotiated with the cosmetics industry to provide initial financing to create
the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore."
In the 1980s he turned his reformist energies toward the farm industry. "He
led a successful campaign to end face branding of cattle and negotiated
with McDonald's and other fast-food companies to get them to supervise
the practices of their suppliers more closely," Feder said. Spira died in 1998
at the age of 71.
Pankhurst practiced prefigurative vegetarianism
By Jon Hochschartner
By Jon Hochschartner
Friedrich Engels, close collaborator to Karl Marx, supported the torture of
animals in the form of vivisection. This position perhaps should not be
surprising given his passion for blood 'sports.'
Writing to Marx in August of 1811, Engels complained about a publication's
pro-animal stance. "Since I've been here I have been taking The Daily News
instead of the Standard," Engels said. "It is even more stupid, if that is
possible. Preaches anti-vivisectionism! Also as deficient in news as the
Standard."
Writing to Karl Kautsky later that same month, Engels referenced the same
factory inspector Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue alluded to in a pro-testing
article I've discussed previously. Kautsky appears to have written his own
defense of involuntary non-human experimentation, called 'Die Vivisektion
des Proletariats,' but I've been unable to find an English translation of it.
"In Nature, you will find a speech made by John Simon before the
International Medical Conference here in which the bourgeoisie is virtually
put on the mat by medical science," Engels said. "Now he, a doctor, finding
his own special field invaded by the Church-led bourgeoisie and their antivivisection movement, has turned the tables on them."
Here Engels was explicitly linking anti-vivisectionist belief to the capitalist
class, seemingly in particular a religious subset, which he saw as opposed
to rational thought. Viewing themselves as rational thinkers, Engels and
Marx were deeply impressed with the work of Charles Darwin. But as Steven
Best pointed out, what they failed to glean from the naturalist's work was
"Darwins emphasis on the continuity of species, on the continuum of
animal existence." This failure to accept the genuine implications of
evolution allowed Engels to continue viewing animals as categorically
different and inferior to humans.
"Instead of preaching dull and colourless sermons like Virchow, [Simon]
goes into the attack comparing the few scientific experiments made by
doctors on animals with the vast commercial experiments made by the
bourgeoisie on the popular masses, thereby placing the question for the
first time in its true perspective," Engels continued.
In a similar way that reactionary socialists might artificially counterpose the
consideration of class and gender, or class and race, here Engels suggested
a false dichotomy between political work on behalf of humans and political
work on behalf of animals. I'd argue this dichotomy propagates what
When it comes down to it, whether animalists are paid greatly effects how
much of their time they are able to dedicate to anti-speciesist work. This
isn't a question of their commitment. It's just an economic reality. Most of
us have to work jobs that are in no way connected to the movement and
dominate the overwhelming majority of our time and energy. When we get
off the clock, we have very little of these resources left, and understandably
choose to put them toward tending to our personal relationships, and eking
out what little pleasure capitalism allows us.
And yet revolutionary animalists trumpet the importance of 'grassroots' and
'do-it-yourself' agitation incessantly, while seeming to condemn even the
possibility of paying for such work. Of course, volunteer activism is
important. But where funds might be raised to pay for such efforts, it is
foolish not to do so. Salaries, wages, and even freelance payments, allow
animalists to contribute more of their time and energy to anti-speciesist
agitation.
How would support for paid activism apply within the socialist-animalist
subset specifically? At the moment we might not be a large enough
potential group, barring someone in our number being quite rich, to support
even one full-time worker. But I believe we could raise enough funds to pay
one or multiple pro-animal leftists to do some movement labor they
wouldn't be able to justify otherwise. The most glaring need at the moment,
in my opinion, is the establishment of an internet hub where anarchists,
Marxists, and social-democrats who share similar views on the animal
question could network and share ideas. Merely creating content on a
regular basis for such a site would be a significant time commitment.
While there are other and perhaps better ways funds could be raised, the
one that comes immediately to my mind is that based on a membership
model. It could be similar to the one employed by the International Socialist
Organization, which charges $25 a month in dues. Those familiar with the
ISO could rightly point out the paid leadership is for the most part
unaccountable to the general membership. This isn't a problem inherent to
organizations that rely on dues to pay staff. Rather the problem lies in the
ISO's lack of genuine democratic mechanisms.
According to former member Pham Binh, this dynamic is created by the
organization's closed-slate election system. The previous years Steering
Committee submits the coming years Steering Committee to the
convention as a single bloc for an up-or-down vote by a show of hands
rather than a secret ballot, Binh writes. A single Steering Committee
member cannot be challenged without offering a whole new slate of a
dozen names. As a result, Binh writes, as far as anyone knows, the ISO has
never had a competitive election for its Steering Committee since it was
founded in 1977.
So here is one potential way in which anti-speciest leftists could raise funds
to pay for movement work that might not otherwise be done. We could
create an organization. It could be called Socialists for Animal Liberation, or
the Louise Michel Club, after the pro-animal communard, or Friends of Mimi,
after Rosa Luxemburg's cat. It really doesn't matter. Membership in the
group would require payment of $25 a month in dues. If we had a mere 20
members, that would give us $500 a month to play around with. Personally,
I would love to see such funds used to compensate someone for
administering a socialist-animalist website, the need for which I discussed
earlier, and pay freelancers to regularly contribute high-quality articles on
the intersection of class and species. As a writer, I'm surely biased. But the
point is that in a democratic organization, we could vote to use this money
however we see fit and pay animalists to do work for which they might not
otherwise be able to expend the time or energy.
Soviets exploited dogs as living explosives
By Jon Hochschartner
In the Second World War, the Soviet Union exploited dogs as living, antitank explosives in their fight against the Germans, following Adolf Hitler's
1941 breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The agreement between the
two nations, which had been made in the summer of 1939, was, according
to the exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, an "extra gauge with which to measure
the degree of degeneration of the [Soviet] bureaucracy, and its contempt
for the international working class."
"The training [of the non-humans] was innovative, to say the least, and
cringe-inducing in its cruelty." Bryan D. Cummins said. "Accustomed to
carrying explosives on their backs, the dogs were kept hungry and fed only
under moving tanks. Thus the unfortunate dogs learned to anticipate the
weight on their backs, the rumblings of the tanks and a meal. Each dog is
alleged to have carried 30 pounds (13 kg) of explosives on its back, to be
detonated by wooden levers on their backpacks that hit against the
underbelly of the tank as the dog ran under it, seeking food."
The plan largely backfired, Cummins said, because the dogs, trained to look
under Soviet-made tanks for food, did so in the field as well, ignoring the
German vehicles. In one case, Soviet troops shot all of their involuntary
canine soldiers to prevent them from inadvertently destroying Russian
tanks. Still, Cummins said, "the Soviets claimed that several German tanks
had, in fact, been destroyed using anti-tank [dogs] at the Battle of Kursk in
1943 and captured German documents corroborate the claim."
In his memoir, Soviet soldier Mansur Abdulin recalled meeting the dogs
condemned to death. "As someone who grew up in the Siberian forestland, I
really love dogs, and I was appalled to learn about the fate of these
creatures," Abdulin said. "What does a meek animal, so dear to children,
have to do with this mess? A dog is a faithful friend. Yet we were apparently
sending these trusting companions to die under enemy tanks!"
Later, according to Abdulin, during a German attack, perhaps five of the
starved dogs, looking for food, were killed by the explosives strapped to
their backs. The animals' deaths repelled the Nazi advance, causing his
comrades to celebrate. He felt he should be happy too. "But instead I wept,
cursing the war and the monsters who started it," Abdulin said.
For its part, the United States War Department was inspired by the Soviet
Union's exploitation of dogs, and started a similar trial program at Fort
Belvoir in 1943. However, acording to John M. Kistler, "rather than targeting
enemy armor, the animals were trained as 'bunker busters' to enter
Japanese tunnels and fortifications with timed explosives." Thankfully,
nothing came of the program. This was for two central reasons. "No one
could be certain that the dog would always go to the target and not return
to 'friendlies' and accidentally blow up allies," Kistler said. "[And] no one
would donate their dogs to the military once it was learned they might be
used as suicide bombers."
London inspired influential animalist group
By Jon Hochschartner
Many may not be aware that the famed novelist Jack London, author of "The
Call of the Wild" and "The Iron Heel" among others, was a socialist. Fewer
still might be aware that the writer, who often wrote from the point of view
of non-humans, inspired the creation of a powerful animalist organization.
Sadly, London's legacy was tarnished, above all, by his racism.
A member of the Socialist Labor Party before joining the Socialist Party of
America, London launched a nationwide lecture tour on the subject of
working-class revolution in 1906, according to Ira Kipnis. He was an admirer
of the Industrial Workers of the World, and met with the Wobbly leader 'Big
Bill' Haywood, "although he never joined them in going so far as to
recommend sabotage," Clarice Stasz said. After London died at the age of
40, the great socialist Eugene Debs expressed his condolences in a letter to
the writer's widow. "Your beloved husband was very dear to me as he was
to many thousands of others who never had the privilege of laying their
eyes upon him," Debs said. "I felt the great heart of him, loved him, read
nearly everything he wrote, and rejoiced in applauding his genius."
London was, according to Lucy Robins Lang, a proselytizing vegetarian for a
time, before returning to omnivority. One is unsure whether his temporary
abstinence from meat was motivated by concern for animals, and if so,
whether his return to flesh represented the abandonment of what he merely
saw as a symbolic gesture toward non-human solidarity or the low priority
he placed on animal lives and suffering.
In the preface to his novel 'Michael, Brother of Jerry,' which was published
after his death, London argued readers should join animal-welfare
organizations. "First, let all humans inform themselves of the inevitable and
eternal cruelty by the means of which only can animals be compelled to
perform before revenue-paying audiences," London wrote. "Second, I
suggest that all men and women, and boys and girls, who have so
acquainted themselves with the essentials of the fine art of animal-training,
should become members of, and ally themselves with, the local and
national organizations of humane societies and societies for the prevention
of cruelty to animals."
London advocated walkouts of performances that exploited animals as
entertainment. "We will not have to think of anything, save when, in any
theatre or place of entertainment, a trained-animal turn is presented before
us," London said. "Then, without premeditation, we may express our
disapproval of such a turn by getting up from our seats and leaving the
theatre for a promenade and a breath of fresh air outside, coming back,
when the turn is over, to enjoy the rest of the programme. All we have to do
is just that to eliminate the trained-animal turn from all public places of
entertainment."
According to Earle Labor, his call "was answered with the formation of the
Jack London Club dedicated to this crusade. The club achieved an
international membership of nearly one million before its disruption by the
Second World War." In 1925, in response to protests by the Jack London
Club, the Ringling-Barnum and Bailey circus removed all animal acts from
their performances, according to Diane L. Beers. As modern socialist
animalist Jason Hribal stated, this was "an extraordinary feat which no
contemporary organization, such as PETA, HSUS, or the ASPCA, has yet to
accomplish." Sadly the victory was short lived. "Just five years later, Charles
Ringling announced that his show would once again include trained big
cats," Beers said.
There's a great joke, of which there seem to be many variations, about the
ludicrousness of a certain kind of sectarianism, that animalists could learn
from. There appear to be many variations of the gag. In a 2005 article for
the Guardian, comedian Emo Phillips claimed to have come up with the it,
originally using the context of Christian denominations. But I originally
heard the joke in the context of socialism. It was very similar, if not
identical, to the version reposted to Louis Proyect's blog, 'The Unrepentant
Marxist,' which goes like this.
An elderly fellow named Sam was walking along the Brooklyn Bridge one
day when he saw a man of similar age, standing on a ledge, about to jump.
Sam ran toward the other man, shouting not to kill himself. The other guy,
who we'll call Joe, asked why not? He'd been a socialist all of his life and the
possibility of working-class revolution seemed as hopeless as ever.
Surprised, Sam said he was a socialist as well, before asking Joe if he had
been in Communist Party USA. Joe said he had. Sam said he had too, before
continuing, "Did you join the pro-Trotsky Communist League of America in
1928, which later merged with the American Workers Party to form the
Workers Party of America in 1934?" Joe answered in the affirmative.
Sam exclaimed, "Spooky, me too! After the WPA was expelled from the
Socialist Party of America in 1936 did you go on to join the Socialist Workers
Party USA and the Fourth International? Joe said he did. It went on like this,
question after question revealing their common trajectory in the history of
leftist sectarianism. Sam asked, "In the 1940 dispute did you side with
Cannon or Shachtman?" He found that they both sided with James P.
Cannon. Sam continued, "In 1962 did you join Robertsons opposition
caucus, the Revolutionary Tendency?" And the man on the ledge did, just
like Sam.
Sam said, "And I bet that like me you were expelled and went on to join the
International Communist League?" Joe said that went without saying. Sam
plowed further, "In 1985 did you join the International Bolshevik Tendency
who claimed that the Sparts had degenerated into an obedience cult?' Joe
said he hadn't, which Sam hadn't either. Finally, Sam asked, "In 1998 did
you join the Internationalist Group after the Permanent Revolution Faction
were expelled from the ICL?" Joe answered he had joined the
Internationalist Group, and exhilarated by their shared history, began to
reconsider suicide. But Sam pushed Joe off the bridge, shouting, "Die,
counterrevolutionary scum!"
At the risk of ruining the joke, the humor here, of course, largely comes
from how much Sam and Joe had in common in relation to an already
microscopic political subset, but how ultimately none of that mattered.
competition and labor. "We may still recall the noble indignation of the
bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat
and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the
unhappy horses having such poor litters!"
Again and again, Lafargue tried to manufacture an inherent link between
anti-speciesism and defense of capitalist exploitation. "The more delicate
souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies
for the protection of animals," he said scornfully. "Schopenhauer, the
bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross
egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his
heart being torn by it."
Lafargue's speciesism, which is all too common on the socialist left, should
be seen for what it is, a form of false consciousness, like homophobia,
sexism or racism, which misdirects proletarian rage away from capitalists,
who are actually responsible for worker exploitation, toward other victims of
the ruling class who face special oppression and exploitation within the
current order.
Wolfe likely motivated by animalist concern
By Jon Hochschartner
Born in 1875, Lilian Wolfe, whose name is spelled in different ways in
different sources, was a British feminist, anarchist and vegetarian.
According to George Woodcock, she was a friend and collaborator to the
influential anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. Given her residency at the
Whiteway Colony, a community inspired by Leo Tolstoy, one might assume
her diet was inspired by concern for animals.
The seriousness with which Wolfe seemed to regard her vegetarianism can
be seen in her steadfastness to the diet during her incarceration for
opposing World War I. "The anarchists round the newspaper Freedom had
their own anti-war organization," Sheila Rowbotham said. "Lilian Woolf, an
ex-suffragette who became an anarchist, was imprisoned [in 1916] for
giving out anti-war leaflets to troops. Pregnant and unmarried on principle,
she remained a vegetarian in prison and was forced to drink cabbage water
to provide herself with some nutrition."
While I no longer put much emphasis on the importance of prefigurative
vegetarianism or veganism, I must admire her tenacity in this instance,
even if it was for what I see now as a mostly symbolic end. When I spent a
mere 40 hours in jail for my 2011 involvement in the Occupy Wall Street
By Jon Hochschartner
Classical Marxism is inherently speciesist and thus it should be the
intellectual priority of socialist animalists to retheorize the position of nonhumans within the system of thought. In classical Marxism, domesticated
animals are literally reduced to machinery. So long as this is unchallenged,
an anti-speciesist Marxism is impossible.
For instance in the first volume of his landmark Capital, Karl Marx wrote,
"An accessory may be consumed by the instruments of labour, as coal
under a boiler, oil by a wheel, [or ] hay by draft-horses." Further in the same
text, he said, "The difference between tool and machine is that in the case
of a tool, man is the motive power, while the motive power of a machine is
something different from man, as, for instance, an animal, water, wind, and
so on. According to this, a plough drawn by oxen, which is a contrivance
common to the most different epochs, would be a machine." In capitalist
society, the instruments of labor, which according to classical Marxism
include animals, are monopolized by the capitalist class. Under socialism,
these instruments would simply be socialized, which from the animals'
perspective means merely a change in ownership.
While I'm incredibly far from an expert in the minutiae of Marxist theory, to
my mind Barbara Noske began the important work of imagining an antispeciesist Marxism in a credible and convincing way. In her book 'Beyond
Boundaries: Humans and Animals' Noske argued that domesticated animals
suffer alienation in a similar manner to the human working class. Marx
delineated four types of alienation which included, according to Noske,
"alienation from the product, from productive activity, from species life and
from fellow-humans."
For Noske, domesticated animals, like human workers, are alienated from
the products of their labor. "Animals are being alienated from their own
products which consist of either their own offspring or (parts of) their own
body," she said. "In production, animals are made to have as many young
as possible, which are taken away from them almost immediately after
birth...The body which makes up an important part of the animal 'self' used
to be steered largely by the animal itself but has now become like a
machine in the hands of management and is actually working against the
animal's own interests."
Noske said that domesticated animals, like human workers, are also
alienated from their productive activity. "Both the body itself and the bodily
functions have been appropriated by the factory management and have
been put to use in one capacity only," she said. "The emphasis on one skill
usually results in deskilling the animal in almost every other way. Calves,
for example, are only supposed to fatten, either in confinement crates or on
metal-slat floors. The fact that crate calves lose the ability to stand at all or
that metal-slat floors cause permanent lameness is of no concern to the
management as long as it does not interfere with the fattening process
the calf's assigned task."
Domesticated animals are alienated from their species life as are human
workers, Noske argued. "An animal's species life encompasses just about
everything: product, productive activity and the animal's relation to nature
and its own society," she said. "We now have come to the stage where the
animal has almost totally been incorporated into human technology. This is
not to say that animals were not exploited under, say, feudalism, but
present-day capitalism tends to eliminate anything in the animal which
cannot be made productive. The animal is modified to suit the production
system, and its offending parts simply cut off. Moreover, the animal is
deprived of its own society which is not replaced in any way."
Just as human workers are alienated from their fellow human workers,
Noske said, domesticated animals are alienated from their fellow animals.
"Capitalist industrial production has either removed the animals from their
own societies or has grossly distorted these societies by crowding the
animals in great numbers," she said." It should not be forgotten that
animals are not just biological organisms most domesticated species are
highly social; both external nature and their own society are crucial to their
existence. The importance of communication, skin contact, social play and
social learning is well known."
We need to develop an anti-speciesist Marxism, and while I'm not an expert
in the intricacies of theory, I believe Noske lays groundwork we could
potentially build on.
Wilde discusses species and class
By Jon Hochschartner
The socialist animalist Lawrence Wilde is an emeritus professor of political
theory at Nottingham Trent University in England. Author of the article 'The
Creatures Too Shall Be Free: Marx and the human/animal distinction,' Wilde
has been a member of the British Labour Party since 1975. He resigned in
protest of the Iraq War before resuming membership in 2010. I recently
interviewed him over email regarding his thoughts on the intersection of
class and species."Politically, I would describe myself as a socialist," Wilde
said. "Intellectually, Im a radical humanist."
Wilde argued that speciesism was used to further human class exploitation.
"By speciesism I take to mean the denial that other species have intrinsic
value, so that they may be treated in any way that is useful for humans,"
Wilde said. "This attitude endorses exploitation animals are subjected to
factory farming methods to yield the cheapest meat, allegedly for the
benefit of humans. The process is analogous to workers being treated
without any regard for their human needs, as described at length by [Karl]
Marx in chapter 10 and 15 of Capital, which comprises more than a quarter
of the whole text. Ideologically, speciesism contradicts the human potential
for compassion, without which alienation can never be overcome."
Asked what areas of the relationship of humans and animals in Marxism
were particularly undertheorized, Wilde seemed to suggest Ted Benton's
1993 book 'Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice'
filled many gaps. "Although I disagree with his conclusion that Marx was
guilty of species imperialism,'" Wilde said. "I suggest that the English
translations of Marxs work use words such as mere and primitive that
are simply not there in the original, and that Marxs discussion of the
difference between humans and other animals does not imply
superiority/inferiority."
Wilde argued that, at the very least, Marxism implied some commitment to
animal welfare. "Historical materialism is a theory of historical development
that points to the present capitalist mode of production as being the
ultimate mode of exploitation, the transcendence of which will achieve
human emancipation," Wilde said. "In terms of the alienation thesis, this
means that the human essence can finally be realised, but this must
involve, as Marx said, the transformation of the relationship between
human and non-human nature. This is why Marx, in 1844, approvingly cited
Thomas Mnzers demand that the creatures too shall be free.' Respect for
human nature requires respect for non-human nature. Of course this is
subject to different interpretation; at the least it means ensuring good
animal welfare."
Wilde defended the value of prefigurative veganism. "Individual ethical
choices should never be dismissed because they do not directly address
systemic problems," he said. "Individual responses demand attention to the
issue at hand and can have unexpected consequences, such as securing
the cooperation of supermarkets on issues such as battery farming." But
Wilde saw a vegan capitalism as unlikely. "It is difficult to imagine a practice
based on compassion to be compatible with one based on exploitation," he
said.
Asked to weigh in on the debate between socialist animalists Jason Hribal,
who argued animals are part of the working class, and Bob Torres, who
argued animals are superexploited living commodities, Wilde sided with
Torres. "The bigger question is whether or not animals belong to the same
moral community as humans," Torres said. "As a humanist I would argue
that our different capacities mean that humans alone form a moral
community, but that the successful pursuit of human flourishing
(eudaemonia) is possible only by fully developing the human potential for
compassion. This would transform the relationship between humans and
non-human animals."
Towards a Marxist animalism
By Jon Hochschartner
To develop a Marxist animalism, we must situate non-humans within the
labor theory of value, building on the intellectual groundwork laid by antispeciesists like Barbara Noske and Bob Torres. The vegetarian socialist
George Bernard Shaw reportedly argued, "I don't need a theory of value to
tell me the poor are exploited." I'm sympathetic to such anti-intellectualism.
But the truth is that for animalists to effect the species politics of Marxists,
who have a disproportionate ideological influence on the far left, we must
learn to speak their language. While I am very far from an expert on the
minutiae of communist theory, this is what I have attempted to begin doing
here.
Domesticated animals, like slaves, are distinct from proletarians in that they
do not sell their labor power under the pretense of free choice. Rather, they
themselves are commodities. Their labor power is sold all at once, unlike
proletarians' whose labor power is sold in increments. "The slave did not
sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his
labour to the farmer," Karl Marx said. "The slave, together with his labourpower, was sold to his owner once for all. He is a commodity that can pass
from the hand of one owner to that of another. He himself is a commodity,
but his labour-power is not his commodity."
Within Marxism, necessary labor is that work needed to reproduce the
exploited's labor power. In the human context, it's the work slaves or
proletarians perform to create the equivalent of their livelihood. All work
over and above this is surplus labor, unremunerated toiling which creates
profits for the slave master or capitalist. Domesticated animals also perform
necessary and surplus labor for their owners. When an animal exploiter
purchases a non-human, he is not only purchasing the animal herself, but a
lifetime of her labor power, which is used to create commodities that
include among others her offspring, her secretions, and her own flesh.
Her necessary labor would be that required to create the equivalent of her
food and shelter. Her surplus labor would be all that beyond this, which is
used to enrich her owner.
Within Marxism, there are two different methods with which slave masters
or capitalists can increase the surplus value their laborers produce.
Absolute surplus value is obtained by increasing the overall amount of time
laborers work in a particular period. For instance, a slavemaster or capitalist
might increase the length of the working day or allow fewer days off a year.
Meanwhile, relative surplus value is created by the lowering the amount of
work dedicated to necessary labor in proportion to that dedicated to surplus
labor. For instance, a slave master or capitalist might reduce what
constitutes their laborers' livelihood or increase their laborers' productivity.
Domesticated animals' surplus labor can also be divided into the generation
of absolute and relative surplus value. For instance, when a carriage horse's
working day is increased from six to nine hours, absolute surplus value is
produced for the animal exploiter. In contrast, relative surplus value is
created when chickens' productivity is increased through genetic
manipulation and the introduction of growth drugs. Similarly, relative
surplus value is produced by lowering the cost of chickens' livelihood
through intensive confinement.
Of course, what constitutes liberation for slaves or proletarians is different
than what constitutes liberation for domesticated animals. Whereas the
ultimate economic goal for human laborers is social control of the means of
production, domesticated animals, were they able, would presumably not
want to seize, say, a factory farm and run it for themselves. They would
want to be removed from the production process entirely.
I hope there are no theoretical errors here, besides the intentional
subversion of classical Marxism's anthropocentrism. But again, the
intricacies of theory are not my strongest suit. I have no doubt others can
radically expand, and where necessary, correct, this brief outline of a
potential Marxist-animalist analysis. In this era of Occupy Wall Street,
Kshama Sawant, and Fight for 15, I believe it will become increasingly
relevant.
Marxist analysis of forced molting
By Jon Hochschartner
From a Marxist-animalist perspective, forced molting, a practice by which
egg-laying hens' productivity is increased through starvation and reduced
access to light, increases relative surplus value for animal exploiters.
"Natural molting means a lot of lost production time, and the chickens
and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an
equal amount of fresh labour-power." In another decision calculated to
maximize surplus value, animal exploiters sometimes choose to kill their
hens immediately after their birds' productivity begins to decline, rather
than allowing a natural molt or imposing a forced molt, because they know
fresh labor power can be acquired more cheaply in the form of younger,
more efficient hens.
Interview with Marxist animalist
By Jon Hochschartner
I recently had the opportunity to interview a 31-year-old Marxist animalist
who goes by the pen name Christopher Harrison due to concerns about
hiring and job security. Among other things, we spoke about how he came
to socialism and animalism and the connections he sees between the two.
In 2000, Harrison began practicing prefigurative vegetarianism, the
prioritization of which, along with that of prefigurative veganism, is
arguably a defining element of bourgeois animalism. He did this after being
exposed to the horrific realities for non-humans subjected to industrial
farming and capitalist-inspired ideas regarding the origins of human hunger.
"I was introduced to the argument that resources are devoted to meat
production for the developed world that would be more efficiently used to
feed the underdeveloped world," Harrison said. "I felt I had heard enough
arguments to convince me that vegetarianism was the way to go. Of course
the truth is that, even with the inefficient use of resources for meat
production, there is still currently plenty of enough food production to feed
the world. The profit system overproduces food while people go hungry. So
my choice to become vegetarian had no real impact on the logic of
capitalism, the real source of hunger."
Harrison said he began his activist career identifying as an anarchist,
without a clear sense of what the ideology meant. "I'd like to tell you that I
came to socialism by reading Marx and Che and Lenin, but the truth is that I
first became attracted to socialism when I saw that the most dedicated
movement activists I met were all socialists," Harrison said. "It may sound a
bit too sentimental, but socialism and Marxism really helped me make
sense of the world: where we had come from, and where we should be
going. I only had vague utopian visions beforehand, but afterward I had a
compass."
Harrison said that within the socialist left he knows many activists who
share a deep concern for animals but are not vocal about this because they