CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND

RADICAL PRACTICE

Mainstream political theory has been experiencing an identity crisis for as long as I can
remember. From even a cursory glance at the major journals, it still seems preoccupied either
with textual exegesis of a conservatively construed canon, fashionable postmodern forms of
deconstruction, or the reduction of ideas to the context in which they were formulated and the

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prejudices of the author. Usually written in esoteric style and intended only for disciplinary
experts, political theory has lost both its critical character and its concern for political prac-
tice. Behaviorist and positivist political “scientists” tend to view it as a branch of philosophical
metaphysics or as akin to literary criticism. They are not completely wrong. There is currently
no venue that highlights the practical implications of theory or its connections with the larger
world. I was subsequently delighted when Palgrave Macmillan offered me the opportunity of
editing Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice.
When I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, during the 1970s,
critical theory was virtually unknown in the United States. The academic mainstream was
late in catching up and, when it finally did during the late 1980s, it predictably embraced the
more metaphysical and subjectivist trends of critical theory. Traditionalists had little use for
an approach in which critique of a position or analysis of an event was predicated on positive
ideals and practical political aims. In this vein, like liberalism, socialism was a dirty word and
knowledge of its various tendencies and traditions was virtually non-existent. Today, however,
the situation is somewhat different. Strident right-wing politicians have openly condemned
“critical thinking” particularly as it pertains to cultural pluralism and American history. Such
parochial validations of tradition have implications for practical politics. And, if only for this
reason, it is necessary to confront them. A new generation of academics is becoming engaged
with immanent critique, interdisciplinary work, actual political problems, and more broadly
the link between theory and practice. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice offers
them a new home for their intellectual labors.
The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpretations of the clas-
sics and salient works by older and more established thinkers. Each after his or her fashion
will explore the ways in which political theory can enrich our understanding of the arts and
social sciences. Criminal justice, psychology, sociology, theatre and a host of other disciplines
come into play for a critical political theory. The series also opens new avenues by engaging
alternative traditions, animal rights, Islamic politics, mass movements, sovereignty, and the
institutional problems of power. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice thus fills an
important niche. Innovatively blending tradition and experimentation, this intellectual enter-
prise with a political intent will, I hope, help reinvigorate what is fast becoming a petrified
field of study and perhaps provide a bit of inspiration for future scholars and activists.
Stephen Eric Bronner

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Subterranean Politics and Freud’s Legacy: Critical Theory and Society
Amy Buzby

Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe: Imagination and Resistance

Margot Morgan

Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy

Edited by Jason Schulman

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

Hannah Arendt and the Specter of Totalitarianism
Marilyn LaFay

The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm

Kieran Durkin

Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom

Nichole Marie Shippen

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The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century
Steven Best

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

The Politics of Total Liberation

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Revolution for the 21st Century

Steven Best

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

THE POLITICS OF TOTAL LIBERATION
Copyright © Steven Best, 2014.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–47111–6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Best, Steven.
The politics of total liberation : revolution for the 21st century /
by Steven Best.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978–1–137–47111–6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Social justice. 2. Animal rights movement. 3. Environmental justice.
I. Title.
HM671.B47 2014
303.372—dc23 2014019310
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: November 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

 For Willis and Erica, the Loves of my Life.

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

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 Contents

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Foreword ix
Norm Phelps
Preface: Crisis and the Crossroads of History xi
Acknowledgments xv

Chapter 1 The Animal Standpoint 1

Chapter 2 The New Abolitionism: Capitalism, Slavery,
and Animal Liberation 21
Chapter 3 The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of
Militant Direct Action 51
Chapter 4 Rethinking Revolution: Veganism, Animal
Liberation, Ecology, and the Left 79
Chapter 5 Minding the Animals: Cognitive Ethology and
the Obsolescence of Left Humanism 107
Chapter 6 Moral Progress and the Struggle for
Human Evolution 137
Conclusion Reflections on Activism and Hope in
a Dying World and Suicidal Culture 159

Notes 167
Index 181

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 Foreword

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W
e have all always lived on the same planet. Now we are
all in the same boat. Human overpopulation, the ever-
increasing power of our technology, and the demand
of our omnicidal, neoliberal economic system of infinite growth on
the basis of finite resources threaten the earth with total destruction.
Rescue, Dr. Steven Best tells us, will only come in the form of total
liberation. Piecemeal approaches will not work. In the face of our uni-
versal victimization, Best issues a clarion call for a total revolution that
will liberate humans, animals, and the environment from the lethal
impact of human intelligence stupidly employed. The Politics of Total
Liberation is a seminal work that will shape the social justice, animal
rights, and environmental protection dialogues for decades to come.
Profound and acute in its analysis, clear and accessible in its style,
The Politics of Total Liberation paints a stark picture of the future that
awaits us all if we do not turn our society away from its trajectory of
total destruction—a future that includes devastating climate change,
catastrophic extinctions of irreplaceable flora and fauna, and the self-
destruction of human society, perhaps of the human species itself. As
Best demonstrates, only a revolution can save us, an unprecedented
revolution on behalf of ourselves, the animals, and the earth—a new
kind of revolution for the twenty-first century.
This may be the most important book of the twenty-first century. It
identifies the common fate that awaits human beings, animals, and the
earth if we do not take drastic action soon: extinction, lifelessness, and
utter and irredeemable failure. Identifying the causes of the advancing

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x M Foreword

cataclysm as the explosion of the human population, the frightful power

of our technology, and the omnicidal nature of capitalism, it prescribes a
cure: a revolution in our way of thinking and living that protects human
beings, our nonhuman neighbors, and the Earth that sustains us all.
The Politics of Total Liberation is a clear-headed, abundantly docu-

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mented, and thoroughly frightening description of the crossroads at
which we now stand. It is also a message of hope. By launching a new
kind of revolution, a holistic revolution in our way of thinking and
living, undertaken on behalf of all of the victims of a rapacious capi-
talist system that feeds off the lives of the weak and the defenseless,
we can save the earth and all who live on it. This vision of a brighter
future, built on his incisive analysis of our dark present, places Best
securely in the forefront of contemporary social philosophers.
A leading historian and analyst of postmodernism, critical theory,
and continental philosophy, Dr. Best is also well known as a staunch
advocate of animal liberation and environmental protection. With
The Politics of Total Liberation, he establishes himself as a preeminent
critic of twenty-first-century neoliberal society. Vast in scope, pro-
found in its analysis, and accessible in style, this succeeds far better
than any book I have yet seen at diagnosing the critical illness afflict-
ing the earth and all who live upon it and in prescribing the cure.
Read The Politics of Total Liberation. If you care about the impover-
ishment, wage-enslavement, and disenfranchisement of the 99 percent
in America, Europe, and throughout the world, read The Politics of
Total Liberation. If you care about the enslavement and slaughter of
billions of sentient, sensitive animals for human appetite and con-
venience, read The Politics of Total Liberation. If you care about cli-
mate change and the destruction of the earth, read this book. If you
only read one book about the crisis facing humanity, animals, and the
earth, read The Politics of Total Liberation. Learn from its clear, well-
documented analysis, and take heart from its call for a new kind of
revolution, a universal revolution for the twenty-first century.
Norm Phelps, author of Changing the Game: Why Animal Rights Is
the Hardest Battle Ever Fought, How We Can Win It, and The Longest
Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA.

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 Preface: Crisis and the

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Crossroads of History

I
n dystopian and apocalyptic times such as ours, one of acceler-
ating global social and ecological crises, this book attempts to
articulate a revolutionary politics of total liberation for the twenty-
first century.
To date, all political approaches and social movements have been
fragmentary, weak, noninclusive, and regressive in their views toward
nonhuman animals. In the last three decades, there have been ini-
tial and tentative alliances among various social justice and environ-
mental causes, with growing recognition that the collective assault on
people and the natural world has common roots in a growth-oriented
capitalist system and agricultural society. But, due to neglect on all
sides, these alliances did not include the causes of vegan and animal
rights/liberation movements. These movements overflow with poten-
tial for advancing progressive values (such as rights, liberty, justice,
equality, community, and peace), for creating ecological societies, and
for overcoming human alienation from other animal species and the
earth as a whole.
Alliance politics generally is a challenging issue, as people prefer
to focus on their own identities and causes rather than supporting
related perspectives and other movements, especially ones that they
disdain or disregard out of ignorance.1 This has to change, and new
political ideologies, strategies, and relationships must be formulated,
for everything else has failed and the stakes could not be higher. At

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xii M Preface

risk is nothing less than the future of life on a planet that has been
pushed beyond all limits to adapt to human existence but which is
prepared to shake us off entirely and allow the evolutionary process to
continue without us. This century—indeed, the next decades or even
the next few years—is decisive, for what we do or fail to do now will

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determine the fate of all species, our own fates, and evolutionary his-
tory on this planet for millennia to come. The urgency could not be
greater; there is no time to waste: it is now do-or-die.
Although diverse in theme, the chapters in this book form a coher-
ent whole and address my core concerns as they relate to the current
crisis conditions. The most promising and relevant politics for this
century, I believe, will not focus solely on class struggle or fragmented
identity politics pursued along single-issue lines concerning race,
gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. It will be, rather, a politics
of total liberation that grasps commonalities among various forms of
oppression, that recognizes the interdependence and common goals
of various liberation movements, and that forges appropriate political
alliances and necessary global responses.
By “total liberation” I do not mean a metaphysical utopia to be real-
ized in perfect form. I refer, instead, to the process of understanding
human, animal, and earth liberation movements in relation to one
another and building bridges around interrelated issues such as demo-
cracy and ecology, sustainability and veganism, and social justice and
animal rights. To be sure, total liberation is an ideal, a vision, and a
goal to strive for, one that invokes visions of freedom, community, and
harmony. But the struggle ahead is permanent and formidable, one to
be conducted within the constraints of human nature and the limits
imposed by ecology. Human, animal, and earth liberation movements
are different components of one inseparable struggle—against hierar-
chy, domination, and unsustainable social forms—none of which is
possible without the others.
Through our predatory behaviors, systems of exploitation, and
growth-oriented societies, we have lived in contradiction to one
another, other species, and the planet for so long that we have brought
about a new geologic epoch. We have hastened the end of the Holocene

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 Preface M xiii

Era, which endured over the last ten thousand years, and thereby have
precipitated the arrival of the Anthropocene Era—whose very name
proclaims our global dominance and the severe environmental impact
of Homo sapiens (see the Conclusion). In our current Anthropocene
period of runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction crisis in

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earth’s history, resource scarcity, global capitalism, aggressive neoliber-
alism, economic crashes, increasing centralization of power, rampant
militarism, chronic warfare, and suffering and struggle everywhere,
we have come to a historical crossroads where momentous choices
have to be made and implemented.
The omnicidal regimes of “civilization” and global capitalism have
reached their zenith and will end—whether through an ascendant
global resistance stronger than this dying world system, or through
the cataclysmic adjustments the planet already has initiated, such as
those that will ensure its evolution for billions of years to come. But
such adaptations will create conditions utterly hostile to support-
ing humans and countless other species. Anything short of radical,
systemic, and comprehensive social changes, of a formidable revolu-
tionary movement against oppressive global capitalism and hierarchi-
cal domination of all kinds, will yield false hopes, pseudosolutions,
useless reforms, dead ends, and protracted suffering. The time for
partial visions, separate struggles, and fragmented resistance is over,
and the hour of revolutionary alliance politics and total liberation has
arrived.
Yet, alarmingly, we have not yet, as a species or critical mass, awo-
ken to the true gravity of the global crisis in the social and natural
worlds, and thus the magnitude of the challenges we face. The big
picture proves elusive, antiquated paradigms prevail, and dogmatism
and complacency strangle possibilities from all angles. Although few
realize it, the human, animal, and earth liberation movements des-
perately need one another, and the weaknesses and limitations of each
can only be overcome through the strengths and contributions of the
others.
If fragmented revolts can mature into a coherent global revolu-
tionary process, the starting point for social transformation is to join

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xiv M Preface

hands across the barricades; to engage in respectful dialogue; to com-

municate, educate, and learn as equals; and to overcome partial his-
tories, critiques, and battles in favor of progressive systemic change.
A politics of total liberation could forge alliances more positive and
powerful than anything yet created. It could emancipate not just one

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class, interest group, or even the entire human species from the grip
of a nihilistic power elite (that value nothing but power and profit),
but also animal communities everywhere, ecosystems worldwide, and
the dynamic energies of evolution and speciation currently blocked by
human “progress” (see chapter 6).
By listening and learning, working united not dividedly, establish-
ing a unity in difference and a differentiated unity, forging a plurality
of critiques and tactics that assail all points and mobilizes resistance
from every social quarter, a flank of allied groups and positions can
drive a battering ram into the structures of repression and domina-
tion. They can unlock every cage and open the doors to a myriad of
possible futures.
But humans will awake, if ever, late in the process of advanced crisis
and decay. Nothing guarantees that we will succeed rather than fail.
But pessimism is suicide, despair is surrender, the stakes are too high,
and our responsibilities are too great for us to flounder. Despite our
violent history as a predatory and colonizing species, what humanity
can and cannot achieve is still unknown. Our capacities and limita-
tions are still being worked out in the laboratory of history and politi-
cal struggle, yet this evolutionary experiment nonetheless might soon
end in extinction. Let us not only hope, but also struggle, for a far
different outcome.

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

 Acknowledgments

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T
his book was originally published in German, by EchoVerlag,
and appears in English with their generous consent. Alafair
Robicheaux, Ann Parkes, Belinda Morris, Jerry Friedman,
Peter Young, Chris de Rose, Chris Lagergren, Anthony Damiano,
Marla Stormwolf Patty, McKenna Grace Fisher, Camille Hankins,
Kostas X, Bobo, Marcos Martinez, Darren Sunderland, Brandon
Becker, Jennifer O’ Conner, Sophie, and Sybelle Foxcroft—thank you
for your friendship and support amid difficult times. I am very grate-
ful to Norm Phelps for the Foreword to this book, and for his stead-
fast solidarity. Many thanks to Belinda for her insights, dedication,
and assistance in editing the final draft of this book. I owe apprecia-
tion to Erica Martinez-Saenz. For without her unwavering support,
I would not have overcome the many obstacles in my way. To you
and to Willis, the Cat of Cats, and the King of Kings. I dedicate this
book. Finally, a huge appreciation for my revered feline companions:
Shag, Slim Shady, Kitty Baby, Vendetta, Gaia, and Blue. You bring me
comfort, companionship, and unconditional love, amid the fondest
memories of those who passed but will never be gone.

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 CHAPTER 1

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The Animal Standpoint

I
f we look at history from the animal standpoint, that is, from the
crucial role that animals have played in human evolution and the
consequences of human domination of nonhuman animals, we
can glean new and invaluable insights into psychological, social, his-
torical, and ecological phenomena, problems, and crises. The animal
standpoint is used here to shed new light on the origins, dynamics,
and development of dominator cultures, as well as to redefine the
dysfunctional power systems that structure our relationships to one
another, to other species, and to the natural world, in hierarchical
rather than complementary terms.
Animal standpoint theory, as I use it, looks at the fundamental role
animals play in sustaining the natural world and shaping the human
world in co-evolutionary relations. While animals have constituted
human existence in beneficial ways, they have seldom been willing
partners. The main thesis of animal standpoint theory is that animals
have been key determining forces of human psychology, social life,
and history overall, and that the domination of human over nonhuman
animals underpins the domination of humans over one another and
over the natural world.
Thus, this approach stresses the systemic consequences of human
exploitation of nonhuman animals, the interrelatedness of our fates,
and the profound need for revolutionary changes in the way human

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2 M The Politics of Total Liberation

beings both define themselves and relate to other species and to the
earth as a whole. This chapter explores the animal standpoint in three
different dimensions: (1) for the light it sheds on historical dynamics,
the origin and development of dominator cultures, and current social,
and ecological crises; (2) for its power to undermine speciesism,1 and

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advance egalitarian arguments and liberation ethics, while debunk-
ing persistent myths regarding a benign human nature; and (3) for its
ability to expose the faulty logic of dogmatic pacifism and to validate
militant tactics in defense of animals and the earth.

Toward a New Perspective

Animal standpoint theory draws from a number of key influences
and transcends them in bold new directions. First, it absorbs the
perspectivalist philosophy of nineteenth-century German philoso-
pher Friedrich Nietzsche.2 Perception and cognition are always per-
spectival, Nietzsche argued, and he scorned those who believed that
the scientist has privileged access to reality expressed in “objective”
knowledge and truths. For Nietzsche there are no explanations, only
interpretations, and science itself is interpretation. Individuals always
come to any type of knowing or inquiry already burdened by a host of
presuppositions, biases, and limitations. A perspective is thus an optic,
a way of seeing, and the more perspectives one has at one’s disposal,
the better one can see. In order to avoid limited and partial vision,
Nietzsche says, one should employ a variety of perspectives in the ser-
vice of knowledge. We typically endeavor to acquire a single viewpoint
or attitude toward all the occurrences and events of life, but reality is
too complex and many-sided to grasp from one outlook.3 The animal
standpoint underscores the fact that history is always written from a
particular view, not just from an elitist, patriarchal, or racist bias, but
also from a speciesist bias—the assumption that humans are superior
to animals and utterly unique by virtue of their alleged rationality,
such that all nonhuman animals are mere means to their ends.
Second, the animal standpoint is an extension of feminist standpoint
theory, which was developed to illuminate patriarchal domination and

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 The Animal Standpoint M 3

its debilitating impact on women and humanity as a whole.4 A key idea

of standpoint theory—which traces back to the master-slave theory
of nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel—is that
from a subjugated and “inferior” social standing, an oppressed per-
son or group can glean unique and important insights into the nature

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of social reality, such as are opaque or unavailable to the oppressor’s
biased position. Standpoint theory employs the insights of socially
marginalized figures to identify the partial, limited, and flawed modes
of understanding held by those “inside” the dominant culture, and
to underscore problems with the social order.5 As Carolyn Merchant
demonstrates in The Death of Nature, for example, feminist standpoint
theory exposes how the alienated and violent psychology of patriarchy
oppresses women yet also informs the “rape of nature,” thereby trans-
forming the earth and animals into inert resources for human use and
exploitation.6 Similarly, people of color and postcolonial and critical
race theorists can illuminate colonial domination, slavery, and racist
pathology, all central to the origins of modernity and global capital-
ism. In a correlative way, the animal standpoint reveals the social and
ecological consequences of speciesism and the disastrous consequences
of our alienation from nature and of the pathological humanist project
to “dominate” and “master” it.
Third, the animal standpoint builds on the modern leftist tradi-
tion that examines history from the perspective of the conquered
rather than the conquerors. History written “from below” is integral
to Marxist and populist theories that focus on the struggles of peas-
ants, serfs, and urban working classes. It motivated the genealogies of
Michel Foucault that aimed to recoup marginalized voices buried by
conventional (“bourgeois”) history as well as by the totalizing Marxist
narrative that reduced all social dynamics to class struggle.7 The ani-
mal standpoint therefore provides the ultimate turning-of-the-tables
narrative shift, for what group has been more oppressed, for the lon-
gest period of time, and in the most intensive and invasive ways, than
nonhuman animals? If history is a struggle between the masters and
slaves, as Marx contended, humans in general are the masters and
exploitable animals are their slaves (see chapter 2).

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Environmental Determinism and Animal Agency

In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx initiated a new approach
to writing history that shifted emphasis from gods and kings to pro-
duction, trade, labor, and class conflict. Whereas historiography was
mired in the “idealist” view that history is driven by God or ideas,

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Marx revealed the underlying material forces of history in economics,
production, and class struggle.
Marx was entirely conventional, however, in limiting historical
dynamics to relations among human actors, rather than also examin-
ing the larger field of action that included human and animal interre-
lations and how animals—as an exploited labor power and productive
force—decisively shaped history. Radical humanists like Marx con-
gratulate themselves on demystifying history by “resolving theology
into anthropology” (Ludwig Feuerbach) in a “scientific” manner. But
the mystification is only relocated, not removed, when historians see
social relations as the primary causal forces in history, isolated from
the significant roles played by animals and the environment. Just as
the story of ruling classes cannot be understood apart from their rela-
tions to oppressed classes, so too human history cannot be grasped
outside the context of the powerful determining effects of animals
and nature on human society.
Since the nineteenth century, geographers and ecologists have
developed theories of “environmental determinism” which reject
the view that history is constituted solely through human-to-human
interactions. In a devastating and humbling blow to humanists,
environmental determinists emphasized that geography, physical
terrain, climate, and other natural forces play a strong, often deci-
sive, role in shaping a wide array of phenomena, ranging from the
emergence of bipedal evolution (hence predating our earliest ances-
tors) to the organization of human societies to varying psychological
temperaments. Once introduced into the disciplines of anthropol-
ogy, historiography, sociology, and psychology, the focus shifted
from humans as the sole or main generative forces in social change to
the vital role that the natural environment, geography, and climate
play in the emergence and development of societies. While a huge

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 The Animal Standpoint M 5

advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape

human actions, and certainly over the theocentric dogma that social
dynamics are the effects of a God or an “Unmoved Mover,” environ-
mental determinists nonetheless discount the importance of animals
in constituting both the natural and social worlds. As with human-

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ists, environmental theorists often reify animal agency, culture, and
influence by reducing animals to “natural history” or mere moving
in the machinery of nature. This falsifies the psychological, intel-
lectual, social, and moral complexity of animals; it also fails to grasp
how animals change environments, and to explain that they are not
merely changed by them.
From large predators such as wolves in the Americas to the dung
beetles in the rainforests of Brazil to pollinators everywhere, ani-
mals play critical roles in ecological diversity and stability.8 Wolves
keep populations in check, help prevent overgrazing near rivers and
streams, provide food for scavengers, and increase the fitness of future
generations of their prey by feeding on the weakest individuals. Dung
beetles spread seeds in the animal manure they transport throughout
forests, while pollinators such as bees and butterflies germinate plants
(including at least a third of which are staples in the human diet). Each
species helps to serve and sustain biodiversity. Environmentalists fail
to emphasize that factory farming, agribusiness, and exploiting ani-
mals for food is a leading contributor to—if not the main cause of—
the most serious environmental problems threatening biodiversity,
sustainability, and planetary balance. Water pollution, destruction
of the oceans, decimation of rainforests and habitats, desertification,
resource scarcity, and climate change are all directly traceable to animal
exploitation (see chapter 4).9
Whether in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, literary
studies, or philosophy, theorists view animals as passive objects deter-
mined by biology and genetics, devoid of subjectivity and culture of
their own. They frame animals as nothing more than resources, com-
modities, and the “raw materials” of human thought and action, be they
objects of prestige, sacrifice, food, or transport devices. They assume
that only humans are conscious, self-directing, and purposeful agents

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6 M The Politics of Total Liberation

and reduce animals to being mere means to human ends. Throughout

history, animals have been systematically neglected and written out
of human experience. In recent years, however, theorists from vari-
ous disciplines have started to challenge the absence of animals in
human history, to rethink our past traditions and culture in terms of

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the human-animal relation, and to analyze the role animals play in
shaping custom, experience, and identity. The new outlook, writes
Erica Fudge, breaks from “an earlier form of history which focused on
human ideas about and attitudes towards animals in which animals
were mere blank pages onto which humans wrote meaning: in which
they were passive, unthinking presences in the active and thoughtful
lives of humans.”10 This novel interpretation “is a history in which
we are being asked to look at the ways in which animals and humans
no longer exist in separate realms; in which nature and culture coin-
cide; and in which we recognize the ways in which animals, not just
humans, have shaped the past.”11
Yet, history is not merely a simple drama of humans unilaterally
imposing their will on animals, always shaping them and never being
modified in return, whereas animals were constituting not only the
natural world but also having powerful effects on human societies.
Part of the denial of agency is the erasure of nonhuman resistance and
rebellion and the constant manifestations of animals’ will, choices,
and desire for freedom. Foucault’s dictum that where there is power
there is also resistance applies to animals as well as to humans, despite
both Aristotle’s dogma that only humans are political animals and
Kropotkin’s error that resistance to oppression is a trait unique to
humans only (see chapter 2).12

Speciesism and the Origins of Hierarchy

The animal standpoint examines the origins and development of
societies through the dynamic interrelationship between human and
nonhuman animals. It therefore interprets history not from an evo-
lutionary position that reifies human agency as the sui generis of all
things, nor as the autonomous actions of a Promethean species, but

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 The Animal Standpoint M 7

rather from a co-evolutionary viewpoint that sees nonhuman animals

as an inseparable part of human history and as autonomous agents.
Animals have been an integral part of the human adventure from
the start. Animals stimulated the awakening minds of our ancient
hominid ancestors. They provided the images, models, and metaphors

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to organize social life. They were gods and guiding spirits. They lit up
the night sky in the constellation of stars, and they were commingling
spirits in an animistic universe. They provided humans with food,
clothing, and resources. They were integrated into communities,
domesticated, and thereby co-evolved with us in various ways (mostly
to our benefit and their detriment). But it was our violent, predatory,
and exploitative relations with animals which prevailed for the last
50,000 years that unfortunately has been far more decisive in shaping
our minds and societies, while constituting the crises that threaten all
life and the planet today.
It is impossible to imagine human society evolving as it did with-
out large-scale hunting, animal domestication, and the profound role
that animals such as cattle and horses played in determining history
and social dynamics, notably warfare. Perhaps the most crucial revo-
lution in human history occurred 10,000 years ago, in the shift from
hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural society. In place of a nomadic
lifestyle and taking food wherever they could find it, humans began
to root themselves in one area in order to cultivate plants (farming)
and animals (animal husbandry). They thereby began to domesticate
an increasing array of wild species. The “domestication” of animals is
a euphemism for a regime of exploitation, herding, confinement, cas-
tration, forced breeding, coerced labor, hobbling, branding, ear crop-
ping, and killing. To conquer, enslave, and claim animals as their own
property, to exploit them for food, clothing, labor, transportation,
and warfare, herders developed broad techniques of confinement and
control, such as pens, cages, collars, chains, shackles, whips, prods,
and branding irons.
Farming emerged in many different regions such as the Fertile
Crescent, but the Middle East distinguished itself from Egypt, India,
China, and the Mayan Incan and Aztec cultures in its commitment

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8 M The Politics of Total Liberation

to an expansionist and domineering way of life, rooted in the domes-

tication of large animals such as cattle, horses, goats, and sheep.13 In
the process of domesticating animals and plants, of creating farming
societies and herding cultures, a cascade of dramatic changes revolu-
tionized societies and worldviews, changing forever the way people

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related to one another, to other species, and to the natural world as
a whole. Everywhere that agricultural societies emerged, people pro-
duced food surpluses, grew populations, expanded territories, waged
large-scale organized warfare, and created the first social hierarchies
including patriarchy, the state, bureaucracy, and classes—all of which
grew out of the bloody soil of animal exploitation and speciesism.
As agricultural societies became socially stratified, politically central-
ized, economically complex, and technologically innovative, people
began to see themselves as independent from nature and superior to
other animals.
As a direct result of hunting, herding, and animal husbandry,
humans developed a dominator worldview, and the subjugation and
slaughter of animals paved the way for subduing, exploiting, and
killing other humans. The sexual suppression of women, modeled
after the domestication of animals, was such that men began to con-
trol women’s reproductive capacity, enforce repressive sexual norms,
reduce them to a status of inferiority, and create patriarchal gods and
culture. Slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that
spawned agriculture and developed as an extension of animal domes-
tication practices. In areas like Sumer, for instance, slaves were man-
aged like livestock, and males were castrated.
Like horses, cattle played a decisive role in the emergence of domi-
nator cultures. Through plowing and agriculture, the exploitation of
cattle facilitated the “progress” of human “civilization.” To an impor-
tant degree, Jeremy Rifkin argues, Western civilization was built on
the backs of the cow and the bull, whose powerful and massive bodies
were exploited for food, clothing, and labor power.14 According to
Rifkin, around 4400 BC, Kurgan people drove huge herds of cattle
into Southern and Eastern Europe and subdued the small, peace-
ful Neolithic village communities through their hoofed armies and

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 The Animal Standpoint M 9

violent ways. This created the first great nomadic cattle empire in
world history; it also brought an end to the peaceful farming cul-
ture of Europe. Their cultures rooted in cattle, Kurgs were inherently
mobile and dynamic. With no allegiance to the land, their identity was
synonymous with movement, exploitation, weapons, and conquest.

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They valued independence, militarism, acquisitiveness, and utilitarian
sensibilities. They introduced large-scale herding and military tech-
nology into Europe, with new emphases on mobility and change.
Similarly, in his classic text, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
describes the crucial historical role played by horses, whose power
and speed allowed the armies that commanded them unprecedented
advantages. Horses “may have been the essential military ingredient
behind the westward expansion of speakers of Indo-European lan-
guages from the Ukraine.”15 Horses also “enabled Cortes and Pizarro,
leading only small bands of adventurers, to overthrow the Aztec and
Inca Empires,” and thus helped establish European dominance on
a global scale. For Diamond, Eurasia emerged as a powerhouse not
because of superior culture or intellect, but rather due to the availabil-
ity of domestic plants and animals and its fortuitous position on the
globe. Whether the peoples of different continents became farmers
and herders, and when, largely explains their contrasting fates. “The
peoples of areas with a head start on food production,” Diamond
argues, “thereby gained a head start on the path leading toward guns,
germs, and steel. The result was a long series of collisions between the
haves and have-nots of history.”16 The diseases humans acquired from
animal domestication, moreover, became a driving force of history
once farmers, herders, and colonialists spread them to other popula-
tions. Indeed, more than guns and steel, it was the germs, derived
from domesticated animals, that killed most of the people whom
Europeans sought to conquer, and that played a crucial factor in his-
tory overall.17
Speciesism provided both the prototype for hierarchical domina-
tion and a battery of tactics and technologies of control. Humans
defined their “nature,” “essence,” and identity as “rational beings”
in direct opposition to nonhuman animals whom they erroneously

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10 M The Politics of Total Liberation

defined as “irrational”—that is, as entirely devoid of the qualities that

allegedly defined humans as unique, separate, and special. Humans
prized rationality as a trait and an endowment important enough to
make all other species and the natural world as a whole a mere means
to their ends. Once animals became the measure of alterity and the

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“irrational” foil to the human “rational essence,” it was a short step to
begin viewing different, exotic, and dark-skinned peoples as brutes,
beasts, and savages, wholly deficient in rationality, and thus sub or
nonhuman. The criterion created to exclude animals from the human
community was also used to ostracize people of color, women, the
mentally ill, the disabled, and numerous other stigmatized groups.
The domination of human over human and its exercise through slav-
ery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of
victims as “savages,” “primitives,” and “mere” animals who lack the
essence and sine qua non of human nature—rationality.
The discourse, logic, and methods of dehumanization were
thereby derived from the human domination over animals, as spe-
ciesism, in turn, provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged,
sustained, and justified the domination and slaughter of numerous
group and types of humans that did not fit the rationalist, patriarchal
model. “Throughout the history of our ascent to dominance as the
master species,” Charles Patterson notes, “our victimization of ani-
mals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization
of each other. The study of human history reveals the pattern: first,
humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people
like animals and do the same to them.”18 Whether the conquerors
are European imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis,
Western aggressors always engage in wordplay before swordplay, in
order to vilify their victims—Africans, Native Americans, Filipinos,
Japanese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and other unfortunates—with opprobri-
ous terms such as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” “vermin,”
or “cockroaches.” Once perceived as brute beasts or subhumans occu-
pying a lower evolutionary rung than entrenched social elites, subju-
gated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as animals,
they could be hunted down as such. Animals, the first exiles from the

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 The Animal Standpoint M 11

moral community, provided a convenient moral refuse bin for oppres-

sors to dispose the oppressed.
European colonialism was but one extension and outgrowth of
human supremacism. For just as humans had subdued animals with
cunning and advanced technologies, many Europeans believed that

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the “white race” was superior by virtue of bringing the “inferior races”
under Western control and subjugation. The international slave trade
borrowed heavily from the technologies of animal domination that
emerged with domesticating wild species, including cages, shackles,
branding, and auctions (see chapter 2). There are, moreover, direct and
profound connections between animal breeding and racist eugenics,
between speciesism and racism, between the industrial technologies
and division of labor first developed in modern slaughterhouses and the
mass killing of human beings in concentration camps and killing fields.
In the words attributed to Theodor Adorno, “Auschwitz begins when
people look at a slaughterhouse and say, ‘They’re only animals.’”

Ethics, Justice, and Human Nature

In an ethical sense, the animal standpoint has value and consequence
on multiple levels, such as determining non-speciesist rules of justice;
obtaining a full evaluation of the moral character of a society or an
individual; and gaining a critical perspective on Homo sapiens as a
primate species with violent, aggressive, hierarchical, and dominator
proclivities.
Too often, people have an absurdly high estimation of themselves
as “good,” while extoling humanity in general as benign and worthy
of its lordship over earth. It is one thing to critically assess human
nature in view of how people frequently torture, degrade, and murder
one another, but a much darker picture of humanity emerges if con-
sidered from the animal standpoint. Obviously, animals cannot tell
us in human language what they really think about us, or we would
wither from their righteous anger and profane diatribes. Think, for
instance, of the quote by English author, professor, and Anglican
priest William Ralph Inge: “We have enslaved the rest of the animal

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12 M The Politics of Total Liberation

creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so
badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they
would depict the Devil in human form.”19 Recall also novelist Isaac
Bashevis Singer’s wry insight that “in their behavior toward creatures,
all men are Nazis. The smugness with which man could do to other

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creatures as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories,
the principle that might is right.”20 Consider too, nineteenth-century
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s correct observation that
“compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of
character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to
animals cannot be a good man.”21
Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, written in 1818, was a power-
ful indictment of humanist hubris, the scientific will to power, and
technology out-of-control.22 Shelley’s classic also provides a poignant
and critical view of human animals from the perspective of a “crea-
ture” assembled from human cadavers but not truly “human.” Born
innocent and without malice, the creature endures a series of cruelties
that ultimately bring him to hate humanity and lash out in rage. But
a far deeper and more informed contempt for humanity wells up as
he comes upon a book that exposes the systemic presence of violence,
warfare, genocide, and destruction throughout human history, and
he recoils in horror.
Similarly, in his novel, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn dramatizes the deep
ideological and structural flaws of humanity through a Socratic dia-
logue between a circus gorilla and an astonished man.23 With keen
irony, the gorilla notes that after 10,000 years of confining and exploit-
ing other animals, human beings are the true “captive,” as the hier-
archical structure of agricultural society has perpetuated disastrous
worldviews which humans have proved unable to critically examine
and change. Like the creature in Shelley’s tale, the gorilla in Quinn’s
story provides a crucial perspective on “civilization” through the ani-
mal standpoint, leveling devastating critiques at agricultural society
and Western cultures as being fundamentally flawed, dysfunctional,
barbaric, and insane, rather than existing as “advanced” and “rational”
forms of life.

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 The Animal Standpoint M 13

Through the animal standpoint we acquire profound ethical insight

made possible by a gestalt shift in evaluation, such that a crucial touch-
stone for gauging the moral character of a society, a culture, or an
individual is how people view and treat other animals. One cannot
adequately assess the moral worth, philosophical depth, and humanity

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of either cultures or individuals until one examines their views and rela-
tions toward animals and the natural world. Just as ethnic and women’s
studies forced reconsideration of the claims that Western society made
for its “civilization” and “progress” (see chapter 6), so we must reex-
amine human institutions once again from the animal standpoint.
According to this quote attributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the
way in which its animals are treated.” Just as no person who traffics in
slavery can be regarded as having moral integrity, so no one who abuses
or neglects animals can be praiseworthy. Thus, the animal standpoint
compels us to look at people and society in new ways, enabling us to
recognize Homo sapiens as the violent, alienated, disturbed, domineer-
ing, murderous, and self-destructive species we too often are.
One test of ethical decision-making is by the “Golden Rule,” a
moral perspective common throughout world religions and cultures
such as the Judaic, Christian, Confucian, and Stoic traditions. The
Golden Rule, of course, enjoins us to treat others as we ourselves want
to be treated by them. This ancient maxim common to numerous
religious traditions is perennially relevant, insofar as it is an indispens-
able decision-making technique for determining right and wrong. It
thus brings together both empathy and the principle of reciprocity,
which links to a rule of logical consistency. Only prejudice and logi-
cal inconsistency prevents us from applying the Golden Rule to our
relations with other animal species. As nineteenth-century English
novelist Thomas Hardy believed, Darwinism “logically involved a
readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging . . . the application of
what has been called the ‘Golden Rule’ from the area of mere man-
kind to that of the whole animal kingdom.”24
In basically restating the principle of the Golden Rule in more com-
plex language, eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant argued

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14 M The Politics of Total Liberation

that actions should be considered from the perspective of the “categori-

cal imperative.”25 According to Kant, we should not act in any way in
which we could not universalize our action without logical contradic-
tion. It is a contradiction, for instance, to demand that everyone follow
the law except oneself. The idea of consistency is crucial here, for if we

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take the Golden Rule, or categorical imperative, one step further, we
must ask ourselves: Would we want animals to treat us in the same
manner as we treat them? Would we want to be slaughtered for food;
experimented on; bred for coats and clothing; or forced to perform in a
circus race, rodeo, or aquarium? Since the answer must be “no,” people
considering this maxim from the animal standpoint are compelled
to confront their own inconsistency, hypocrisy, double-standard, and
unjustifiable discrimination against animals.

Politics and Strategies

The animal standpoint is crucial not only to grasp social organiza-
tion and change, and adequately assess the character of individuals,
cultures, and humanity as a whole, but also to rethink strategies for
political resistance and struggle. Wherever discussion is repressed,
censored, or stultified due to the hegemony of pacifist dogmas, the
animal standpoint allows us to reconsider tactics from the standpoint
of victims rather than victimizers. It can thereby help to restore com-
mon sense, moral clarity, and tactical pluralism to a discourse domi-
nated by the purveyors of violence and the pacifist choir in various
“opposition” movements.
Except for extreme pacifists, most people acknowledge the legiti-
macy of so-called violence in cases such as self-defense and as nec-
essary to stop implacable forces of evil (see chapter 3).26 Yet when
it comes to defending innocent animals under violent and sadistic
attack in fur farms, factory farms, slaughterhouses, vivisection labora-
tories, and other chambers of horror, one typically finds a blatant logi-
cal inconsistency. This speciesist double standard says, in effect, that
human lives are prized enough to merit physical force as a means of
protection and defense if necessary, but nonhuman animals are not.

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 The Animal Standpoint M 15

When considering ethical and tactical problems and issues, we

should stop taking corporate, state, media, mainstream “animal
advocacy” groups, and uninformed public opinion as barometers
of legitimacy and arbiters of action never to offend or transgress.
Instead of asking ourselves if a course of action is legal, morally

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sanctioned, or palatable to public opinion, we can adopt the animal
standpoint to ask: What would oppressed and tortured animals
want us to do? What courses of action would they approve and
which would they condemn as inadequate and a betrayal?
Discussing a problem such as huge dams being built for corporate
profit at the expense of species and ecosystems, author and deep ecol-
ogy advocate, Derrick Jensen, asks: “What is the most moral thing
to do? Do we stand by and watch the last of the salmon die, or blow
up the dam? Do we write letters, file lawsuits, and do similar time-
consuming actions that have been proven to fail, or do we take out the
dams ourselves?”27 To those who seek education and legal-based strat-
egies, Jensen retorts: “What if those in power are murderous? What
if they’re not willing to listen to reason at all? Should we continue to
approach them nonviolently? When is violence an appropriate means
to stop injustice? With the world dying—or rather being killed—we
no longer have the luxury to ignore these questions.”28
To shake people from their pacifist slumbers and humanist com-
placency, Jensen asks us to shift the paradigm and adopt the perspec-
tive of ecosystems at risk:

What if, instead of asking “How shall I live my life?” people were
to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, “What
can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from
this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from
killing you?” If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will
tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you
willing to do it?29

There is real value in adopting the perspective of nature. It calls

into question individualist pursuits of “the good life,” as defined apart

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16 M The Politics of Total Liberation

from what is good for animals and the land, and it can plug our ears
long enough to drown out the siren song of humanist pacifism. While
nature cannot speak in any sense, the imaginative and empathetic
standpoint of the earth and nonhuman life allows us to raise some
basic questions: What are their “interests” independent from those

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of exploiters or humans generally? Would they want to flourish and
exist intact and in peace, or to be violently assaulted, blown up, and
destroyed by greedy industries and the increasing demands of a surg-
ing human population? Would they want us to be patient and to fol-
low the law, even if it led us down the path of total futility? Or would
the earth and the animals want us to protect their existence, integrity,
and peace by repudiating unjust laws and defend their interests by any
(intelligent and effective) means necessary?
To be sure, one cannot presume to know in any finite way what
nature “wants” or “needs.” One can be wrong or misinformed, and
cannot conjecture much beyond the general axiom that land and life
“wants” to live, not die. “Listening” to the “voice” of nature hardly
amounts to a rigorous thinking about complex philosophical, politi-
cal, tactical, and organizational issues. Random and sporadic acts of
sabotage, moreover, are ultimately ad hoc, piecemeal, rear-guard, and
limited tactics which fall far short of developing a coherent theory and
politics of social transformation.
A related question to the ones raised from animal and environ-
mental standpoints would be: What would future generations want
us to do? Radical environmentalist Paul Watson gives us yet another
perspective—which I will call the “future generations’ standpoint”—
from which to challenge knee-jerk condemnations of militant direct
action (see chapter 3) and revolutionary struggle. From the perspec-
tive of future generations, would sabotage seem “radical” or barely
adequate to the task? Watson observes that while environmentalists
are currently a minority population, they actually represent a vast
majority of people, as one can safely assume that future generations
will have no choice but to focus on urgent environmental issues.
Moreover, although today’s environmentalists are often derided or
vilified as “whackos,” “extremists,” and “ecoterrorists,” those unlucky

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 The Animal Standpoint M 17

enough to be struggling on a degraded planet by mid-century would

likely view the radicals of today as the only sane and responsible citi-
zens of the era. Undoubtedly, they will condemn present-day pacifists
and moderates as dreamers and cowards who failed to stop the inten-
sifying assault on animals and the earth. Thus, Watson quipped, from

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the perspective of future generations, environmentalists “make damn
good ancestors.”
By deploying anti-speciesist, biocentric, and future generations’
standpoints, we obtain productive ways of approaching complex philo-
sophical and strategic questions. These new optics facilitate support
for mass resistance, militant direct action, and revolutionary counter-
force in defense of peoples, animals, and a planet under increasingly
aggressive assault. The vegan, animal rights/liberation, and environ-
mental movements desperately need new ideas, new perspectives, and
new tactics. The animal, ecological, and future generations’ stand-
points open up new spaces for thought and new possibilities for action
currently stifled by the dogmas of mainstream politics.

Deciphering the “Riddle of History”

The animal standpoint seeks generally to illuminate human biological
and social evolution in important new ways, such as revealing the ori-
gins, dynamics, and development of dominator cultures, social hierar-
chies, economic and political inequalities, and asymmetrical systems
of power. Through the animal standpoint, one can glean important
lessons regarding the origins of hate, hierarchy, violence, war, geno-
cide, slavery, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. Providing perspec-
tives and insights unattainable through other historical approaches,
the animal standpoint analyzes how the domination of human over
nonhuman animals is intimately linked to the domination of humans
over one another, as it also brings to light the environmental impact
of large-scale animal slaughter and exploitation.
According to the animal standpoint, speciesism was the first form
of hierarchy and domination, and laid the groundwork for other
forms of oppression, power, and violence. Given that exploitation and

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18 M The Politics of Total Liberation

domestication of animals was crucial for the development and survival

of other power systems, one is tempted to say, paraphrasing Marx,
that the animal standpoint, not class analysis and communism, is “the
solution to the riddle of history.” The animal standpoint casts a bril-
liant light on problems that one cannot even see or identify through

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the opaque lens of humanism or its theoretical offshoots.
While not widely recognized as such, the animal standpoint is
a crucial perspective for critical theory and radical politics, offer-
ing unique insights into human history, the origin and dynamics of
hierarchy (including patriarchy, slavery, and racism), the ubiquity
of warfare and violence, social and ecological crises, and the condi-
tions necessary for a viable future. As the critical theory of society is
immeasurably enriched through the animal standpoint, so too does
the animal standpoint need a critical social theory to understand how
animal exploitation in the modern world is driven by capitalist profit
and growth imperatives and operates within a despotic state appara-
tus that serves corporate interests and suppresses serious dissent, often
violently.
While it is important to have various theoretical perspectives that
can map the origins and trajectory of patriarchy, race, class, state,
and so on, the animal standpoint has been relatively ignored. The
burgeoning field of animal studies is changing this, but its arid, scho-
lastic, and detached framework precludes politicizing the profound
insights into the nature and genesis of the key crises plaguing the
world today.30 Unlike the largely apolitical field of “human-animal
studies,” the animal standpoint is no more “neutral” or “objective” in
relation to animals than Marx’s work was toward the working class or
the Frankfurt School’s critical theory was to oppressed and suffering
peoples. It is an ethically and politically engaged viewpoint that con-
demns the exploitation and slaughter of animals, and promotes the
emancipation of animals from all forms of human enslavement and
domination—a goal which demands revolutionizing capitalism and
dismantling hierarchical societies and dominator cultures.
As I use it, the animal standpoint is vital to a total liberation poli-
tics that promotes human, animal, and earth liberation as interrelated

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 The Animal Standpoint M 19

struggles which need to unite against common enemies such as capi-

talism, militarism, and the state. It advocates an alliance politics in
which different radical movements work together toward the positive
goal of shifting the dominant paradigms from hierarchy to equality,
from growth to sustainability, from alienation to harmony, and from

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violence to peace (see chapter 4). Its ultimate goal is to help dismantle
every oppressive and dysfunctional hierarchical system that thwarts
freedom, creative activity, self-organization, and diversification.
Thus, the animal standpoint examines the crucial importance of
animals to our existence and to the planet as a whole, in ways humans
rarely comprehend when constrained by the straitjacket of speciesism.
The animal standpoint sees the freedom and happiness of humans
and animals to be deeply interconnected, and highlights the grave
consequences for humans when they violate animal lives on a massive,
global scale such as is characteristic of modern societies. The animal
standpoint analyzes how human liberation is implausible if discon-
nected from animal liberation; thus, humanism collapses under the
weight of its logical contradictions. If the animal standpoint analyzes
how the domination of humans over animals is intimately linked to
the domination of humans over one another, then, conversely, it shows
that humans will never establish peaceful, just, and sustainable societ-
ies until they renounce their arrogant speciesist identities and begin
to harmonize their existence with the millions of other life forms on
this planet. The abominations humans inflict on animals inevitably
rebound to haunt human existence. The exploitation of animals poses
a grave threat to countless imperiled species, to the future of human-
ity, and to the global ecological system, all of which look increasingly
problematic, troubled, and bleak.
Without understanding the co-evolution of human and other
animals, and the systemic psychological, social, and ecological crises
brought about by speciesism, animal domestication, the rise of agri-
cultural society, and the “Might is Right” psychosis of “civilization,”
we cannot formulate a viable theory of history, hierarchy and power,
or of social organization and change. Without the animal standpoint,
we cannot adequately understand human conflict, the dynamics of

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20 M The Politics of Total Liberation

warfare, the pathology of violence and genocide, the alienation of

humans from one another and the natural world, and the dynamics
driving the current ecological crisis, such as stem principally from
corporate agriculture and the global livestock industry. And if we can-
not understand the key causes of our current crises, then we surely

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cannot solve them, nor forge a better culture, humanity, and future
for ourselves and all life forms on this planet.

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 CHAPTER 2

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The New Abolitionism: Capitalism,
Slavery, and Animal Liberation

C
apitalism originated in—and would have been impossible
without—imperialism, colonization, the international slave
trade, genocide, and large-scale environmental destruction.
Organized around profit and power imperatives, capitalism is a sys-
tem of slavery, exploitation, class hierarchy, inequality, violence, and
forced labor. The Global Capitalist Gulag was fueled, first, by the
labor power of millions of slaves from Africa and other nations, and,
second, by massive armies of immigrants, former artisans and crafts-
men, domestic workers, and urban masses that comprised an utterly
new social class, the industrialized proletariat.
As Marx observed, the accumulation of wealth and the production
of poverty, the aggrandizement of the ruling class and the immis-
eration of the ruled, the development of the European world and
the underdevelopment of its colonies, are inseparably interrelated.
Then as now, these apparent antipodes are inevitable consequences
of a grow-or-die, profit-seeking system of exploitation whose cease-
less expansion requires a slave class and inordinate amounts of cheap
labor power.
The transatlantic slave trade emerged in 1444 when Henry the
Navigator began taking Africans back to Portugal to exploit for labor.
Africans already were enslaving each other, but their labor market was

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22 M The Politics of Total Liberation

more akin to indentured servitude and nothing like the horrors that
millions would later face in British America. Prior to trafficking in
African slaves, European nations enjoyed positive relationships with
Africa, based on friendship and trade. This ended in the mid-fifteenth
century when colonial states succumbed to insatiable appetites for

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gold, profits, and the spoils of slave labor. As was evident in the brutal
exploits of Columbus and Spain, many European states waged geno-
cidal war against dark-skinned peoples in order to appropriate their
land, resources, riches, and labor power to fuel expanionist needs.
Over the next few centuries European forces of “civilization,”
“progress,” professed Christianity, and capitalism kidnapped twenty
million Africans from their homes and villages. They forced inland
captives to march up to 500 grueling miles to the coast while bare-
foot and in leg irons. Half died before they reached the ships and
more expired during the torturous six-to-ten-week journey across
the Atlantic primarily to North America and other global ports.
The slave traders confined their human cargo to the suffocating hell
beneath the deck. Africans were packed into tight spaces, chained
together, and were delirious from heat, stench, and disease. They
were beaten, force-fed, and thrown overboard in droves if sick or
troublesome. The lucky ones dived into a watery grave on their own
accord.
Marx rightly saw colonialism as the “primitive stage of capital
development” that preceded the emergence of advanced market soci-
eties in the nineteenth century. “Capital,” Marx said, “comes into
the world . . . dripping with blood.”1 For five centuries, profits from
the slave trade built European economies and powered the American
empire. The glorious cities and refined cultures of Western modernity
were built on the backs of millions of slaves, and this brilliant “civili-
zation” was the product of barbarism. The atrocities associated with
slavery were the burning moral and political issues in states such as
England and the United States, and they culminated in strong aboli-
tionist movements. Although various slave markets still flourish and
thrive today and the battle against racism, domination, and exploita-
tion is far from over, throughout the world a moral revolution has

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 The New Abolitionism M 23

emerged, as society shifts from considering human to animal slaves

and a new abolitionist movement seeking animal liberation emerges
as a potential catalyst of significant social change.

Strange Fruit of American Democracy

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Before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, America was a slave-
hungry system. In its European form, as a product of British capital
ventures and yearnings for liberty from state tyranny, the fledgling
nation emerged from scratch, with no prior feudal history or com-
munal traditions. As British colonists found no vast supplies of gold
in America like the Spaniards did in the Southern Hemisphere,
they turned to agriculture. From the “Indians” they learned to grow
tobacco as a profitable crop, but planting and harvesting required
intense physical labor. For their sturdiness, vulnerability, and cheap
price, colonists favored Africans over Native Americans and British
laborers for the task.
The first Africans arrived on the North American continent in
August 1619, a year before Pilgrims landed the Mayflower on the
shores of Massachusetts and decades before the slave trade began in
New England.2 Exchanged for food, 20 blacks stepped off a Dutch
slavery ship to become the first generation of African Americans.
Joining a society not yet lacerated by slavery and racism, they worked
as indentured servants to British elites. As such, their status was equal
to that of poor whites, and laborers of either race could gain freedom
after their tenure. As with the whites, blacks owned property, mar-
ried, and voted in an integrated society.
This relatively benign situation changed dramatically in the
1660s, when ever-more Africans were shipped to colonies to meet
the growing demand for labor. As slavery became crucial to capital-
ist expansion and to plantation economies producing work-intensive
tobacco, sugar, and cotton crops, British colonists constructed racist
ideologies to legitimize the violent subjugation of those equal to them
in the eyes of God and the principles of natural law. Having survived
the shock of capture and trauma of transport, African men, women,

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24 M The Politics of Total Liberation

and children were then auctioned, branded, and sold to white slave
owners, who grew rich from trading, breeding, and exploiting their
bodies. With no consideration of blood ties or emotional bonds,
black families were torn apart. Stripped of their rights, dignity, and
human status, these African citizens and their millions of American

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descendants were brutalized in the most vicious exploitative system
on the planet.
Upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776,
the number of slaves had grown to nearly 700,000, comprising
20 percent of the population. As colonists became increasingly
autonomous from the monarchy abroad, and British military occu-
pation and oppression increased, the conflict between the Empire
and its unruly subjects–dramatized in events such as the Boston Tea
Party in 1773—inexorably led to war. When the Revolutionary War
ended in 1783, social relations and racial views were in a state of great
flux. Tens of thousands of slaves fled to England, Canada, Spanish
Florida, or Indian camps. Many Northern slaveholders, who authen-
tically embraced the nation’s egalitarian values, freed their captives.
In 1783, Massachusetts became the first state to abolish slavery, and
from 1789 to 1830 all states north of Maryland gradually followed
suit. At the same time, however, slavery put down stronger roots in
Southern states that were becoming increasingly influential, eco-
nomically and politically.
The new nation stood at a crucial moral crossroads regarding the
slavery question and the true meaning of its professed democratic and
Christian values. It could end slavery and adhere to its noble ideals, or
it could perpetuate a vicious system of bondage anchored in hypocrisy
rather than democracy. Tragically, the profit imperative triumphed
over the moral imperative. Although the industrializing north con-
tinuously pandered to Southern plantation interests, the two cultures/
economies drifted apart irreconcilably, like shifting tectonic plates.
Rather than pulling together as one nation honoring the progressive
values that led it to war against England, the United States imploded
through internal contradictions, and in 1861 the North and South
embarked on a long and bloody battle.

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 The New Abolitionism M 25

The Roar of Abolitionism

With liberty denied and justice betrayed, both free and enslaved
blacks intensified their resistance to racist/capitalist oppression,
and many allied with progressive whites. Increasingly, opponents of
slavery broke with the prevailing tactics of reform, moderation, and

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incremental change to demand the total and immediate dismantling
of the slavery system. With conditions worsening and patience frayed,
emancipation could not wait. Compromises were scorned, ceaseless
agitation was urged, and nothing short of total abolition of slavery
was acceptable. Thus, in the early 1830s, the US abolitionist move-
ment was born. Abolitionism is rooted in a searing critique of racism
and slavery and their dehumanizing effects on black people. In the US
slavery market, a human being—on the basis of skin color alone—
was declared naturally inferior to a predominant race, and by that
sole criterion thereby stripped of all rights. In such a system, the slave
is transmogrified from a human subject into a physical object, from
a person into a commodity, and thus reduced to a moveable form of
property known as “chattel.”
Abolitionists viewed the institution of slavery as inherently evil,
corrupt, and dehumanizing, such that no black person in bondage—
however well-treated by their “masters”—could attain the full dignity,
intelligence, and creativity of their humanity. Abolitionists renounced
all reformist approaches that sought better or more “humane treat-
ment” of slaves, in order to insist on the immediate and total emancipa-
tion of blacks from the chains, masters, laws, courts, and ideologies
that corrupted, stunted, and profaned their humanity. Abolitionists
did not address the slave owner’s “obligation” to be kind to the slaves,
but rather demanded the complete and unqualified eradication of the
master-slave relation, thus freeing the slave from all forms of bond-
age. In Tom Regan’s ringing description of the rights/abolitionist
approach:

When an injustice is absolute, one must oppose it absolutely. It

was not “reformed” slavery that justice demanded, not “reformed”
child labor, not “reformed” subjugation of women. In each of these

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26 M The Politics of Total Liberation

cases, abolition was the only answer. Merely to reform absolute

injustice is to prolong injustice.3

The abolitionist movement included both whites and blacks, men

and women, privileged and non-privileged, citizens and slaves, and

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nonviolent and violent elements. Its diverse social composition proved
a fertile matrix for alliance politics as, for instance, with the suffrag-
ettes, who were first politicized via their public support of abolition-
ism and through recognizing parallels between plantation slavery and
domestic slavery. Unlike the typically fragmented and single-issue
nature of political developments to follow over the next two centu-
ries, the intense upheavals of the nineteenth century frequently united
movements militating for women, workers, African Americans, chil-
dren, nonhuman animals, and urban environmentalists in broad
visions of rights, equality, and justice.
Abolitionism was not only diverse in its social composition and alli-
ance, but also in the wide variety of tactical means it employed toward
the end of emancipation. The most militant voices advocated the use
of force as a necessary or legitimate tactic of struggle and self-defense.
David Walker, for instance, was born a free black, but he traveled and
witnessed firsthand the evils of slavery. In September 1829, Walker
published his “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” a fiery
80-page pamphlet that became a catalyst for militant abolitionists.4
With poignant irony, he denounced racist injustice: “America is more
our country,” he said, “than it is the whites . . . The greatest riches in all
America have arisen from our blood and tears . . . Americans have got
so fat on our blood and groans.”5 As whites thought nothing of mur-
dering blacks, reciprocal violence, he contended, was perfectly legiti-
mate as an act of self-defense. In the volatile zone of race wars, it often
is a matter of “kill or be killed.”6 Similarly, New York Presbyterian
minister, Henry Highland Garnet, espoused armed resistance as a
needed tactic in the war against slavery. In his keynote speech to the
National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, in
August 1843, Garnet urged a nation of four million blacks to con-
front their oppressors, demand freedom, and strike them down by the

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 The New Abolitionism M 27

sword if necessary. For Garnet, “There is not much hope of redemp-

tion without the shedding of blood,” and it was far better “to die free
men rather than to live as slaves.”7
Along with the Haitian Revolution of August 22, 1791, during
which slaves overthrew Spanish and British occupiers to establish

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Haiti as a free black republic, such views panicked US slave owners
over the possibility of slave revolts and violence. Their fears were
justified, as blacks throughout the country, inspired by the Haitian
Revolution, began plotting rebellions, hoping to achieve with bullets,
machetes, and fire what they could not attain through politicians,
laws, and courts. Whereas rebels such as Gabriel Prosser and Denmark
Vesey were betrayed and executed before they could ignite large-scale
insurrections, others like slave Nat Turner and John Brown, a white
Christian abolitionist, led armed insurrections and raids against slave
owners and the state. They spilled the blood of soldiers and exploiters
before being captured and executed by the state, but only to live on as
inspiring icons of resistance.
Other influential voices urged militancy and direct action with-
out violence. William Lloyd Garrison, a former indentured white
servant, started a prominent abolitionist newsletter, the Liberator, on
January 1, 1831, which he published for 35 years. In the first edito-
rial, Garrison attacked the philosophies of gradualism and compro-
mise and called for the “immediate and complete emancipation of all
slaves.” Against the complacency of reform, Garrison stated:

I do not wish to think, to speak, or write, with moderation . . . Tell

a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to
moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the
mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it
has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the
present!8

Garrison also brought Frederick Douglass into the abolitionist

movement. Douglass was born into slavery, became self-educated,
and fled from bondage. With Garrison’s assistance, he became a star

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28 M The Politics of Total Liberation

on the lecture circuit, publishing abolitionist newspapers and an

autobiography. In his stirring speeches, Douglass preached a potent
“gospel of struggle,” most eloquently expressed in an 1857 talk that
exposed the Machiavellian essence of politics and the hypocrisy of
certain “abolitionists” in the animal advocacy movement:

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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never
will . . . The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows
that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born
of earnest struggle . . . If there is no struggle there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation,
are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they
want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its waters.9

Black females also played an important role in the abolitionist

movement. They organized antislavery societies, staged protests, and
gave stirring public speeches. One of the leading stars of the move-
ment was Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery and freed in 1827, for
40 years she traveled across the nation, electrifying audiences with her
wit and passion. Harriet Tubman was the celebrated “conductor” of
the Underground Railroad, a vital part of the abolitionist movement
that operated clandestinely and illegally by a network of volunteers,
each of whom risked his or her own freedom to smuggle thousands
of slaves into northern “free states” and Canada. Tubman used the
safe house network to escape slavery herself in 1849 at the age of 25,
and returned to Maryland numerous times—risking jail or death,
dodging slave hunters and hefty bounties on her head—to free family
members and 70 other slaves. She epitomized the courage, passion
for freedom, spirit of resistance, and acute sense of justice driving the
abolitionist movement.
After the Civil War ended in 1865, the US Congress passed the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, thereby ban-
ning slavery and mandating equal treatment for blacks and whites.
Subsequently, four million African Americans throughout the nation

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 The New Abolitionism M 29

were legally “free” and “equal” to whites, but in reality they remained
trapped in racist systems of discrimination, exploitation, poverty, and
violence. The United States became an apartheid system organized
around Jim Crow segregation laws that institutionalized the principle
of “separate but equal.” Violence against blacks increased dramati-

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cally through lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan, and racist police, while
job, education, and housing prospects remained dismal. Not until the
civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, did the walls of US apartheid begin to crack—such that even
marginal social progress might become possible in a nation deeply
afflicted to this day with racism, class domination, and poverty.

The “Dreaded Comparison”

To those familiar with the plight of animals in the twenty-first cen-
tury, it may seem noncontroversial to speak about “animal slavery” in
literal terms, or to invoke the phrase “animal holocaust” in a serious
way to emphasize the incomprehensible scale and scope of the violence
humans inflict on animals. Each year, however, humans kill hundreds
of billions of land and sea animals for food consumption alone, while
driving hundreds or thousands of species into extinction.
On theoretical grounds, leftists argue that it is a category fallacy
to use discourse such as “slavery” and “exploitation” in reference to
animals. These concepts are said to make sense only in relation
to conscious human beings in social relations, a world beyond the
“merely” biological and instinct-governed world that nonhuman ani-
mals allegedly inhabit. Ethically regressive and scientifically outdated,
left-leaning humanism operates with a crude ontological dualism that
rigidly separates humans from animals and denies animals any com-
plex needs or preferences such as the desire for freedom (see below
and chapter 5). On political grounds, in the United States above all,
people of color respond with hostility toward any attempt to analo-
gize human and animal slavery. Similarly, many Jewish people deeply
resent use of the word “holocaust” in any context other than what
happened to Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, even

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30 M The Politics of Total Liberation

though the term originally means “burnt offering” relating to animal

sacrifice.10
In the apt title of Marjorie Spiegel’s book The Dreaded Comparison,
the attempt to analogize nonhuman and human slavery is “dreaded”
precisely because of the volatile emotions and political altercations it

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provokes.11 This is directly due to the fact that in modern Western
societies, the United States in particular, peoples of color generally
have been reduced to the status of animals and subhuman life forms,
to “primitive” and “barbaric” types that are inferior to the exalted
white cultures of Western “civilization.” Thus, when People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) rolled out their traveling
exhibit titled “Are Animals the New Slaves?” (renamed the “Animal
Liberation Project”), most blacks were deeply offended and civil
rights organizations universally condemned the campaign, which
featured images and text comparing human and animal slavery.
Similarly, PETA’s “Holocaust on a Plate” exhibit, which contrasted
images of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps with pictures of
animals suffering in factory farm conditions of intensive confine-
ments, aroused a vehement condemnation from many Jewish people
and organizations.
However poorly executed or received, the intent of these exhibits
was to challenge speciesism, to elevate consciousness about animal
suffering, and to inspire people to cross that bridge of understand-
ing to move from condemning one form of slavery or mass murder
involving humans to reviling another form carried out on a far larger
scale that victimizes nonhumans. As Dick Gregory, a noted black civil
rights activist, commented:

PETA’s display shows how the horrifying excuses that were once
used to enslave humans are now used to oppress animals—on fac-
tory farms, in laboratories, in circuses, and elsewhere. In making
this comparison, PETA is attacking enslavement and oppression at
their roots . . . Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence
causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of
death, the same arrogant, cruel, and brutal taking of life.12

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 The New Abolitionism M 31

As a black American, Gregory’s sensitivity toward animal rights is

exceptional, however, and the overwhelming denunciations of PETA’s
exhibits were symptoms of the very same discriminatory and hierar-
chical outlook that oppressed peoples condemn. It is revealing that in
the copious commentary on the “Animal Liberation” and “Holocaust

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on Your Plate” exhibits, no human rights or social justice advocates
mentioned the unfathomable horrors that animals experience in mod-
ern systems of speciesist oppression. Typically, one hears victimized or
oppressed peoples bemoan how they were “treated like animals”—as if
exploitation, torture, slavery, and mass murder are acceptable so long
as the victims are “only” animals. The point of PETA’s exhibits and of
animal rights advocacy in general is not to reduce humans to animals,
but to elevate animals to full moral status. It is to grant animals basic
rights (such as to their own bodies and liberty) and to treat them as
equal to humans as sentient beings with interests and preferences that
favor joy, freedom, and life over suffering, captivity, and death.
Our aim should be not to objectify or exploit one group’s trag-
edy to dramatize another’s, but rather to underscore and probe the
underlying logic and root causes of all oppression and to contextualize
the enslavement of nonhumans and the animal holocaust with other
modes of organized violence and administrated murder. In this sense,
PETA’s exhibits were not only making valid analogies among various
forms of oppression, but also addressing causal relations in history
between speciesism and other modes of hierarchy and violence.
There are some obvious differences to note, of course. First, for
example, whereas slaves can express their oppression and desires in
human language, animals cannot. More generally, animals, unlike
humans, do not create interest groups, political parties, or complex
sociopolitical systems, although there are definitely traditions, rules,
obligations, expectations, and ordered patterns of behavior in many
animal communities. This is not to say, indeed, that animals do
not have complex and evolved forms of communication, emotions,
thought, and behavior—they do (see chapter 5).
Another salient difference to note is that speciesism is older and
more entrenched in the human mind than racism and other systems

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32 M The Politics of Total Liberation

of exploitation, and so it will be far harder to eliminate than racism

or other forms of hierarchy involving the domination of human over
human. Thus, rallying all humanity behind the cause of animal lib-
eration is a far more ambitious project than human liberation, and
one not likely to be realized in mature or universal form. Humans

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generally have distinct interests and advantages in being oppressors,
and the more difficult human existence becomes, such as in condi-
tions of increasing resource scarcity, the more dependent people will
likely be on exploiting animals.
The argument is not that human and animal experiences and
forms of oppression are identical or that there are no salient differ-
ences to be drawn, but rather that the similarities are more important
than the differences, and they are substantive enough to apply the dis-
course of rights, slavery, holocaust, oppression, and liberation toward
nonhuman animals as well as human animals. The problem lies more
with those offended by efforts to make legitimate claims and analo-
gies, and who cannot accept that all beings have rights—above all,
the right to be free from slavery, torture, and violent murder, and free
to live an autonomous, pleasurable, peaceful existence. The advan-
tages outweigh the disadvantages when these analogies are applied
in historically informed, factually accurate, and culturally sensitive
ways, and we must not accept blanket rejections of the validity of
“animal slavery” and “animal holocaust” terminology, such as voiced
in blatantly speciesist ways.
Abducting Africans from their homeland, wrapping chains around
their bodies, shipping them in cramped and disease-ridden quarters
across continents for weeks or months, branding their skin to mark
them as property, auctioning them as slaves, breaking up their fami-
lies, breeding life for no other purpose than service and labor, exploit-
ing for profit, beating and killing with impunity—all these horrors
and countless others inflicted on human slaves for the New World
began with the exploitation of animals.
Like racism or sexism, speciesism creates a false dichotomy
between one group and another in order to arrange the differences
hierarchically; to justify the domination of the “superior” over the

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 The New Abolitionism M 33

“inferior”; and to claim that this domination is “the natural order”

of the universe, “divinely ordained,” “scripturally sanctified,” or
the outcome of dynamics such as natural selection. Whereas racism
involves biases, discrimination, and hierarchical domination of one
race over another, speciesism, which concerns the biases, discrimi-

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nation, and domination of one species—Homo sapiens—against all
other animal species that exist on earth, is far greater in its magni-
tude. Just as racist regimes endow a given race with privileges over
others based on skin color or other identifiable characteristics, so
too do speciesist societies grant humans absolute power over other
animals simply because of their species. Whereas the racist mind-
set creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the basis of inherit-
able qualities or traits, the speciesist mindset subjugates animals
to human purposes on equally fallacious and arbitrary grounds of
species, by privileging reason, language, and other alleged “unique”
human traits as the sole criteria of moral value. As racism stems from
a hateful racial supremacism, so speciesism draws from a virulent
human supremacism, namely, the arrogant belief that humans have
a natural or God-given right to subjugate animals and use them for
any purpose they devise.
Both racism and speciesism are born out of the need to maintain
an economy and society rooted in bondage. Only through slavery can
the privileged—be they ruling classes, the white minority elite, or
the human populace in general—enjoy conveniences and live com-
fortable lives. Some of the key rationalizations for maintaining both
racist and speciesist slave economies include the claim that the slaves
are well-treated, that they actually like their slavery and prefer it to
freedom, and that they are safer and better off in bondage than in
liberty. As white supremacists had no knowledge of the true nature of
blacks as full-fledged persons, equal to whites in creative potential and
intelligence, so speciesists are ignorant of the emotional, social, and
intellectual complexity of animals (see chapter 5). By corollary, just
as debased conditions of enslavement prevented blacks from realizing
their full human potential, so the real nature of animals is impos-
sible to discern or manifest in conditions of exploitation and intensive

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34 M The Politics of Total Liberation

confinement, such as in factory farms, fur farms, zoos, aquariums, or

other human-constructed environments.
It was not uncommon for apologists of slavery in the United States
to argue that the bondage system was beneficial to slaves because
blacks were biologically unfit for freedom. Employing the same illogic,

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exploiters such as factory farm managers and zookeepers argue that
pigs, calves, and chickens are better off in “managed environments”
where their “needs for food are met” than in their natural environ-
ments defined by “scarcity and predation.” According to racist doc-
trines, blacks did not desire freedom, and lacked the “higher” wants
and needs of European whites. Slave owners who became targets of
black rage, however, might have believed otherwise. The history of
black slavery is the history of black rebellion. Black resistance began
with mutinies on British slave ships before blacks ever set food in
America. Beginning in the 1640s, African slaves organized freedom
societies; sought damages for unlawful detention; circulated petitions;
made pleas to legislatures; engaged in work slowdowns and strikes;
and launched sabotage and arson attacks. They revolted, fled, lib-
erated themselves and others, and overthrew foreign occupiers; they
also murdered white oppressors in ultimate acts of vengeance.
In much the same way, speciesist ideologies hold that animals are
simple biologically programmed organisms or machines that lack com-
plex forms of consciousness in their relations with one another and
the natural world. Ironically, this lack of awareness characterizes the
speciesist mindset, which fails to grasp that animals are no different
from humans in how they suffer in conditions of captivity, or how their
needs for freedom are violated. Moreover, like human slaves, animals
too will flee from, disobey, revolt against, attack, and kill their captors
and tormentors.13 Their rebellion in exploitation settings, such as labo-
ratories, is evident in their resistance to being handled and acts such as
zoo monkeys throwing feces at spectators. More dramatically, circus
elephants, tigers, and orca whales frequently rebel against their con-
finement, boredom, exploitation, and beatings by attacking and often
killing their trainers. The repetitive motions of fur-farmed animals, the
self-mutilation of laboratory animals, and the madness of factory-farmed

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 The New Abolitionism M 35

animals and those in long-term incarceration, such as bear-bile farms,

are signs that oppression violates their every need and instinct. Evident
too is the depression and resignation of animals trapped in “shelters,”
gestation crates, and battery cages, all of whom are too weary and weak
for any display against the total violation of their lives.

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Stolen from the wild; bred and raised in captivity; separated from
their habitat, families and communities; held in cages and by chains
against their will; brutalized and tortured; forced into a life of inten-
sive labor that produces value and profits for exploiters in endless
ways, animals are slaves. The raw materials of exploitative economies,
animals are confined, worked, tortured, and killed for their fur, flesh,
bodily fluids, excretions, labor, and spectacle/entertainment value.
In factory farm conditions that resemble the mechanized production
lines of concentration camps, animals are forced to produce maximal
quantities of meat, milk, and eggs—an intense coercion that takes
place not only through physical confinement but also now through
chemical and genetic manipulation. As typical in Nazi compounds,
this forced and intensive labor terminates in death. In circuses, rodeos,
and aquariums animals have been taken prisoners and are held in cap-
tivity, forced to perform many times daily for the entertainment and
economic value of humans. Vivisection labs imprison animals and
invade their bodies for purposes of product-tests and experiments,
to produce data for research reports necessary to the vivisection and
pharmaceutical industries and vital to their profits.
Quite literally, if animals are prisoners and slaves, they can be freed.
We can thus speak of animal liberation no differently than human
liberation.14 One cannot “enslave,” “dominate,” or “exploit” physical
objects, nor can they be “liberated” or “emancipated.” These terms
apply only to organic life forms that are sentient—to beings who can
experience pleasure and pain, happiness or suffering. Human and non-
human animals share the same evolutionary capacities for joy or suf-
fering, and in this respect they are essentially equal. Like their human
counterparts, nonhuman animals are sentient, conscious, feeling,
and thinking beings endowed with wills, desires, interests, and much
more. They have abilities and potentialities that need satisfaction, and

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36 M The Politics of Total Liberation

complex physical, psychological, and social needs that can only be

fulfilled in their own cultures and communities, within natural set-
tings undisturbed by humans.
It makes perfect sense, therefore, to speak of animal liberation and
to call the non-reformist sectors of the contemporary animal rights

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struggle a new abolitionist movement. The ontological, psychologi-
cal, and political dichotomy should not be between humans and
animals, but rather between sentient beings and non-sentient things.
Humanists who insist that the term “animal liberation” is an oxymo-
ron because animals are not complex, feeling, thinking subjects who
seek and need freedom are completely ignorant about both human
and animal nature; they have confused living subjects with inert
objects, dead matter, and things.
Thus, animals require freedom from human exploitation and free-
dom to self-determination. Nevertheless, since animals cannot always
successfully rebel and liberate themselves, nor organize politically to
assert their rights and demands in the prison house of human society,
they require the intervention of humans. Animal liberation is a move-
ment of and by human animals for nonhuman animals. Where ani-
mals are enslaved, ethically responsible humans arguably have a duty
to liberate them. Answering this call of conscience and duty, animal
rights/liberation groups have sprouted throughout the world, with the
ultimate objective of freeing captive animals from systems of exploita-
tion and overcoming speciesist institutions and mindsets.

The New Abolitionism

Slavery has once again become a focus of social debate and struggle,
as attention broadens from the bondage of human over human to
include the enslavement of human over nonhumans. Consequently,
a new abolitionist movement seeking animal liberation has emerged
as a flashpoint for moral evolution and social transformation. As
people of color and antiracists everywhere continue to struggle for
justice and equality, the moral and political spotlight has expanded
to illuminate a far more ancient, pervasive, intensive, and violent

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 The New Abolitionism M 37

form of slavery in an ongoing global holocaust. Whereas black

scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) said that “the
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,”15
we could state with equal relevance that the problem of the twenty-
first century is the problem of the species line. For the fate of ani-

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mals, society, and the environment are inseparably interconnected,
and the war humans have waged on animals is increasingly a war
waged on themselves.
Just as nineteenth-century abolitionists sought to awaken people
to the greatest moral issue of the day involving the slavery of millions
in a society professing universal rights, so too the new abolitionists
endeavor to enlighten others about the plight and rights of nonhuman
animals. Black slavery raised fundamental questions about the mean-
ing of capitalism, American “democracy,” and modern values. Current
discussion regarding animal slavery provokes critical examination
of a collective human psyche damaged by violence, arrogance, and
alienation, while emphasizing the urgent need for a new sensibility
rooted in respect for all life and connectedness to the biocommu-
nity. Whereas racial standpoint theory illuminates core pathologies
of modernity in the critique of colonialism and imperialism, so the
animal standpoint exposes the destructive dynamics of the violent
dominator cultures that have emerged and spread throughout the
globe over the last 10,000 years (see chapter 1).
The shift from liberating human slaves to emancipating animal
slaves is a continuous and coherent struggle against slavery in modern
society. It advances a positive aspect of human nature that manifests
in increasingly inclusive ethical systems, the universalization of rights,
and thereby the expansion of liberties, democracy, equality, and com-
munity (see chapter 6). Animal liberation is an integral part of the
modern antislavery movement, and it is the next logical development
in moral evolution. Globally, developed human societies are verging
potentially toward a similar stage in moral debate over the human
treatment of animals, as some Western societies were two centuries
ago regarding the moral and legal status of African slaves. Whereas
Western societies increasingly have discerned that it is prejudiced,

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38 M The Politics of Total Liberation

illogical, and unacceptable to devalue based on ethnic and gender

bias, they—and other cultures as well—are beginning to learn how
arbitrary and wrong are the justifications for the tyrannical rule of
human over nonhuman animals.
Then as now, there is great social turmoil and division surround-

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ing efforts to recognize the rights of enslaved beings and to sever, not
lengthen or polish, their chains. In the same way that white abolition-
ists worked across racial lines to create new forms of solidarity, so the
new abolitionists reach across species lines to defend the defenseless
and expand the moral community. John Brown and other white abo-
litionists were condemned as fanatics and race traitors in their time;
similarly, animal advocates today are often vilified as extremists, ter-
rorists, misanthropes, lunatics, and species traitors. Whereas the state
in the nineteenth-century America frequently compromised with
the South by enacting laws that protected slave-owner interests and
required escaped slaves to be returned to their rightful “owner,” so too
the global corporate-state-security apparatus has come down on the
new antislavery struggle with draconian “eco-terrorist” laws to defend
animal and nature exploitation industries.16
Parallel to the nineteenth-century-abolitionist movement that
defined itself against both slavery and reformist responses to it, the
new abolitionist movement challenges not only the enslavement of
animals, but also the welfarist approach that seeks only to ameliorate,
not eliminate, the institutions and practices of animal exploitation.
Because welfarists only seek to regulate the exploitation and slaughter
of billions of animals, they fail to challenge the legitimacy of oppres-
sive institutions, laws, practices, and actions, and the speciesist ideol-
ogy underlying all of it. Whereas some welfarists accept animal rights
philosophy, albeit problematically (in that they believe that reformist
tactics will ultimately lead to abolition), others share with oppressors
the speciesist outlook that animals are resources for human use and
benefit. Such welfarists thus reject the language of “animal rights”
and its egalitarian meaning altogether in favor of the hierarchical dis-
course of “human responsibility” toward other animals they exploit.
Welfarism legitimates any human use of animals, the only caveat

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 The New Abolitionism M 39

being that people should not be “cruel” to animals or cause “unneces-

sary harm.” This feeble pseudo-“ethical” view fails to grasp that any
form of captivity, confinement, and enslavement is inherently cruel
and injurious.
Thus, the new abolitionists reject welfarist reforms as wrong in

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principle and practice; in defiant contrast, they stress the rights of
animals and the need for their complete emancipation from all forms
of human domination. Nineteenth-century abolitionists renounced
the idea of “humane treatment” of slaves as nonsensical, given that the
institution of slavery is inherently cruel and dehumanizing. Similar
talk of “humane killing” of animals is equally absurd, as there is no
“humane” way to steal and violate an animal’s life. No accurately
aimed bolt shot through the head of a sentient being warrants pretense
to any kind of moral dignity or “responsibility,” whatever “improve-
ment” such reforms might be over standard industry practices of dis-
membering animals while they are still fully conscious and aware. The
act of killing itself—unnecessary and unjustifiable—is inhumane and
wrong. Just as there is no humane rape or humane pedophilia, there
is no humane animal slaughter, and the entire institution of confine-
ment, exploitation, and slaughter is an abomination.
The new abolitionism is evident in the hunt saboteur movement
that emerged in England in 1963. It is manifest in the “open rescue”
campaigns (where activists free animals from factory farms without
causing property destruction or hiding their identity), such as began
in Australia in the 1980s and later spread to countries including the
United States, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and elsewhere. Also, problemati-
cally (see below), it includes vegans who boycott animal products for
ethical reasons, and consider themselves abolitionists on the grounds
that they do not personally participate in the most significant cause of
animal suffering and slaughter, and seek to shutdown the meat, dairy,
and egg industries by participating in a mass withdrawal of consumer
demand.
A vivid example of the new abolitionism is the Animal Liberation
Front (ALF). The ALF was born in England in 1976 as an off-
shoot of hunt saboteur groups who used numerous nonviolent direct

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40 M The Politics of Total Liberation

action tactics to disrupt and stop foxhunts. The ALF took the same
direct action philosophy many steps further by destroying hunters’
property and applying sabotage including arson tactics against a
broad spectrum of exploiters, including commercial breeders, vivi-
sectors, the fur industry, factory farms, foie gras producers, meat

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suppliers, and fast food chains. The ALF does not wait for some
indefinite time in the future when human oppressors would become
enlightened or laws would be passed against animal slavery, as they
have no faith in a speciesist corporate-controlled state dominated by
animal industry interests. They choose their targets and strike at
animal exploiters when and where they can.
Often operating under the cover of darkness, wearing balaclavas
or ski masks, organized in underground decentralized cells of a few
people, ALF activists employ two principle means toward the goal of
animal liberation. First, the ALF enters into buildings housing animal
prisoners in order to release them (e.g., mink and coyotes) or rescue
them (e.g., cats, dogs, mice, and guinea pigs). They are liberating, not
“stealing,” animals, because animals should not be considered law-
ful commodities or property for someone to “own.” Second, they use
sabotage tactics to strike at the economic heart of exploiters and make
it less profitable or impossible to exploit animals. The ALF insists that
its methods are nonviolent because they only attack the property of
exploiters, and never the exploiters themselves, as they rightly insist
that the real violence is what exploiters inflict on animals. As of yet,
there are no Nat Turners or John Browns in the animal liberation
movement, but they may well be forthcoming and would not be with-
out just cause and historical precedent.
Now active in dozens of countries, from England and the United
States to Russia and Mexico, ALF activists have cost the animal exploi-
tation industries hundreds of millions of dollars. Along with the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF), the ALF occupied the top positions of the US
government’s “domestic terrorism” list in the post-9/11 era. Whereas
corporate society, the state, and mass media brand the ALF as crimi-
nals and terrorists, the ALF shares important similarities with some
of the great freedom fighters of the past two centuries, and is akin to

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 The New Abolitionism M 41

contemporary peace and justice movements in its quest to end vio-

lence, repression, and discrimination against other sentient beings.
In the context of American history alone, the ALF belongs to a
long and noble tradition of direct action, law-breaking, and militant
uprisings, from the Boston Tea Party and the suffragettes to the civil

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rights and anti-war movements. The men and women of the ALF
pattern themselves after Nazi resistance movements that liberated war
prisoners and destroyed equipment—such as weapons, railways, and
gas ovens—used to torture and kill millions of Jews and other victims.
Similarly, by providing veterinary treatment and homes for many of
the animals whom they liberate via vast underground networks, the
ALF is a superb contemporary extension of the Underground Railroad
that funneled black slaves to freedom through clandestine support
channels.

From Pseudo-abolition to Radical Liberation

In the early 1980s, a new animal rights movement with abolitionist
goals glowed bright with potential. The cause of animal protection-
ism, which became a bona fide social movement in the early nine-
teenth century, had made the huge leap from the utilitarian welfarist
positions as expressed so influentially in Peter Singer’s (deceptively
titled) book, Animal Liberation (1975) to Regan’s abolitionist work,
The Case for Animal Rights (1983). In just a few years, however, the
light faded to black as corruption, opportunism, and bureaucracy
snuffed out the promise of genuine change based on an uncompro-
mising rights/abolitionist approach. Soon, it became obvious that
large mainstream organizations such as PETA, the Humane Society
of the United States (HSUS), the Royal Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), and the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had become entrenched
bureaucracies and corporate behemoths.
Increasingly co-opted and compromised, large animal rights orga-
nizations frequently worked with, rather than against, animal exploi-
tation industries in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing

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42 M The Politics of Total Liberation

animal holocaust.17 Since the 1990s, for instance, PETA has pressured
McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken to adopt
“less cruel and more profitable” slaughter methods, while HSUS
aggressively campaigned for so-called humane meat, and the RSPCA
extolled the virtues of “humanely” slaughtered “freedom food.” PETA

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presents awards to industry collaborationists who design “humane”
slaughterhouse architecture, and both PETA and HSUS sought seats
on the board of directors of giant meat production corporations to
“influence” their policies toward more welfare-friendly standards.
It is often hard to tell the difference between corporate propaganda
and welfarist promotion and, in fact, they have become inseparable.
Gone is the moral clarity and non-compromising politics of the US
abolitionists in the nineteenth century, where talk of happy lynch-
ing or certification of kind beatings would have been unimaginable.
Meanwhile, a renewed effort to recover abolitionist goals emerged as
a response to the co-optation of animal rights, but unfortunately it
proved to be a false heir to the militancy and pluralism of the nine-
teenth century tradition.
In direct response to the reformism and opportunism of bureau-
cratic “welfarism,” another type of abolitionist movement emerged
that built on the rights position of Regan and anchored abolition-
ism in a vegan lifestyle and pacifist worldview. Beginning in the mid-
1990s, Gary Francione, professor of law at Rutgers University, exposed
the duplicity of “new welfarist” approaches, such as articulated by
PETA, that in theory espouse animal rights positions, but in prac-
tice pursue welfarist policies.18 This orientation, Francione argues, is
incoherent and dilutes the meaning of rights. Welfarism in any form,
he insists, works to the benefit of industries and thus increases, rather
than decreases, the demand for animal-derived products by consumers
whose tenuous “moral conscience” is appeased in the knowledge that
the animals on their plate were treated and killed “humanely.”
Francione tapped into and mobilized a growing dissatisfaction
with corporate reformism and sparked an emerging vegan abolitionist
movement, one rooted in an ethical critique of all exploitative uses
of animals in society while abstaining from consuming any animal

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 The New Abolitionism M 43

products (be they food, clothing, or prescription drugs). While

Francione advanced a forceful critique of welfarism, he proved to be a
reactionary figure largely bereft of political vision and devoid of viable
alternatives to reformist policies.
As a symptom of a consumerist, individualist, and depoliticized

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US culture, Francione’s fatuous panacea for a multitude of intrac-
table social and ecological crises is to “go vegan.” Francione advanced
from marginal movement critic to dogmatic cult leader by peddling
simple “solutions” to complex problems, and easily attracting adher-
ents of the same apolitical and delusionary mindset. Francione’s fol-
lowers see themselves as missionaries whose task is to save the world
by spreading the Gospel of Veganism throughout the Internet and
blogosphere. As the case with all fundamentalists, these cult-like
believers insist that they possess the Truth while all others struggle
in error. For them, the world is black and white, answers are cut
and dry, and complexity is reduced to the Procrustean bed of rigid
“either/or oppositions,” rather than enlivened through the dialectical
logic of “both/and” possibilities.
In Francione’s view, the animal advocacy movement is threatened
by two equally undesirable extremes. On one side, Francione states,
the reformism of corporate welfare groups such as PETA, HSUS, etc.
dilutes the integrity of the animal rights message, sells animals out at
every turn, and hinders abolitionist efforts to promote species equal-
ity and to regulate, not eradicate, exploitation. On the other side,
however, Francione believes that radical “extremist” groups such as
the ALF use counterproductive “violent” tactics that, he alleges, fail
to save animals, alienate the public, and ignore the root problem of
eliminating speciesism through educational means (see chapter 3).
Trying to steer between the Scylla of reformism and the Charybdis
of radicalism, Francione attempts to chart a third way, championing
nonviolent vegan education as the only possible way to advance aboli-
tionist goals. There is no alternative, he argues, but obedience to law,
peaceful vegan outreach, and a focus on individuals and consump-
tion habits over the institutions and production imperatives of global
capitalism.

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44 M The Politics of Total Liberation

Despite passing references to capitalism, state power, and com-

monalities of oppression in hierarchical societies, Francione ultimately
pushes a simplistic apolitical, quiescent “go vegan” approach pitched
to a marginal white, affluent, and privileged Western audience. In
their vegan outreach efforts, Francione, and the global vegan move-

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ment generally, rarely engage people of color, working-class families,
the poor, or peoples in China and India—the world’s most popu-
lous and rapidly modernizing nations whose insatiable appetites for
meat pose massive problems for vegan abolitionism and, indeed, the
planet. Francione thereby reinforces the abysmal elitist, classist, and,
racist stigmas attached to animal advocacy since the early nineteenth
century, and he further isolates veganism and animal rights from pro-
gressive movements and the social mainstream.
Unable to articulate a structural theory of oppression, Francione
exculpates capitalism—its destructive logic and disastrous impact on
humans, animals, and the environment—to lay the entire burden of
blame and responsibility for change on individual consumers. He
identifies the problem as one of individual demand for, not institu-
tional supply of, animal products. Certainly, individuals need to take
responsibility for their choices and the consequences of their actions,
such as by engaging the ecological and ethical imperative to become
vegan. However, it is also crucial to recognize the formidable power
of corporations, the state, mass media, schools, and other institutions
in peoples’ lives, and to appreciate the constraints imposed by poverty,
class, and social conditioning. Of course individuals must change, but
so, too, must institutions; yet neither will change if our focus is limited
solely to dietary education and our pedagogical strategies are flawed
and feeble. Francione’s rigid focus on consumer demand fails to grasp
the obvious point that supply stimulates demand through such means
as mass media, advertising, and government subsidies. Unfortunately,
such pivotal political realities fall outside of Francione’s reified asocial
outlook.
The corollary of Francione’s focus on individual ethical choices is
his antipathy to social and political action of any kind, hostility to
militants, and silence regarding the most pressing social and ecological

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 The New Abolitionism M 45

issues of the day. Francione fails to realize that independent psycho-

logical and ethical change does not automatically bring about large-
scale social transformations needed for creating viable democratic and
ecological cultures. He also is oblivious to the assimilating nature of
market structures that easily absorb veganism into capitalist ideolo-

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gies and market mechanisms, such that vegan abolitionism takes on
an ideologically and economically stabilizing role rather than being
an oppositional force.
This “abolitionist approach” has no grasp of the totality and sys-
temic logic of capitalism. It offers little else than a tepid political
reformism which is no more effective in changing the overall social
relations of domination than “welfarism” is in breaking the chains of
speciesist oppression. Unable to uncover the root causes of hierarchi-
cal domination and ecological crisis, blaming individuals over insti-
tutions, Francione is hardly in a position to understand the problems
let alone to offer potential solutions. Thus, the vague, elitist, asocial
“vegan education” approach is hopeless in the face of such formidable
forces. Yet Francione and flock lack even the most rudimentary ele-
ments of a theory and practice of education; this is more than a small
problem, given their fetishized focus.
Oblivious to the tipping point this planet is about to cross with
global warming (see the Conclusion), they promote slow, incremental
change amidst rapid ecological breakdown. They foster fantasies that
assume an infinite amount of time for change within finite condi-
tions, as set by resource scarcity, overpopulation, species extinction,
climate change, and systemic ecological collapse. Francione, like most
of the global vegan movement, lives in a deep state of denial and delu-
sion about the urgency of ecological crisis and is dangerously naive in
his faith in the singular efficacy of conjectural education and moral
persuasion apart from direct action, mass confrontation, civil disobe-
dience, alliance politics, and struggle for radical change.
Incredibly, as global social and ecological crises rapidly mount
with aggressive neoliberalism, class exploitation, overpopulation, and
relentless pillaging of the planet, Francione ignores the most crucial
events of the day. Clearly, these complex and catastrophic problems

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upset the vapid “go vegan” message and the facile optimism rampant
in the vegan movement, which is continuously celebrating its delu-
sional progress and victories amidst global crisis. Yet for every person
who becomes vegan, a thousand flesh-eaters arise in China, India, and
Indonesia. For every new vegan product on the supermarket shelves,

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another hundred species die, and for every vegan bistro built, another
ecosystem collapses.
Francione champions animal liberation, not total liberation; he
denounces the property status of animals without a serious critique of
capitalism, the state, property relations, and commodification dynam-
ics in general. He condemns animal exploitation, but never probes
into the underlying mechanistic and instrumentalist attitudes, such
as inform the vast domination of technics over society and nature. He
wants the abolition of animal exploitation, but not capitalism, market
domination, and hierarchy in general. Francione does not confront
the state, but rather works in and through it, legitimating it as a tool
of capitalist and bureaucratic domination.
Pacifist liberal lifestyle veganism is another dead-end and ground-
less hope, completely inadequate to address the unprecedented chal-
lenge of a planet in crisis. Francione’s approach is complacent, detached
from troubling realities, and irrelevant to the massive and complex
struggle necessary to forestall biological meltdown and ecological
catastrophe. Francione presides over a pseudo-abolitionist movement,
a bourgeois white elitist, individualist, consumerist lifestyle vegan-
ism that is powerless to change anything in society. Ultimately, what
Francione offers is not a viable alternative to welfarism, but a theory
divorced from any practice in the form of significant education or
concrete abolitionist campaigns. Consequently, Francione has more
similarities than differences with the corporate welfare movement. All
speak exclusively to elite, mostly white audiences; they pursue single-
issue reformist policies and non-confrontational politics; they espouse
pacifism exclusively and denounce justifiable sabotage as “violent”;
they eschew structural critiques of capital and the state; and they seek
glacial, piecemeal change in a world that is rapidly disintegrating into
unprecedented social and ecological crisis.

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 The New Abolitionism M 47

African-American educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915)

rejected the program of the abolitionists and the goal of achiev-
ing “equality” with whites in favor of incremental welfare reforms.
Where abolitionists and thinkers like Du Bois emphasized the need
for ceaseless agitation, Washington urged accommodation with

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the Jim Crow apartheid system. Rather than challenge segrega-
tion, he emphasized the importance of black education for advance-
ment within a racist hierarchy. Hence, Francione is the Booker T.
Washington of the new “abolitionism,” promoting gradual social
reforms, stressing accommodation to the system, and focusing on
“educating” individuals rather than transforming institutions. Yet, as
Joan Dunayer notes, “The relationship between [new] abolitionists
and enslavers must be adversarial, as it was with regard to African-
American enslavement.”19
To the extent Francione has managed to monopolize the meaning
of “abolitionism,” the concept has become so diluted and domesti-
cated, so defanged and declawed, so drained of oppositional energy
and devoid of political vision, that the word itself is arguably debased
and ruined. Just as Francione’s “abolitionist approach” is a major
regression from the action-oriented pacifism of the Gandhi and King
traditions, so it is a pale shadow and caricature of the abolitionist
tradition to which it claims allegiance. It is a quiescent, housebroken,
apolitical form of consumption by and for docile citizens. Veganism
is the new opiate of the people.
We need a far richer and more radical concept of abolitionism that
draws from and revitalizes the power of the nineteenth-century anti-
human slavery movement that erupted in the United States, one that
returns to and renews its radical roots, pluralist tactics, and alliance
politics orientation. In contrast to Francione’s pseudo-abolitionism
that offers nothing but apolitical veganism and new consumer prac-
tices, I urge a total liberationist alternative. Against the false option
that Francione imposes between welfarism and vegan abolitionism,
I advocate a holistic approach that integrates veganism and animal
liberation into a broader political project that seeks the abolition of
capitalism and hierarchical domination generally.

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48 M The Politics of Total Liberation

Since this alternative model is richer, multidimensional, and far

more political in its scope, it escapes the dismal marginalization of
animal advocacy and veganism, in order to pursue novel and dynamic
organizing possibilities. Unless tied to alliance politics and radical
social and environmental movements, the animal rights movement is

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a single-issue reformism and veganism is reduced to just another form
of bourgeois individualism and capitalist consumerism. Profound in
moral, social, and ecological implications, animal rights and vegan-
ism are crucial necessary steps for liberation politics, but hardly in
and of themselves sufficient conditions for revolutionary change. The
profound importance of veganism and animal rights can be recog-
nized by a social majority only in a broad political context, and only
in alliance with other struggles can their revolutionary potential be
realized (see chapter 4).
It is not just the content of Francione’s positions that I challenge,
but also the very form and method of his approach. We cannot prog-
ress in the struggle for liberation or hope to be politically relevant,
unless we abandon Francione’s dualistic, either/or logic for a dialecti-
cal both/and logic, one that abandons bogus dichotomies and false
oppositions. Thus, we need education and agitation, mainstream and
militant tactics, peaceful resistance and confrontation and sabotage,
and aboveground/legal and underground/illegal means of weakening
speciesist capitalism.
The pluralist and contextualist method central to my position (see
chapter 3) absorbs the partial value and validity of vegan abolition-
ism, but without its debilitating dogmatism, denialism, apoliticism,
and pacifism. This approach is far truer to the diverse and militant
nineteenth-century movement that emphasized the importance of
relentless struggle, bold confrontation, and militant resistance. It
renounces the naïve belief that one can win significant change through
a corporate-dominated society and legal system. It abandons single-
issue fetishism and the complacency of class and racial privilege in
favor of diversity, solidarity, and common interests. It initiates bridge
building with the economically disadvantaged, the politically mar-
ginalized, and the globally oppressed. It confronts the growing social

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 The New Abolitionism M 49

and ecological crises that threaten all life on this planet. It directly
engages the problems posed by rapidly modernizing giants such as
China, India, and Indonesia (in terms of their soaring rates of meat
consumption, energy use, population growth, and so on). It recap-
tures the militant spirit of nineteenth-century abolitionism while also

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drawing from contemporary theories and political movements. It
also can reinvigorate a movement sold-out by corporate opportunists
and paralyzed by pacifists suffering from what can appropriately be
described as the Stockholm syndrome.
Thus, I advance a multidimensional total liberation position that
incorporates the following: (1) it defends the legitimacy of militant
direct action tactics such as liberation and, where necessary, sabotage;
(2) it views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and
destructive system, and regards the state as a corrupt tool whose func-
tion is to advance the economic and military interests of the global
elite and to repress opposition to their agenda; (3) it has a broad, criti-
cal understanding of how different forms of oppression are interre-
lated, seeing human, animal, and earth liberation as inseparable;
(4) it promotes an anticapitalist alliance politics with other rights,
justice, and liberation movements that share the common goal of dis-
mantling all systems of hierarchical domination and remaking soci-
eties according to new democratization and ecological imperatives;
and (5) it overcomes the limitations of humanist “progressive” and
“radical” movements in hopes of awakening political masses to the
urgent necessity of veganism and animal liberation for human libera-
tion and, indeed, for human survival and planetary integrity.

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 CHAPTER 3

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The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of
Militant Direct Action

G
lobally, the vegan and animal advocacy movements are in
crisis, one so profound that it has evaded critical attention.
As global social and ecological problems deepen, and the
animal holocaust claims billions more victims each year, the vegan
and animal advocacy movements grow correspondingly weaker, not
stronger in response.
Despite the precariousness of these movements on many fronts,
vegans and animal advocates are in serious denial. Rather than a sober
recognition of their weaknesses, losses, and marginalization, many
are convinced that their movements are ascendant forces and that the
renaissance in diet and ethics they seek to advance will bring social
enlightenment, global peace, and ecological healing and balance.
Vegans and animal advocates exaggerate the growth in their num-
bers and the significance of minor reforms, as they simultaneously
ignore the global picture and its ominous trends. They underestimate
corporate and state domination, and large organizations such as the
HSUS and PETA are integrated into the system and often collaborate
with exploitation industries to promote “humane meat” and “humane
slaughter” (see chapter 2).
To overturn arbitrary power systems, therefore, one must iden-
tify the ideologies, myths, norms, and values that validate social

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52 M The Politics of Total Liberation

domination, block critical thinking, stifle political resistance, and

bind the oppressed to their oppressors. Thus, the rationalist ideology
champions the Socratic-Enlightenment/liberal notion of humanity as
rational beings who do wrong only when they do not know what is
right. Similarly, the pluralist democracy ideology depicts the capitalist

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state as a neutral arbiter among conflicting wills, one that gives all
interests equal consideration and voice. Finally, the pacifist ideology
views the state as open to reforms and understands human beings
to be fundamentally good and amenable to moral persuasion and
ethical conduct. Thus, pacifists conclude, while civil disobedience
may be a necessary catalyst for change, there is never a rationale for
using “violence”—a complex concept that few adequately define or
contextualize.
This chapter focuses on pacifism as a problematic moral and politi-
cal philosophy that perpetuates power relations and violence, in con-
tradiction to its stated aims. While critical of nearly all interpretations
of pacifism as dogmatic, limiting, and weakening, I trace the degen-
eration of the action-oriented and confrontational pacifist tradition of
Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to the timid, apolitical, and
domesticated passivist approach taken by many contemporary vegan,
animal rights and other social change advocates. In contrast to dog-
matic or “fundamentalist” pacifism, reality is complex, ambiguous,
paradoxical, dilemma-ridden, and often undecideable, and I thereby
reject absolutist truths, universal values, and reductionist models.
Against fundamentalist pacifism, I advance a pragmatic, contextu-
alist, and pluralist method that abandons attachment to principles
for achieving results. I reject totalizing viewpoints to emphasize
differences and specific contexts, and I abandon dogmas that limit
resistance tactics in favor of a pluralistic stand that maximizes the
possibilities for struggle and progressive change.
This approach further exposes the flaws of pacifism while absorb-
ing its partial truths and limited insights in a broader context; it nei-
ther opposes nonviolence nor fetishizes violence but rather opts for
whichever approach works best in specific situations. The entire range
of militant tactics, including physical force, is defended as legitimate

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 53

and necessary responses to the total war against all life and the earth
as a whole.1 Also, I invoke a principle I call “extensional self-defense”
to justify cases where animal activists—the self-appointed “voices of
the voiceless”—have a moral duty to use any (intelligent and effective)
means necessary to effectively defend animals from violent assault, as

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animals under attack themselves would if they could.

The Fallacies of Pacifism

Vague and therefore often misleading, the term “pacifism” has pro-
voked considerable confusion over its meaning, as it connotes the
opposite of its intended use. More accurately termed “nonviolent
resistance” or “nonviolent civil disobedience,” pacifism is, in fact,
a dynamic, active, and assertive opposition to violence, oppression,
and injustice. Pacifism has acquired a negative connotation of inac-
tion; this is not only due to a literal interpretation of its meaning, but
also because of the precipitous decline in the public sphere, democracy,
and political activity of a citizenry transformed into a mass consumer
base. This is a regressive development, conspicuous in the lifestyle
of veganism and the single-issue animal advocacy movement (see
chapter 2). Dissatisfied with the connotations of “pacifism,” Gandhi
coined the term “satyagraha,” or “soul force,” to stress the active power
of ethically principled resistance—one that seeks to counter violence
with nonviolence, to overcome hatred with love, and to transcend
injustice with justice.
For Gandhi and King, pacifism entailed dramatic confrontations
and bold actions against oppression and injustice, such as involved
protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience. Hardly tailored for
the weak, timid, or cowardly, Gandhi and King emphasized that
nonviolent resistance demanded extraordinary courage, risk, and
strength to stand up against violent assault and repression without
using weapons or physical aggression of any kind, even in self-defense.
Both directly provoked and challenged systems of oppression in order
to spotlight injustice, sharpen conflicts surrounding it, awaken the
dormant masses, and to wear oppressors down with the capacity of

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resisting peoples to endure suffering. Since power cannot be main-

tained except through the consent and cooperation of the oppressed,
they taught the need for noncompliance and noncooperation with
unjust laws. When the law is wrong, and contradicts ethical prin-
ciples, one has a duty to defy that law, to pressure the state to rectify

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injustice and end oppression.
A hegemonic ideology among contemporary social movements,
nonviolence has been fully embraced by vegans and animal advo-
cates. Many envision themselves creating a community of peace and
respect deeper than anything yet conceived, far surpassing the lim-
its of humanism. The assumption is that one cannot reach the goal
of a peaceful world without peaceful means, an argument invariably
“sealed” with non-contextual clichés such as “Violence only begets
violence,” “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” and “The
ends do not justify the means.” Every platitude is framed as a time-
less and universal truth, and counterexamples are never considered
for the clear reason that there are devastating refutations of such glib
universal claims.
Here pacifism truly becomes, literally, passivism—a degenerate,
enfeebled form of pacifism, one that replaces courage with fear and
public presence with private retreat. Passivism avoids mass protests and
civil disobedience to prevent alienating public opinion. It abandons
agitation for “education,” fragments groups into isolated individuals,
flees from the streets to the sanctuary of the home, and abandons the
public space of real land for the cyberspace of the Internet. Just as they
corrupted the concept and movement for “abolitionism,” so too have
predominant vegan pacifists co-opted the notion and history of direct
action. Whereas “direct action” refers to potentially dangerous street
confrontations, civil disobedience, and protesting against oppressors,
vegan pacifists have opportunistically redefined it to designate indi-
vidual ethical choices and consumer behavior, for instance, that based
on boycotting “animal products.”
The “resistance” of vegan passivists manifests itself in “political”
actions such as posting and “liking” comments on Facebook, trad-
ing recipes, baking cookies for potlucks, blogging to the converted,

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 55

and launching sectarian attacks on other vegans. Shifting focus from

corporations and the state to consumers, from unjust institutions to
false consciousness, passivism bypasses critiques of institutionalized
power structures and logic to focus on individual consumers whose
“demands”—falsely abstracted from supply-side manipulation—are

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singled out as the root of the problem (see chapter 2). This approach
not only exonerates the state and capitalist institutions—with their
repressive legislations and destruction of peoples, biodiversity, and
ecosystems of all kinds—but also absolves animal exploitation indus-
tries from moral crimes of the highest order, including the slaugh-
ter of billions of innocents annually. It occludes the structural logic
of capital, ignores how supply stimulates demand, and nullifies the
importance of targeting industries and states to focus instead on the
amorphous and sole task of changing consumer behavior through
“education.”
Hence, on this liberal model, the “solution” is not institutional
change and revolution, but consumer education with respect to veg-
anism. One cannot miss the bold contrast between these movements
that piously quote Gandhi and King in words, but never follow their
teachings in practice. Civil disobedience is not part of the lexicon
or tactics of contemporary vegan and animal advocacy movements,
let alone animal liberation and property destruction. Rather, these are
condemned as “violent” and terrorist” in language taken straight out
of the playbook of the corporate-state-security complex.
The most egregious example of internalizing the state superego,
and becoming compliant rather than defiant, is the vegan “abo-
litionist approach” associated with professor Gary Francione (see
chapter 2). The consummate elitist, liberal, apolitical, single-issue
vegan, Francione not only vehemently denounces the “closed res-
cue” tactics of the ALF, but also the Gandhi-friendly “open rescue”
approach (which overtly breaks into factory farms, causing minimal
property damage, to rescue a small number of animals and to docu-
ment conditions of abuse). Francione disavows all civil disobedience
and law-breaking tactics, renounces protests or demonstrations, rejects
all legislative campaigns (even at the local level), mocks “single-issue

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campaigns” (such as anti-vivisection), and literally renounces every-

thing but “vegan education,” which is but a hollow mantra that sub-
stitutes for real thinking and action.
Fundamentalist pacifists do not engage in genuine argumentation,
but rather assert claims without rational support. Their rhetorical

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strategy is not to think and reason for themselves in a dialogic process,
but rather to quote Gandhi, King, the Dali Lama, and other sanctified
authorities—usually out of context. As a dogmatic and authoritarian
discourse, fundamentalist pacifism dresses its language in the garb of
truth, not interpretation or perspective. It is theology secularized, and
spoken with the reassurance of the “True Believer.”2 Even a superficial
acquaintance with this sector of the contemporary vegan movement
generally reveals a preachy, judgmental, and arrogant tone informing
a religious faith in veganism as a panacea to the world’s problems. As
religion is often hostile to science, so fundamentalist vegans—many
of whom boast secular and atheistic views—typically ignore the facts
of science, ecology, and social theory that upset their facile schemes,
naïve optimism, and one-dimensional vision. Fundamentalists rigidly
adhere to inflexible principles because to admit exceptions is to allow
complexity, precisely what fundamentalists seek to avoid. So it is an
either/or and all-or-nothing equation for their mindset, as so-called
violence is always wrong and their concept of nonviolence is always
right, both in principle and in consequence.
This is seductively logical and deceptively simple, as indeed is
virtually every pacifist argument against force, or “violence.” For if
rational arguments and moral persuasion have little effect on animal
exploiters and the animal holocaust industry generally, and speciesist
propaganda techniques that exploit emotions rather than target the
mind are far more powerful than vegan education methods, then
evidently people are not as educable as pacifists claim. Hence is it not
logical to conclude that methods that are more forceful are needed
to stop the massive assault on animals? If the state and security com-
plex are tools of industries that are heavily lobbied and paid to pass
draconian laws against activists, then there are further grounds to
believe that direct action is necessary to protect animals from violent

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 57

assault and mass slaughter. Finally, if it turns out that militant

direct action tactics and so-called violence often stop violence, in
cases where boycotts, education, and legislation are dismally slow
and hopelessly ineffective, then the moral coherence model (one can
only achieve nonviolent ends through nonviolent means) fails and

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pacifism collapses.
Education and moral persuasion can often be potent forces of
change, but the efficacy of rational and ethical appeals is greatly
exaggerated. Despite Socratic and Rousseauian visions of humans
as essentially rational, good, and compassionate, the record is quite
clear: humans—all too often—are evil, xenophobic, tribalist, sadistic,
selfish, and irrational, and the history of Homo sapiens is largely a sor-
did tale of violence, greed, genocide, and environmental destruction.
People are not moved by fact or reason as much as they are animated
by aggressive urges and manipulated at the unconscious and emotional
level by propaganda techniques.
The standard education model relies on a false, idealist, and ratio-
nalist view of human nature. It denies the primacy of irrational forces
and drives, and the sadistic pleasure and thrill that people such as
hunters derive from killing animals. It ignores the identity invest-
ment humans have as members of the “superior” species for whom all
other animals are mere means to their ends. It dismisses the psycho-
logical mechanisms used to resist change, rationalize behaviors, and
avoid unpleasant realities. It negates the operations of detachment and
compartmentalization that facilitate indifference to shocking cruel-
ties and unfathomable levels of mass slaughter of animals. Lastly, it
seems oblivious to the power of propaganda and manipulation, to
the resultant resistance to change, and to the overall denial of ratio-
nal dialogue and compassionate appeals, especially where economic
interests are involved. When humans have a financial stake in a tradi-
tion, institution, or industry that is exploitative and violent—such as
Canadian sealers, Japanese whalers, or African rhino and elephant
poachers—their attachment to irrational drives, cruelty, greed, and
selfishness is more implacable and tenacious than ever. Despite the
epistemological revolution sparked by Nietzsche and Freud over a

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century ago (see chapter 5), pacifists cling to a false theory of human
nature that ignores seven million years of primate evolution that pre-
dated our emergence as “modern humans,” as Homo sapiens sapiens,
45,000 years ago.
Thus, where exploiters will not voluntarily surrender their power

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over others, ending oppression and advancing liberatory goals requires
a more forceful approach that moral persuasion and education can
offer. Throughout the history of modern democratic struggles, moral
progress has occurred not through civilizing the elites, who then volun-
tarily relinquish or share their power, but mostly through one kind of
coercion or another—be it Gandhi’s soul force (satyagraha), sabotage,
physical force, or armed struggle and revolution.
If not ignorant of historical complexity, pacifist fundamentalists
represent events in simplistic, one-sided, and tendentious ways. On
their distorted view, nonviolence always advances social progress and
violence, however justified, perennially impedes it. Their modus ope-
randi is to argue that social progress in the modern world was the
result of nonviolent tactics and these alone. While nonviolent strategies
have often been used creatively against oppressive governments and
dictatorships, and dramatic social change has sometimes come about
nonviolently (e.g., the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia in 1989
and the “singing revolution” in Estonia during 1987–91), pacifism
has also failed miserably in numerous conflicts. Throughout Central
America, in the twentieth century, nonviolent protests were drowned
in blood by fascist juntas serving US interests, and Gandhi’s call for
nonviolent resistance to German Nazism demonstrated that nonvio-
lent resistance alone is futile, and cannot work in conditions where
oppressors are ruthless in their use of violence to suppress dissent.
Invariably, “victories” attributed to nonviolent struggles have been
taken entirely out of context to ignore the important role of resis-
tance and a variety of forces militating for change. Gandhi did not
gain the independence of India alone, as a violent insurgency was
also attacking British forces. Martin Luther King Jr. did not win civil
rights achievements unaided, as Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and
thousands of rioters setting cities aflame brought strong pressure for

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change, while King was positioned as a moderate and the lesser of

many evils. Nor was the American peace movement decisive in end-
ing the war in Vietnam. President Nixon mocked them, and esca-
lated the war even as opposition to it increased. The United States
fled Vietnam in 1973 not because of peaceful hippy protests, but

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rather because the nation was defeated militarily on the battlefield
by the armed insurrection of the Vietnamese people. In such cases,
“violence” (more precisely, self-defense) ended violence, and only
“violence” could win peace.
The tactics that apply in advanced Western democracies may not
work at all in Eastern nations, Asian dictatorships, or South American
juntas. In their privileged lives in which they encounter violence on
the television but not in the streets, white middle/upper class Western
liberals are accustomed to resolving conflicts solely through negotia-
tion, and thus champion the ideology of the “pluralist democratic”
state. They never ask whether the open, aboveground, nonviolent,
legislative tactics they believe prevail in advanced capitalist nations
might not be suicidal in fascist or authoritarian states. What is more
presumptuous than privileged elites dictating to the entire globe, to
diverse peoples struggling under varying conditions, that nonvio-
lence is the only legitimate and viable way? Moreover, by implication,
pacifists are legislating tactics to future generations, the unfortunates
who will live in advanced stages of sociopolitical, economic, and eco-
logical crisis and may well have far fewer options of resistance against
total war.

What Is Violence?
While few animal liberationists misrepresent pacifism as a static state
of nonactivity, there is far less appreciation and charity in pacifist rep-
resentations of militant direct action. Pacifists distort, caricaturize, and
slander militant approaches, vilifying radicals in the corporate-state
language as being “violent” and “terrorist” people who allegedly dam-
age the security and respectability of peaceful, law-abiding citizens.
Part of a larger reactionary culture, fundamentalist pacifists censor all

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discussion or debate about militant direct action and they expel viola-
tors from their groups and Internet forums. Yet just as prolife support-
ers wrongly revile “pro-choice” advocates as “pro-abortion,” given that
their normative goal is to defend women’s reproductive rights and not
endorse killing fetuses for its own sake, so pacifists slander proponents

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of militant direct action as “pro-violent,” whereas in fact militants
seek the best means to stop the violence against animals and hardly
celebrate “violence” as inherently good.
Pacifists rarely trouble themselves with providing a cogent and
nuanced definition of violence. Instead, they dogmatically cite
Gandhi and King or even use corporate-state definitions designed to
recode sabotage as a terrorist crime. I must emphasize that the contro-
versy over “violence” in the animal liberation movement is not about
attacking, kidnapping, torturing, and assassinating animal exploiters,
because almost no one is even talking about violence in the narrow
sense, let alone carrying it out. Rather, the censure of “violence” in
reality applies to tactics such as liberation, sabotage, home protests,
confrontations, and other militant direct action tactics that cannot be
defined as “violent” in any precise or substantive way.
Definitions of violence that are broad, vague, and promiscuous in
scope must be opposed because they lack precision, blur crucial dis-
tinctions, and are advanced by and for the corporate-state complex.
Broad definitions that focus on property, not animals, occlude the
massive violence that corporations and governments inflict on sentient
beings, while condemning courageous activists who rescue animals
from murderous aggression as “violent extremists” and “terrorists.”
They also obscure the fact that the corporations, states, police, and
security forces direct real violence, apart from the atrocities inflicted
on animals, against animal and environmental activists.3
Thus the narrow definition of violence is entirely defensible, as
it is more precise, plausible, and maintains perspective on the real
violence and the true criminal forces, which are obscured by corpo-
rations, states, security agencies, mass media, sundry exploiters, and
pacifists alike. Within the narrow definition, an act is “violent” when
one individual or group intentionally and aggressively causes physical

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 61

harm, injury, or death to another individual or group without justi-

fication and adequate cause. Moreover, it is noteworthy that all such
acts of “violence,” as defined above, are expressly contrary to the stated
guidelines and principles of the ALF.
If the definition of violence is to be broadened at all, the expan-

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sion should include attacks on animals, on sentient life, rather than
damage to property. The Orwellian corruption of semantics, which
vilifies breaking windows but not butchering hundreds of billions of
animals, occurs in the context of capitalist societies in which prop-
erty is sacred and life is profane. It is painfully ironic that in capital-
ist legal terms, corporations are “persons” and animals are things,
resources, and commodities. But how can one “hurt,” “abuse,” or
“injure” a non-sentient thing—for example, an animal-breeding
research building, or computers and equipment in a vivisection lab-
oratory—that does not feel pain, have awareness, and is not alive?
How can one be “violent” toward brick and mortar, glass and steel?
How can hammers, bolt cutters, and spray paint be likened to guns
and knives?
If they give reasoned arguments at all in support of their sweeping
claims, pacifists see violence in both (1) the act of damaging property
and things, and (2) the psychological consequences it has on humans
who own or use the property. The first rationale identifies violence
with destructive acts per se, whether against a human being or pri-
vate property. Saboteurs deface, break, burn, and demolish objects
and thus, on this line of reasoning, they exert anger, aggression, and
hostility rather than calm, peace, and love. They rely on coercion
and intimidation rather than logical reasoning and moral persuasion.
For pacifists adept at tuning out the horrors of the animal holocaust,
sabotage qualifies as bona fide violence. The second point considers
the harm or trauma caused to people whose homes, cars, or offices
are damaged. Their businesses, investments, livelihood, research, or
careers may be adversely affected or ruined as well, and they may be
injured psychologically, emotionally, economically, and profession-
ally. These potential results as well, it is assumed, suffice to brand
sabotage as a form of violence.

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There are serious consequences to using the broad, vague, and

indiscriminate definition of violence. First, inflating the meaning
of violence to include buildings, laboratory equipment, technolo-
gies of domination, and assorted objects trivializes the violence the
corporate-state complex inflicts on humans and other animals, as

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it blurs the critical distinction between living beings and nonliving
things. There is a huge moral difference between slitting the throat
of a pig and slashing the tires of a meat truck. The values of society
are revealed all too clearly when only the latter action is condemned
as a crime worthy of intense opprobrium and legal sanctions. Second,
those who accept the corporate-state’s definition of property destruc-
tion as violent unwittingly contribute to the demonization of freedom
fighters as “terrorists,” and thereby legitimate state repression of the
animal liberation movement and its supporters.

Assessing “Violence” from “Principled” and

“Pragmatic” Grounds
Arguments for or against animal liberation stem from two different
logics that are crucial to differentiate, which I call the “principled”
and “pragmatic” perspectives. The principled standpoint examines
whether militant direct action tactics are ethically legitimate for
intrinsic reasons, and asks if actions are right or wrong independent
of good or bad consequences. In contrast, the pragmatic standpoint
brackets ethical issues to focus on extrinsic concerns relating to the
consequences of tactics, and asks if militant tactics help or hinder
the movement. The distinction between principled and pragmatic
assessments of radical approaches is critical, for one could argue that
militant direct action is (1) ethically legitimate but has damaging
consequences; (2) morally wrong but yields effective results, (3) ethi-
cally sound and fruitful in results, or (4) morally wrong and negative
in consequences.
Pacifists reject all “violent” actions as wrong and counterproduc-
tive and thus renounce militant direct action on both principled and
pragmatic grounds. They never grant the legitimacy of direct action,

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 63

nor do they acknowledge the proven effectiveness of underground

sabotage and liberation tactics. A shrewd theorist or activist analyzes
actions or campaigns on both principled and pragmatic levels, and
may be as much Machiavellian as moral, believing that the vicious war
that humans have waged against other animals does not afford them

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the luxury of bourgeois etiquette. When the game is rigged, only fools
follow rules. In a two-sided war, militants would be equally strategic,
utilitarian, and as indifferent to the life of exploiters as exploiters are
to animals. The sole focus would be on tactics, so that the “good”
action is an effective action, one that inflicts maximal harm on abus-
ers and liberates as many animals as possible.
As Malcolm X quipped, “Tactics based solely on morality can
only succeed when you are dealing with people who are moral or a
system that is moral . . . We are nonviolent with people who are non-
violent to us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent
with us.”4 The only categorical imperative that resistance movements
have under conditions of total war is to inflict as much damage as
possible on exploiters; to liberate the enslaved from captivity, torture,
and death; and generally to thwart the assault on all life and the
earth by any means necessary. The global holocaust industry is such
an inexorable and prodigious killing machine, one could argue, that
any chance at effective resistance requires a “teleological suspension
of the ethical” (Kierkegaard) and a going “beyond good and evil”
(Nietzsche) through unequivocal counterforce and extensional self-
defense (see below).

The Principled Objection

Pacifist opponents of militant direct action uncritically define property
destruction as violence and reject it as inherently wrong. In classic
syllogistic logic, they argue:

(1) Property destruction is violence;

(2) Violence is always wrong;
(3) Therefore, property destruction is always wrong

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64 M The Politics of Total Liberation

As we have seen, this reasoning is unsound, principally due to its pro-

miscuous definition of “violence” and the dogmatic dismissal of any
possibility that “violence” is justifiable, necessary, and effective. Once
again, fundamentalists advance unqualified universal judgments that
“violence” is always wrong and never works to the advantage of ani-

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mal, human, or earth liberation.
Let us, for the sake of argument, follow Tom Regan’s strategy,
which is to grant the contested premise that sabotage is violence, and
thereby shift the question from “Is it violence?” to “Is it justifiable?”5
Conceding that sabotage is violent (and Regan insists it is) does
not lose the argument to pacifists, Regan argues, for it does not
follow that if an action is violent, it is therefore wrong. Drawing
on the tradition of “just war theory,” Regan proposes criteria that
“violent” actions would have to satisfy to be ethically legitimate,
such as (1) one uses violence defensively against an offensive assault,
(2) one uses counterviolence as a last, not first, resort to self-defense,
and (3) one uses the minimum amount of force necessary to stop a
violent attack.
Despite the provocative title of his essay, “How to Argue for
Violence,” Regan—a mainstream philosopher, a respected and deco-
rated professor emeritus, and an avowed pacifist—can hardly con-
clude with a defense of violence unless he were prepared to risk losing
his revered standing in the academic and activist communities. Thus,
the tease of his essay’s title aside, the pacifist outcome is predeter-
mined against militancy, whether in narrow or broad terms. Regan
easily escapes his ploy by insisting that we have not run out of options
and still have many educative and legislative possibilities yet to pur-
sue. Regan thereby opens the door a crack toward more militant and
pluralist forms of struggle, but only to promptly slam it shut again.
Many pacifists are content to stroll slowly down the long and
interminable hallways of the system, patiently pushing education and
legislation strategies, while the screams of the tortured intensify, the
blood flows wider and deeper, and the body count of butchered ani-
mals climbs by the billions. In the bigger picture, moreover, the global
eco-crisis is so severe, so near or already past the tipping point of

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 65

runaway climate change and systemic collapse, that we do not have

time for glacial improvements and incremental reforms. In the midst
of accelerating climate change, species extinction, human population
growth, rainforest devastation, resource scarcity, dying oceans, and
so on, we must seek more potent means of resistance and immediate

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catalysts of social transformation.
Apparently unmoved by a sense of urgency, advocates of the prin-
cipled critique believe that “violence” and civil disobedience are
unnecessary for a cause allegedly strong enough to prevail on logical
arguments alone. Peter Singer, for example, affirms animal protec-
tionism as good and just, so long as it remains “nonviolent.” After one
paltry concession to decades of stunning victories by the ALF, Singer
argues that for real success:

We must change the minds of reasonable people in our soci-

ety . . . The strength of the case for Animal Liberation is its ethical
commitment; we occupy the high moral ground and to abandon
it is to play into the hands of those who oppose us . . . The wrongs
we inflict on other species are . . . [undeniable] once they are seen
plainly; and it is in the rightness of our cause, and not the fear of
our bombs, that our prospects of victory lie.6

Besides grotesquely minimizing the achievements of militant direct

action, and uncritically advancing rationalist models of human nature
and education that are false and outdated, Singer further undermines
his argument by tying it to a naïve and thoroughly discredited faith in
the State and mythical “democratic process.” He ignores the fact that
these systemic processes serve as alibis for corporate hegemony over
every facet of society and everyday life. This crude and caricatured
propaganda model views the state as a servant to the people, whereas
in truth people are slaves to the state, to a greater or lesser degree.
It sees representative or parliamentary democracy as embodying the
general will of the citizenry, rather than the private will of power-
ful corporations and their various armies, including lobbyists with
money-stuffed suitcases.

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This model of indirect democracy (a contradiction in terms) views

politics as the province of professional bureaucrats and the product
of pacified voters. With a gullibility matched only by their ignorance
of realpolitik, a preponderance of animal advocates feel that the two-
track strategy of education and legislation is the sure ticket to over-

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coming entrenched speciesist mindsets and laws, whereas in fact it
is a double delusion and total dead-end. Pacifists massively under-
estimate the task of changing the dominant ideologies and undoing
the systems of speciesist indoctrination in schools and mass media.
They rarely understand the need for, let alone the means to, disman-
tling the hegemony of corporations, states, banking industries, and
the military-industrial complex, all of which work together to ensure
the perpetuation of repression, violence, domination, and, ultimately,
planetary collapse.
From the realization that the state is hardly a neutral arbiter of
competing interests, but rather is a tool of capitalist interests, a second
political tradition of direct democracy has emerged. Direct action advo-
cates argue that the indirect system of representative or parliamentary
democracy is irredeemably corrupted by money, power, cronyism, and
privilege. Appealing to the lessons of history, direct activists insist that
one cannot win liberation struggles through education, moral per-
suasion, political campaigns, and demonstrations—or any form of
aboveground, mainstream action—alone. In direct action campaigns,
activists abandon time-consuming, futile efforts to persuade the state
to turn against its corporate masters. Unhindered by the constraints
and mechanisms of capitalist ideology, they themselves assume all
responsibility to attack, blockade, sabotage, or act in any way to stop
the violent, destructive, or genocidal practices of relevant targets.
When exploiters will not voluntarily shut down the lucrative
machinery of exploitation and killing, when the state lends its full
legal weight and military might to protect oppressors, and when the
populace is passive or ineffective, activists have no option but to right
these wrongs outside of sanctioned channels. One’s obligation to pro-
tect innocent life from harm, and to defend the earth from pillage and
irreparable devastation, far outweighs the duty to obey unjust laws or

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 67

to respect moral and legal prohibitions against “violence” that serve

the cause of violence so well. There comes a time when one is forced
to choose between pacifist principles or pragmatic results, between
tolerance or intolerance of state-sanctioned violence, and no principles
are more important that the sanctity of life, the defense of the inno-

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cent, and the preservation of biodiversity and the earth as a whole.

Extensional Self-Defense and Just War

Dogmatic pacifists do not even accept self-defense as the most obvi-
ous and compelling counterexample to their rigid rule against “vio-
lence.” They thus do not address the question of whether one can
use force against exploiters if necessary to protect defenseless animals
targeted for their horns, skin, flesh, fur, milk, or other body parts
and excretions. As they accept no possible justification for violence,
they therefore reject the concept of just war, first elaborated upon in
the medieval writings of St. Augustine (354–430) and St. Aquinas
(1225–74) in order to defend the legitimacy using explicit force and
warfare in specific conditions.
Self-defense and just war theory are two widely accepted rationales
for retaliation against aggressors. But a clear speciesist double stan-
dard informs the argument made by those who defend using physical
force when human lives are at stake, but suddenly begin equivocating
and moralizing when the victims confined, exploited, tortured, and
murdered are other animals. Why are Nazi resistance fighters extolled
as heroes while the ALF, ELF, and others are denigrated as “terrorist”
groups? Why is it laudable to break down doors, smash windows, and
launch military strikes to save hostages, but “wrong” and “counter-
productive” to raid laboratories and rescue animals infected with dis-
ease, sickened with toxic products, and mutilated in heinous burn
experiments? Clearly, to explain this hypocrisy, it is not the methods
of direct action that people disagree with as much as the subjects for
whom the actions are undertaken.
When Malcolm X said African Americans should fight for freedom
“by any means necessary,” he was not advocating aggressive violence

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and offensive attack; rather, he was emphasizing the right to self-

defense in conditions where police, the state, and the military are not
protectors but enemies with intent to kill. Like humans, animals have
the right to self-defense, and with few exceptions (e.g., orcas imprisoned
in aquariums, lions trapped in zoos, and elephants exploited in cir-

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cuses often turn on and kill their trainers) cannot defend themselves.7
Therefore, given that (1) animals mostly cannot defend themselves
against human violence and mechanized murder; and (2) human
activists—often self-styled “voices of the voiceless”—represent their
interests; and (3) if animals would use extreme force to defend them-
selves against deadly attacks; then (4) humans who act on behalf of
animals have a prima facie duty to do protect them from injury by any
means necessary.
This theory makes no assumptions about animals’ thoughts, needs,
or desires except the reasonable belief that they do not want to be
confined, sickened, tortured, and murdered, and would rather live
a life of pleasure and freedom in natural conditions, with their own
kind, making their own choices. If physical force is needed to save
an animal from attack, then that force is a legitimate form of what I
call “extensional self defense.” This principle mirrors US penal code
statutes known as the “necessity defense,” which can be invoked when
a defendant believed that an illegal act was necessary to avoid great
and imminent harm. One only needs to expand this concept slightly
to cover actions that are increasingly desperate and necessary to pro-
tect animals from total war against them.
Extensional self-defense is not just a theory, it is a crucial national
policy put into practice in countries like South Africa, where govern-
ments hire armed soldiers to protect rhinos and elephants from ruth-
less poachers who kill for horns and tusks more valuable than gold
on the international market.8 The struggle to defend endangered spe-
cies against mafia, poachers, and mercenaries has escalated into full-
scale war, in which many poachers are killed, but far more rhinos and
elephants lay dead, with the horns and tusks ripped from their heads
and faces. In a perverse irony, the more endangered the species, the
more valuable their body parts. The rhino and elephant wars raging

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 69

in Africa are a clear sign of increasingly intense struggles developing

around the “politics of nature” that involves animals, activists, con-
servationists, endangered species, biodiversity, the environment, and
the struggle over natural resources in conditions of scarcity. Pacifists
cannot stop poachers, but bullets can, and while many measures must

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be taken to protect endangered species, right now armed soldiers are
the best protection rhinos and elephants have against murderous,
weapon-wielding poachers. At the same time, some conservationists
“are now coming to a surprising conclusion: In exceptional circum-
stances, they say, the only effective way to protect the environment
may be at the barrel of a gun.”9
Understood in context, these actions are not violence, they are coun-
terviolence, dynamics of just war, and extensional self-defense. To
confuse these emergency measures that demand armed protection of
imperiled animals with machismo and “pro-violent” measures, rather
than necessary defensive actions, indicates the absurdity, misplaced
priorities, and tragic consequences of pacifist principles that actually
increase violence. Contrariwise, militant actions and extensional self-
defense reduce violence. The pacifist cliché that “violence only creates
more violence” is thus glib, hollow, and false.

The Pragmatic Critique

The pragmatic argument brackets the ethical status of militant direct
action to focus on its possible or actual consequences for the animal
advocacy movement. Here, the question is not so much whether vio-
lence is ethically defensible, but is it pragmatically effective and helpful
or harmful to stated goals. While there are various lines of objection,
the most common pragmatic critiques are that militant direct action
is negatively framed by the media; that it diminishes public percep-
tions of the animal advocacy movement; and that is “counterproduc-
tive” in achieving no positive results for animals, actually setting the
movement back rather than moving it forward.
The pragmatic argument that all militant direct action is alienat-
ing, damaging, and counterproductive is riddled with fallacies, false

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assumptions, and factual errors. It assumes, first, that all or most

actions are widely reported in the media, when in fact the vast major-
ity are minor actions, or successful strikes that corporations do not
wish publicized. How the public can form opinions on all but a few
dramatic actions is not explained, unless in the unlikely event that

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they are regular readers of magazines and websites that regularly
report on the animal liberation movement.10
As for militant actions that make the news, it is hardly true that
all reporting is negative and therefore that radical resistance “always”
alienates public support. Often, one finds a complex and indetermi-
nate mix of negative and positive framing, which however “encoded”
or portrayed by the media is “decoded” or interpreted by audiences
in different ways. Provocative militant direct action strikes—such as
the August 2003 ALF actions against San Francisco Bay Area foie
gras chefs and restaurants—often bring unprecedented publicity to
horrific conditions of animal exploitation, thereby creating debate
and change on issues that otherwise would not have been exposed
or discussed. While militant tactics turn some people off (such as
middle or upper-class consumers), they turn other people on (such
as alienated or rebellious youth and disillusioned citizens), and many
activists credit ALF media reports as their main influence for joining
the animal rights movement in one form or another. Yet dogmatic
pacifists claim to know what “the public” thinks without a shred of
sociological research or empirical evidence; clearly, their conclusions
are speculative, unsubstantiated, and altogether groundless.
Most militant activists do not write off public opinion and educa-
tion as irrelevant. A key purpose for establishing a press office for
the animal and earth liberation movements, after all, is to counter
corporate-state propaganda and frame direct actions as necessary and
legitimate tactics of freedom fighters, not “terrorists.” Mollifying pub-
lic opinion, however, is not a militant’s first priority, which is instead
to rescue and liberate animals and inflict maximal economic damage
on exploiters. In the words of an ALF activist, “Our aim is to destroy
property and force laboratories to close—publicity is neither here nor
there.”11 More importantly, public opinion does not shape progressive

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 71

change; rather liberation movements shape history and values, and

mass consciousness catches up with progressive struggles decades or
centuries later.
The claim that militant direct action is counterproductive and
injurious to the animal rights movement is nonsensical. The most

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stunning successes have come from underground actions that target
exploiters’ property, inflict heavy or devastating economic damage,
take “property” confined in cages, and recover damning videotapes
of the hideous realities that animal exploiters present to the public as
“humane” and in keeping within legal “welfare” standards. Moreover,
these tactics are often highly effective in generating media publicity,
and they move the debate toward the radical pole in a way that lends
more credibility toward mainstream approaches that otherwise might
be mocked and dismissed as too “extreme.”
Finally, it is crucial to dispense with the most damaging myth
of all regarding militant direct action, which is that every animal
liberated is replaced and that every building razed to the ground is
rebuilt. A favorite pacifist myth is that militant direct action tactics
never work and are nothing but injurious and counterproductive to
the movement. This assertion is advanced without any regard for, or
recognition of, the historical record that clearly shows thousands of
cases in which raids, sabotage, and other militant actions liberated
countless animals, hundreds or thousands at a time, and shut down
oppressors altogether. Since the ALF first emerged in 1976, it staged
dramatic raids on vivisection laboratories, especially in the United
States during the 1980s. From 1996 to 2005, after the ALF nearly
eliminated the fur industry in England, direct action tactics closed
down a half dozen breeders who supplied animals to laboratories, and
liberationists stopped construction of a major animal research center
at Cambridge University and almost at Oxford as well. If not for the
massive intervention by British and American governments, activists
might have bankrupted and destroyed a major pharmaceutical and
product testing company, Huntingdon Life Sciences.
As four decades of history actions show, underground activists
accomplished their goals by rescuing countless thousands of animals

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and weakening or dismantling the apparatus of commercial breeders,

far farmers, vivisectionists, and sundry exploiters. Exploiters recovered
on some, but hardly all, occasions, and the annals of history are filled
with cases of raids and attacks that ended operations forever, perma-
nently, never to start again. Not only were the animals suffering and

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dying in these gruesome compounds, freed by the only means pos-
sible, but also countless thousands more animals were spared the same
fate. Innumerable animals would have endured the same nightmar-
ish pits of hell were their lives dependent upon mainstream activists
unable to transcend their own fear and self-concern. It is instructive
to contrast the relative inertia of chanting, petitioning, leafleting, lob-
bying, and working for years to win largely meaningless or limited
reforms of grisly practices with forms of exploitation that liberation-
ists have ended in a matter of minutes or hours.12
Are historically informed, thinking people supposed to believe the
absurd claim—advanced by corporations, states, security forces, mass
media, and mainstream animal “advocates” alike—that those who
freed suffering souls while hurting no one are “violent”? Are rational
individuals expected to agree that an unbroken dramatic series of vic-
tories over four decades and dozens of countries truly should be dis-
missed as “counter-productive”? If the argument is that some groups
and tactics are indeed counterproductive, then let us shift attention
from militants and liberationists to reformists and mainstream col-
laborationists. Let us talk not of militant direct action, but rather
the RSPCA promoting “freedom food” or the HSUS working with
industries to certify “humane meat” and “cage free” eggs, and even
sponsoring events promoting meat consumption. Let us talk about
PETA’s campaign to persuade Kentucky Fried Chicken to kill chick-
ens with gas rather than to slice their throats; their objectification of
women (alienating to social movements) to protest the objectification
of animals; and wearing Ku Klux Klan costumes for media atten-
tion. Further, let us talk about PETA’s awards to Temple Grandin for
using her alleged “empathetic” abilities to design technologies that
facilitate the march of animals to their slaughter; their astronomic

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 73

kill-rate of healthy and adoptable animals; their embarrassing use of

celebrities that pose for anti-fur ads one day and model fur coats the
next. Let us also discuss evangelical, apolitical, single-issue, pacifist
vegans who confuse boycotts with action and potlucks with politics.
How is it possible for direct action to “damage” a movement already

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moribund and riddled with more than its share of sell-outs, frauds,
opportunists, and collaborators? Or might direct action instead
revive, reinvigorate, and embolden the animal rights movement—to
become something more than a pawn of industries and lackey to the
state, such that it might find it is the will and the courage to boldly
resist speciesism and other forms of oppression?
If my argument so far is unconvincing, another way to assess the
effectiveness of militant direct action is to ask: What tactics do ani-
mal exploitation industries fear the most: vegan outreach and pot-
lucks, or liberations and sabotage? If mainstream organizations and
pacifists tendentiously minimize and distort the efficacy of militant
tactics, we can gain a different and arguably more accurate perspec-
tive from animal exploiters themselves, many of whom openly admit
that groups such as the ALF have greatly impeded their plans and
projects. “Because of terrorist [sic] acts by animal activists,” says Susan
Paris, president of the pro-vivisection group Americans for Medical
Progress, “crucial research projects have been delayed or scrapped.
More and more of the scarce dollars available to research are spent on
heightened security and higher insurance rates. Promising young sci-
entists are rejecting careers in research. Top-notch researchers are get-
ting out of the field.” Similarly, a report to the United States Congress
on “Animal Enterprise Terrorism” states: “Where the direct, collat-
eral, and indirect effects of incidents are factored together, the ALF’s
professed tactic of ‘economic sabotage’ can be considered successful,
and its objectives, at least toward the victimized facility, fulfilled.”13
It is not for trivial reasons that after 9/11 the United States corporate-
state complex designated the ALF and the ELF the top two “domestic
terrorist” groups, given the threat they pose to the property and profits
of animal and earth exploiters.

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The Methodology of Militant Direct Action

Thus, my position contradicts fundamentalist pacifism at every ideo-
logical and methodological point. It is, first, nondogmatic in striv-
ing for the virtue of “intellectual honesty” championed by Nietzsche.
Unlike fundamentalist pacifists, these arguments are not made ex

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cathedra, nor do they have pretensions to omniscience, infallibility,
and unassailable Truth. As Gandhi said, “Truth is an experiment,”
and one should not pose as a scientist armed with indubitable facts
of human nature, nor as a prophet with a crystal ball that can deter-
mine the right tactics and predict public response. Intellectual hon-
esty requires abandoning pretense to indubitable knowledge that one
cannot have.
This approach, second, is thereby pragmatic in not being tied to
philosophical or moral doctrine, but rather to the categorical impera-
tive to advance animal/total liberation. The pragmatic outlook allows
the situation and context to dictate the action, rather than imposing
a master theory onto all possible situations historically and globally.
It is committed to results over doctrines, dogmas, rules, traditions,
authorities, and teachings of any kind. It abandons fidelity to all
moral principles, ideologies, and party lines. Maintaining the moral
high ground at the expense of achieving results is a luxury that libera-
tionists cannot afford, especially as the global elite are greedy, power-
hungry, nihilistic, implacably violent, and committed to total war.
Fundamental pacifists ought to question whether their priorities are
to axioms or to animals, to a lexicon or to liberation.
Abandoning doctrine, dogma, and dicta, one is left with specific
situations and different contexts in all their complexity and contin-
gency. This leads, third, to a contextualist approach, which asks:
What tactic or combination of tactics is most appropriate to a spe-
cific situation? In a campaign to ban animal-exploiting circuses in
one’s community, for example, one might best combine public educa-
tion and legislative measures, accompanied by protests and demon-
strations. But since reason is a weak opponent to self-interest and
the profit motive, one should not expect victory based on the force
of logic as much as the logic of force, and be prepared to make it

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 75

as uncomfortable and unprofitable as possible for a circus to return

again. If the goal is to end animal experiments at a university, argu-
mentation and moral persuasion are almost certain to fail, given the
entrenched ideology of speciesism and the billions of dollars at stake.
A pragmatic approach would also use militant means such as target-

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ing animal breeders, demonstrating at vivisectors’ homes, inflicting
maximal property damage on laboratories, and liberating captives
from their sadistic abusers.
While nonviolent tactics may be adequate or even more effective
than militant direct action in some cases, this will not be true in
all instances. Only from a dogmatic position could one declare that
all protest, resistance, and liberation struggles must be lawful and/
or without force. Each situation needs to be assessed according to
its own specifics, not for its fidelity to predetermined and inflexible
principles. Thus, we move from a priori rules to a posteriori diagnos-
tics. A contextualist approach is necessary, moreover, to determine
the validity and nature of tactics in defense of animals. Whether an
action is justifiable and potentially effective depends on context.
In a global setting, contextualism asks this question: How can we
best defend all life and the entire planet from the massive and unre-
lenting assault of global capitalism, centralized political rule, milita-
rism, and the metastasizing growth of the human empire colonizing
the earth and monopolizing its resources? Questions concerning the
legitimacy and efficacy of physical force cannot be answered in the
abstract, but only in specific contexts. Whereas partisans on both sides
want to read the history of moral progress as driven exclusively by
nonviolence or violence, the fact is that social change unfolds through
the entire arsenal of pressure tactics, which include strikes, protests,
demonstrations, boycotts, sabotage, liberation, education, legislation,
or even armed struggle.
Contextualism implies the fourth key methodological tenet of
this view of militant direct action, namely, pluralism, for a pluralist
approach uses any and all tactics relevant to specific situations. Unlike
totalizing pacifism, a contextualist and pluralist approach does not
apply a general rule to each and every circumstance in a grandiose act

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of deduction; it looks, rather, at each circumstance and determines

which action, strategy, or campaign among a host of options seems
most promising. The only rule is that there is no rule. The fundamen-
tal idea is to have the flexibility to use a variety of tactics as appropri-
ate to different situations. Whereas dogmatic pacifists allow one and

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only one strategy—nonviolence—militants concede the need for edu-
cation, leafleting, vegan outreach, effective legislation, media cam-
paigns, exposés, protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience—all
mainstream or traditional, nonviolent tactics. Indeed, these are stan-
dard tactics for many militants’ activism too, but they also insist on
augmenting stock practices with underground and high-pressure
approaches and ultimately whatever intelligent and effect action it
takes to stop the animal holocaust and the devastation of the earth.
A pluralist approach does not categorically reject militancy and
counterviolence, nor does it fetishize or unqualifiedly support radi-
cal rhetoric and tactics. Context matters. In April 2012, the Green
Hill Occupy movement in northern Italy liberated hundreds of beagle
dogs through daring daylight open rescues, with support of police
and media. This Gandhi-like nonviolent open rescue tactic should be
used to its fullest potential in Italy so long as it remains fruitful and
widely accepted. It would be a mistake, therefore, in this particular
context, to prematurely move to more radical actions such as eco-
nomic sabotage, actions which could bring on police repression and
alienate public support.
Thus, one cannot claim that all radical tactics are always warranted,
tactically sound, or done intelligently—such blanket pronouncements
violate a contextualist approach. Nor should one ever romanticize vio-
lence or recklessly urge a “tear down the house” mindset. Rather, there
should be careful scrutiny of each situation and the judicious weighing
of variables such as short-term benefits and long-term costs, includ-
ing possibly damaging media coverage, negative public reaction, and
state blowback. In some situations, moral persuasion may work; other
scenarios will require protests, legal work, civil disobedience, or more.
Still other forms of domination, exploitation, and destruction are best
carried out with sabotage or may even necessitate counterviolence or

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 The Paralysis of Pacifism M 77

warfare, as is clearly the case in Africa where a war of extermination

is being waged against elephants and rhinos. A contextualist posi-
tion disarms pacifist dogmas and opens new vistas of tactical think-
ing rooted in the animal standpoint—what works to promote animal
liberation—rather than the liberal-bourgeois, fear-conditioned, delu-

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sional, conformist, dogmatic, pacifist humanist standpoint.
Whereas proactive and open-minded activists use inclusive
approaches that acknowledge the validity of different approaches
and mainstream tactics in various situations, their pacifist and main-
stream critics adopt exclusive mindsets that deny the need for tactical
richness and pragmatic realism. Nonviolence works as a complement
to militant direct action and counter-violence, and vice versa. The
key distinction to be drawn is not between nonviolence and violence,
but rather between pacifism and pluralism: the former is totalizing,
dogmatic, exclusive, and one-sided, whereas the latter is contextualist,
fluid, and inclusive. Pacifism reads history rigidly and tendentiously,
pluralism views social struggle and change dialectically.

Post-pacifist Politics
As a dogma, a tool of censorship, and a totalizing ideology, pacifism in
any form—especially the corrupt and degenerate form of postmodern
passivism—is a major obstacle to radical social change. This pathol-
ogy internalizes the repressive state superego to induce conformity;
it is apolitical, bourgeois, and individualist; it reveres authority and
reviles radicalism, even renouncing civil disobedience as “too radical.”
It handcuffs opposition movements and disarms them of highly effec-
tive means of struggle. Pacifism in all forms limits our tactical options
at a time when we desperately need to think in new ways, to diversify
tactics, and to expand the means and scope of resistance. Pacifism
is rooted in false assumptions and models regarding human nature,
education, power dynamics, and the determining logic of capital and
state domination.
The complex philosophical, political, and tactical questions about
how to vanquish speciesism and the 10,000-year reign of dominator

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78 M The Politics of Total Liberation

cultures cannot be settled with dogma, clichés, censorship, naiveté,

historical revisionism, collaborationism, and the proverbial turning
the other cheek. We can only progress in the struggle for animal liber-
ation once we dispense with fallacious logics such as fundamentalism,
rationalism, liberal democracy, and essentializing views of an alleg-

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edly benign human nature. People must also overcome their latent
Stockholm syndrome-complex that binds them to their oppressors.
This pervasive mentality commands obedience to the rules, norms,
and laws that are designed to perpetuate elite rule and compels activ-
ists to seek the “inner good” of animal exploiters, while vilifying lib-
erationists as criminals, terrorists, and threats to “civilized” society.
To apply contextualism to our current era of systemic social and
ecological crisis, one can observe in recent decades that animal advo-
cacy and environmental movements have become increasingly radical-
ized, with militant resistance as the next logical and perhaps inevitable
stage in this development. The evolution, for instance, of mainstream
environmentalism to the direct action and “monkeywrench” tactics
of Earth First! to the Earth Liberation Front is a clear response to a
mounting global ecological crisis. The sense of urgency generally is
rising in proportion to the severity of planetary crisis. With the earth
in the throes of climate change, dying ecosystems, the sixth great
extinction crisis, and an ever-growing holocaust, “reasonableness” and
“moderation” are as entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as “uncon-
ventional” and “radical” actions are necessary and appropriate.
Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of
the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially
until an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a
battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too
late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried
to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought,
the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of
pacifism with the greatest violence of all.

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 CHAPTER 4

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Rethinking Revolution: Veganism,
Animal Liberation, Ecology,
and the Left

U
nlike the corporate-state-security apparatus, the entire spec-
trum of the Left is oblivious to the fact that in the last few
decades a new movement has emerged that is of immense
ethical, political, and ecological significance.1 That movement is the
animal liberation movement. Because animal liberation—and the
inseparably related concept and practice of veganism—challenges
the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas entrenched in
radical and progressive traditions, leftists as a whole have ignored or
mocked rather than engaged these important new movements, and
most environmentalists are equally antagonistic and clueless. The
vital importance of veganism and animal liberation has yet to be rec-
ognized, and both deserve a prominent role in the decisive politics
of the twenty-first century. This is all the more important given the
incursions into the animal advocacy movement by those on the Far
Right, particularly in England, France, and Italy.
Since the 1970s, animal liberation has been one of the most
dynamic resistance forces on the planet. As the “new social move-
ments,” comprised of people of color, women, students, peace and
antinuclear activists, gays and lesbians—all defining their cause

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80 M The Politics of Total Liberation

and identities in opposition to a moribund labor movement and

reductionist class politics—had themselves waned by the late-1970s,
a novel “politics of nature” emerged with ascending environmental-
ism and animal advocacy. Although each had humble beginnings
in England and the United States in the early-nineteenth century,

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by the 1970s and 1980s they had become mass social movements.
While different from one another in key ways, both environmen-
talist and animal advocacy movements were a break not only with
narrow class politics of the “old Left,” but also with the anthropo-
centrism and humanism of the “new Left” and “new social move-
ments” as well. The animal liberation movement has kept radical
resistance alive and is growing in numbers and influence globally—
despite mass conformity, state repression, and corporate blowback,
and the corporatization and co-optation of mainstream animal
advocacy groups.
It is becoming increasingly clear that human, animal, and earth
liberation movements are inseparably linked, such that none (humans,
animals, and dynamic ecosystems) can be free until all are free—from
human exploitation and interference. In the last three decades, there
has been growing awareness that environmentalism cannot succeed
without social justice and social justice cannot be realized without
environmentalism. This insight led to new forms of alliance politics,
such as launched the American environmental justice movement,
Earth First! alliances with timber workers, Zapatista coalition build-
ing, and the 1999 Battle of Seattle that united workers and environ-
mentalists.2 The coalitions that have emerged to date have tended
to link human rights and social justice issues with environmentalism
only. Despite the many historical, ideological, and institutional modes
of oppression linking human, animal, and environmental concerns,
there have been no significant attempts in practice to forge an alliance
of unprecedented depth, diversity, inclusivity, and power that would
unite human and earth liberation struggles with vegan and animal
liberation movements.
Fault lies equally on all sides; except for rare historical figures
who grasped the systemic nature of oppression and occasional

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 Rethinking Revolution M 81

writings on the topic of overlapping systems of oppression, both the

Left and animal advocacy movements have ignored each other at
best, or expressed intense mutual disdain and hostility.3 Similarly,
despite the crucial relevance of veganism for resolving a wide range
of environmental and social problems relating to diet-based dis-

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eases, resource scarcity, agribusiness domination, and expropriation
of small-scale farmers and indigenous peoples from their land, no
significant alliances have been organized around common concerns
apart from rare efforts such as from vegan-oriented social/food jus-
tice groups. Even amidst the startling political energies that erupted
during the Occupy Movement that spread throughout the United
States during 2010–11, anarchists, social justice groups, environ-
mentalists, vegans and animal rights activists failed to capitalize
on the unprecedented opportunities for dialogue, interaction, and
bridge building over common concerns, such as the catastrophic
effects of global agribusiness. What is truly disturbing, however, is
that elements within the far Right, that is, neo-Nazis and other rac-
ist organizations, have been attempting to infiltrate and hijack the
animal movement—with some degree of success—to co-opt their
popularity and political energy, and to serve as a platform for their
own repugnant views and their political agenda based on intoler-
ance and hate.
Human, animal, and earth liberation are interrelated projects that
must be fought for as one, as we recognize that veganism is central to
peaceful, healthy, ecological, and just societies. Given their symbiotic,
holistic, and interlocking relationship, it is imperative that we no lon-
ger speak of human liberation, animal liberation, or earth liberation
as if they were independent struggles, but rather that we talk instead
of total liberation.
This chapter asserts the need for more expansive visions and poli-
tics as it calls for initiating new forms of dialogue, learning, and stra-
tegic alliances on all sides. Each movement has much to learn from
the other, yet all weaken and marginalize themselves through narrow,
dogmatic, and isolated positions. None, however, can achieve their
goals apart from solidarity with the others, and it is only through

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82 M The Politics of Total Liberation

strategic alliances and total liberation politics that humanity has a

chance to defeat the corporate-state-military complex that has been
waging total war on all life and the planet. The similarities vastly
outweigh the differences among key social movements and common
objectives could become clear through a productive dialogue that has

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yet to commence.
Forming complex and enduring alliances with human animals
from different groups with varying agendas, and shaping a resistance
movement powerful enough to effect radical social transformation in
the midst of advanced crisis and be able to withstand fierce repression
and opposition, is clearly no easy project. Thus, one can be forgiven
for being far from optimistic that humanity can find the collective
will, intelligence, and courage to wage war against the war-makers,
before impending social and ecological collapse brings about a dif-
ferent world of mass suffering, global chaos, desperate survival con-
ditions, and authoritarian control. We are at a historical crossroads,
time is running out, and our options are few.

The Left Critique of Vegan and Animal

Advocacy Movements
As discussed in chapter 2, the animal welfare approach seeks to regu-
late animal suffering in systems of exploitation, the animal rights out-
look aims to eliminate these institutions altogether, and the animal
liberation orientation uses direct action—sometimes, but not always,
in defiance of the law—to free animals from captivity and to attack
exploiters through various means, including economic sabotage.
Whereas welfarists never formally challenge the assumption that
animals are resources and property for human use, rights advocates
attack speciesism and insist on the intrinsic value and equality of all
sentient life. Liberationists share the welfarist concern for immediate
action and relief of animal suffering, and often rely on rights-based
assumptions while upholding abolitionist goals; yet they adopt mili-
tant tactics and radical outlooks that are antithetical to both welfare
and rights positions.

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 Rethinking Revolution M 83

For most people, the clear divide in the animal advocacy movement
is between the welfare and rights camps, and intense debates typically
erupt over these opposing views. Welfarists deride the rights posi-
tion as extremist, purist, and utopian—a vacuous dream of a distant
future when animal exploitation might be abolished, without address-

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ing urgent issues of suffering and failing to propose viable alternatives
to reformism. Rights proponents, in turn, disdain the “meaningless”
measures that lead to “bigger cages” and “humane killing” and argue
that welfare campaigns benefit the exploitation industries far more
than animals, while seducing the public into thinking holocaust vic-
tims are confined and killed “humanely.” Welfarists, they argue, pro-
mote more, not less suffering and killing; reinforce speciesist views
that animals are resources for human use; and block the path toward
abolition, especially when mainstream organizations actively collabo-
rate with exploitation industries.
Against conventional thinking, one can see the welfare and rights
approaches as variations within the same mainstream paradigm rather
than as antithetical or incommensurable frameworks. Their similari-
ties are more important than their differences, and their conflicts are
more akin to a family squabble than a civil war. It can be argued
that the more significant fault line in the animal advocacy movement
is between the mainstream, law-abiding, pacifist, and single-issue
standpoint of welfare and rights approaches on one side, and the mili-
tant, law defying and, to a lesser degree, alliance politics orientation of
liberationists on the other. This is evident through a number of lines
of comparison.
First, whereas both welfare and rights proponents advance their
goals in strictly legal and aboveground ways, focusing on education
and legislation, liberationists employ underground and high-pressure
methods that include harassment campaigns, freeing captive animals,
and economic sabotage. Both welfare and rights proponents uncriti-
cally rely on education approaches that can exaggerate the efficacy of
rational argument and moral persuasion on human beings who are
deeply irrational, self-interested, or hateful and violent to animals. In
addition to education campaigns, both mainstream tendencies pursue

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84 M The Politics of Total Liberation

legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels, and tend to be

naïve to the fact that the state (especially at the national or federal
level) is a corrupt tool of capitalist interests.
Although rejecting paltry compromises and reforms without offer-
ing viable and concrete alternatives, the rights camp generally shares

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with welfarists a complete contempt for the “extremists” in the libera-
tionist movement. Both thereby adopt the discourse of the corporate-
state complex to demonize some of the boldest actions and most
effective tactics in movement history. Because they believe the only
way to effect positive change is to work within the system, rights and,
especially, welfare advocates follow the law and often show an obse-
quious respect to exploiters and a hostile public alike. Both welfarists
and rights proponents denounce the liberation and sabotage tactics
of groups such as the ALF as “terrorist,” “counter-productive,” and
a threat to the movement’s “credibility” (see chapter 3). Fearful that
the state, media, and public will smear the entire movement with the
same “extremist” brush (which could tarnish their halo of respectabil-
ity and cause precipitous drops in donations), mainstream groups erect
a firewall between their own “law-abiding” and “peaceful” activism
and the alleged “violent and criminal” tactics of militants, which they
insist have no legitimate place in a principled movement. Thus, in
their editorial pages, mainstream magazines like Animal People regu-
larly denounce “violent extremists” in the movement, as the Humane
Society of the United States applauds FBI persecution of legal direct
action campaigns and even contributes reward money for the capture
of alleged saboteurs. Disturbingly evident in these examples is the
deep internationalization of the Stockholm syndrome in the move-
ment’s mainstream and pacifist sectors. Also apparent is how the rule
of capitalist logic determines an organization’s main priority—to
make profits, not to help animals.
Both welfarists and rights proponents accept the legitimacy of cap-
italist economic, political, and legal institutions, at least in practice,
and unlike Left theorists, are far less inclined to possess the histori-
cal and theoretical framework required to understand the inherently
exploitative and growth-oriented logic of capital and the structural

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 Rethinking Revolution M 85

relationship between market and state. They typically lack even a

rudimentary understanding of class domination and struggle, state
power and repression, colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism,
and the wide spectrum of mechanisms (such as corporate media,
advertising, and entertainment industries) that control populations

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through consent as well as force. In their single-issue focus, segments
of the animal activist community are often ignorant of, and indif-
ferent to, social justice struggles and the plight of poor, exploited,
disenfranchised, and colonized peoples, and cannot draw useful com-
parisons and contrasts between various liberation movements. This
also makes them vulnerable to the Far Right groups that allegedly
promote animal welfare or rights at the expense of human rights, and
that often champion misanthropic views.
Generally, animal advocates promote single-issue reforms within
market societies, rather than challenge the core logic and systematic
devastation of capitalist institutions. Indeed, mainstream organiza-
tions are themselves capitalist bureaucracies that accumulate coveted
money and influence from the corporate-state system, and thus, are
hardly subversive institutions breeding the next generation of radicals.
The politics of the movement range from the Far Right and fascist to
free market libertarianism to liberalism, with radical voices almost
always marginalized. Predominantly middle class, overwhelmingly
white and privileged, insensitive to class oppression and the lack of
diversity within their movements, vegans and animal advocates typi-
cally are entombed in their elitist enclaves. As such, they hardly inspire
radicals, progressives, working classes, the poor, people of color, and
other oppressed groups to regard them as anything but privileged
misanthropes whose moral pieties are irrelevant to immediate survival
imperatives.
Those in the welfare and rights camps who seek change through the
pre-approved channels of capitalism usually do so from an unshake-
able conviction that parliamentary or representative democracy is a just
and functional system. They embrace the myth that the state is, more
often than not, a fair and neutral arbiter of competing interests rather
than a subservient tool to corporations, the military, and the power

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elite. They thereby legitimate the myths of bourgeois democracy and

obscure the determinate role of corporations, lobbyists, vested-interest
groups, and money. The mainstream sectors thus proceed without
a systemic analysis, holistic vision, and structural critique of global
capitalism and supporting systems such as the state, mass media,

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schools, and military. In the contemporary animal slavery economy,
where agriculture and pharmaceutical industries are major economic
and political powers, vegans and animal advocates fantasize that one
can end speciesism without revolutionizing capitalism itself—as if the
corporate-state complex will willingly cease all operations once per-
suaded their mega-exploitative systems are unethical. Given that capi-
talism is an irrational system that is inherently growth-oriented and
exploitative, talk of “green capitalism” or “sustainable development”
within this socioeconomic context is sheer folly and the fundamental
fallacy of all reformist projects and single-issue politics.
The asocial theoretical vision bears political deficits and yields
seductive pseudo-solutions to deep problems. Some of the most
incisive writers who grasp the profound importance of the animal
standpoint (e.g., Jim Mason and Charles Patterson) still advocate
ineffectual moral changes alone, rather than emphasizing the pro-
found institutional and structural transformations necessary to stop
global capitalism, the animal holocaust, and planetary breakdown.
Of course, spiritual and moral changes are necessary, but to focus on
inner enlightenment apart from social oppression is hopelessly naïve,
utopian, and diversionary. New-Age veganism and animal spiritual-
ity perfectly serve the needs of capitalism by locating the burden of
change on individuals rather than on destructive institutions, irratio-
nal social imperatives, and ultimately on the power elite waging total
war on the planet. The spiritual revolution presumes to obviate or
supersede the social revolution and directs people to inner contempla-
tion rather than public confrontation and political transformation.
Lacking a sophisticated social, political, economic, and historical
analysis of capitalist societies, and seeking reforms in one sector of
society with the crucial purpose of alleviating or abolishing the suffer-
ing of animals, much of the animal advocacy movement well-deserves

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 Rethinking Revolution M 87

the Left critique that it is a reformist, single issue movement. Further,

its demands—which are potentially radical to the extent that animal
liberation threatens an economy and society deeply rooted in animal
slavery—are easily contained within a totalizing global system of
exploitation, commodification, and domination. The ease with which

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capitalism can transform the subversive potential of veganism into
more fodder for profit-making, consumerism, and political pacifica-
tion is blatantly obvious with the mass marketing of veganism and the
glossy magazines and apolitical discourse of prominent spokespersons
for the healthy lifestyle.
As Left libertarian Takis Fotopoulos notes of the reformist tenden-
cies dominating the animal advocacy movement, it “might be viewed
as a kind of ‘popular front’ organization that seeks unity around basic
values on which people from all political orientations—from apoliti-
cal, conservative, and liberal persuasions to radical anarchists—could
agree. But . . . this is exactly its fundamental weakness which might
make the development of an anti-systemic [i.e., a holistic critique of
capitalism and related power structures] consciousness out of a philos-
ophy of ‘rights,’ etc. almost impossible.” Fotopoulos further observes
that, “Unless [such a] current develops out of the present broad move-
ment soon, the entire movement could easily end up as a kind of
‘painless’ (for the elites) lobby that could even condemn direct action
in the future, so that it could gain some ‘respectability’ among the
middle classes.”4
Here Fotopoulos correctly emphasizes the ease with which large
animal advocacy groups can be co-opted and take on regressive roles
in society. But he fails to discriminate among the different aspects of
“the entire movement,” to note the presences of a Far Right or fas-
cist element, and to appreciate what the fringe “left radical” elements
have in common with his revolutionary politics. On occasions at
least, liberationists attack capitalist systems and challenge the myths
of bourgeois democracy. They bypass the corrupt gatekeepers of the
state to accept responsibility for animals under attack, to take power
into their own hands, and set out to abolish exploitative conditions
through direct action.

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88 M The Politics of Total Liberation

Some animal liberationists have close affinities to the anarchist

tradition in ideology, temperament, and organization. Not only anar-
chist in political outlook, many work in small, decentralized groups
and underground cultures, in much the same manner as the ALF.
These decentered, anonymous resistance units are akin to anarchist

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affinity groups in their mutual aid, solidarity, security culture, and
consciousness building. Unlike the single-issue focus that dominates
the animal advocacy movement, the militant wing of the move-
ment is more likely to advance a total liberation viewpoint—one that
emphasizes human, animal, and earth liberation struggles must be
interrelated in theory and practice because they stem from similar
root causes and have overlapping dynamics. Liberationist subcultures
oppose imperialism, fascism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on,
all of which they link to and mediate with anti-speciesism, and they
militate against the infiltration of Far Right and fascist elements into
the animal movement. With varying degrees of sophistication, they
are politically aware of global realities and planetary crisis and sup-
port all genuine struggles for liberation. Indeed, in many cases, animal
liberationists may have the broadest systemic vision of activists across
the political spectrum.
Thus, the “animal advocacy movement” is not a monolithic entity,
but rather a conflicted force field of opposing tendencies, such as
involve statist and non-statist, aboveground and underground, and
conservative and radical dimensions. One main problem of Left/
progressive critiques is that they reduce a plurality of conflicted
approaches and fractious divisions to a homogenized “movement.”
They therefore (1) conflate Left-radical and mainstream tendencies,
(2) carelessly overlook the radical aspects of the liberationist camp and
its many similarities with progressive social movements, and (3) fail
to grasp the profound importance of the moral message of animal
advocacy as a whole.
Clearly, among the plurality of approaches in the animal advo-
cacy movement, those who engage in direct action are closest to
the concerns of the Left and progressive politics. To the extent that
animal activists grasp the big picture that links human, animal, and

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 Rethinking Revolution M 89

earth liberation struggles as one, they can be viewed as a profound

new political force that has a crucial place in the planetary struggles
of the twenty-first century. In conditions where social movements and
NGOs are reformist, institutionalized, collaborationist, or co-opted,
animal liberationists are key forces of resistance. They defy corpo-

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rate power, state domination, and capitalist ideologies; they literally
attack institutions of domination and exploitation—not just through
critiques and denunciations, but rather with bricks, sledge hammers,
and Molotov cocktails. Whereas too many left radicals are blustering
in cafes, pontificating in seminars, or spewing inscrutable jargon in
obscure journals, animal liberationists are taking action against the
commodification and exploitation of life. Since the 1970s, animal
and earth liberationists have been among the most dramatic forces
of resistance on a global scale, boldly operating in a post-9/11 epoch
where the corporate-state complex and its proto-fascist police-security
apparatus have pacified populations already neutralized by media/
entertainment spectacles and pacifist ideologies. Animal liberationists
and eco-activists thereby merit widespread support and recognition
that they play an important role in empowering resistance, even if
sabotage tactics are ad hoc measures and hardly substitutes for build-
ing mass resistance movements.
Beyond their obliviousness to important affinities that radical
cultures share with animal (and earth) liberationists, and their
abhorrence of the Far Right “animal rights” imposters, leftists and
progressives fail to grasp the more subtle point that all aspects of
the animal movement have contributed to the deep sea change in
human thought and culture. This awareness needs to spread far wider
and deeper on a global scale if humanity is to survive the ultimate
challenge it currently faces. For over 2,500 years, beginning with
ancient Eastern cultures that profoundly shaped the best elements of
Western societies from the Greeks to the present, enlightened proph-
ets, visionaries, philosophers, poets, writers, artists, and statesmen
have advocated kindness, decency, and even equal treatment to ani-
mals, and these teachings have had crucial civilizing influences in
a universally barbaric human civilization. The animal protectionist

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movement that began in England and the United States nearly two
centuries ago, and all compassionate animal advocacy figures and
groups since, have furthered this moral progress in various ways (see
chapter 6). Similarly, the ancient teachings of vegetarianism and more
recent advocacy of veganism are immensely important for the gen-

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eral enlightenment and education of humanity, to improving both
moral and physical health, and to building sustainable societies and
overcoming a myriad of environmental problems including climate
change. Given the profound relation between the human domina-
tion of animals and the crisis—social, ethical, and environmental—
in the human world and its relation to the natural world, animal and
earth activists are in a unique position to articulate the importance of
new relations between human and human, human and animal, and
human and nature.

Speciesism and the Paleoleft

Moral advance today involves sending human supremacy to the same
refuse bin into which society earlier began to discard male supremacy
and white supremacy. The gross inconsistency of progressives who
champion democracy and equality while supporting a system that
enslaves billions of other sentient and intelligent life forms far sur-
passes the hypocrisy of Americans protesting British tyranny while
enslaving millions of Africans. Animal (and earth) liberation requires
that people transcend the complacent boundaries of humanism to
make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the
moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity.
As the recent confrontation with ecology infinitely deepened and
enriched leftist theory and politics, so too can an encounter with veg-
anism and animal liberation.
Animal liberation demands radical transformations in the mind-
set and practices of human beings as it also entails a fundamental
restructuring of all social institutions that define animals as human
property, commodities, resources, and objects, with the aim to end
animals’ slave status and exploitation in all forms. The philosophy of

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 Rethinking Revolution M 91

animal liberation deconstructs the identities and worldviews that por-

tray humans as conquering Lords and Masters of nature, and neces-
sitates radically new ways of relating to animals and the earth. Animal
liberation is a frontal assault on the supremacy that human beings
have claimed over animals since they began hunting them to extinc-

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tion tens of thousands of years ago.
Animal rights is not an alien idea to modern societies, but rather
builds on the most progressive ethical and political values Westerners
have devised in the last two hundred years—those of rights, equality,
democracy, autonomy, and nonviolence—as it carries them to their
logical conclusions. Whereas humanists argue that rights are “cheap-
ened” when extended to animals, in fact, they are redeemed from an
artificial and prejudicial limitation of their meaning and application
to those having human linguistic and rational capacities. The next
great step in Western moral evolution is to abolish the last acceptable
form of discrimination and slavery that subjugates the vast majority
of species on this planet to the violent whims of one.
The discriminatory, hierarchical, and domineering ideology of
speciesism infects social and environmental movements as much
as it poisons mass consciousness. This atavistic ignorance necessar-
ily calls into question the “radical,” “enlightened,” or “progressive”
nature of left politics. While championing democracy, equality, jus-
tice, rights, respect, and peace for all, the Left/progressive traditions
have ignored—often defended—the most severe forms of exploitation
and violence on the planet today, as they remain oblivious to the cata-
strophic consequences of speciesism. Although priding themselves on
being critical, rational, moral, just, egalitarian, and defenders of the
weak, leftists impale themselves on the hypocrisy of speciesism and
dramatize the shallowness of humanist values. Champions of “dialec-
tics,” holistic theorizing, and systemic analysis, they completely miss
the most portentous connections of our time—the hideous chains
linking animal exploitation to human exploitation and environmen-
tal catastrophe. They excoriate exploitation, denounce domination,
preach peace, and vie for the vulnerable, while consuming the dis-
eased and dismembered bodies of the most oppressed beings on the

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planet. They rail against profit fetishism, growth imperatives, total

commodification, exploitation, slavery, and corporate domination,
yet the animal products they consume daily are mass-produced for
the enrichment and expansion of transnational market systems that
further cannibalize the earth’s resources. Those with an ecological

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sensibility prattle on about the “unsustainable” nature of capitalism
and decry its ruinous effects on environments and peoples, while
remaining oblivious to the fact that agribusiness is the leading cause
of environmental destruction today.
The arrogance and incoherence of humanism is obvious when
victims of violence and oppression wail that they were “treated like
animals,” as if exploitation, torture, and murder are perfectly accept-
able so long as inflicted on nonhuman animals. The problem with
humanism—however extensive, inclusive, and universal the scope
of democracy, autonomy, and rights—is that its bigotry toward the
millions of other animal species with whom we share this planet,
nullifies its liberatory potential and brands it as just another domi-
nator culture that cannot possibly bring peace, justice, and sustain-
able societies. Just as anarchists saw the Marxist workers’ state and
Leninist vanguard party as bureaucratic domination under a new
name, so animal liberationists might view humanist and populist
struggles of any kind as pseudo-revolutions that preach democracy
and peace, but practice domination and perpetuate a holocaust for
animals.
From the animal standpoint, leftists have been regressive and reac-
tionary forces. In the Communist Manifesto, for instance, Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels dismissed animal protectionists as mere petit-
bourgeois reformers.5 They failed to see that the animal welfare move-
ment in countries like the United States was vital to women whose
opposition to animal cruelty was inseparable from their struggle
against male violence and the exploitation of children. Similarly, in
his work, On the History of Early Christianity, Engels belittled veg-
etarians and anti-vivisectionists, with no understanding of the impor-
tance of these issues for reducing human cruelty to both human and
nonhuman animals, and for moral progress generally.6

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 Rethinking Revolution M 93

Establishing the model for generations of leftists down to the

present, Marx and Engels developed a naturalistic theory of human
evolution inspired by Darwin, but jettisoned Darwin’s emphasis that
humans are different from animals only in degree and not kind. In
works such as 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx pos-

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ited a sharp dualism between human and nonhuman animals, arguing
that only human beings have consciousness, free will, and a complex
psychological life and social world. Marx claimed that whereas ani-
mals have an immediate and merely instinctual relation to productive
activity, human labor is mediated by imagination and intelligence.
In Marx’s narrative that links social progress to the domination of
nature, animals exist merely as natural resources to exploit in the goal
to “humanize” and master the physical world.
Of course, Marx and other radicals of his time were products
of Western society—from Greco-Roman and stoic cultures, to
Christianity and medievalism, to modern science, the Enlightenment,
and the Industrial Revolution. Despite the sharp differences among
these eras, the continuities are far more profound. Whether ancient
or modern, secular or religious, aristocratic or democratic, the entire
trajectory of Western society, with roots in agricultural societies that
emerged 10,000 years ago, has been premised on domestication of
the wild, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and the subjugation of “bar-
baric,” “savage,” and “primitive” cultures—all deemed deficient and
“animal-like” in their alleged lack of rationality and sophistication.
Advancing these pernicious ideologies to their highest expression,
modern European societies viewed white male capitalists as paragons
of “civilization” and embarked on the reckless and hubristic project of
“dominating” nature.
While there is lively debate over whether or not Marx had an envi-
ronmental consciousness, there is no question that he internalized
a dualistic speciesist paradigm that vitiates the Left and progressive
traditions to this day. Leftists have tended to either ignore vegan and
animal issues, or deride them in embarrassing displays of ignorance
and smug hostility. Left-liberal magazines such as the Nation, for
example, write scathing critiques of the exploitation of workers toiling

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in factory farms and slaughterhouses, without even mentioning the

far worse plight of animals intensively confined, mercilessly tortured,
and dismembered alive. In bold contrast, Gale Eisnitz’s powerful work
Slaughterhouse documents the exploitation of animals and humans
alike on the killing floors of slaughterhouses, showing how the sadis-

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tic violence workers inflict on animals at the workplace explodes in
domestic violence as well.7
As symptomatic of the provincialism rampant in left traditions,
consider the case of Michael Albert, a noted anarchist theorist and
co-founder of Z Magazine and Z Net. In his interview with an animal
rights magazine, Albert confessed:

When I talk about social movements to make the world better,

animal rights does not come into my mind. I honestly don’t see
animal rights in anything like the way I see women’s movements,
Latino movements, youth movements, and so on . . . a large-scale
discussion of animal rights and ensuing action is probably more
than needed . . . but it just honestly doesn’t strike me as being
remotely as urgent as preventing war in Iraq or winning a 30-hour
work week.8

One would not expect a human supremacist like Albert to see animal
and human suffering as roughly comparable. But it is hard to fathom
privileging the exploitation of workers by ten hours a week over free-
ing animals from nonstop, intensive confinement that ends only with
a horrifying death—a hell worth suffered, of course, so that it can
grace the workers’ dinner plate. Albert betrays a shocking but typical
anarchist insensitivity to the animal holocaust and lacks the holis-
tic vision to grasp the profound connections between animal rights,
viable nonhierarchical societies, and flourishing ecosystems.
Anarchists criticize authority, centralization, and hierarchical struc-
tures as antithetical to human freedom, and traditionally they have
excoriated Marxists and hardline communists for reproducing repres-
sive power dynamics in statist bureaucracies. Despite astute critiques
of left authoritarianism, in relation to the animal question, anarchists

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 Rethinking Revolution M 95

were as bigoted, backwards, and hierarchical in their views of ani-

mals as other radicals, and they remain so today with the exception of
vegan anarchist subcultures advancing a total liberation orientation.
A paragon of anarchist speciesism is the “eco-anarchist” or “social
ecologist” writer Murray Bookchin. In the early 1950s, Bookchin

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published pioneering critiques of industrialized farming, described
emerging environmental disasters, and exposed the dangers of an
increasingly chemicalized food supply. More generally, Bookchin dis-
sected the delusional nature and disastrous consequences of Western
anthropocentrism, such as culminated in the modern project to
“dominate” nature. Bookchin recognized, however, that replacing
antagonistic paradigms with complimentary relations to nature was
impossible to realize in market-dominated societies rooted in profit
and growth imperatives antithetical to human freedom and ecological
balance alike. Thus, he argued, the ecological crisis is a social crisis,
provoked by irrational and destructive social systems, and therefore
demands a social solution—namely, abolishing capitalism and hierar-
chical domination generally, in favor of a federation of decentralized
democracies which “remake society” in ways that allow autonomous
citizens to shape rational, free, ecological societies.
As clearly as Bookchin saw the social ecology connection, he missed
the profound relevance of veganism and animal liberation to a libera-
tory future. Bookchin condemned the mechanization of agriculture
because of its effects on small-scale farming, the land, and human
food supply, not because of its horrific impact of animals suffering
in systems of intense confinement and ruthless production methods.
Describing his concept of an ecological society, Bookchin blithely
spoke of killing animals for food, hunting, and other human purposes.
He thereby typifies the entire left spectrum, which is unable to escape
speciesist social conditioning to grasp that human and nonhuman
animals have equal interests in freedom, happiness, and life over
captivity, suffering, and death. Like Marx, Bookchin embraced the
Cartesian-mechanistic view of animals as dumb creatures devoid of
any complex consciousness or social life (see chapter 5). In Bookchin’s
terms, animals belong to the non-reflexive world of “first nature,”

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along with rocks, trees, and other insensate objects, and he reserved
the self-conscious and creative world of “second nature” for humans.
For as social evolution phased out of biological evolution, humans
alone, he claimed, made the ascent from instinct and mere sensation
to self-consciousness, language, and reasoning.9

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Consequently, Bookchin vehemently rejects the concept of ani-
mal “rights,” as he adopts conventional rationalist and social contract
views that only beings who can speak, reason, and barter moral obli-
gations can have rights. With the concept of rights arbitrarily pre-
cluded, welfarism fills the vacuum. The “enlightenment” of the entire
left spectrum never surpasses the moral bankruptcy of welfarism—
the obfuscating alibi used by factory farms, slaughterhouses, fur
farms, and vivisectors to legitimate torture and mass slaughter under
the guise of “humane” treatment. Thus, the Left is at one with mass
ideology and industry propaganda, in justifying an accelerating ani-
mal holocaust and ecological entropy through a fraudulent moral dis-
course. The most advanced position the Left can achieve is treating
the slaves “kindly,” without condemning the evil of slavery itself.
Like nearly all leftists, Bookchin failed to mediate analysis of the
ecological crisis with the exploitation of animals in factory farms.
This is a major problem as agribusiness is the primary cause of global
warming, the main source of water pollution, and a key contributor
to other crises such as rainforest destruction and species extinction.10
The global meat culture also aggravates inequality and poverty among
the world’s peoples, as ranching interests and agribusiness displace
peasants and farmers from their land and raze rainforests for cattle
grazing. Power, profit, and resources flow from impoverished south-
ern nations to the United States and Europe, industrialized societies
plagued by an array of diseases and health care crises due to a heavy
consumption of animal protein and fat.
Despite his understanding that scarcity is socially created and not a
natural occurrence, Bookchin also occluded the connection between
meat consumption and world hunger, specifically, that animal agri-
culture is a hugely inefficient use of resources. Bookchin’s view of an
inexhaustibly “fecund” earth that could feed over ten billion people,

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 Rethinking Revolution M 97

if rationally and democratically managed, proved to be another mod-

ernist fantasy discredited in the twenty-first-century world of climate
change, depleted resources, and degraded ecosystems—strained fur-
ther by burgeoning human population growth and Western con-
sumer cultures. Moreover, as the most rapidly modernizing giants,

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China and India, have begun to switch from a traditional plant-based
to Western animal-centered diet, while demanding Western levels of
income, consumption, and comfort, the problems of resource scar-
city, pollution, and climate change have worsened dramatically. Thus,
in this era of real, not artificial, scarcity, intense “resource wars” are
erupting throughout the globe.11 Bookchin’s dangerous cornucopian
fantasies aside, today’s population of over seven billion people con-
suming more than two hundred billion land and sea animals every
year is completely unsustainable, and no anarchist world federation
could resolve this crisis without urging a global shift toward a vegan
diet. Hence, in June 2010, the United Nations published a report
emphasizing that in the current world, marked by growing popula-
tions and escalating meat consumption, the only globally sustainable
diet is veganism.12
Although since the 1970s, the Left began to seriously address the
“nature question,” radicals and progressives have universally failed to
engage the “animal question” that lies at the core of key social and
ecological crises. Calls for a “re-harmonization” (Bookchin) of society
with ecology, and emphases on a “new sensibility” that focus on the
environment apart from the millions of animal species which play
critical roles in ecological diversity and maintenance are speciesist and
tragically inadequate. As with most environmentalists, the overrid-
ing concern of the Left is with fisheries, not fish; with forests, not its
nonhuman inhabitants; with “resources” for human use, not animals
with inherent value. Ecological concerns stem not from a “biocentric”
respect for the intrinsic value of all life and the earth, but rather from
the Left’s oxymoronic concept of “enlightened anthropocentrism”
that reduces animals and the natural world to mere means to human
ends and is incapable of advancing a new planetary ethic to inform a
truly sustainable mode of life.

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In the last two decades, Green parties have emphasized progressive

social concerns in conjunction with environmental values. However,
Greens have not endorsed animal rights or veganism, and they are
as speciesist as leftists and progressives, even if they do not share the
same virulent form of humanism. Green parties, mainstream envi-

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ronmental groups like the Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund,
controversial (but still co-opted and corporatized) organizations such
as Greenpeace, and noted environmentalists such as Dave Foreman
and Bill McKibben all adopt speciesist positions that support hunt-
ing and meat-eating, oblivious to how factory farming and copious
global meat consumption contradicts their ecological values. In 2007,
Greenpeace called a press conference on the connection between meat
production and global warming, emphasizing how methane gas from
cattle is a major ozone destroying gas. But instead of advocating veg-
anism, they called for consuming non-ruminant animals such as kan-
garoos, as they do not produce greenhouse gases and in addition are
“pests” that should be eliminated!13 It is far easier to “respect nature”
through innocuous but relatively meaningless reforms—for example
by recycling, eating local and organic meat, or driving hybrid cars—
than it is to make the profound conceptual shift and conversion to
becoming vegan and committing to being an animal/earth libera-
tion advocate. These philosophies and lifeway are changes that are
far more decisive for a sustainable future; they are the most important
actions one can take in one’s personal life.
Amidst the violence, racism, war, and social turbulence of the
1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned a future “worldhouse.” In
this cosmopolitan utopia, all peoples around the globe would live in
peace and harmony, such that religion fulfills their spiritual needs
and capitalism satisfies their material needs. Yet even if this sentiment
were realizable within an economic system that breeds violence, war,
destitution, extinction, and ecocide, until humanity stops exploiting
and killing animals, King’s worldhouse is still a bloody slaughterhouse.
King’s “dream” for the human species is a nightmare for the billions of
animals butchered each year for food, clothing, “science,” and other
exploitative purposes. Just as “capitalist democracy” is a contradiction

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 Rethinking Revolution M 99

in terms, so a worldhouse built on values of peace, respect, equality,

and nonviolence for humans only is a farce. The humanist hallucina-
tion will always haunt the social world itself, as it remains plagued by
social and environmental problems that stem from animal exploita-
tion and dominator paradigms. Humanist “revolutions” are super-

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ficial by definition. Humanist “democracy” is speciesist hypocrisy.
Humanism is tribalism writ large—the “Us” of Homo sapiens vs. the
“Them” of all other animals, a conceptual dualism that underpins the
vicious and violent system of species apartheid.
In short, the broad spectrum of modern radical and progressive
traditions stands in continuity with the entire Western heritage of
anthropocentrism, speciesism, hierarchy, violence, domination, power,
and instrumentalism. Thus, from the animal standpoint, leftism is far
from a liberating philosophy or revolutionary politics; it is, rather,
part of the ancient and reactionary thinking that spawned millennia
of dominator cultures. It is Stalinism and Nazism toward animals.

Talkin’ About a (Total) Revolution

Since the fates of all species on this planet are intricately interrelated,
the exploitation of animals cannot but have a major impact on the
human world—psychologically, socially, physically, and ecologically.
When humans hunt animals, they disrupt natural selection and
degrade ecosystems necessary for their own lives. When they butcher
animals by the tens of billions every year in factory farm systems,
they poison the air and water, degrade aquatic ecosystems, squander
scarce resources, ravage rainforests, turn grasslands into deserts, and
spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Intensive confinement
of pigs and birds spread deadly viruses that jump to human popu-
lations, causing outbreaks of diseases such as Bird Flu (H5N1) and
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that raise the specter of
catastrophic contagion that could kill billions of people. Heavy use
of antibiotics (80 percent in the United States are given to animals
not people) to promote rapid growth and control disease in agribusi-
ness has weakened the ability of these former “miracle drugs” and

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ushered in a post-antibiotic era rife with deadly strains of drug-resis-

tant bacteria. There are crucial links between meat consumption, the
displacement of farmers and peoples, and world hunger due to global
agribusiness and its insatiable need for land and resources. Animal
experimentation not only kills over one hundred million animals

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annually, it kills thousands of people as well, being driven by huge
pharmaceutical companies whose goal is to make profits, not to cure
disease. Animal research is inherently unscientific and misleading
data is routinely manipulated to secure government approval for mar-
keting drugs ultimately tested on humans. People who are violent to
animals tend to turn violence against humans, as dramatically evident
in the biographies of serial killers. The connections go far deeper, as
speciesism was arguably the first hierarchical system and contributed
to the emergence of patriarchy, state power, slavery, racism, milita-
rism, colonialism, genocide, fascism, ableism and domination of all
kinds (see chapter 1).
In countless ways, the exploitation of animals rebounds to create
crises within the human world itself. The vicious circle of violence and
destruction can end only when humans learn to form harmonious
and complementary, rather than hierarchical and antagonistic, rela-
tions with other animal species and the natural world. Understanding
the relationship between human and animal oppression blocks the
tired objection used to berate every animal advocate: “But what about
human suffering?” This question assumes a zero-sum game whereby
helping animals undermines humans (see chapter 6), and completely
fails to grasp what Martin Luther King Jr. identified as the “garment
of mutual entanglement.” Whether they realize it or not, activists who
promote veganism and animal rights are ipso facto engaging a vast
complex of problems in the social and natural worlds.
Thus, animal liberation is best pursued not through reformist single-
issue approaches, misanthropic myopia, or compromises and collabo-
ration with corporations and politicians. It cannot be achieved without
connecting speciesism with class domination, global capitalism, state
power, and hierarchical rule in all forms. One cannot change vio-
lent, exploitative, and destructive dynamics without transforming the

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 Rethinking Revolution M 101

economic, political, and legal institutions that produce and reproduce

them. The abolition of speciesism cannot advance without eradicat-
ing market systems and their imperatives of growth, commodification,
exploitation, and consumption. Corporate destruction of nature and
nonhuman animals is financed and controlled by hierarchical social

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relations, whereby capitalists and power elites commandeer the polit-
ical, legal, security, and military system in the service of exploiting
every available “resource,” be it a worker in a factory, an animal in a
cage, or a grassland rich in oil.
Any viable solution to the animal holocaust and to global ecological
destruction must promote the democratization of society. Allocations
of power and resources must not be dominated by an elite minor-
ity who act solely for their own benefit, in complete disregard of the
needs of the biocommunity, but rather would be managed collectively
by autonomous communities. So long as corporations, banks, politi-
cians, and bureaucrats monopolize economic and political power and
decision-making over weak and passive citizens of authoritarian soci-
eties, animals and the environment will suffer too, as rational, sane,
and peaceful modes of existing are precluded to advance the interests
of predatory narcissists and sociopaths.
As has been argued, the human/animal/earth liberation move-
ments have much to learn from one another, and none can achieve
their goals apart from the others. Veganism and animal liberation
could gain new critical perspectives by engaging radical social dis-
course and histories of oppression and struggle. Left progressives
can help temper the apolitical, ahistorical, elitist, misanthropic, and
other problematic ideologies rife throughout the vegan and animal
advocacy movements, such as creeping proto-fascism, by advancing
awareness about capital logic, systemic power, social oppression, the
plight of peoples, and the need for inclusiveness and diversity within
social movements. Conversely, in dialogue with vegans and animal
activists, those in social and environmental movements could over-
come the blatant hypocrisies of only condemning oppressive and
anti-ecological ideologies and practices when these are not associated
with, or result from, animal exploitation. From the vegan and animal

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standpoints, they could gain new insights into the dynamics of hier-
archy, domination, and environmental destruction and develop more
effective politics and tactics. All parties would benefit through acquir-
ing new perspectives and potentially more effective politics; certainly,
all would grow wiser and become stronger in numbers, diversity, and

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power in alliance with one another and other progressive social move-
ments. Imagine, for instance, the powerful opposition that could be
mobilized against agribusiness if vegans, animal activists, social radi-
cals, and environmentalists joined ranks, along with small farmers
associations, indigenous peoples, and health care advocates.
It is not understood by the Left or the animal rights/liberation
movement, for example, that despite the amorphous political plu-
ralism of animal advocacy, and absurd claims from some extremists
on the Far Right to the contrary, the animal rights/liberation move-
ment is fundamentally leftist in origins and values. The concerns for
equality, rights, democracy, peace, justice, community, inclusiveness,
nonviolence, and autonomy define both human and animal rights
movements equally. The animal rights movement drank deep from
the well of progressive modernism that also spawned radical social
movements, but hardly in a derivative and uncreative way that did not
expand these values to their full meaning and potential.
Any analysis of left politics with respect to its relationship to the
animal rights and liberation movements would be incomplete with-
out a discussion of ongoing incursions into the animal movement by
elements of the political Far Right. Recently, there has been much
debate on social media over the attempted infiltration into the animal
movement by far-right extremists and their racist and fascist ideolo-
gies. Essentially, there currently exist two opposing camps: one which
maintains that animal rights is a social justice cause of the Left, and as
such, encompasses and embraces humanist concerns, such as issues of
racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and so forth. The other argues
that the cause of animal rights should be strictly single-issue and
exist entirely independent of all other movements. Therefore, if, for
instance, individuals who are proponents of animal rights also held
and espoused bigoted or proto-fascist—or even neo-Nazi—positions,

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 Rethinking Revolution M 103

a minority hold the “big tent” view that they should still be part of the
animal movement, as “all that matters is the animals.”
As much as militant direct action must constitute part of animal
liberation politics, so, too, must militant anti-fascism. Espousing a
cause such as animal rights, which requires a humane and compas-

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sionate sensibility, while simultaneously disregarding or dismissing
other social justice issues that demand equally of our empathy and
ethics, is at best a fundamental contradiction and, at worst, a perver-
sity. Whereas the animal cause does not exist in a social vacuum, nei-
ther do other repressed societal entities or victims. Thus, it behooves
both the Left and the animal advocacy movement to acknowledge
and respect the social needs of all oppressed and marginalized groups,
if each hopes to effectively represent its respective constituency in the
sociopolitical arena, and if a progressive alliance politics is to be possi-
ble. Fortunately, those in the animal movement who uphold the tenets
of total liberation were outraged at the attempts by the Far Right to
penetrate the animal movement as a whole, and have again mounted
a fierce resistance. As a result, they vigorously countered those forces
of fascism, despite the latter’s recent surge in overall popularity, and
electoral wins in France, that campaigned, in part, on a ticket that
decried the horrors of “halal” butchering, a front for its real agenda:
anti-immigration and racism.
Attacking the new slave economy as it does, the animal liberation
movement is a significant threat to global capital. Animal liberation
challenges large sectors of the capitalist economy by assailing corpo-
rate agriculture and pharmaceutical giants and their suppliers. Far
from being irrelevant to social movements, animal rights can form
the basis for a broad coalition of progressive social groups and drive
changes that strike at the heart of capitalist exploitation of animals,
people, and the earth. It is not a revolutionary force on its own, but it
is hardly reducible to a petit-bourgeois parlor game. The animal advo-
cacy movement as a whole, today, is the fruition of twenty-five hun-
dred years of a vast cultural and learning process, spanning Eastern
and Western cultures, evolving from venerable ancient times to the
postmodern era. The vegan and animal standpoints bear the seeds of

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a profound paradigm shift, turning away from dominator cultures,

predatory violence, and pathological humanism, toward a new ethic
and culture of complementarity, interconnectedness, and reverence
for all life. They thereby advance possibilities for harmonizing human
society with other animal species, with the biocommunity, and with

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itself. Despite their often feeble nature, the vegan and animal rights/
liberation movements have the potential to advance rights, demo-
cratic consciousness, psychological growth, and awareness of biologi-
cal interconnectedness to higher levels than previously achieved in
history.
Animal liberation is by no means a sufficient condition for demo-
cracy and ecology, but it is for many reasons a necessary condition
of economic, social, cultural, and psychological change. For it is not
enough to democratize power, as the Left demands, if one does noth-
ing but redistribute the authority and capacities to exploit and kill.
From the animal and earth standpoints, the slogan “Power to the
People!” is frightening, not enlightening; it is oppressive, not liberat-
ing. One must change the instrumentalist mindset itself, transform
sensibilities that view animals as nothing but resources for human
use, provoke profound changes in human identity, and promote
respect for, and connectedness to, all life and the earth as a whole.
Vast social, political, and economic changes by themselves are inad-
equate, unless accompanied by equally profound psychological trans-
formations. This involves a Copernican revolution in human ethics,
identities, values, and worldviews, whereby people realize that they
belong to the earth, and that the earth does not belong to them.
In a world under relentless attack in every way from nihilistic
forces and predatory powers that thrive on domination, exploitation,
and violence, and which will kill and destroy until nothing is left,
all who are not murderous operatives of this system share a common
interest in shutting it down and building a new world altogether. It
is, truly, one struggle, one fight. There is a desperate need for more
expansive visions and politics on all sides of the human/animal/earth
liberation equation. No movement can achieve its own immediate
objectives apart from solidarity with other progressive struggles, and

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 Rethinking Revolution M 105

alliance-building processes can begin with open and constructive

dialogues and debates. Unfortunately, to date, no significant efforts
have been undertaken along these lines; indifference, misunderstand-
ing, and acrimony persist on all sides. We must replace identity politics
and single-issue orientations in favor of a far broader, deeper, holistic,

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and more inclusive concept of total revolution. Rather than a polemic
against any one structure of domination, we need a critique of hierar-
chy as a systemic phenomenon. We thereby must reject partial struggles
for a broader, deeper, more complex, and more inclusive concept and
politics. We must not only see the “entanglement of human/animal
oppression,” but also those of human/animal liberation.14
A truly revolutionary social theory and movement will not just
emancipate members of one species, but rather all species and the
earth itself. A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will
grasp the ancient conceptual roots of hierarchy and domination, such
as emerged in the animal husbandry practices of early agricultural
societies. It will incorporate a new ethics (ecology and animal lib-
eration) and politics of nature that overcomes instrumentalism and
hierarchical thinking and institutions in every pernicious form pos-
sible. It will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most pro-
found values and goals of humanity. It will build on the achievements
of democratic, socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate
radical green, feminist, LGBT, and indigenous struggles. It will repu-
diate proto-fascist ideologies and unequivocally reject alliances or
association with the Far Right. It will merge human, animal, and
earth liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism
and domination in of all kinds.
A radical politics of the twenty-first century must dismantle all
asymmetrical power relations and structures of hierarchy and begin the
vital process of healing the breach among human beings and between
human and nonhuman animals. It must eliminate every vicious form
of prejudice and discrimination—not only racism, sexism, fascism,
homophobia, and ableism, but also the scientifically false and mor-
ally repugnant lies of speciesism and humanism. It must reverse the
growing power of the state, mass media, and global corporations in

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order to promote decentralization and democratization at all levels of

society, and only then can society possibly be reconstituted in har-
mony with the natural world and other species. Radical politics is
impossible without the revitalization of citizenship and the repoliti-
cization of lives, which begins with forms of education, communica-

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tion, and culture that anger, awaken, inspire, and empower people
toward action and change.
Articulating connections among human, animal, and earth lib-
eration movements no doubt will be challenging, but it is a major
task that needs to be undertaken from all sides. We may not succeed
in this endeavor, or even come close, but the results of such failure
promise to be catastrophic.

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 CHAPTER 5

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Minding the Animals: Cognitive
Ethology and the Obsolescence
of Left Humanism

W
hat does it mean to be “human”? The question, though
it has occupied some of the greatest Western minds of
philosophy, science, history, and political theory, could
not have been answered with any plausibility until recently. For only
in the last century or so have we begun to acquire enough knowl-
edge through evolutionary theory, geology, ecology, anthropology,
paleontology (the scientific study of prehistoric life), archaeology, and
genetics to provide an informed response. At the same time, recent
scientific and technological developments have produced radical and
vertiginous change. The possibilities of artificial intelligence, robotics,
cloning, pharmacology, stem-cell research, and genetic modification
pose entirely new challenges for attempts to define “human” in fixed
and essentialist, rather than fluid and plastic, terms. Ironically, just as
we are beginning to acquire important knowledge of human nature,
we have developed the means to begin altering ourselves in dramatic
ways, yet as technological animals with malleable natures this itself is
an important part of what it means to be human.1
Despite our deep-rooted animality and long lineage of biological
evolution, “humanity” is also a social construct involving the identity

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and conception that humans have of themselves as members of Homo

sapiens. In its arrogant, alienated, and domineering Western form,
human identity reflects a host of problematic assumptions, biases,
prejudices, and myths derived from religion, philosophy, science, and
culture as a whole. The massive, tangled knot of ideologies involved

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in the construction of our species identity (as opposed to our racial,
religious, ethnic, gender, or national identities) needs to be critically
unraveled, so that we can develop new values and worldviews and
forge sane, ethical, ecological, and sustainable lifeways. To an impor-
tant degree, the new consciousness requires an ethic of respect for
all sentient life—human and nonhuman—and a reconnection to the
earth as a whole. The new identities—post-anthropocentric, post-
speciesist, and post-humanist—would be not only ethically progres-
sive in their egalitarian, inclusive, and nonviolent outlook, they would
also be scientifically valid, by accurately representing the true place of
Homo sapiens in the intricate biocommunity of this planet.
Profound change has been stirring in areas such as philosophy
and religion, but in many key aspects science is paving the way, with
constant new discoveries that demand radical rethinking of human
identity and carry profound moral, social, political, and ecological
implications. In urging systematic conceptual shifts in our views of
the natural world and of nonhuman animals, this chapter underscores
an irony and problem that has received little if any attention. This
concerns the gross failures of the Left to engage one of the most sig-
nificant intellectual convulsions of the modern era, namely, cognitive
ethology: the scientific study of animal intelligence, emotions, behav-
iors, and social life.
Science has always been important to the Left, as radicals and
progressives proudly claimed the mantle of critical inquiry and the
Enlightenment, and championed the liberatory possibilities of scien-
tific and technological innovation. From the nineteenth century to
the present, leftists embraced empiricism, naturalism, skepticism, and
agnosticism or atheism. Inseparably related to their support of criti-
cal reason, radical traditions also, of course, embraced the moral and
political avant-garde in ethics and politics, namely the bourgeois

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 Minding the Animals M 109

ideals of equality, justice, autonomy, and rights, whose true liberatory

potential could only be realized, they argued, in a postcapitalist and
genuinely democratic society.
This chapter raises various questions concerning human identity
politics—the social, political, and environmental implications of how

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humans view and conduct themselves as species beings in relation to
other species and the earth as a whole. While advancing the progres-
sive norms and institutions of modernity in many ways, the leftist
tradition is viewed more as a part of the problem than the solution.
Leftists, radicals, progressives, liberals, humanists, populists, and so
on, uncritically reproduced the pathologies of Western anthropocen-
trism, speciesism, humanism, and rationalism. En masse, therefore,
they have failed to break with the repressive mindsets and institutions
underpinning hierarchy, oppression, violence, and the domination of
human over human, other animals, and the natural world. Because
of their atavistic, unenlightened, pre-scientific, and discriminatory
views toward nonhuman animals (such as led them to ignore some
of the most profound scientific and moral revolutions of the mod-
ern era), leftists cannot regain their former place of pride or pretense
to avant-garde thinking. Their claim of progressive vision cannot be
realized until they engage the profound issues of veganism, animal
rights, and cognitive ethology, and break from dominator cultures at
their very roots.

Modernity and Its Discontinuities

As humans continue to explore their evolutionary past and gain a
more accurate knowledge of the intelligence of great apes and other
animals; as they probe the depths of the cosmos in search of life more
advanced than themselves; as they develop increasingly sophisticated
computers and forms of artificial intelligence and artificial life (self-
reproducing “digital DNA”); as they create transgenic beings and
cross species boundaries to exchange their genes with other animals;
as they clone life forms and create others virtually from scratch; and
as they merge ever more intimately with technology and computers to

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construct bionic bodies and become cyborgs, the question inexorably

arises: Who and what is Homo sapiens?
From the first cosmologies, ancient Greek philosophy, Christian
theology, modern science, and the Enlightenment to Marxist
humanism and beyond, Western culture has struggled, and failed,

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to attain an adequate understanding of the human species. From
religious attempts to define humans as immortal souls made in the
image of God to philosophical efforts to classify us as disembodied
minds, thinkers have often approached the question of human nature
apart from our bodies, our animal past, and our evolutionary his-
tory. Whereas religious and philosophical fictions such as “soul”
and “consciousness” vaporize biological realities, deny our animality,
and exaggerate human uniqueness in relation to other animal spe-
cies, disciplines such as sociobiology or behaviorism reduce humans
to biologically determined organisms, “selfish genes,” and the like.
Both extremes fail to grasp the tensions and mediations that shape
the human animal, a being that exists within the tautness of culture/
nature, of the long biological and social constitution of Homo sapiens.
A deep understanding of human nature has been obscured by van-
ity, arrogance, error, and pomposity, as well as fear and insecurity of
being “merely” animal.
Human identity in Western culture has been formed through
the potent combination of the agricultural domestication of ani-
mals and plants, Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism and speciesism,
Greco-Roman rationalism, medieval theology, Renaissance human-
ism, modern mechanistic science, and Social Darwinism. Whether
ancient or modern, religious or secular, philosophical or scientific,
these multiple determining influences concur in the belief that
humans are wholly unique beings, existing in culture rather than
nature, alone in having language and reason, and ontologically
divorced from animals and the physical world. Throughout the entire
trajectory of “civilization,” in Western cultures above all, humans
imagined themselves to be unique, privileged, and advanced forms
of life, agents of a cosmic telos, the end to which all other beings and
things were mere means.

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 Minding the Animals M 111

Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the dominionist,

anthropocentric, speciesist, theocratic, and geocentric worldview of
Western society suffered a series of powerful intellectual blows that
decentered humans from their cosmological throne and self-assigned
position of power and privilege. Each conceptual bomb destabilized

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the medieval cosmological picture—which can be visually depicted
as a series of concentric circles—in which God is the center of all
things, the earth is the heart of the universe, “Man” is the core of the
earth, and the soul or reason is the essence of the human. Over the
last five hundred years, this cosmology has been overturned through
a series of “discontinuities.” These involve scientific, technological,
and ethical revolutions that shatter the illusory privilege, harmony,
and coherence that human beings vaingloriously attempted to estab-
lish between themselves and the universe. Whenever a rift opens in
their narcissistic map of reality, humans are forced to reevaluate the
nature of the universe, to rethink their place in it, and to restore phil-
osophical order. Invariably, this process occurs by reestablishing their
alleged privilege and uniqueness in a new way. While some push for
change amidst ongoing paradigm shifts, others fear the new and cling
to dogma and the status quo. Thus, in times of transformation and
uncertainty, opposing forces clash and struggle for the power of truth
and the truth of power.
As a strong reaction to theism, the hegemony of theology, and the
oppressive and hostile stance that the Church took toward scientific
and technological advance, humanists championed unleashing the
powers of science, technology, and industry. Breaking with fatalism,
absolute subservience to God, or passive stoicism, modernists such as
Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Rene Descartes urged humans to
seize command over nature and bend it to our will to advance human
life. This Promethean outlook tended to separate culture and nature
even further, and deepened the chasm between the human and animal
worlds by establishing a false dualism between irrational beasts and
“rational man.”
In his book, The Fourth Discontinuity, Bruce Mazlish identifies
four ruptures in the medieval worldview, brought about by dynamic

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changes in the modern world.2 The first discontinuity opened with the
Copernican revolution in the sixteenth century. In place of the domi-
nant geocentric paradigm that situated the earth at the epicenter of
the universe and claimed that the sun revolved around it, Copernicus,
and subsequently Galileo in the seventeenth century, argued that the

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sun occupies the center of the universe and the earth revolves around
the sun. Under the spell of the Ptolemy and medieval astronomy,
human beings had to confront the fact that their planet is not the
physical center of the cosmos. Not only did this reality contradict
official church dogma, the spatial decentering entailed a psychologi-
cal decentering, moving the earth from the center of the picture to the
margins. Of course, science has since demonstrated that there is no
center to the universe and that its limits are endless. There have been
rich speculations, moreover, that alien species exist that are far more
intelligent and advanced than humans are; that there may be multiple
or “parallel” universes; and that humankind inhabits a “small planet
attached to an insignificant star in a backwater galaxy.”3
But rather than a blow to human supremacism, some modern
thinkers saw this first decentering or discontinuity as an opportunity
for humankind to assert itself even more boldly in the universe. As
J. B. Bury writes,

Finding himself in an insignificant island floating in the immensity

of space, [“man”] decides that he is at last master of his own desti-
nies; he can fling away the old equipment of final causes, original
sin, and the rest; he can reconstruct his own chart and, bound by
no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe into account only in
so far as he judges it to be his own profit. Or, if he is a philosopher, he
may say that, after all, the universe for him is built out of his own
sensations, and that by virtue of this relativity “anthropo-centrism”
is restored in a new and more effective form.4

Thus, one should never underestimate the narcissistic capacity of

humans to deny reality and to reassert the delusional belief in their
privileged position and special meaning and purpose. Heliocentrism

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 Minding the Animals M 113

was part and parcel of a new empirical science that was a crucial
catalyst for modern humanism, a veritable secular religion in which
humanity elevated itself to God-like rule over the earth. The mecha-
nistic theories of Thomas Hobbes and Julien Offray de Le Mettrie,
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, were poten-

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tial counters to religious mythologies, philosophical idealism, and
human supremacy. Their heretical ideas rejected Cartesian dualism,
stripped away the soul and reduced the human to nothing but a body
as machine. Yet religion, science, and philosophy deflected these dan-
gerous ideas and together reasserted dualism and our unique essence
as soul or mind, and thus defended a significant challenge to human
supremacism while resurrecting the walls between animality and
humanity.
Despite the heliocentric theories of Copernicus and Galileo and
the emergence of a secular scientific culture, Western humanity nev-
ertheless could still feel privileged and superior in its alleged radi-
cal uniqueness and growing delusions of mastering nature. A more
powerful blow to their cosmic narcissism arrived with the second dis-
continuity humans had to confront, when Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species, in 1859. This earth-shaking work dealt a
fatal blow to the Platonic metaphysics informing Western thought,
which denied the reality of change and sought Truth in a transcen-
dental and timeless realm of Ideas or Forms. During the nineteenth
century, numerous thinkers explored the notion that nature changes
and evolves toward greater diversity and complexity. It was not until
Darwin’s insight into natural selection as a key mechanism of biologi-
cal change that Platonism finally retreated and humans were forced
to confront their own animality.
With the help of emerging geological science, which demonstrated
that the earth was billions not thousands of years old, Darwin demol-
ished a litany of propositions taught by mainstream interpretations
of the Old and New Testaments. These included traditional religious
beliefs, such as: God made humans in his image; God put animals on
the earth for human benefit; God created the animals after he created
humans; and each act of creation was unique. Yet Darwin showed,

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and science subsequently has confirmed, a set of counterpropositions:

one can explain the universe without positing God, there is no inher-
ent purpose in the universe, animals lived for billions of years before
humans, and all life evolves in a continuum according to the same
mechanisms of change.

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Over a century a half after the publication On the Origin of Species,
however, much of humanity still cannot accept the facts of evolution
and the animalic origins of human life. Moreover, as many scien-
tists had strong psychological attachments to speciesism, along with
powerful economic and career investments in the burgeoning vivi-
section and pharmaceutical industries, they either ignored Darwin’s
emphasis on the emotional, psychological, and social continuities
between human and nonhuman animals, or they grotesquely mis-
used and distorted Darwin’s concepts to promote elitist agendas.
Conservative thinkers in the social and natural sciences along with
sundry elitists, reactionaries, and capitalist ideologues transformed
“Darwinism,” a scientific theory of biological evolution, into “Social
Darwinism,” a political ideology justifying class domination and
hierarchical rule.
This bastardization of Darwin’s work applied biological concepts
such as struggle, competition, and “survival of the fittest” (a phrase
coined by Herbert Spencer not Darwin), to social relationships in
ways that conflated key differences between the biological and social
worlds; that erased the role of cooperation in nature; and that natu-
ralized capitalism, class domination, ruthless egoism, and insatiable
greed. Projecting capitalist values into nature, Social Darwinists por-
trayed social life as a brutal struggle for survival in which only the
“fit” (capitalists and social elites) survive while the “weak” (workers
and other oppressed groups) languish and die, unable to “compete.”
Social Darwinism and the “might is right” ideology bolstered not only
class domination of human over human, but also speciesist domina-
tion of humans over other animals.
Thus, rather than interpreting Darwin’s theory in a way that
undermines speciesism and anthropocentrism by underscoring the
unity and interconnectedness of all life and natural processes, various

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 Minding the Animals M 115

ideologues appropriated Darwin for reactionary purposes. They

thereby reinforced conditions of alienation, division, exploitation, and
violent domination in human relations to one another, to other ani-
mals, and to the natural world. Darwinism, therefore, was not unam-
biguously progressive; rather, it was put to reactionary uses and cut

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both ways. Hence, a subversive discontinuity that should have revo-
lutionized human thought and existence was effectively countered,
co-opted, and used to buttress antiquated ideologies and a destructive
status quo.
While still grappling with the dangerous provocation of Darwin’s
research on evolution and cognitive ethology (see below), Western
culture had to confront the subversive implications of a third discon-
tinuity launched by Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century
and advanced by Sigmund Freud into the twentieth century. Against
the Christian/Cartesian view of the body as an ephemeral shell for
the immortal soul and the self as governed by a rational essence,
Nietzsche and Freud demonstrated that reason and conscious thought
are products of the body. They are epiphenomena of the subterranean,
unconscious realm of existence governed by primordial instincts,
desires, drives, and the sexual and violent urges of the Id. Inverting
the Western view of the self, these iconoclasts viewed Homo sapiens
as a desiring, not a rational, creature; as unable to master its inter-
nal world, let alone external realities; and as animalic through and
through and therefore, not the radically unique being humans have
fantasized themselves to be since the dawn of symbolic culture and
the invention of writing.
But despite the power of these provocations, there was, as with
Darwin, little problem for reactionary ideologues to suppress, falsify,
and adulterate these subversive philosophies in order to make them
serve, not undermine, dominator societies. Thus, Nietzsche’s complex
concepts of the will to power and “higher types” were appropriated
by Nazis to justify anti-Semitism, Aryan domination, and genocide.
Freud’s theory of the unconscious was ironically fashioned into a
new science, as psychotherapy generally became a tool of a conform-
ist “therapeutic culture” that made individuals, not repressive social

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institutions, responsible for their alienation and unhappiness. The job

of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists was less to rehabilitate
humans into happy and fulfilled human beings than to readjust and
reintegrate malcontents into the capitalist machine, working hand-
in-hand with pharmaceutical industries in order to dull awareness

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and produce “happy robots.” Dismissing both Nietzsche and Freud as
reactionary thinkers (and to be sure, each was politically problematic
in various ways), leftists did not trouble themselves with the radical
elements of their critiques, such as that which called into question the
speciesist and rationalist fallacies informing the archaic model of left
humanism and theory of human nature.
Finally, Mazlish notes, a fourth discontinuity surfaced during the
mid-twentieth century, following the rapid development of computer
technologies and artificial intelligence. After being forced to confront
their separation from the cosmos, their long biological history and
animal origins, and the primacy of the unconscious over the con-
scious mind, humans had to reconsider their relation to machines
and the ancient dualism of determinism vs. free will. Just as pious
believers in God, the soul, and immortality were, and are, repelled by
the thought of their animal nature and origins, so humans generally
loathe being likened to machines that in contrast to them are devoid
of mind, intelligence, and free will.
Yet, as the artificial intelligence of computers grows ever-more
sophisticated and continues to surpass the capacities of human minds
in numerous ways, people are forced to question yet another alleged
ontological divide, the one separating humans from machines. Even
machines are no longer mechanisms as traditionally described, as
they increasingly approximate the biological operations of the brain
through neural nets, parallel processing, evolutionary hardware, and
the like. Moreover, when the self-ascribed “essence” of the human
is stripped away, and human beings begin to merge intimately with
technology, fusing flesh with steel and silicon chips, human identity
comes into question in disturbing ways.
In contrast to technophobics, who responded with anxiety to
the breathtaking pace at which computers were becoming faster,

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 Minding the Animals M 117

smaller, more ubiquitous, and increasingly sophisticated—able to

self-organize, mimic human thinking processes, and beat Russian
chess masters—a bold cadre of technophiles, visionaries, futurists,
and “transhumanists” embraced this revolution. They declared the
weakness and inferiority of the human carbon-based life form and

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championed the merging of biology with technology as the next stage
in evolution. Some argued, for instance, that merging with machines
would dramatically increase human intelligence, happiness, and
longevity, thus in effect creating a new post-human cyborg spe-
cies far superior to the feeble evolutionary product known as Homo
sapiens. Others, articulating visions of Christian reincarnation and
neo-Cartesian views of consciousness as the human essence, desire to
abandon their bodies and to upload their consciousness into a com-
puter. According to radical technophiles, the day is fast approaching
when humans will create “spiritual machines” or “mind children”
that advance evolution by quantum leaps.5

The Human Chimpanzee

Thus, since the opening of modernity five centuries ago, humans
were compelled to engage, if only to deflect, at least four major dis-
continuities that problematized their alleged radical uniqueness and
special status in the universe. In each case, “rational man” had to
rethink human identity—his species identity common to all other
humans, or rather, to all who counted as “human,” such as white
Western males—which was defined in opposition to nonhuman ani-
mals. In quick succession, reflexive members of Homo sapiens had
to overcome scientific and philosophical errors, false dichotomies,
cosmic narcissism, an exaggerated sense of uniqueness, and illusions
of separation from the natural and animal worlds. Those possessing
the virtue (extolled by Nietzsche) of “intellectual honesty” digested
the nauseating knowledge of the cosmic insignificance of humanity
masked by a vast carapace of lies, while coming to grips with human
contingency and our humble evolutionary origins; this led to philoso-
phies such as existentialism, anti-speciesism, and biocentrism.

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Yet, as we have seen, with each discontinuity and tear in the care-
fully woven fabric of cosmic delusion, there is great struggle and tur-
moil, leading to a dialectic of decentering and recentering the human
position in the universe. When faced with their contingency, insig-
nificance, and limitations that challenge human supremacy and the

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power of social elites, reactionaries battled to reinterpret, distort, and
domesticate any subversive ideologies; the full weight of intellectual
revolutions, scientific discoveries, technological changes, and moral
advance, however, pressured the infantile narcissism of humankind.
Increasingly, more accurate knowledge and plausible truths began to
nullify the “utility of the lie[s]” (Nietzsche) that humans elaborately
construct for purposes of cosmic comfort, psychological peace, arro-
gant complacency, and for justifying and protecting the privileges and
powers of the few over the many—whether these violent hierarchi-
cal systems were aristocratic, monarchical, capitalist, or democratic-
humanist in nature.
While Mazlish ably describes four major challenges to human
identity from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, there are
many additional developments in the decentering process and human
identity formation that are important to highlight and thematize,
only a few of which are touched on here. Some of the most important
conceptual revolutions from the mid-nineteenth century to the pres-
ent relate to a deepening understanding of other animals and our own
animality. The huge gains in knowledge relating to our nature and
evolutionary past came from evolutionary theory, ecology, anthropol-
ogy, paleoanthropology, archaeology, genetics, and cognitive ethology.
After the blows to anthropocentric and speciesist identities inflicted
by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, computer tech-
nologies, transhumanists, and others figures and sources, Richard
Ryder—the English philosopher who coined the term “speciesism”—
believes that the moral revolution of animal rights (a philosophy that
in many ways is supported by, and is compatible with, recent scientific
discoveries) is yet another crucial discontinuity with implications that
we as a species must embrace. “We must now continue this [decen-
tering] process,” Ryder argues, “by discarding speciesism along with

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 Minding the Animals M 119

our other delusions of grandeur, and accept our natural place in the
universe.”6
The fact is that only since 1859 has humanity begun to understand
the forces of life and their origins and nature at all. Mythology, reli-
gion, philosophy, and science all contributed to constructing myths,

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distortions, and falsehoods that obscured the animal roots and real
nature of Homo sapiens and the long process during which social
evolution phased out of biological evolution. Until the late 1800s,
humans had virtually no conception of our closest biological rela-
tives, the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orang-
utans). Accounts from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries
describe gorillas as dangerous degenerates, beast-men, primitive races
incapable of speech, or monsters. Growing acquaintance with the
physiology and behaviors of primates, however, quickly undermined
the speciesist belief in human uniqueness as it became increasingly
obvious that we shared common evolutionary roots.
“Ecology” did not emerge as an official science until 1866, when
German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel coined the term. As the study of
organisms in their relation to one another and to their natural envi-
ronment, ecology is an inherently holistic outlook that contextualizes
the origins and development of plant and animal species within vast,
intricate, and dynamically changing natural conditions. Yet, whereas
many humans assume they live in rarified technological castles that
hover above the coarse earth, ecology showed that humans are part
of a planetary web of intricate interrelationships and interdependen-
cies (which they happen to be radically disrupting). A humbling blow
to our arrogant outlook, ecology reveals that humans—who conceive
of themselves as the most autonomous and exalted forms of life—are
entirely dependent upon the natural world, biodiversity, and in par-
ticular, the crucial role nonhuman animals play in maintaining and
enriching nature. Indeed, earthworms, dung beetles, butterflies, and
bees are far more important to the integrity and diversity of nature
than humans are—the latter being the only species one could remove
from earth ecosystems with positive effect. From an ecological per-
spective, humans are an overpopulated, parasitic swarm, living in total

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ignorance of natural “laws” they foolishly think they can master, but in
truth must conform to and harmonize with if they intend to survive.
Archaeology dates back only to the late 1800s, and did not become
a systematic science until after World War II. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, it was believed that a large brain was the initial

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step and driving force of human evolution. This falsehood was encour-
aged with the hoax of the Piltdown man, a fabricated fossil skull of an
alleged early human that for forty years helped to perpetuate gross sci-
entific errors. These falsehoods persisted until 1924, when Raymond
Dart discovered the “Taung child” fossil in South Africa and identified
it as a new species, Australopithecus africanus, which existed 2.5 million
years ago. In addition to assuming that humans evolved in Europe or
Asia rather than Africa, anthropologists and others believed that they
emerged relatively recently and that large brains (the human essence,
after all) developed before bipedalism. In 1974, these assumptions were
decisively refuted, when Donald Johanson discovered the remains of
“Lucy,” an Australopithecus afarensis species who existed 3.2 million
years ago.7 The ancestral human timeline was thereby pushed back
further and Lucy and other fossil discoveries confirmed beyond doubt
that our australopithecine ancestors walked upright before developing
large brains, a process that would take millions of years of evolution.
Lucy and other australopithecines were ape-like in their relatively small
brain mass, and human-like in their morphology and upright mobility,
making bipedalism not cognition or language the earliest and most
defining characteristic of Homo sapiens.
Not until 1960, when Jane Goodall made her historic journey to
Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Africa, did human beings pos-
sess even a rudimentary understanding of the great apes, specifically
the chimpanzee. Using her pioneering method of “habituation,” of
patient observation that invited eventual acceptance or ignoring her
presence, Goodall discovered that infanticide, warfare, and murder
were not behaviors unique solely to humans, but existed among chim-
panzees as well. Bonobos, in contrast, live in matriarchal and peace-
ful societies dominated by sex, not war. Whereas thinkers such as
James Burnett and Darwin recognized that humans have significant

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physical and behavioral similarities with primates, the facts of our

biological relationships were not established definitively until 1975,
when molecular genetics determined that chimpanzees and humans
are 95–99 percent alike in their DNA. This means that chimpanzees
are our closest biological cousins and are nearer to humans than they

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are to orangutans and gorillas. This also helps to explain Goodall’s
findings, for along with chimpanzees, humans are the most violent
and aggressive species on the planet.8
In 2002, The Human Genome Project corroborated these genetic
findings, and they were confirmed again in 2003, when scientists at
Wayne State University argued that, based on additional evidence,
chimpanzees should be reclassified as Homo troglodytes.9 This
change would make them full-fledged members of our genus, Homo,
which would be revised to currently include Homo (Homo) sapiens,
or humans; Homo (Pan) troglodytes, or common chimpanzees; and
Homo (Pan) paniscus, or bonobos. On this approach, Jared Diamond
is perfectly correct in removing humans from their exclusive place in
the Homo genus to identify them instead as the “third chimpanzee.”10
According to current genetic research, humans and chimpanzees
shared a common ancestor 5–8 million years ago, before branching
off into two separate lineages. But whereas some taxonomists situate
chimpanzees as members of the Homo genus, it seems more logical to
move humans into the chimpanzee Genus, Pan.

The Revolution of Cognitive Ethology

Beginning in the seventeenth century, modern science constructed a
mechanistic paradigm that depicted animals as automata or machines.
From Descartes to sociobiology and behaviorism in the present, the
modern tradition cast animals in the role of brutes or machines
devoid of emotional, cognitive, and social complexity. Unless they
sought ridicule and academic failure, students trained in the mech-
anistic paradigm learned to avoid reference to the subjective life of
animals. Under the spell of behaviorism, scientists redescribe the love
a chimpanzee feels for his or her mother as “attachment formation”;

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elephants are not roused to anger, but rather display an “aggression

exhibition”; and problem solving by birds manifests not intelligence,
but only a “conditioned reflex.”
Scientific journals refused to publish papers that alluded to ani-
mal thoughts or emotions, as if they were human-like (or, rather, we

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were animal-like). To apply “human” concepts such as love or sadness
to animals is to commit one of the most egregious mistakes in sci-
ence, namely the fallacy of “anthropomorphism.” By using incom-
mensurable categories appropriate to the ontological divide between
animals and humans, scientists prohibit describing animal existence
in anything but mechanistic terms and so by default reduce them to
machines and beg the question of their true nature.
Clearly, we do not want to project onto animals attributes that they
do not have (as a grinning chimpanzee is not happy but nervous);
however, there is a difference between denying all complexity to ani-
mals and misinterpreting their emotions or behaviors, and working to
improve our understanding. Moreover, the evolutionary continuum
from nonhuman to human animal entails that humans have inher-
ited much from their primate ancestors and thus we do share many
similar thoughts, emotions, and behaviors with other animals; in fact,
much of our own experience is derived from animals (see below). So we
can distinguish between crude anthropomorphism and what Donald
Griffin calls “critical anthropomorphism,” which is an interpretive
process that does not erect a wall of understanding but rather seeks an
empathetic and reflexive opening into similar and shared worlds and
seeks to verify its findings scientifically. Behaviorism and the scien-
tific fetish of “objective detachment,” in contrast, has been a principle
obstacle to understanding other animals and guarantees that we will
languish in error so long as such barriers and false assumptions stand.
Yet, having misled us for so long about animals, science has initi-
ated a revolution in our understanding of animal emotions, minds,
behaviors, and social lives. As evident in a spate of recent books and
the new discipline of “cognitive ethology” that studies nonhuman
animals, science finally is beginning to understand the true nature
and complexity of other animal species, elevating our respect for their

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 Minding the Animals M 123

complexity while rightly devastating our deluded and vain species

identity.11 Without question, the early pioneer of cognitive ethology
was Charles Darwin, and here his most important contribution was
not The Origin of Species, but rather his later works, The Descent of Man
(1871), and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). As

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stated, Darwin established the animal roots of humanity, he described
significant physiological and behavioral similarities between nonhu-
man and human animals, and he argued that humans differed from
other animals such as apes “in degree, not kind.” Darwin thereby
underscored the continuity of animal evolution, rather than positing
an ontological chasm incompatible with the basic principles of bio-
logical change and development.
In the late 1970s, inspired by Darwin’s innovative lead but draw-
ing on a growing body of knowledge unavailable in Darwin’s day,
Donald Griffin established cognitive ethology as a new and respected
science.12 Griffin’s work inspired a new generation of writers and
helped spawn a proliferation of articles, books, websites, and docu-
mentaries that revolutionized the way many scientists and laypersons
alike viewed animals. Of course reactionaries defended mechanism,
dualism, behaviorism, and speciesism; however, these were ad hoc and
weak responses to an emerging new paradigm and scientific revolu-
tion that refuted a host of fallacious theories and established its new
approach and findings on solid ground.
On the basis of biological science and genetics, field research and
experimental testing, and careful observation and logical reasoning,
we know that the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social worlds
of animals are more remarkable and complex than we could have
imagined. Virtually every emotion that humans have—including
fear, stress, loneliness, sorrow, jealousy, embarrassment, pride, empa-
thy, love, and joy—animals have as well. We know, for instance, that
Michael the gorilla loved the music of Luciano Pavarotti, just as Flint
the chimp died of grief upon the death of his mother, Flo. It is a well-
known fact that elephants mourn their dead, enact burial rituals, and
seemingly are aware of the significance of death. Animals know joy as
well as sorrow, and can be playful as well as serious. They also possess

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an aesthetic sense, and sense of humor, as evident in the behavior

of birds who delight in dancing and chimpanzees who love to bang
drums, throw balls, and paint.13
Complex skills and forms of intelligence run broad and deep
throughout the world of animals. Birds have acute memories and

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impeccable spatial mapping skills, and crows and other bird species
use tools and exhibit problem-solving skills as well. Many animals
have abilities to count and to recognize patterns and visual relation-
ships and analogies—often better than children and even college
undergraduates. There is strong evidence that “higher” mammals
such as whales, dolphins, gorillas, and chimpanzees have significant
rational and linguistic abilities. Koko the gorilla commanded a sign
vocabulary of 1000 words, such as she displayed on her many Internet
chats. Alex the African Grey parrot could name over a hundred differ-
ent objects, seven colors, and five shapes, while able to count objects
up to six and speak in meaningful sentences.14 Chimpanzees have a
repertoire of at least thirty sounds that have express distinct mean-
ing. Given the tools of American Sign Language, great apes convey
thoughts and feelings to human beings and one another. Using com-
puter keyboards with lexigram symbols, they correctly answer ques-
tions that demand reasoning skills. The fact that chimpanzees who
stare at themselves in mirrors and remove dots placed on their fore-
heads suggests they have a sense of self-identity. Dolphins communi-
cate their individuality to each other through signature whistles and
whales have a repertoire of over six hundred different social sounds.
Thousands of experiments in the field and laboratory have demon-
strated that animals such as prairie dogs, squirrels, and chickens use
distinct sounds to convey information to one another, such as to warn
of a predator in the vicinity.
Acknowledging only one model of intelligence and communica-
tion, that of Homo sapiens, scientists have argued that since animals
do not speak or reason like we do, they do not have minds at all—a
monumental non sequitur. In expecting animals to satisfy human cri-
teria of rationality and language, scientists have succumbed to the very
anthropomorphic fallacy they condemn. It is not that many animal

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 Minding the Animals M 125

species cannot think, reason, symbolize, and communicate in sophis-

ticated ways, but that we “wise” beings could not overcome dogmatic
assumptions and exert enough intelligence to recognize and interpret
other kinds of minds and communication. Intelligence and thought
processes can assume many forms, not all of which follow textbook-

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defined rules of inductive and deductive reasoning; similarly, com-
munication can transpire through sounds, expressions, gestures, and
behaviors, and meaning is not transmitted only by following the con-
ventions of human syntax, although monkeys seem to understand
basic rules of grammar.15
Beyond the abilities that many animals have in counting, memory,
spatial mapping, analogical reasoning, problem solving, and com-
munication, they also evince a clear sense of morality, justice, and
fair play.16 Great apes, elephants, wolves, whales, dolphins, hyenas,
rats, and mice display a wide range of moral behavior. Despite the
stereotype of nature “red in tooth and claw,” animals are not brutal,
violent, killing machines built only to survive and reproduce, while
locked into life-or-death struggle with competitors. Rather, they, like
humans, have peaceful, empathetic, compassionate, nurturing, and
altruistic aspects to their nature, as evident in the ways animals care
for family or their own kind, express feelings of love and grief, and
nurture of or sacrifice for individuals of other species.
The moving nature of this compassion and altruism in animals
invites comparison with the way humans behaved in the infamous
experiment of Stanley Milgram in which many individuals, obey-
ing the order of an authority figure, gave (simulated) lethal levels of
electric shock to actors feigning intense pain. Empathetic and altru-
istic actions suggest that animals should be viewed as moral agents
who often act with awareness, deliberation, care, and concern toward
one another. The “gladiator view of life” was never one propounded
by Darwin, who rather emphasized the evolutionary importance of
cooperation as much as competition, as did Kropotkin’s important
book Ethics: Origin and Development.17
Far from being automatons governed by rigid biological impera-
tives and crude instincts, ethologists have shown that animals such as

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chimpanzees, monkeys, and dolphins form genuine cultures, whereby

knowledge and behaviors are transmitted by teaching and learning
rather than acquired through genetic inheritance.18 As demonstrated
by Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, and others, chimpanzee societies
are not instinct-driven, but rather rule-governed.19 Chimpanzees live

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in hierarchical societies dominated by an alpha male and there are
known rules of behavior and punishments for violating expected
norms (such as demand cunning and secrecy when a subordinate male
sneaks sex with the female of the alpha male). They think and act in
terms of conventions, hierarchy, rules, consequences, and mutualism.
The intelligence of primates is not innate and fixed, but rather, like
ours, an important part is socially constructed in the context of cul-
ture and technological innovation.20
Aristotle was flat wrong in his attempt to define human unique-
ness in terms of being political animals, which we can take to mean
not only that humans are social creatures but also organize them-
selves in societies governed literally by power relations and political
struggle. For chimpanzees are social and political animals in a similar
sense, living in rule-governed, power-oriented communities that are
Machiavellian in their emphasis on dominance and subordination,
imposing and violating rules, and chronic struggles for alpha male
power.21 Similarly, Kropotkin could not have been more misguided
in his attempt to define human uniqueness in terms of having the
agency and will to resist repression and to desire freedom. Resistance
to human oppressors is rampant in a world that holds animals in
captivity and exploits, tortures, and kills them. The most dramatic
examples of animal rebellion involve elephants and orca whales kill-
ing their trainers, but animal resistance to human oppressors occurs
constantly and they rebel against abusers and fight for freedom just
as humans do.22

Crumbling Walls and Conceptual Claustrophobia

The old paradigms have been eclipsed, proven to be utterly false
and bankrupt, and many quarters of science and philosophy have

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 Minding the Animals M 127

abandoned Cartesian mechanism, behaviorism, and speciesist dual-

ism. The belief that animals are primitive only betrays the archaic
limitations of the human mind and its inability to grasp the otherness
of animal life and behavior. We are recognizing distortions and fal-
lacies on each side of the ontological chasm that society dug between

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human and nonhuman animals, and ethology has broken down the
thick walls of separation. Humans overestimate their own rationality
as they underestimate the rationality of animals. Whereas humans
have reduced animals to biology and thus denied animals culture, so
too, focusing only on the voluntarist facets of their own behavior, they
have failed to grasp the biological dimensions of human culture.
Much light can be shed on human behavior once we renounce cos-
mic narcissism and abandon the dualist and speciesist mindsets that
block our understanding of other animals and ourselves and alien-
ate us from other species. With as much arrogance as ignorance, we
define ourselves as radically unique beings that are not the product of
4.6 billion years of evolutionary history on planet earth. Too often,
humans do not see themselves as primates who began to walk upright
millions of years ago, but rather as beings who emerged in vacuo and
ab novo, building an empire on earth to fulfill a special divine, cosmic,
or evolutionary purpose.
The carefully policed boundaries between human animal and
nonhuman animal keep shrinking as it becomes increasingly obvi-
ous that Homo sapiens is not a singular being, a beacon of reason
standing apart from a dark and primitive animal world, but rather
a part of a vast, differentiated evolutionary continuum. The rich sci-
ence of cognitive ethology supports Darwin’s theory that humans
differ from animals in degree, not kind, such that human forms of
thinking, self-awareness, intentionality, communication, language,
and social interaction are products of evolution that stem from our
primate ancestors and are shared by numerous other species to vary-
ing degrees. “Human intelligence,” note Dickie and Roth, “may be
best likened to an upgrade of the cognitive capacities of nonhuman
primates rather than an exceptionally advanced form of cognition.”23
The false dualisms and synthetic walls separating humans and other

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sentient species are tumbling down, and we cannot put the Cartesian
figure of Humpty Dumpty back again.
Only humans, we thought, experience a deep and broad range of
emotions, such as love, joy, grief, jealousy, and embarrassment. Now
we acknowledge that science has demonstrated these same feelings

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among many animal species. Mammals possess a limbic system and
neocortex, the functions that enable human beings to experience
emotions and have abstract thoughts. All mammals possess oxyto-
cin, a hormone involved in the experience of pleasure during sex and
that plays a key role in mother-infant bonding. Female bonobos and
chimpanzees have been seen to put things on their heads and “primp”
themselves in the mirror, suggesting that even fashion and vanity are
not unique to humans. Humans alone, we have been told repeatedly,
grieve over and bury their dead in some type of ritualized ceremony,
yet grief and mourning emotions exist in other animals such as ele-
phants, who enact burial rites for their dead.
For millennia, it was thought that only humans—Homo faber—
make and use tools, until recent discoveries that chimpanzees, birds,
and other species do also (for instance, chimpanzees use sticks to
extract termites from their mounds, apply stones to crack open palm
nuts, and craft spears to kill bush babies). The dogma that only
humans—Homo loquens—have complex forms of language and sys-
tems of communication prevailed until it became clear that chimpan-
zees, dolphins, whales, prairie dogs, and other animals do, as well.
To disparage these as pseudo-languages because they are not human
languages and allegedly have no sense of syntax or grammatical rules
is question begging, and provincial in its definition of language and
communication. Washoe, Koko, Kanzi, and other primates fluent in
American Sign Language or other languages demonstrate that sym-
bolic communication is not unique to human animals.24
With traits allegedly unique to humans running out, philoso-
phers and scientists claimed that only humans have minds complex
enough to allow a sense of self-consciousness or self-identity, but, alas,
chimpanzees and other animals demonstrated significant degrees of
self-consciousness too. Parallel to Levi-Strauss’ defense of the “savage”

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 Minding the Animals M 129

mind, which is no better or worse than the “civilized” mind, but

rather a different incarnation of the same human capacity for thought
and culture, so Marc Hauser argues that all animal brains have to
cope with various problems. Hence, each species has its own special
“mental toolkits” for processing information about objects, number,

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and space, and so on.25 Variations lead to differences among species,
with Homo sapiens evolving toward an unprecedented complexity in
many ways. Still, Hauser concludes, “We share the planet with think-
ing animals . . . Although the human mind leaves a characteristically
different imprint on the planet, we are certainly not alone in this
process.”26 Similarly, many claimed that only humans live in cultures,
in which behaviors and norms are transmitted by learning rather than
inheritance. Bookchin’s crude bifurcation between first and second
nature (see chapter 4) has been refuted by science itself, which shows
gradations, not a gulf, between nonhuman and human animal cul-
tures. Like humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and other species also
live within complex societies, whereby they formulate a technics and
a moral outlook, and transmit knowledge through communication,
teaching, and learning.

Rethinking Human “Uniqueness”

The much-vaunted claim that humans are “unique” is uninformative
and tautological, for, by definition, every species is unique. The hawk,
the rattlesnake, the silverback Gorilla, the African elephant, and the
ocelot are all different from one another and from us. So, humans are
not even unique in being unique, or rather, in being radically unique,
as certainly humans are distinct animals in many ways, as again every
species is novel and different from others.
The rationalist view of human beings as information processors
whose choices and actions reflect preferences governed purely by
reason and logic is as false as the Cartesian and behaviorist views of
animals as creatures devoid of intelligence and complex behaviors.
Certainly, no other species has written sonnets or sonatas, solved alge-
braic equations, or meditated on the structure of the universe. There

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is no comparison between the counting skills of a bird and the math-

ematics of Einstein, between the rock used by a chimpanzee to crush
a nut and the spaceships devised by rocket scientists.
Yet humans are not unique in their possession of a neocortex;
of complex emotions like love, loneliness, empathy, and shame; of

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sophisticated languages, behaviors, and communities; of aesthetic
and moral sensibilities; or of self-awareness. Indeed, not only do
nonhuman animals have culture, art, technology, morality, and so
on, they invented them (or were active agents of their development)
within their own social contexts, environmental conditions, and evo-
lutionary dynamics that predate the emergence of humans and their
ancestors. Humans only enjoy the capacities they do because of their
evolutionary heritage and biological roots in animality. Humans,
however, are ingrates who withhold due credit to their primate and
animal ancestors for “human” traits that often are elaborations of an
evolutionary heritage not their own cultural innovations. In a per-
verse irony that is characteristic of a predatory and delusional spe-
cies, humans then deny these traits to nonhuman animals in order
to legitimate their violent subjugation of nonhuman animals, just as
they do to groups of Homo sapiens that they deem subhuman.
Chimpanzee societies are a likely source of human morality in
their creation of a stable family life community (even if hierarchical),
implicit moral rules defining expectations and obligations, and look-
ing after one another, for example, by mutual grooming and having
concern for the general community. “Human morality,” de Waal says,
“can be looked at as [primate] community concern made explicit.”27
Humans do not acquire any traits whatsoever—whether emotions,
brains, social and familial norms, or principles of justice—ex nihilo,
but rather through elaborating on, often dramatically changing, the
results of evolutionary development and dynamics of nonhuman ani-
mal communities.
Let us never forget that nonhuman animals have distinct and
amazing traits that humans lack and the alleged rational nature of
humans hardly justifies speciesist exploitation and the ongoing animal
holocaust. Humans cannot fly like hawks, echolocate like bats, nor

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communicate with their feet like elephants by sending vibrations

through the ground. They lack the grace of the gazelle, the strength of
the chimpanzee, and the speed of the cheetah. Just as animals are often
faster, stronger, and more agile and graceful than humans, so, in some
ways, they are smarter and morally superior. African Gray parrots,

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pigeons, and chimpanzees can outperform children and adults alike
in capacities such as memory and analogical reasoning, and macaques
can exhibit more compassion toward their fellow kind than humans
show one another.28 Further, one might consider animals morally
superior in the sense that they often exhibit more kindness, compas-
sion, and altruism than humans, despite the myth of nature being
“red in tooth and claw.” Animals prey on, eat, and kill one another,
but, with rare exceptions such as chimpanzees—not coincidentally
our closest biological relatives—they are not pathologically obsessed
with control, power, hierarchies, social status, violence, warfare, and
mass killing.
Human beings are stereoscopic, bipedal, big-brained, language-
using, technologically and linguistically sophisticated animals, but
they are morally stunted, hierarchical, predatory, violent, and barbaric
primates as well. As a species, they are unique in traits such as neotany
(undergoing an unusually prolonged period of childhood and deferral
of maturity); their ruthless proclivity toward violence, aggression, and
war; and the degree to which they possess many qualities they deny
other animals have in kind. They are land mammals, descendants of
apes, and the sole heir of the Homo Genus. Humans today, therefore,
are descendants of the “winners” of an evolutionary competition in
which all other Homo species were the “losers,” and countless nonhu-
man animal species were bludgeoned into extinction along the path
of our fabled “ascent” to the “top of the food chain.”
The definition of humanity typically extols our cultural brilliance
as manifest through millennia of mythology, religion, philosophy,
art, music, literature, dance, architecture, and science. The praise of
humanity’s multifaceted achievements is well deserved, but this stun-
ning radiance also has a macabre and dark side that is an inseparable
part of human history and nature. This underbelly of “civilization” is

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barbarism—the unbroken timeline involving hierarchy, domination,

colonization, violence, war, genocide, extinctions, and environmental
ruination. The species that decorated the caves of Lascaux, wrote The
Bhagavad Gita, erected the Parthenon, painted the Sistine Chapel, and
composed the Eroica Symphony also operated the ovens of Dachau,

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dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, butchered itself
in tribal conflicts and world wars, laid waste to natural environments,
and soaked the earth in blood. We are a complex, tortured, divided,
ambiguous Janus-faced species capable of good and evil, creativity and
destruction, Eros and Thanatos; we cannot be reduced to one facet
or the other and no utopian society can dissolve our dysfunctional
nature or remove our evolutionary baggage.
Homo sapiens is a brash, arrogant, brilliant, ignorant, and menac-
ing species that in a very short period of time has colonized the entire
planet and left death, destruction, and extinction everywhere it went.
In the era of ecological crisis marked by species extinction, rainforest
destruction, desertification, resource shortages, and climate change,
the epithet “wise man” is intolerably pretentious and false. If intel-
ligence and wisdom entails the ability to survive, exercise foresight,
and adapt to one’s environment, then countless animal species are far
more intelligent than human beings. Dinosaurs lived for hundreds
of millions of years, cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) have
survived for tens of millions of years, Homo erectus existed for over
a million years, but Homo sapiens sapiens, emerging only fifty thou-
sand years ago, may not survive another century or two, certainly not
in enviable form. For all their sophistication, human beings are still
primitive animals. Their neocortex—the seat of language, creativity,
and abstract thinking—rests on ancient limbic and reptilian areas of
the brain that evolved millions of years before symbolic thinking and
it still conditions human behavior.

Animals: The Missing Element in the Radical Equation

After centuries of dramatic intellectual revolutions and discoveries,
Homo sapiens have been knocked off its pedestal and now flails about

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 Minding the Animals M 133

in the winds of uncertainty. We cannot overlook the paradox of a spe-

cies who, boasting god-like powers of rationality, still does not com-
prehend itself and its place in the world. Humans are now close to
exterminating their closest biological relatives, the great apes, as they
dispatch up to thousands of other animal species to extinction every

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year, thereby ensuring that Homo sapiens will die as it was born—in
ignorance of its own nature.
“Throughout recorded history,” Armesto notes, “almost every
supposedly distinguishing feature by which humans have identified
and differentiated themselves from other creatures, classified as non-
human, turns out to be mistaken or misleading.”29 Humans have
clouded accurate understanding of their own nature and possibili-
ties with irrational beliefs, religious fictions, primitive mythologies,
logical fallacies, philosophical illusions, scientific dogmas, God-
complexes, infantile needs, and narcissist fantasies. Although recent
advances in philosophy, science, and other areas have refuted numer-
ous myths about human and nonhuman animals alike, falsehoods
persist because they conveniently promote elitist platforms, comfort
human vanity, reinforce anthropocentrism and speciesism, and there-
fore advance base humanist agendas to exploit nature and animals for
their own purposes.
Traditionally, the riddle of human existence was pondered through
mythology and religion; however, today we know that an adequate
understanding of human nature depends heavily on science. Although
modern science—like religion, philosophy, and literature throughout
Western history—has perpetuated pernicious errors about human
and nonhuman animals alike, this deplorable betrayal of its stated
methods, goals, and principles has been significantly redeemed with
advances in various disciplines. Ecology, geology, anthropology,
archaeology, paleontology, genetics, and cognitive ethology have revo-
lutionized our understanding of ourselves, other animals, the forma-
tion of the earth, and the cosmos in general. But the painstaking
acquisition of knowledge is no guarantee of its universal acceptance,
or that truth-seeking inquiries will not be corrupted and co-opted by
those with vested interests in profit and power.

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Ethology in particular has been progressive and liberating. It has

shattered Cartesian and behaviorist views of animals as machines or
simple pre-programmed organisms devoid of thought or intentional-
ity, and is only now liberating us from the prescientific era of under-
standing animals. During the European “Age of Discovery,” so-called

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civilized society debated whether dark-skinned and traditional peoples
were anything but “savages” and subhumans. From our “enlightened”
and “progressive” positions in the twenty-first century, we may laugh
at the arrogance, racism, and ignorance of such views, without appre-
ciating that the vast majority of the human population still view ani-
mals with an even greater crudeness, ignorance, and bias—a benighted
outlook that informs the most violent, barbaric, and devastating prac-
tices ever unleashed, unprecedented in the degree of rage, insanity, and
impact even for Homo sapiens, the most dangerous animal on earth.
Once we see what flimsy, fallacious, and corrupt constructs anthro-
pocentrism and speciesism are, and how deeply embedded they are in
the philosophies, values, and narratives of “civilization,” we can begin
to grasp their catastrophic effects and implications. The systemic
institutional changes needed to avert social and ecological catastro-
phe must be accompanied by a parallel conceptual revolution that
involves the construction of new values, worldviews, narratives, and
species identities.
Although an intellectual vanguard is pulling humanity out of the
quicksand of ignorance, unenlightened views persist throughout all sec-
tors of society and overall, we are still in the Dark Ages of understand-
ing other species, our planet, and ourselves. It is painful enough to
contemplate the illiteracy and ignorance of the general population—
such that, for example, the majority of citizens in the United States
believe in angels, the Devil, and creationism. It is particularly disturb-
ing, however, to see virtually all sectors of left and liberal cultures
tenaciously clinging to atavistic moral and scientific views toward
nonhuman animals as well as the earth, as they flatter themselves as
“progressive” and “enlightened.”
If humans have for so long failed to understand animal minds, it
is due to their own stupidity, insensitivity, arrogance, and speciesist

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 Minding the Animals M 135

biases. But as the darkness begins to recede in various quarters of

thought, it is time leftists attempt to reclaim the progressive science
and ethics status they once held. While it took the Left a good cen-
tury to catch onto the importance of ecology, and to begin merging
concerns such as justice and autonomy to sustainability and ecology,

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leftists have consistently devalued or ignored the plight of animals,
failing to understand this as a profound moral issue in its own right,
and as an indispensable lens for understanding the current global
social and ecological crisis. There can be no full or even adequate
understanding of the systemic problems of capitalist society, of the
origins and dynamics of hierarchy, and of a future rational, autono-
mous, ethical, and ecological society until we address the 10,000-year
legacy of speciesism and the barbaric exploitation of other animals.
Until the Left engages the animal standpoint, in short, it cannot
recapture the mantle of progressive thinking in the moral and sci-
entific realms, and it cannot advance the new values and identities
appropriate for the twenty-first century. By ignoring or deriding the
profound ethical and scientific revolutions of animal rights and cog-
nitive ethology, the Left and social progressive traditions have for-
feited any claim they once had to enlightenment, progressive ethics,
political vision, and commitment to radical change. It has become
increasingly obvious that the deficiencies of leftism, progressivism,
humanism, populism, and mass resistance movements toward the
animal question vitiate the ability of these cultures to address—
let alone resolve—urgent social and environmental crises. This is a
tragic loss for humankind, at least, for only radical theorizing and
social resistance/transformation movements can steer us out of the
current evolutionary impasse that threatens to engulf humanity itself,
in the rapidly advancing social and ecological crises that now stand as
its most salient legacy on earth.

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 CHAPTER 6

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Moral Progress and the Struggle
for Human Evolution

W
e live in dark, disturbing times: we are witnesses to prolif-
erating wars, perpetual genocide, predatory global capi-
talism, rampant militarism, unparalleled government
surveillance and repression, and a phony “war on terrorism” that
fronts for attacks on dissent and liberties. We are facing the ever-present
threat of financial collapse and global depression, climate change,
the sixth great extinction crisis in the earth’s history, and systemic
planetary meltdown. Scientists warn that we are at a tipping point
of global ecological collapse, and report the shocking speed of cata-
strophic changes such as those that turn icecaps into water and forests
into savannas.
Welcome to the fruits of “progress.” The modernist ideology par
excellence, progress is defined as the expansion of the human empire
over animals and nature; as bringing other species and the natural
world under human command; and as overcoming the “primitive,”
“savage,” and “barbaric” stages of premodern human existence for
full-blown techno-scientific, mechanistic, and market-dominated
societies. The inherent fallacies and disastrous consequences of the
long lineage of dominator cultures that peaked in modern European
societies led to a volatile contradiction between the social and natural
worlds. The question is not if this contradiction between fast-growing

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market societies and slow-changing, sustainable-oriented ecological

systems will be resolved—it will be one way or the other. The ques-
tion, rather, is: will humans consciously and voluntarily change and
adapt to nature, or will nature drastically reduce human numbers
and their impact, through prolonged and painful means such as war,

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famine, and disease?
This is a difficult moment to argue for the notion of progress.
Indeed, who thinks that tomorrow will be better than today? That their
children will inherit a brighter future and jobs, wages, and retirement
plans will be secure? Are we confident that homes, health care, and
education will be affordable? Can we be certain that the plight of the
poor and the needy will be overcome by waging war on poverty rather
than on people? That the ecosystems which sustain life will convalesce,
and not collapse? Did not the dream of the Enlightenment—which
foretold that the spread of reason, science, technology and “free mar-
kets” would bring autonomy, peace and prosperity to all—die on the
slaughter bench of the twentieth century? In reality, multiple conflicts
including two world wars, fascism, totalitarianism, genocide, the hor-
rors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of nuclear annihilation,
growing corporate hegemony, and accelerating environmental break-
down led the dance of death during that entire macabre period. Barely
out of the starting gates, the twenty-first century opened with attacks
on the World Trade Center; the deployment of an endless “war on
terror” masking a permanent war on democracy; and the unparalleled
rise of surveillance and security states. It has already recorded resource
scarcity crises; escalating wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa; and
increasingly aggressive neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. It
has witnessed ever-widening gaps between the world’s rich and poor,
global market crashes, hastening species extinction, and catastrophic
climate change.
Toward the end of the 1960s, a new wave of counter-enlightenment
thinkers, or postmodernists, rose to prominence with denunciations
of civilization, modernity, and the notion of progress.1 They were
influenced by Max Weber’s critique of the “iron cage of bureau-
cracy,” Martin Heidegger’s analysis of technological domination, and

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 Moral Progress M 139

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s dissection of the failure

of the Enlightenment project and revolutionary Marxism. Whereas
eighteenth-century theorists saw the spread of reason promoting
autonomy, freedom, prosperity and peace, Horkheimer and Adorno
described the perverse irony in which rationality instead produced

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technical domination, totalitarianism, fascism, irrationality, and
mass conformity through sophisticated systems of propaganda,
disinformation and cultural control. Whereas the “Age of Reason”
“aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as
masters,” Horkheimer and Adorno witnessed a “wholly enlightened
earth . . . radiant with triumphant calamity.”2
Similarly, Michel Foucault rejected the Enlightenment equation
that happiness and freedom advance in lockstep with the spread of
reason, science, and technology. He resolved the “unity of Western
history” into discrete eras devoid of developmental logic or coherence.
Rather than producing an endless and undeviating road to human
perfection, Foucault saw history as shifting power constellations that
“progressed,” if anything, toward increasing regulation and control
of bodies, populations, and minds.3 Jean-Francois Lyotard diagnosed
the fin-de-siècle “postmodern condition” as a jaded cynicism toward
any “metanarrative” (Hegelian, Marxist, or capitalist) of history as the
development of freedom and progress.4 Against the totalizing critiques
of postmodernists, Jürgen Habermas championed the Enlightenment
as an “unfinished project” that harbored not only the instrumental
rationality of technical and bureaucratic domination, but also the
“communicative rationality” underlying critical thinking, reasoned
debate, and the dialogic skills vital for freedom and democracy.5
Progress is the preeminent myth of modernity, a potent ideology
and, indeed, a pervasive and near-unwavering secular faith. It has pro-
moted a fetishism of growth, control, and money. It functioned as an
alibi for greed, exploitation, and genocide, along with the crushing
of peoples, animals, biodiversity, and nature under the burgeoning
corporate-military juggernaut. The discourse of progress helped to
create and legitimate Eurocentrism, colonialism, industrialism, capi-
talism, imperialism, consumerism, and the systematic eradication of

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organic life and inorganic environments. According to Enlightenment

thinkers, progress involved emancipation from the domination of
nature and the tyranny of ignorance, and advanced in proportion to
the evolution of European modernity beyond the “savage,” “primi-
tive,” “stagnant,” and “barbarian” cultures of the past. In particular,

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they believed, progress surged ahead to the degree that secular nation-
states overcame the bondage of the medieval “Dark Ages,” escaped
from the straightjacket of Christian dogma and irrationality, and
moved boldly into the “Age of Reason.”
However, the new postmodern concept cannot hope to correct
our perilous course and inspire true moral and institutional prog-
ress without a post-humanist foundation that repudiates the deep-
rooted ignorance, arrogance, and errors of anthropocentrism and
speciesism in favor of humility, respect, and connectedness. What
is required is nothing less than a radical broadening of ethics and
community to include all sentient beings and ultimately the earth
itself. This demands overcoming entrenched dogmas, discrimination,
bias, prejudice, and hierarchical institutions of all kinds—not only
the domination of human over human, but also the elevation of
humans over other animals and the natural world as a whole.

A Brief Genealogy of “Progress”

The notion of progress—which states that history advances in a defi-
nite, desirable and irreversible direction of constant improvement—
has become so entrenched in modern thinking, it is easy to forget that
it is a relatively recent invention. Certainly not all cultures were as
dynamic as European modernity, few embraced change with such fer-
vor (many resisted technological “advance” in favor of social stability),
and none identified rapid and uprooting transformations as progress.
The progressivist narrative covers a historical sweep of at least
10,000 years, and in many accounts begins with the revolutionary
shift from nomadic hunting and gathering (or “foraging”) lifeways
to settled agricultural societies rooted in farming and herding. Many
progressivists view the domestication of plants and animals as the

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 Moral Progress M 141

“great leap forward” from “savagery” to “civilization.” The champi-

ons of progress assume that more is good, bigger is better, and moder-
nity is the apex of history, a kind of “maturity” over a “childlike”
past. One can interpret the shift from dispersed hunting-gathering
cultures to expansionist agricultural empires as the most decisive rev-

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olution in history; however, many progressivists (taking the opposite
view of contemporary “primitivists”) tendentiously ignore or malign
the many positive qualities of primal lifeways. This denies that for
millions of years these modes of living well-served humans and their
ancestors in many ways (such as providing better health, less work,
more autonomy, and social equality). At the same time, of course,
progressivists also exaggerate the benefits of farming, herding, popu-
lation growth, city life, industrialization, market societies, and so on.
The flip side of this fallacy involves discounting the regressive effects
of domesticating plants and animals in societies that were large, labor-
intensive, expansionistic, warlike, and increasingly stratified accord-
ing to gender, class, and other dimensions. Nor do progressivists grasp
how the domination of humans over animals, nature, and one another
spawned the violent pathologies, unsustainable cultures, and debili-
tating systems of hierarchical domination that imperil us today in the
form of severe crises in society, animal communities and biodiversity,
and the planet as a whole.
“Progress” represented a radical departure from premodern and
non-Western ways of thinking. Modern thinkers broke with the pes-
simistic, cyclical model of the ancient world that saw time as repeti-
tive rather than innovative, as an eternal recurrence rather than an
evolving process. According to the ancient outlook, history played
out in the rise and fall of civilizations, in endlessly repetitive cycles
of chaos and order and birth and destruction, driven by monoto-
nous dynamics that seemed to yield societies devoid of purpose,
goals, meaning, or direction. As evident in Plato’s metaphysics, many
ancient philosophers and historians equated the passage of time with
corruption and decay; they denigrated the empirical world as mere
appearance and falsehood, while seeking truth in timeless essences.
The Greco-Roman worldview was fatalistic, determinist, and cyclical

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rather than optimistic, open-ended, and linear. From Homer to the

Roman Stoics, the ancients believed in Moira, an inflexible law of the
universe to which human beings must acquiesce. Their cosmology
did not allow, let alone inspire, people to conceive of gradual improve-
ment in human affairs and to look forward to a future better than the

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present and past.
Unlike the theological Providential vision of history, secular-
oriented progressivist accounts demand a positive view of change, a
rejection of an inalterable universe hostile to our purposes, a renuncia-
tion of a fixed human nature, an affirmation of technological ingenu-
ity, and an optimistic belief that people can gradually improve their
lives over time. Modernists thus typically operated with stage theories
of history and linear narratives depicting inexorable improvements in
life, advancing from generation to generation.6 Key roots of Western
progressivism, nevertheless, lie in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The
enigmatic belief that history had meaning—human beings struggling
to realize God’s purpose and plan—and the view that time involved
a steady advance from sin to salvation (for an elite few) was a radical
departure from the pessimistic, cyclical model of the ancients.
Yet, the ascendance of progressivist history required not only a lin-
ear narrative and stage model of ameliorative change, but also bril-
liant advances in science, technology, medicine, the arts, and culture.
Cumulatively, these innovations inspired the optimistic mindset asso-
ciated with many Enlightenment and modernist thinkers. From the
sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the preconditions nec-
essary for a full-fledged progressivist discourse took shape, such as
prepared by the Renaissance, modern science, the Enlightenment,
the French and American Revolutions, capitalism, and the indus-
trial revolution. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Enlightenment
visionaries praised what they viewed as unheralded advances in learn-
ing, reason, criticism, liberty, individuality, and happiness. Progress
would emerge, they thought, through the unstoppable achievements
of science, industry, and rational modes of government. Despite skep-
tics, the growing consensus was that the laws of history were dis-
cernible; that reason, freedom, and markets could spread peace and

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 Moral Progress M 143

prosperity worldwide; and even that human nature and society were
“perfectible.”
Modern thinkers embraced the progressivist form of the Christian
narrative, while nonetheless giving the Providential vision a secular
coding. Modern science did not break with the anthropocentric and

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speciesist ideology of orthodox Christianity (and earlier cultures), but
rather bolstered the project of dominating nature and exploiting both
it and animals by seizing full advantage of innovations in science, tech-
nology, and markets. Thus, in the transition from providential to pro-
gressivist history, from the “dark ages” to the “era of Enlightenment,”
people usurp the throne of God. Humanism becomes the new Gospel,
science and technology pave the road to salvation, and profit and com-
petition become indubitable truths and sacred values.
As evident by the unshakeable confidence of Marquis de Condorcet,
jailed and executed by the functionaries of the French Revolution
that he rapturously praised, the Enlightenment’s faith in progress
was often as dogmatic as the Christian conviction in Providence.
Although modernists de-deified the historical process, they formed
a new God in “Man,” and built a new “Church of Reason” (August
Comte). Consequently, many Enlightenment figures espoused a secu-
larized Providential and salvationist narrative that traced the devel-
opment of humanity from ignorance to knowledge, from slavery to
freedom, and from coarse animality to spiritual perfection. In many
ways, humanism is less a novel philosophy than a repackaged theol-
ogy in which people deify themselves as Lords of the Earth, and claim
the right to commandeer its teeming life forms and fecund resources
for their own purposes and benefits.
Despite the “Renaissance” in knowledge and arts, and the awaken-
ing of autonomy and critical reason in the Enlightenment, regnant
dogmas and ignorance were perpetuated by modern European cul-
tures. They replicated anthropocentrism and speciesism; reproduced
cruelties, torture, pogroms, and conquests; replaced monarchical
domination with the oligarchic tyranny of capital; and intensified
hierarchies while disseminating oppressive power systems. Orthodox
Christian ideologies combined with humanism and the emerging

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techno-sciences to reinforce the ontological and moral chasm divid-

ing human and nonhuman animals, and to promote unprecedented
pathologies of power that targeted global peoples, “brute beasts,” and
hostile “wilderness.”
Thus, dramatic advances in science and technology; the emanci-

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pation of rational inquiry from Church strictures; the hegemony of
instrumental over communicative reason; a grow-or-die market society
organized around profit, commodification, and accumulation impera-
tives; and exponential population growth—all these factors and more
produced a massive, expanding, intensive, and unprecedented system
of power and animal slavery. The modern “civilized” and “enlight-
ened” world proved itself more barbarous than any past culture, as it
confirmed the non-sentient status of animals and only now it tortured
them mercilessly without anesthetic in the hidden dungeons of vivi-
section laboratories. Subsequent developments in technological and
scientific domination led to the industrialization of animals through
slaughterhouses, meatpacking plants, and factory farms, as well as to
technologies of genetic engineering and cloning based on the most
invasive control and manipulation of animal bodies possible.7
With strong roots in political economy and the capitalist theory of
Homo economicus, the progressivist vision assumes that humans are
rational, self-interested beings who seek constant change, technologi-
cal advances, and increasing material comforts and wealth. Since the
seventeenth century, progress has been measured in strictly quantita-
tive terms, such as growing powers of technical control over nature,
expanding markets and wealth creation, and spreading “peace and
prosperity” throughout the globe. Modernist measures of progress
rely on indices such as production quotas, employment rates, profit
margins, housing sales, consumer confidence levels, and the Gross
National Product. Aside from ignoring the catastrophic impact of
growth on exploited peoples, animals, and the environment, the
quantitative model cannot measure intangibles such as human mean-
ing, satisfaction, and happiness. Thus, in crucial ways, this paradigm
cannot address the question of whether industrial capitalism is a “bet-
ter” social system than premodern forms. Indeed, the evidence points

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 Moral Progress M 145

decisively in the other direction, showing that in myriad ways moder-

nity regresses behind or eliminates many advantages of precapitalist,
primal, and nonhierarchical societies.
As there is no direct connection between changes in the objective
and subjective worlds, between wealth and well-being, and between

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the quantity of goods and the quality of life, and as happiness and
satisfaction cannot be measured mathematically, there must be a quali-
tative measure of progress that one can use in critical contrast to the
dominant model. Indeed, a dramatic indicator that modern Western
societies are not progressing in crucial areas like health and happiness
is the phenomenon that psychological, social, and physical afflictions
climb in proportion to the rate of modernization. It is a well-known
fact that the more “advanced” a society, the higher its rates of alco-
holism, drug abuse, suicide, mental illness, depression, job dissatisfac-
tion, crime, murder, divorce, and so on.8 Given the inverse relation
between social and technological development and human fulfillment,
and between economic growth and ecological balance, we clearly need
new, varied, and more reliable means of measuring progress.9
Advances in “progress” were determined not only according to a
narrow range of material indictors that charted growth and innova-
tion in realms such as science, technology, medicine, and economic
profits. A few theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Condorcet,
and Karl Marx rejected any concept of progress that enriched a small
minority of elites by exploiting and impoverishing the vast majority
of people whose lives dramatically worsened in the factories and slums
of capitalist society. For socialists, Marxists, anarchists, feminists,
abolitionists, and reformers, one could only speak meaningfully of
“social progress” when the immense potential of modern knowledge
and industry benefited all people more or less equally, rather than by
creating conditions in which the few exploited the many. The techni-
cal and democratic potential of industrial capitalism, radicals insisted,
could be realized in a socialist, communist, or anarchist society in
which workers and citizens collectively owned, democratically man-
aged, and equally shared the benefits of advanced science, technology,
and industry.

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The Limitations of Humanism

Modernity is a huge subterfuge constructed as a zero-sum game, a situ-
ation in which some gain if, and only if, others lose, with the conse-
quence of distributing resources such as money, status, and influence
in increasingly asymmetrical patterns, and thereby creating or exacer-

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bating hierarchical domination. Thus, capitalists are rich only because
workers are poor and workers are poor because capitalists exploit their
labor power and appropriate surplus value as profit. Powerful states
and empires amass wealth and power by stealing resources and enslav-
ing people from vanquished states. The world’s “developed” nations
become rich and powerful by siphoning resources and wealth from
“undeveloped” states, which in fact were intentionally underdevel-
oped and suffered poverty and a crumbling social structure brought
on by colonization. The cities and palaces of Europe could not have
been erected without reducing African cities to rubble and its peoples
to slaves.
The obscenity involving what one human group or class does to
another to advance its own interests in the name of “progress” is expo-
nentially greater if we consider the worst case of this injustice, which
involves how humans exploit other animals. The entire human spe-
cies gains at the expense of millions of nonhuman animal species and
countless billion of animals that humans enslave, exploit, and kill. In
the greatest zero-sum game of all, human advances exist in inverse rela-
tion to the massive losses of freedom and life suffered by other animals.
Thus, the more humans gain, the more animals lose; the greater the
human comfort, the more suffering and death for animals; and growth
in human population numbers bring extinction to other animals and
reduces biodiversity. While helping humanity in highly uneven ways (as
determined by class, state power, imperialism, systems of hierarchy, and
so on), modern techno-science intensified the misery and slaughter of
animals, and exacerbated the destruction of the earth. This is evident
in the growing horrors of vivisection, factory farming, slaughterhouses,
fur farming, and sundry systems of exploitation, which polluted and
poisoned all aspects of their immediate physical surroundings, and
provoked catastrophic climate change on a global scale.

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From the animal and ecological standpoints, therefore, “progress”

is regress, science is sadism, humanism is barbarism, and the “light”
of Reason brings darkness and madness. Since injury and damage
to nonhuman animals and ecosystems inevitably undermines human
existence itself, the “gains” resulting from modern innovations are

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short-term and partial at best. The bill for the true social and ecologi-
cal costs of industrial capitalism is now due, and will be shouldered
most by underdeveloped nations who contributed least to conditions
of crisis, while future human and animal generations will incur the
heaviest costs and greatest suffering, as climate change is already tak-
ing a huge toll on humans and other animal species.
Against the metanarrative that links the first step in social advance
with the rise of agricultural society, Jared Diamond identifies the shift
from foraging to farming cultures as “the worst mistake in the his-
tory of the human race.”10 Agriculture brought infectious diseases,
malnutrition, a shorter life span, and more work; it worsened the posi-
tion of women, introduced economic and political stratification, and
overall it “inextricably combines causes of our rise and our fall.”11
Thus, the agricultural revolution came at a huge cost, and brought
numerous regressive developments, especially for nonhuman animals.
The creation of surplus food and the building of ever-larger towns and
cities enabled the rapid expansion of the human population, which
encouraged increasingly intensive exploitation of animals. Gradually,
humans commandeered animal bodies for food, clothing, labor,
transportation, and warfare. From chance and haphazard experimen-
tation to increasingly sophisticated forms of knowledge and control,
humans learned how to shape virtually every facet of animal exis-
tence to their own advantage. They discerned, for instance, how to
manipulate the reproductive lives of animals by castration (to make
males more docile) and, more generally through artificial selection.
Over time, humans dominated other animals through hobbling,
confinement, whips, prods, chains, and branding to auction them as
commodities and mark them as private property. Today, domination
and manipulation extends to the cellular and genetic levels of animal
bodies through genetic engineering and cloning in order to breed and

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mass produce “farmed animals” such as cattle, pigs, and chickens to

grow as fast and large as possible for maximum profit.
To call capitalist modernization and the current state of the world
“progress” is madness. The dominator societies that spread across the
globe over the last 10,000 years have been a calamitous error. The

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narratives, values, and identities of anthropocentrism and speciesism
that brought us to this evolutionary dead-end cannot possibly pro-
vide the solutions to the problems dominator cultures created. The
fallacious consequences of separating humans from other animals
and from the earth as a whole; the hubristic and ignorant efforts to
“dominate” and “control” nature and bend it to the human will; and
the arrogant dismissal of limits to growth in favor of the fantasy of
unending abundance, is evident in the ecological crisis reverberating
through the world.
No coherent, consistent, or defensible definition of progress would
sanction the exploitation of the majority of humans for the benefit of a
minority whose lives dramatically worsened, so that ruling elites could
prosper. For the same reason, no viable notion of progress is possible
that focuses on the “advantages” that human beings gain, however
democratic, universal, and justly distributed the benefits might be, at
the expense of animal suffering and lives and the ecological integrity
of the planet. Progress cannot be defined in reference to the human
community alone, for however many its beneficiaries, the exploita-
tion of staggering numbers of other species and individuals cannot be
justified. Only a pathologically violent, disconnected, ignorant, and
egoistic species—Homo sapiens—could call this legacy of madness
and murder “progress.” The fatally flawed nature of humanism grows
ever clearer and more malignant each day. Contrariwise, while much
of humanity has proven itself incapable of learning the most basic
lessons of ecology, such as to appreciate the limits to nature and the
need to live in harmony with its surroundings, others have clung to
the knowledge of ancient cultures or appealed to the insights of ecol-
ogy. For a viable human world is impossible without humility, respect,
connectedness, and recognition that what people do to the animals
they do to themselves.

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 Moral Progress M 149

We most assuredly need new, multidimensional ways of measur-

ing progress that gauge the quality of life (such as relate to mean-
ingful work and leisure time) rather than fetishizing the quantity of
innovation, growth, and wealth. In spite of this, the new paradigms
proposed by reformists such as Edward Burch (who advanced a more

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diverse but still limited, “General Progress Index”), various apolitical
visionaries, or revolutionaries of any leftist stripe are fatally flawed
and deeply inadequate. The new concepts of humanity and society,
the bold models of progress, the novel blueprints and moral compasses
of life, must be more far-reaching than most dare to envision or can
even imagine. Human identity, philosophy, social theory, and ethics
must transcend the limits of humanism, however democratically con-
ceived, in order to bring animal liberation and ecological ethics into
the forefront of a postmodern consciousness—one that deconstructs
and reconstructs the concept of progress. This involves abandoning
the illusions of zero-sum logic in favor of the truth of mutual aid, and
developing a profound understanding of holistic interrelationships,
interdependencies, and shared fates. It requires refashioning the social
world so that humanity can live in harmony with, rather than in con-
tradiction to, the flourishing of biodiversity and the integrity of the
natural world.

The Task of Reconstruction

In the current era of the sixth great species extinction crisis, rainforest
destruction, accelerating global warming, and runaway human popu-
lation growth, we must recognize that the Emperor has no clothes. It is
time to call Western civilization for what it is—a metastasizing system
of domination, war, slavery, slaughter, omnicide, exterminism, and
ecological devastation. The fallacious and disastrous consequences of
separating human animals from nonhuman animals and the natural
environment, attempting to dominate and subjugate complex beings
and physical systems of which we have no grasp, while fantasizing that
the earth is an inexhaustible cornucopia of resources, is dramatically
evident in the ecological crisis reverberating through the world.12

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The earth itself is refuting the dualistic, speciesist, anthropocentric,

and hierarchical philosophies that informed Western thought from
Aristotle and Aquinas to Descartes and Bacon to Marx and beyond
into the present day. But rather than merely deconstruct progress and
strand ourselves in a nihilistic wasteland without a moral compass,

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we can reconstruct the concept to effect a rupture with the past and to
chart a radically new way forward that can potentially stave off social
chaos, unimaginable suffering and loss of human and animal life, and
catastrophic ecological collapse.
Only through reference to some notion of progress can we assess
whether our lives and societies are moving in a positive direction.
Unlike traditional peoples, the modern-day populace lives in dynamic
societies and expects its conditions to “improve” over time, as parents
expect—or once did—that their children will lead better lives and
have more opportunities than what they inherited. Of course, since
the quality of individual lives is directly bound up with the state of
their societies, people need correspondingly diverse criteria to assess
whether their society is moving in a positive or negative direction.
One can easily recognize the need for better policies—for progress—
in critical areas such as education, health care, and employment, as
well as ameliorating social inequality, poverty, and homelessness.
Similarly, one can envision a marked improvement in human atti-
tudes and practices toward other animals in addition to restoring the
integrity of the natural environment. “Progress” entails two distinct
conditions: (1) change (from one state or situation to another), and
(2) improvement (the new state or situation is an “advance” over the
prior one). Whereas the second condition entails the first, the first
in no way demands the second, as change can bring about worse,
rather than better, conditions for individuals, society, humankind,
animals, and the earth as a whole. Positive assurances to the contrary,
the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) in 1994, for instance, considerably worsened environmental
and labor conditions in Canada, the United States, and Mexico while
greatly benefiting multinational corporations. Since the 1980s, paral-
leling developments globally, US corporate profits have risen, CEO

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 Moral Progress M 151

salaries have skyrocketed (now over 400 times the wages of the average
worker), and the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily wider.
In recent years we have witnessed the “Athenization” of European
Union countries with the neoliberal assault on pensions, benefits, and
social programs, and the subsequent social unrest.

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In a world predicated on rapid, chaotic, directionless flux for its
own sake (or rather, for the same of destroying traditions that conflict
with market growth and the production of new “needs”), “progress”
is an indispensable critical and normative concept. It can advance
democracy, autonomy, ecology, and animal liberation, and thereby
help guide society in a healthy, humane, and sane direction, rather
than barreling down the same dysfunctional and destructive path
that we have embarked upon for ten thousand years. The concept of
progress is a means of guiding and directing change in the direction
of greater democracy, freedom, biodiversity, ecological integrity, and
animal liberation. Even anarcho-primitivists like John Zerzan—who
rejects the totality of civilization and longs for a mode of existence
prior to the emergence of speech and symbolic thought—imply some
notion of progress by assuming that things would greatly improve
with the collapse of “civilization” and return to Paleolithic lifeways.13
Today it is patently obvious that no viable concept of progress
can be dominionist, anthropocentric, and speciesist, or can ignore
the evolutionary and ecological unity and coherence of the human,
animal, and natural worlds. A definition of progress that violently
elevates humans over other animals; that enslaves every being from
which it can draw blood, labor, and profit; that obsesses over growth
and mandates plunder; and that is bound up with addiction to fossil
fuels and unsustainable levels of consumption, implodes under the
weight of its massive contradictions. A sound concept of progress, in
contrast, would be holistic in outlook, and grasp the interrelations
and evolutionary continuity among the natural, animal, and human
worlds. In reconstructed postmodern and post-humanist form, a
viable notion of progress abandons hackneyed hierarchies, pseudo-
separations, and indefensible prejudices of all kinds, as it views non-
human animals as sentient subjects of a life with their own inviolable

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purposes and value, and are respected as equals who share with us
core needs, wants, and interests. It grasps that the requisite moral and
psychological revolutions that humanity must rapidly undertake to
overcome its formidable evolutionary impasse are impossible without
equally profound transformations of all social institutions.

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A postmodern, post-humanist concept of progress repudiates the
zero-sum game of winners and losers. The only meaningful definition
of progress refers to improvements in life and conditions for all—not
just all humans, but rather all species, and the staggeringly complex and
interconnected systems of planetary ecology. A notion of progress that
sanctions the exploitation of the majority for the benefit of a minority
is dysfunctional and disastrous. The new concept I have advocated, in
contrast, breaks with domineering, hierarchical, and dualistic mind-
sets and institutions that succumb to the hubristic “human first” men-
tality. This mindset defines human interests in opposition to other
species and nature, rather than understanding humans as inseparably
involved with the vast biocommunity and entire earth. The demo-
cratic principle of equal consideration extends in principle not only
to all human interests (and therefore underpins a theory of equality,
autonomy, and global justice), it also gives equal consideration to the
interests of animals and the requirements of ecological systems.
Quite unlike the humanist definition, however broad, “radical,”
and “egalitarian,” a new account of progress must incorporate non-
human animals into the category of “all” who benefit from, or at
least are not harmed by, social practices and policies. We need to
advance a new universalism, unparalleled in scope, that transcends
the arbitrary and parochial mindset of humanism to respect the
inherent value of nonhuman beings and the physical environment, as
we cultivate harmonious relationships among humans, animals, and
the earth. In contradistinction to postmodern attacks on “totalizing”
theories and grand narratives, the problem is not with overly broad
stories that occlude cultural differences, but rather with frameworks
that are not universal and inclusive enough.
Accordingly, it seems prudent to define progress as occurring when-
ever social values, practices, laws, and institutions advance democracy,

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 Moral Progress M 153

equality, rights and community in ways that promote, balance and

harmonize the needs and interests of humans, animals, and nature.
On this conception, progress is measured according to the degree that
change promotes the well-being and integrity of three overlapping
communities. A policy promoting development or resource consump-

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tion that advances human interests at the expense of animals and the
earth is an anthropocentric and speciesist approach, which gives insuf-
ficient consideration to the biocommunity as a whole. This orienta-
tion, therefore, is not likely to promote harmonization, sustainability,
or “progress” in our new sense and more accurate definition.
Truthfully, given the metastasization of global capitalism, the
rise of authoritarian police states, the growing severity of social and
environmental problems, and the inveterate human failure to prevent
looming or potential problems with foresight, restraint, and precau-
tionary measures leaves one with little optimism. Hence, it is hard to
view the ideals of total liberation and balancing human, animal, and
ecological requirements as anything less than utopian (see Chapter 7).
But utopian visions, too, can be critical and constructive, and can
offer progressive guidance however inadequate the results.

Nonlinear History
History is neither repetitive and random, nor linear and teleological
(seeking some preordained goal); it is formed in the complex matrix in
which humans shape—and are shaped by—biological, environmen-
tal, and social determinants, as they co-evolve with other animals (see
Chapter 1). As we see in the work of thinkers ranging from eighteenth
century philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder to Foucault and
Manuel de Landa, the singular concept of “history” must be broken
up and dispersed into a plurality of histories, involving different cul-
tures that develop unevenly and semi-autonomously from one another
(but often in parallel evolution as well).14
Yet, despite its nonlinear complexity, history is not as random
and meaningless as postmodernists like Foucault or Jean Baudrillard
suggest.15 Rather, one can find developmental dynamics and patterns

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comprehensible only through a unifying narrative. History is not a

smooth, linear trajectory, unperturbed by contingency, chaos, con-
flict, contradiction, spontaneity, stagnation, regression, and ambiguity.
Against a single, uniform, homogeneous, and totalizing “metanarra-
tive” that sees history as a grand story of either freedom and progress,

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or domination and disaster (a “metanarrative in reverse”), social evolu-
tion exhibits competing and often contradictory norms, values, poli-
cies, institutions, and developmental tendencies. Thus, since “Western
culture” is not a monolithic, uncontested, and seamless advance of
anthropocentrism, speciesism, racism, patriarchy, and hierarchy, it
is important to trace the simultaneous development of two opposing
lineages. We therefore need a dual narrative that maps competing
dynamics and contradictory values, traditions, and tendencies.
Throughout Western history, cultures of complementarity and
hierarchy have developed dialectically, side-by-side, simultaneously,
in opposition and antagonism to one another. In addition to the domi-
neering humanist conceptions of ancient, medieval, and modern cul-
tures, there emerged vital alternatives through the ahimsa ethic and
holistic vegetarian ideals born in ancient Eastern religious cultures
and that influenced Western outlooks as well. Thus, great historical
beings—such as Pythagoras, Porphyry, Ovid, Jesus Christ, Leonardo
da Vinci, Shakespeare, Thomas More, John Milton, Alexander
Pope, William Paley, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake,
Caroline Earle White, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Gandhi,
Henry Salt, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and growing legions of
contemporary thinkers and activists from diverse backgrounds—have
all repudiated one facet or another of speciesism, anthropocentrism,
human supremacism, carnivorism, and violent hierarchical lifeways.
Each has striven to promote peaceful, compassionate, and egalitarian
values that can unite humans, animals, and the earth in one vast com-
munity of unity-in-difference and difference-in-unity.
Tragically, however, the egalitarian and non-hierarchical tradi-
tions remained marginalized and dominator cultures and their hier-
archical mentalities and institutions prevailed, wreaking violence and

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 Moral Progress M 155

destruction in a formicating and colonizing spread of Homo sapiens

throughout the planet. From Aristotle, the Stoics, Paul, Augustine,
Aquinas, and Martin Luther to Descartes, Bacon, Kant, Marx,
humanists, Social Darwinists and the present time, the hierarchi-
cal tradition sought to marginalize, repress, and silence the voices of

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complementarity and to establish human supremacy as natural and
unquestionable.
Among the many evolutionary possibilities and narrative interpre-
tations of history, one can trace a broad evolutionary trend, a develop-
mental pattern, a coherent movement, a meaning and a potentiality.
Despite the massive failures indelibly etched into the slaughter bench
of history, such as played out in an endless stretch of hierarchies,
regimes, wars, empires, territories, classes, genocide, and omnicidal
devastation, one can also find—in particular, by examining the last
few centuries of European and American history—a discernible
advance of moral progress.
One can define and gauge moral progress as the broadening of
the moral community toward ever-greater degrees of inclusiveness
and equality. From another perspective, and in a different (admit-
tedly capitalist and individualist) language, one can map the dynamic
movement of the universalization of rights.16 The struggles for freedom,
rights, justice, autonomy, democracy, inclusiveness, and community,
while not unfolding in a linear or inexorable way, provide a kind of
coherence to the last few centuries of modern Western history. As vital
as sympathies and sentiments are to mutual aid and the ethical life,
critical reason is also crucial to developing more expansive and inclu-
sive communities of “subjects-of-a-life” (Tom Regan) with inherent
value. The shift from uncritically accepting customs to demanding a
logical justification for their assent, moves society away from dogma
and tradition toward the rational viewpoint crucial for ethics, justice,
equality, community, and ecological sustainability.
The expansion of the moral community was not a linear develop-
ment encompassing all humanity in a single, continuous, irreversible,
and irrevocable trajectory. Affirmations of biological and moral relat-
edness of species are evident through history and various cultures,

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and were present throughout Western society, but advances in moral

reasoning (always related to democracy-building) were often lost,
delayed, or reversed, and still have a long way to go. “Nevertheless,”
Peter Singer writes, “it is the direction in which moral thought has
been going since ancient times,” a process of increasingly expansive

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moral values and a movement in which, since the eighteenth century,
egalitarian philosophies and moral and legal rights have widened in
scope and influence.17
Dynamically developing throughout the turbulence of the last two
centuries, the notions of value, rights, and community were moving
moral concern beyond humans, beyond animals, beyond even sen-
tience, into a holistic ecological ethics that enfolded the entire natural
world and physical environment into a new moral paradigm. From
Albert Schweitzer and Aldo Leopold to deep ecologists, enlightened
thinkers in the twentieth century have broadened the notion of com-
munity beyond the human sphere to include other animal species and
the earth as a whole. Schweitzer, for instance, advocated a general
ethics of “reverence for life” that encompassed the organic and inor-
ganic world. For the authentically ethical person, no person, animal,
or element of nature should be harmed, all must be protected, and
“life itself is sacred.”18 Leopold championed a “land ethic” rooted
in respect for and awareness of the complex interrelatedness of all
matter and life on this planet.19 The new ecological sensibility and
“biocentric” ethics that assigned intrinsic value throughout the world
was bolstered considerably by the tradition of deep ecology, which
was developed by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in the 1970s
and was elaborated by a wide range of thinkers including George
Sessions and Bill Duvall.20 In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation
to include the “Rights for Nature” in its Constitution.
Moral progress entails a new form of enlightenment that overcomes
all forms of discrimination, including speciesism; that recognizes and
respects the basic rights animals have as sentient beings; and that
treats animals with the same respect it accords members of its own
species. We must elaborate a new concept of progress that is ecologi-
cal, humane, holistic, and rooted in a new ethics of nature, one that

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dialectically mediates the needs and interests of humans, animals,

and the earth. The new Enlightenment promotes a paradigm shift
in the way we think about and relate to the natural world, it widens
the boundaries of community to other species and inorganic matter,
and it extends basic rights to nonhuman animals by application of the

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same logic used to grant human rights.

An Imperiled Future
The Western concept of progress and the system that spawned it have
brought us to an evolutionary crossroads where we must now con-
front profound options and choices. Under the spectral shadow of
climate change, resource scarcity, biological meltdown, environmen-
tal entropy, nuclear threats, and escalating global conflicts, the future
of human evolution is problematic at best and unlikely or doomed
at worst. Progress is something human beings still must aspire to and
can achieve, but only with revolutionary changes in society, culture,
politics, worldviews, values, and human identity. We desperately need
a new moral compass to guide and inform the radical institutional
and conceptual changes necessary to stave of catastrophic social and
ecological collapse.
After millions of years of prehistory, only two hundred thousand
as Homo sapiens and just 50,000 years as Homo sapiens sapiens
(modern, language-speaking humans), we have reached a pivotal point
in history, a crossroads for the future, such that we can choose either
breakdown or breakthrough. In the language of chaos theory, there
have been numerous bifurcation points of social disequilibrium in his-
tory when a fundamental system transformation could have occurred,
but the new fluctuations did not provoke sufficient change in the
fundamental structures and mindsets. As social and ecological crises
deepen, however, new arrangements will arise that must be exploited
for their transformative potential.
Moral progress should not be conceived in idealist terms as an
autonomous development of human ethical capacities. Reason and
emotion have played key roles in the development of ethics, but moral

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evolution also develops in and through political rebellion and social

movements for rights, justice, autonomy, community, and liberation.
Arguably, the best vehicle for continued ethical and social advance
today is the politics of total liberation, which views the emancipation
of humans, animals, and the earth as one interrelated, comprehensive,

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unified struggle. As such, it demands an alliance politics of unprec-
edented breadth, diversity, and inclusiveness.
It is indisputably obvious that the fates of humans, animals, and
the earth are inextricably bound. Progress can no longer entail the
zero sum game of human “gain” at the expense of animals and the
environment. Rather, a deeper concept of progress must emerge that
eliminates the opposition between human and animals and society
and nature. Most fundamentally, it would understand the profound
interrelatedness of all aspects of planetary ecology, thus enabling us
to become good citizens of the biocommunity (Gaia [Greek: earth]),
rather than being wretched barbarians, invaders, mercenaries, juntas,
and death squads, hell-bent on bringing down the whole house.

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 CONCLUSION

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Reflections on Activism and Hope in
a Dying World and Suicidal Culture

W
e are winning some battles in the fight for a decent
and viable world for humans, animals, and the
environment.

But without question we are losing the larger war.

The war against greed, violence, plunder, profits, and domination.
The war against class domination, hierarchical power, state repression,
transnational corporations, world banks, imperialist aggression, and
militarism.
The war against metastasizing systems of economic growth, techno-
logical development, overproduction, and overconsumption.
The war to stop biological meltdown and planetary eco-collapse.
The war to save the forests, oceans, rivers, wetlands, mountains, and
soil.
The war to preserve biodiversity.
The war against the animal holocaust.
The war against the warmakers and their relentless assault on the
planet and all life.

We must focus like a laser beam on an unpalatable truth. Despite

the efforts of social, environmental, and animal advocacy movements

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over the last two centuries, we are nevertheless losing ground in the
battles for democracy, equality, autonomy, ecology, peace, and sus-
tainability. In the last three decades, neoliberalism and global capital-
ism have destroyed social democracies, widened gaps between rich
and poor, dispossessed farmers, assaulted indigenous peoples, and

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marketized the entire world, all the while escalating the war on ani-
mals and intensifying the assault on every ecosystem and on the earth
as a whole.
Signs of ecological distress are evident everywhere, from shrink-
ing forests, dying oceans, and grasslands turned into deserts to melt-
ing ice caps, rising sea levels, proliferating superstorms, and climbing
temperatures. Throughout history, societies have devastated local
environments. But only in the last few decades has humanity upset
the planetary ecology to the point where it is bringing about global
climate change.
Moreover, we are now living in the era of the sixth extinction crisis
in the history of the planet, the last one occurring 65 million years
ago when a meteor struck the Gulf of Mexico and annihilated half of
existing species including the dinosaurs. Unlike the last five, however,
the sixth extinction crisis is caused by human activity. Conservation
biologists predict one-third to one-half of the world’s plant and ani-
mal species might vanish in the next few decades. The ice caps could
melt by 2040, around the time sea life vanishes from the oceans. By
2050 the human population will top 9 billion, and world meat con-
sumption will likely double. After 2050, some scientists believe, the
world—ravaged by climate change, scarcity, and struggle—will be
“unrecognizable.”1
For decades, concerned scientists have warned humanity of
impending ecological catastrophes. The climate change debate is
over, the skeptics have been exposed or refuted, and planetary break-
down is exceeding the most pessimistic predictions of recent years.
We are already at, or well past, the “tipping point” of runaway cli-
mate change, such that the changes that we have brought about will
play out for thousands of years. Scientists agree that the absolute
threshold of global warming we must not cross is an increase of two

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 Conclusion M 161

degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Since 1800 and the rise of
the Industrial Revolution, humans thus far have raised the average
temperature of the planet 0.8 degrees Celsius, enough already to
cause severe ecological damage. Even if we stopped increasing all
carbon dioxide gas production right now, computer models predict

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the average global temperature will rise another 0.8 degrees, mov-
ing us already to nearly three-quarters of the two-degree limit. In
spite of this, carbon emission rates keep growing annually and the
coal already set aside for burning will push us past the two degrees
threshold, perhaps up to 6 degrees Celsius over the next hundred
years or less. We are clearly on a runaway train heading toward
unimaginable disaster.2
The uniqueness, importance, and decisive character of the times
in which we live cannot be overemphasized. This is an entirely new
era in the history of the earth, not just society, and we are all wit-
nesses to the dynamic changes as we stand together at this evolution-
ary crossroads that demand decisive choice. The Holocene Epoch,
which prevailed for the last 12,000 years, has given way to a new stage
in evolutionary history, the Anthropocene Epoch, an era in which
human actions have become the most determinant influence on the
planet and natural events.3
In 1989, American environmentalist Bill McKibbin anticipated
the recent naming of this new epoch, in his book titled, The End
of Nature.4 What McKibben described was not the literal death of
nature, but rather a natural world that has become so colonized, dom-
inated, and transformed by human populations and technologies that
there is not a raindrop or breeze not somehow influenced or altered by
human existence. The combination of capitalist and industrial revolu-
tions resulted in structural imperatives for growth, addiction to fossil
fuels, surging populations concentrated in sprawling megacities, pav-
ing wilderness and natural habitats, draining wetlands and damming
rivers, spreading poisons and waste everywhere, and eventually alter-
ing the global climate.
We monopolize solar energy, fresh water, and habitats, and we
degrade and destroy it all. The human species has exceeded all

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ecological boundaries and has grossly overextended its presence on

this planet, such that it has become a malignant force devastating
the natural environment and robbing life from other species and
future human generations. Homo sapiens, this “wise man” and
crown of creation we pretend to be, have stripped the earth bare of

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its rich fruits.
Perhaps the greatest irony of our time is the inverse relation between
the aggressive attack on all life and the planet and the apathetic and
passive response. Forces of resistance exist, to be sure, but are frag-
mentary and momentary. Despite the all-out assault on the planet and
the overt devastating effects, the overwhelming response has been one
of apathy, complacency, and timidity. Whatever measures have been
taken against the ongoing holocaust and omnicide, they have been
too little, and likely too late.
We now face the grim choice posed by revolutionaries over the last
two centuries, which involved “revolution or barbarism.” Our situa-
tion has deteriorated so dramatically that we must choose between
revolution or ecological collapse, mass extinction, and possibly our
own demise. The twenty-first century is a time of reckoning. This
is undeniably a pivotal time in history and an evolutionary cross-
roads where very different possible futures lay ahead. Nevertheless,
windows of opportunity are closing. The actions that humanity now
collectively takes–or fails to take—will determine whether the future
will be only dire or completely catastrophic, merely difficult or totally
disastrous, incredibly challenging or simply impossible.
In the aftermath of 10,000 years of incessant growth and endless
wars that humanity waged upon itself, other species, and the earth,
we now live amidst unsustainable global capitalism and a system
of growth that is driving natural systems to an irreversible tipping
point. The greatest challenge in the history of our species is staring
us right in the face: Can humanity dramatically change its entire
mode of existence—from moral and psychological outlooks to their
economic and political institutions—in order to forestall planetary
catastrophe? Or will people remain inert, apathetic, delusional, and
fail to mount global and united resistance movements adequate

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 Conclusion M 163

to stop the aggression, nihilism, and death drive of an omnicidal

system?
We need the largest, broadest, boldest, and most systemic and
inclusive visions and strategies possible. We require the most uncom-
promising, militant form of politics we can muster. To stop the

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machinery of planetary war, we must employ every means at our dis-
posal—from nonviolent resistance to civil disobedience, from sabo-
tage to liberation, and from guerilla warfare to armed struggle. We
must not take anything off the table, for everything is at stake. From
Athens to Paris, from New York City to Brazil, there is growing real-
ization that politics as usual just will not cut it anymore.
We will always lose if we play by “their” rules rather than invent
new forms of struggle, new social movements, and literally arm
ourselves against unconscionably violent forces. The defense of the
earth requires immediate and decisive action: logging roads must be
blocked, driftnets should be sliced, whaling ships need to be scuttled,
and cages of every kind need emptying. But beyond these minimal
defense measures, we must forge a powerful resistance movement and
build a revolutionary alternative to the current “system.” We need to
radically change our values, identities, worldviews, economic systems,
social and political institutions, and our relations to one another, to
other animals, and to the earth as a whole.
The global capitalist world system is inherently destructive to peo-
ple, animals, and nature. It is unsustainable and the bills for three
centuries of industrialization are overdue. It cannot be humanized, civ-
ilized, or made green-friendly, but rather must be transcended through
revolution at all levels—social, economic, political, legal, cultural,
technological, moral, and conceptual. We must replace single-issue
approaches and fragmentary struggles with systemic battles and politi-
cal alliances. In the most encompassing terms, these clashes address
the war against humans, animals, and the earth, and must combine in
a politics of total liberation. We must link the liberation of humans to
other animals to the planet as a whole. We need to build a revolution-
ary movement strong enough to vanquish capitalist hegemony and to
remake society without the crushing loadstones of anthropocentrism,

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164 M The Politics of Total Liberation

speciesism, patriarchy, racism, classism, statism, heterosexism, ableism,

and every other pernicious form of hierarchical domination.
Articulating connections among human, animal, and earth lib-
eration movements will be challenging, to say the least. Given the
advanced nature of the crisis, the feeble and fragmented resistance

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to total war, the tribalist tendency of humans to divide rather than
unite, and the ferocity of repression one can expect to the degree this
struggle could advance, we must acknowledge this truth.
Thus, I am not being glib, naïve, or complacent in advocating the
project of total liberation. On the contrary, I am acutely aware of the
difficulties and complexities involved in such an epic political battle
and harbor no illusions about humanity, anymore than I entertain
fantasies about the good intentions of corporations or the benevolence
of the state.
Despite the inspirational platitude, we must realize that failure is an
option. Our future is problematic at best and doomed at worst. There
is no inherent purpose we are here to fulfill, no destiny at which we
are assured to arrive at in glory, however tardy, tattered, bruised, and
blackened we might be. There are no guiding angels to protect us
from failure and no God to save us from an apocalypse. Countless
millions of species have been annihilated in past extinction events,
our Homo ancestors are gone forever, we are dispatching thousands
of other species into oblivion, and there is nothing but the determi-
nation of aware, concerned, and committed peoples to save Homo
sapiens from vanishing into nothingness as well. As Michael Boulter
notes, the earth is a self-organizing system that strives toward balance,
and species lose out, if necessary, to the larger dynamics of ecological
imperatives. “Extinctions are an essential stimulus to the evolutionary
process,” and humans are not only expendable in the overall calculus,
their demise would be a positive and necessary event.5
Nor are there inexorable laws or wheels of fate that have prede-
termined disaster and demise. We must change our course, and we
can—if a critical mass of people throughout the world can under-
stand the current crises and respond with the level of urgency, solidar-
ity, and militancy necessary to transcend this evolutionary impasse.

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 Conclusion M 165

That Is a Big “if”

While horrifying to contemplate from our perspective, Homo sapi-
ens may not have the will, intelligence, or resolve to meet the great-
est challenge and threat it has ever faced. It might thereby succumb
to the same oblivion that engulfed all its hominid ancestors, and

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into which it dispatched countless thousands of other species. Just
as ancestral hominids have gone extinct, so have prior civilizations
collapsed. As Diamond has shown, numerous civilizations through-
out history (including the inhabitants of Easter Island, the ancient
Mayan, and the Greenland Norse) have suffered economic and social
collapse due to overpopulation, overfarming, overgrazing, overhunt-
ing, deforestation, soil erosion, and starvation.6 We are repeating the
same mistakes of the past, still refusing to recognize ecological laws
and limits to growth; the future is as bleak as the historical pattern is
monotonously clear.
In an era of catastrophe and crisis, the continuation of the human
species in a viable or desirable form, is obviously contingent and not a
given or a necessary good. But considered from the standpoint of animals
and the earth, the demise of humanity would be the best imaginable
event possible, and the sooner the better. The extinction of Homo
sapiens would remove the malignancy ravaging the planet, destroy
a parasite consuming its host, shut down the killing machines, and
allow the earth to regenerate while permitting new species to evolve.
After 4.6 billion years of evolution, earth is only middle-aged, and
there is ample time for an amazing abundance of stunning new life
forms to emerge.
This time it is we who are the meteor crashing into the earth, and
we keep crashing and crashing and crashing, never allowing the planet
to recover. We are a meteor storm that continuously, repetitively keeps
slamming into the planet, precluding adaptation and blocking recov-
ery. If we cannot learn how to live on this planet and harmonize our
existence with other species and the biocommunity as a whole, then,
frankly, we have no right to live at all. If we can only exploit, plunder,
and destroy, then surely our demise is for the greater good. Whereas
worms, pollinators, dung beetles, and countless other species are vital

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166 M The Politics of Total Liberation

to a flourishing planet, Homo sapiens is the one species the earth

could well do without.
Every crisis harbors opportunities for profound change, whether it
is a disease in the body or a deep disturbance in a species and its dys-
functional mode of existence. The current state of emergency and the

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severity of the social and ecological crises haunting humanity and the
planet are so grave as to demand radical positive changes in human-
ity itself. It requires nothing less than our drawing on every positive
capacity we have and forcing us to evolve at every level, individually
and collectively, spiritually and politically.
Human evolution is not a fait accompli—either in the sense that
things will improve with the passage of time or that our species will
continue at all. Thus, the future of human evolution—in a viable
and desirable form, rather than in a post-apocalyptic, barren, Social
Darwinist, Mad Max world—is something that will not come easily,
if at all, and demands a struggle on an unprecedented scale.
The main challenges of our time are these: Which road will
humanity choose—the path leading to peace and stability, or the one
verging toward greater war and chaos? Will we advance in a direc-
tion that establishes social justice, or which exacerbates inequality
and poverty? Will we recognize that we have come to the crossroads
of uncontrolled global capitalist growth and neoliberalism, or will
we find an alternative route that radicalizes the modern traditions
of Enlightenment and democracy and is guided by new signposts
toward a future that is just, egalitarian, participatory, healthy, happy,
and sane? Will we move, in David Korten’s words, toward the “Great
Unraveling” and plummet deeper into the abyss, or will we undertake
a “Great Turning,” where we finally learn to live in partnership with
one another, other animals, and the earth?7
The only certainty is a growing planetary crisis and the need for
revolutionary opposition and change. We are living in the twilight
of optimism and pessimism, in the tension of hope and despair. As
Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The challenge of modernity
is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”8

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

 Notes

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Preface: Crisis and the Crossroads of History

1. For a critical contrast between alliance politics and single-issue approaches

such as relate to identity politics, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner,
Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. (London and New York:
Macmillan Press and Guilford Press, 1991), and “Dawns, Twilights, and
Transitions: Postmodern Theories, Politics, and Challenges,” Democracy
and Nature, vol. 7. no. 1, March 2001, pp. 101–117, http://www.demo
cracynature.org/dn/vol7/best_kellner_postmodernism.htm.

1 The Animal Standpoint

1. “Speciesism” is the belief that humans are superior to animals by sheer

virtue of having human attributes such as reason and language. Only
human beings, according to this mindset, have these traits, and they
endow humans with the power and the right to enslave, exploit, torture,
and murder animals in any way they see fit.
2. On Nietzsche and perspectival theory, see Steven Best and Douglas
Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford
Press, 1991).
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968).
4. See, for instance, Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing
the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in
Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality:
Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and
Philosophy of Science (New York: Springer), pp. 283–310.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979).

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168 M Notes

6. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the

Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).
7. On Marxist and Foucauldian theories of history, see Steven Best, The
Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, and Habermas (New York:
Guilford Press, 1995).
8. See, for instance, Stephan L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Naghan, The

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Forgotten Pollinators (Washington DC: Island Press, 1996). The role of
pollinators is becoming increasingly appreciated due to the immanent
crisis posed by “colony collapse disorder,” such that in countries like the
United States one-third of all honeybee populations have vanished due
to the deadly effects of pesticides, among other causes.
9. For an overview of the environmental impact of animal exploitation,
meat production, factory farms, and the agribusiness model, see David
Kirby, Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and
Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2010).
10. See Erica Fudge, “The History of Animals” at: http://www.h-net.org
/~animal/ruminations_fudge.html.
11. Ibid.
12. On animal resistance to human oppression, see Jason Hribal, Fear of
the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (Oakland,
CA: AK Press/Counterpunch Books, 2011), and my review of this
essay at: http://drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animal-agency
-resistance-rebellion-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy.
13. Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature.
(New York: Lantern Books, 2006).
14. See Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture
(New York: Plume, 1995).
15. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 91.
16. Ibid., p. 86.
17. On the profound influence of animal viruses on human health and
society, see Michael Greger, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching
(New York: Lantern Books, 2006).
18. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the
Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), p. 109.
19. Quoted in Franklin Le Van Baumer, Main Currents of Western Thought
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 774.

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 Notes M 169

20. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1972), p. 257.
21. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality (Mineola, New York: Dover
Publications, 2005), p. 114.
22. Mary Shelly, Frankenstein (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
23. Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (New York:

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Bantham, 1995).
24. Hardy cited in Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History
of Environmental Ethics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1989), p. 43.
25. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
26. Here, as in chapter 3, I often use the word “violence” with quotation
marks to resist conflating damage caused to property (sabotage) with
harm caused to sentient life.
27. Jensen, “What Goes Up Must Come Down,” in Steven Best and
Anthony J. Nocella (eds.), Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the
Earth (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), p. 287.
28. Ibid.
29. Derrick Jensen, “World at Gunpoint: Or, What’s Wrong with the
Simplicity Movement,” Orion Magazine, May/June 2009, http://www
.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4697/.
30. For a critique of animal studies as well as its “critical animal studies” coun-
terpart, see Steven Best, The Rise (and Fall) of Critical Animal Studies:
http://www.liberazioni.org/articoli/BestS-TheRise(and%20Fall)
ofCriticalAnimalStudies.pdf.

2 The New Abolitionism: Capitalism, Slavery,

and Animal Liberation

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867),

trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 926.
2. See Lerone Bennett Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America
(New York: Penguin Books, 1993).
3. Tom Regan, http://www.cultureandanimals.org/pop1.html.
4. Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life by Garnet and Walker
(http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16516).
5. Ibid.

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170 M Notes

6. Ibid.
7. Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States
of America, Buffalo, N.Y., 1843,” http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/8/.
8. Garrison cited in Before the Mayflower, pp. 152–53.
9. Douglass cited in Before the Mayflower, p. 160.
10. For a thorough historical, philosophical, and political discussion of

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the controversies and conflicts surrounding use of the term “animal
holocaust,” see Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of
Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002). In the
final section of his book, Patterson describes the schism in the Jewish
community, whereby many Holocaust survivors completely understood
the close parallels between what Nazis did to Jews and others and what
humans do to animals, between concentration camps and factory farms
and slaughterhouses, and stopped eating animals. Others who lacked
this empathetic insight resented and rejected the analogy to animals
and insisted that the term holocaust could only be used to describe the
Jewish experience in Nazi Germany.
11. Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery
(New York: Mirror Books, 1997).
12. Dick Gregory, http://www.peta.org/animalliberation/angerOverExhibit
.asp.
13. See Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of
Animal Resistance (Oakland, CA: AK Press/Counterpunch, 2011).
14. For a classic example of the speciesist leftist denial of this basic fact and
“animal liberation” discourse, based on Cartesian-mechanistic assump-
tions, see Takis Fotopoulos and John Sargis, “Human Liberation vs.
Animal ‘Liberation,’” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy,
vol. 2, no. 3 (June 2006): http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal
/vol2/vol2_no3_Takis_Sargis_animal.htm.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 1994 [1903]), p. v.
16. See Steven Best, “The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act: New, Improved
and ACLU Approved,” International Journal for Inclusive Democracy,
vol. 3, no. 3 (July 2007): http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal
/vol3/vol3_no3_best.htm.
17. For the classic statement of how advanced capitalist societies easily dis-
arm, co-opt, and commodify protest and resistance movements, see

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 Notes M 171

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,

1991 [1964]).
18. Francione first developed his critique of “new welfarism” in his book
Rain without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), and he reiterated the
main points of that book ad nauseam in subsequent books, articles, and

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blog posts.
19. Joan Dunayer, Speciesism (New York, Lantern Books, 2004), p. 69.

3 The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of

Militant Direct Action

1. As I employ it, the term “militant direct action” refers to actions taken
against exploiters by people who forego relying on a corrupt state
apparatus to bring about change in order to take justice into their
own hands. Direct action can be legal or illegal, nonviolent or vio-
lent, in nature, but in either case involves activists confronting oppres-
sors without the mediation of the state. I add the qualifier “militant”
to contrast bona fide social resistance movements from the lifestyle
consumerism that pacifist vegans attempt to dignify as direct action.
Lifestyle vegans and fundamentalist pacifists thereby conflate differ-
ences between individualist-oriented and mass-based tactics, erase a
rich history of social movements, and dilute the political meaning
of direct action. Typically, I used the term “militant direct action”
to refer to underground liberation and sabotage approaches such as
employed by the ALF.
2. See Eric Hoffer’s classic work, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature
of Mass Movements (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
2002 [1951]). Written about converts to dogmatic philosophies such as
Christianity or Marxism, Hoffer’s insights clearly apply to rigid paci-
fists, “vegan abolitionists,” and assorted cultists as well.
3. For a partial list of animal and environmental activists killed worldwide
by various industries and governments, see Bert Bently, “Killing Earth
Angels,” Lowbagger.Org, December 20, 2006, at: http://lowbagger.org
/killingearthangels.html, and the “Environmental and Animal Activists
Injured or Killed,” SourceWatch (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index
.php?title=Animal_activists_who_have_been_injured_or_killed).

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172 M Notes

4. Malcolm X, “Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-

American Unity” (1964), http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1964-malcolm
-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity.
5. Tom Regan, “How to Justify Violence,” in Steven Best and Anthony
J. Nocella II (eds.), Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the
Liberation of Animals (New York: Lantern Books, 2004), pp. 231–36.

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6. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, (New York: Random House, 1975),
pp. xii–xiii.
7. On animal resistance to human slave masters, see Steven Best, “Animal
Agency: Resistance, Rebellion, and the Struggle for Autonomy,” http://
drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animal-agency-resistance
-rebellion-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy/.
8. For background and updates on elephant and rhino poaching in Africa,
see the website Bloody Ivory at: http://www.bloodyivory.org) and the
news archives of Cee4Life (http://cee4life.org/cee4life.php and New York
Times at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects
/i/ivory/index.html.
9. “Martial Law of the Jungle,” Boston Globe, December 21, 2008, http://
www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/12/21/martial_law
_of_the_jungle/.
10. See, for instance, Bite Back at: http://directaction.info/, Animal
Liberation Frontline at: http://www.animalliberationfrontline.com/,
and Animal Liberation Front.com at http://www.animalliberationfront
.com/ALFront/Actions-index.htm.
11. See “Terrorists or Altruists?” New Internationalist, issue 215, January
1991.
12. For details on many ALF victories, for instance, see the Introduction
to Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Also see “Blast From the Past— ‘80s
Lab Raids,” No Compromise, issue 15, Winter 1999/2000, http://www
.nocompromise.org/issues/15blast_past.html and “Timeline of Animal
Liberation Front Actions, 1976–1999,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Animal_Liberation_Front_actions,_1976%
E2%80%931999.
13. Both quotes cited in Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? p. 43. Also see
“Animal Welfare Advocates Win Victories in Britain with Violence and
Intimidation,” New York Times, August 8, 2004, http://www.nytimes
.com/2004/08/08/international/europe/08rights.html.

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 Notes M 173

4 Rethinking Revolution: Veganism, Animal

Liberation, Ecology, and the Left

1. I use the term “left” in both broad and narrow senses. We can distin-
guish “left” from “liberal” politics in that the former seeks revolution-
ary transformation of capitalist society while the latter seeks to reform

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institutions it deems to be basically sound rather than inherently flawed.
Specifically, by “left” I mean the entire spectrum of radical ideologies
and politics that have evolved since the nineteenth century, including
Marxism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and countless variations
on these themes. I also use the term “social progressive” to refer to people
or groups or movements seeking to promote “progressive” change in
society—namely reforms ameliorate some of the harshest inequities
and injustices of capitalism and promotes core modern values such as
democracy, equality, rights, and autonomy. I sometimes use the terms
“leftist,” “left-liberal” or “progressives” to designate all tendencies that
seek positive changes in society, whether from a radical or reformist
perspective. The point of lumping these different approaches together
in some contexts is to emphasize that despite their differences, radicals
and reformists share a speciesist worldview that leads them to dismiss
or deride vegan and animal rights viewpoints. As I find all dogmatic
humanist philosophies to be regressive, discriminatory, hypocritical,
and inconsistent with the values championed by leftists and liberals,
I resist as much as possible to put redundant scare quotes around terms
such as “radical” and “progressive.”
2. For further analysis and example of various kinds of alliance politics,
see Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella II (eds.) Igniting a Revolution:
Voices in Defense of the Earth (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).
3. The intense hostility the Left has toward vegans and animal rights, to
some extent understandable, is embarrassingly flaunted in an endless
stream of infantile, ignorant, ad hominem, and abusive attacks in essays
and commentary on anarchist sites such as Indymedia and Libcom.org.
4. Personal correspondence with Fotopoulos in December 2005, cited
with permission.
5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in
Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader. (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1978).

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174 M Notes

6. See, Marx and Engels on Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1984),
p. 322.
7. Gail Eiznitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect,
and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1997).
8. Michael Albert, “Progressives: Outreach is the Key. The Satya Interview

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with Michael Albert,” Satya, September, 2002, http://satyamag.com
/sept02/albert.html.
9. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution
of Hierarchy, rev. ed. (Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books,
1991). See Steven Best, “A Critical Appraisal of Murray Bookchin’s The
Ecology of Freedom,” Organization and Environment, volume 20, number 3.
September 1998: 283–99.
10. On the environmental impact of factory farming, see Jeremy Rifkin,
Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York: Dutton,
1993), and David Kirby, Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of
Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).
11. See Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global
Conflict (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), and The Race
for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (New
York: Picador, 2012).
12. “Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and
Production,” http://www.unep.fr/shared/publications/pdf/DTIx1262x
PA-PriorityProductsAndMaterials_Report.pdf.
13. “Greenpeace Urges Kangaroo Consumption to Fight Global Warming,”
Karen Collier, Herald Sun, October 10, 2007, http://www.news.com
.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22562480–662,00.html.
14. David Nibert, Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression
and Liberation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

5 Minding the Animals: Cognitive Ethology and

the Obsolescence of Left Humanism

1. On recent scientific and technological revolutions and their implications

for human nature and identity, see Steven Best and Douglas Kellner,
The Postmodern Adventure: Science and Technology Studies at the Third
Millennium (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

 Notes M 175

2. Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press, 1993).
3. David Orr, http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~cses/csessite/restricted/EreadDocs
/Orr_chapter_9.pdf.
4. J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into its Origin and Growth
(New York: Dover Publications, 1960), pp. 160—61.

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Glasgow University Library - PalgraveConnect - 2015-10-10
5. See Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines When Computers Exceed
Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Hans
Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
6. Richard Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes toward Speciesism
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), p. 247.
7. See “Mother of Man—3.2 Million Years Ago,” BBC Science and Nature,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/human/human_evolution
/mother_of_man1.shtml.
8. See Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and
the Origins of Human Violence (New York: Mariner Books, 1997).
9. See “Chimps Genetically Close to Humans,” BBC News, May 20, 2003,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3042781.stm.
10. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the
Human Animal (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
11. To provide just some recent examples of this literature, see Roger Fouts,
Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are
(New York: William Morro, 1997); Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics:
Power and Sex Among Apes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989); Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The
Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995); Frans
de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans
and Other Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Marc
Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores
Animal Joy, Sorry, and Empathy—and Why They Matter (Novato,
California: New World Library, 2007); Marc Bekoff, Animals Matter:
A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion
and Respect (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 2007); Steve Wise,
Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Cambridge, MA:
Perseus Books, 2000); and Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for
Animal Rights (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2002). For evidence
that the paradigm shift of cognitive ethology is indeed finally taking

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176 M Notes

hold, see Marc Bekoff, “Scientists Finally Conclude Nonhuman Animals

Are Conscious Beings,” Psychology Today, August 10, 2012, http://www
.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201208/scientists
-finally-conclude-nonhuman-animals-are-conscious-beings.
12. See Donald Griffin, Animal Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984), and Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
13. See, for instance, Rebecca Morelle, “Birds Show Off Their Dance
Moves,” BBC News, April 30, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science
/nature/8026592.stm.
14. See Irene Maxine Pepperberg, The Alex Studies: Cognitive and
Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
15. See “Monkeys ‘Grasp Basic Grammar,’” BBC News, January 22, 2004,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3413865.stm. On bonobo
and chimpanzee communication, see Rowan Hooper, “Bonobos and
Chimps ‘Speak’ with Gestures,” NewScientist.com, April 30, 2007,
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11756-bonobos-and-chimps
-apes-speak-with-gestures-.html.
16. See David Whitehouse, “Monkeys Show Sense of Justice,” BBC News,
September 17, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3116678
.stm; and Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of
Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
17. Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development (Montreal and New
York: Black Rose Books, 1992).
18. See “Chimps are Cultured Creatures,” BBC News, June 16, 1999, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/370807.stm. For a sustained argument in
favor of animal culture, see Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka, Animal
Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000). A famous example of animal culture in the
sense of transmitted learning concerns macaque monkeys on the island
of Koshima who upon discovering the benefits of washing sweet pota-
toes in a stream have handed down this teaching over many generations.
Similarly, once some blue tit birds learned how to open milk bottles,
the behavior spread across England. Other studies have shown that dol-
phins in Australia use sea sponges to protect their snouts when foraging,
and teach this practice to their young; see Rowan Hooper, “Dolphins

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

 Notes M 177

Teach Their Children to Use Sponges,” NewScientist.com, June 2005,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7475.
19. See Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics.
20. See Barbara Smuts, “Orangutan Technology: How Did the Great Apes
Get to Be So Smart?” Scientific American, November 22, 2004, http://
www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=orangutan-technology.

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Glasgow University Library - PalgraveConnect - 2015-10-10
21. See Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics; Dario Maestripieri, Machiavellian
Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the
World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Natalie Angier,
“Political Animals (Yes, Animals),” The New York Times, January 28,
2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/science/22angi.html.
22. See Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal
Resistance.
23. See Ursula Dickie and Gerard Roth, “Animal Intelligence and the
Evolution of the Human Mind,” Scientific American, August 2008,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=intelligence-evolved.
24. See Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin, Kanzi: The Ape at the
Brink of the Human Mind (New York: John Wiley, 1994).
25. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1968); and Marc D. Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals
Really Think (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000).
26. Hauser, Wild Minds, p. 257.
27. Frans de Waal, Good Natured, p. 207.
28. See George Page, Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking
Exploration of Animal Intelligence (New York: Doubleday, 1999);
Michael Hanlon, “The Disturbing Question Posed by IQ Tests—are
Chimps Cleverer Than Us?” Daily Mail, December 5, 2007, http://
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-499989/The-disturbing-question
-posed-IQ-tests--chimps-cleverer-us.html#; Christine Kenneally,
“Animals and Us, Not So Far Apart,” Washington Post, April 13, 2008,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11
/AR2008041103329_pf.html; and “Still Dumber Than a Chimpanzee,”
New Scientist.com, February 13, 2009, http://www.newscientist.com
/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/02/still-dumber-than-a-chimpanzee-1
.html#more.
29. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Humankind: A Brief History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), p. 12.

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178 M Notes

6 Moral Progress and the Struggle for

Human Evolution

1. See Steven Best and Douglass Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical

Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991).
2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

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(New York: Continuum, 1998 [1944]).
3. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books,
1980).
4. The writing of “grand narratives” runs counter to recent postmod-
ern critiques of “metanarratives” of history which are simplistic,
teleological, and homogenize disparate dynamics and events in a
homogenous framework. Whereas metanarratives defined by post-
modernists are indeed problematic, we should not lose sight of the
narrative aspects of theory and science and the importance of macro-,
or “grand,” narratives. The grand narrative of “moral progress” tries
to avoid the fallacies of metanarratives, without reducing history to
mere randomness. See Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations.
5. See Jürgen Habermas, “Enlightenment: An Unfinished Project,” in
Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic (Washington: Bay Press, 1983); and
Jürgen Habermas and Thomas McCarthy, Theory of Communicative
Action, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
6. To be sure, some modernists had more complex and dialectical models
of progressive change that allowed for regressions and reversals (which
nevertheless ultimately triumphed in progressive changes). Some think-
ers such as Rousseau or Nietzsche were anti-progressivist, and others
such as Diderot were quite pessimistic or skeptical about the possibili-
ties for a rational society and benevolent humanity. See Steven Best, The
Politics of Historical Visions: Marx, Foucault, and Habermas (New York:
Guilford Press, 1995).
7. See Steven Best, “Genetic Engineering, Animal Exploitation, and the
Challenge for Democracy,” in Carol Gigliotti (ed.), Leonardo’s Choice:
Genetic Technologies and Animals (New York: Springer Press, 2009),
pp. 3–20.
8. Island cultures and Latin American nations, in contrast, rank high-
est in life expectancy and happiness; see Philip Thornton, “Wealthiest
Countries at Bottom of List of Happiest Societies,” New Zealand Herald,
July 12, 2006.

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 Notes M 179

9. Thus, for example, Edward Burch replaces the narrow Gross National
Product index with the broader General Progress Index (GPI).
Incorporating data from the United Nations “Human Freedom Index,”
the GPI model employs 22 different criteria to assess human, social, and
environment needs (including leisure time, educational attainment, and
reduction in global warming emissions) and their levels of attainment.

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See Edward Burch, “Gross National Happiness,” Clamor Magazine,
issue 35.5, January/February 2006 (http://www.clamormagazine.org
/issues/35–5/content/economics_1.php).
10. Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human
Race,” Discover Magazine (May 1987), pp. 64–66.
11. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the
Human Animal (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 139.
12. On the cornucopian worldview, that essentially there are no limits to
resources or growth, see Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (New
Haven: Princeton University Press, 1998).
13. See John Zerzan, Future Primitive: And Other Essays (Williamsburg,
Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994).
14. See Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Vintage,
1980); and Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
(New York: Zone Books, 2000).
15. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1972); and Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End
(Oxford: Polity Press, 1994).
16. On the universalization of rights as a key indicator of moral progress,
see Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental
Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
17. Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), p. 113.
18. Albert Schweitzer, Philosophy of Civilization (New York: Prometheus
Books, 1987).
19. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books,
1986).
20. See Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Bill Devall and
George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Layton,
Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2001).

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180 M Notes

Conclusion: Reflections on Activism and Hope in

a Dying World and Suicidal Culture

1. “Planet Could Be ‘Unrecognizable’ by 2050, Experts Say,” Phys.org,

February 20, 2011, http://phys.org/news/2011–02-planet-unrecognizable
-experts.html.

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2. See Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling
Stone, July 19, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global
-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719.
3. See Mike Davis, “Welcome to the Next Epoch,” TomDispatch.com,
June 26, 2008, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949/mike_davis
_welcome_to_the_next_epoch.
4. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House,
2006).
5. Michael Boulter, Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 183.
6. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New
York: Penguin, 2011).
7. David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
(San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2006).
8. This oft-cited quote was the phrase Gramsci used as the masthead for
the radical newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, which he edited in Turin after
the First World War.

10.1057/9781137440723 - The Politics of Total Liberation, Steven Best

 Index

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Glasgow University Library - PalgraveConnect - 2015-10-10
ableism, 100, 105, 164 animal liberation, xi, xii, 17, 19,
abolitionism, 25–9, 44–9, 54 21, 23, 39, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40,
Adorno, Theodor, 11, 139, 178n2 41, 46, 47, 49, 55, 60, 62, 65, 70,
agriculture/agricultural societies, xi, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 87, 88,
8, 20, 23, 86, 93, 95, 103, 105, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 101, 102, 103,
140, 141, 147 104, 105, 106, 149, 151, 164
Albert, Michael, 94, 174n8 Animal Liberation Front, 39–41,
alliance politics, xi–xiv, 19, 26, 45, 43, 55, 65, 67, 70–1, 73, 84, 88
47, 48, 49, 80, 82, 83, 102, 103, animal rights, xi, xii, 17, 31, 32, 36,
105, 158, 167n1, 173n2 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 52,
American Society for the 70, 71, 73, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89,
Prevention of Cruelty to 91, 135, 157, 173n3
Animals (ASPCA), 41 animal slavery, 23, 29–40, 86, 87,
Americans for Medical Progress, 73 91, 96, 144
Angier, Natalie, 177n21 animal standpoint (theory), 1–20,
animal advocacy movement, 28, 37, 77, 86, 92, 99, 101–2, 104,
43, 48, 51, 53, 55, 69, 80, 81, 83, 135, 147, 163
87, 88, 89–90, 101, 102, 103 animal studies, 18, 169n30
animal agency, 4–6, 126, 168n12, animal welfare, 38, 42–3, 45, 46,
172n7 47, 71, 82, 83, 84, 85, 92, 96
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act animality (human), 107, 110, 113,
(AETA), 73, 170n16 118, 130, 143
animal holocaust, 29, 30, 31, 32, Anthropocene Epoch, xiii, 161
37, 42, 51, 56, 61, 63, 76, 78, 83, anthropocentrism, 93, 95, 97, 99,
86, 92, 94, 96, 101, 130, 159, 110, 114, 133, 140, 143, 148,
162, 170n10 154, 163

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182 M Index

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 67, 140, 155 class, 3, 4, 8, 18, 21, 29, 33, 44, 45,
Aristotle, 6, 126, 150, 155 48, 59, 70, 80, 85, 87, 100, 102,
Armesto, Felipe Fernandez, 133, 114, 141, 146, 155, 159, 164
177n29 classism, 102, 164
Augustine, St., 67, 155 climate change, ix, xiii, 45, 65, 78,
Avital, Eytan, 176n18 90, 97, 132, 146, 147, 157, 160

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co-evolution, 1, 7, 19, 153
Bacon, Francis, 111, 150, 155 cognitive ethology, 107, 108, 109,
Battle of Seattle, 80 115, 118, 121, 122, 123, 127,
Baudrillard, Jean, 153, 179n15 133, 135, 175–6n11
Bekoff, Marc, 175–6n11 colonialism, 11, 17, 22, 37, 85,
Bennett, Lerone Jr., 169n2 100, 139
Bentham, Jeremy, 154 Condorcet, Marquis de, 145
Bentley, Bert, 171n3 consumerism, 48, 87, 139, 171n1
Best, Steven, 167n1, 168n7, 169n30, contextualism, 74–5, 78
172n7, 174n9, 178n1, 178n7 co-optation, 42, 80, 170n17
Black Panthers, 58 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 113, 118
Blake, William, 154 critical animal studies, 169n30
Bookchin, Murray, 95–7, 129, 174n9
Boulter, Michael, 164, 180n5 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 154
Boyle, Robert, 111 Dart, Raymond, 120
Brown, John, 27, 38, 40 Darwin, Charles, 113–15, 118,
Buchman, Stephan C., 168n8 123, 125
Burch, Edward, 149, 179n9 Davis, Mike, 180n3
Burnett, James, 120 de Waal, Frans, 126, 130, 175n11,
Bury, J. B., 112, 175n4 177n19
deLanda, Manuel, 153, 179n14
capitalism, xiii, 18, 21, 22, 37, 43–9, Descartes, Rene, 111, 121, 150, 155
75, 78, 85, 86, 87, 92, 95, 98, 100, Devall, Bill, 156, 179n20
105, 114, 142, 144, 145, 147, 153, Diamond, Jared, 9, 121, 165,
162, 173n1 168n15, 175n10, 179n10,
Christ, Jesus, 154 180n6
civil disobedience, 52–5, 65, 76, Dickie, Ursula, 127, 177n23
77, 163 direct action, 16, 17, 27, 40, 45, 49,
civil rights, 29, 30, 41, 58 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 66,
civilization, xiii, 8, 12, 13, 19, 22, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78,
30, 89, 93, 110, 131, 134, 138, 82, 84, 87, 88, 103, 171n1
141, 149, 151, 165 discontinuities, 109–18

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 Index M 183

discrimination, 14, 29, 33, 41, 91, Foreman, Dave, 98

105, 140, 156 Fotopoulos, Takis, 87, 170n14,
dominator cultures, 2, 17, 18, 37, 174n4
99, 104, 109, 137, 148 Foucault, Michel, 3, 139, 153,
Douglass, Frederick, 27–8, 170n9 178n3, 179n15
Du Bois, W. E. B., 37, 47, 170n15 Fouts, Roger, 175n11

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Dunayer, Joan, 47, 171n19 Francione, Gary, 42–8, 55, 171n18
Frankfurt School, 18
Earth First!, 18, 78, 80 Freud, Sigmund, 57, 115–16, 118
earth liberation, xii, 49, 64, 70, 78, Fudge, Erica, 6, 168n10
80, 81, 88, 89, 96, 98, 191, 105, fundamentalist pacifism, 43, 52,
106, 164 56–74, 171n1
Earth Liberation Front (ELF), 40, future generations’ standpoint,
67, 73, 78 16–17
earth standpoint, 16, 104, 165, 147
ecology, 56, 90, 95, 97, 104, 105, Galileo, 113, 118
107, 118, 119, 133, 135, 148, 151, Gandhi, Mohandas K., 13, 52, 53,
152, 156, 158, 160 55, 56, 58, 60, 74, 76, 154
Einstein, Albert, 154 Garnet, Henry Highland, 26–7,
Eisnitz, Gail, 94, 174n7 170n7
Engels, Friedrich, 92–3, 173n5, Garrison, William Lloyd, 27, 170n8
174n6 global warming, 96, 98, 149,
environmental/ecological crisis, 78, 174n13, 179n9, 180n2
90, 95, 96, 132, 135 Goodall, Jane, 120–1, 126
environmental determinism, 4–5 Gramsci, Antonio, 168, 180n8
environmental movements, 17, 48, Green Hill Occupy Movement, 76
68, 79, 80, 81, 91, 101, 102, 159 Green parties, 98
extensional self-defense, 53, 63, Greenpeace, 98, 174n13
67–9 Greger, Michael, 168n17
extinction crisis, xiii, 45, 78, 96, Gregory, Dick, 30–1, 170n12
132, 137, 149, 160, 164 Griffin, Donald, 122, 123, 176n12

Far Right, 79, 81, 85, 87, 88, 89, Habermas, Jurgen, 139, 178n5
102–3, 105 Haeckel, Ernst, 119
fascism, 88, 100, 101, 103, 105, Hanlon, Michael, 177n28
138, 139 Hardy, Thomas, 13
feminist standpoint theory, 3–4 Hartstock, Nancy, 167n4
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 4 Hauser, Marc, 129, 177n26

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184 M Index

Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 167n5 Humane Society of the United

Heidegger, Martin, 138 States (HSUS), 41, 42, 43, 52,
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 153, 72, 84
179n14 humanism, 18, 19, 29, 54, 80, 90,
hierarchy, 6, 17, 18, 19, 21, 31, 32, 92, 98, 99, 104, 105, 109, 110,
33, 46, 47, 99, 105, 109, 126, 113, 116, 135, 143, 146–9, 152

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132, 135, 146, 154, 174n9
Hobbes, Thomas, 113 Inge, William Ralph, 11–12
Hoffer, Eric, 171n2
Jablonka, Eva, 176n18
Holocene Epoch, xiii, 161
Jensen, Derrick, 15, 169n27–9
Homo sapiens, xiii, 11, 13, 33, 57,
Johanson, Donald, 120
58, 99, 108, 110, 115, 117, 119,
just war, 64, 67–9
129, 121, 124, 127, 129, 130,
132, 133, 134, 148, 155, 157, 162, Kant, Immanuel, 13–14, 155,
164, 165, 166 169n25
homophobia, 88, 102, 105 Kellner, Douglas, 167n1, 174n1,
Hooper, Rowan, 176n15 178n1
Horkheimer, Max, 139, 178n2 Kenneally, Christine, 177n28
Hribal, Jason, 168n12, 170n13, Kierkegaard, Soren, 63
177n22 King, Dr. Martin Luther Jr., 52, 53,
human evolution, 1, 4, 17, 58, 93, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 98, 100
107, 109, 110, 114, 115, 117, 119, Kirby, David, 168n9, 174n10
120, 122, 123, 127, 130, 131, 153, Klare, Michael T., 174n11
157, 158, 161, 164, 165, 166 Korten, David, 166, 180n7
Human Genome Project, 121 Kropotkin, Peter, 6, 125, 126,
human liberation, xi, 19, 32, 35, 176n17
49, 64, 80, 81, 88, 101, 105, 106, Kurzweil, Ray, 175n5
170n14
human nature, xii, 2, 11, 36, 37, 57, Le Mettrie, JulienEffray de, 113
58, 65, 74, 78, 110, 116, 119, 133, leftism, 3, 29, 79–109, 116, 134,
142, 143 135, 149, 170n14, 173n1
human rights, 31, 80, 91, 92, 102 Leopold, Aldo, 156, 179n19
human slavery, 3, 8, 10, 13, 17, Levi-Strauss, Claude, 128–9,
18, 21–39, 47, 91, 92, 96, 100, 177n25
143, 149 Lewin, Roger, 177n24
human uniqueness, 111, 113, 117, Luther, Martin, 155
119, 126, 129–32 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 139

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 Index M 185

Marcuse, Herbert, 171n17 Occupy Movement, 81

Marx, Karl, 3, 4, 18, 21, 22, 92–3, Orr, David, 175n3
145, 155, 169n1, 173n5, 174n6 overpopulation, 45, 165
Marxism/Marxist, 3, 92, 94, 110, Ovid, 154
139, 145, 168n7, 171n2, 173n1
Mason, Jim, 86, 168n13 pacifism, 2, 16, 46, 47, 48, 51–78

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Masson, Jeffrey, 175n11 Page, George, 177n28
Mazlish, Bruce, 111, 116, 118, Paley, William, 154
175n2 Paris, Susan, 73
McCarthy, Susan, 175n11 passivism, 54, 55, 77
McKibben, Bill, 98, 161, 180n2 patriarchy, 3, 8, 17, 18, 100, 154, 164
Merchant, Carol, 3, 168n6 Patterson, Charles, 10, 86, 168n18,
metanarrative, 139, 147, 154, 178n4 170n10
Milgram, Stanley, 125 Paul, 155
militant direct action, 17, 49, People for the Ethical Treatment of
51–78, 103, 171n1 Animals (PETA), 30–1, 42, 43,
Milton, John, 154 51, 72
modernity, 3, 22, 37, 109, 117, 138, Pepperberg, Irene Maxine, 176n14
139, 140, 146, 166 perspectivalism, 2
Montaigne, Michel de, 154 Peterson, Dale, 175n8
moral evolution, 22, 36, 37, 91 Pierce, Jessica, 176n16
moral progress, 13, 75, 90, 92, Plato, 141
137–58, 178n, 179n1 pluralism, 42, 75–7
Moravec, Hans, 175n5 politics of nature, 80
More, Thomas, 154 Pope, Alexander, 154
Morelle, Rebecca, 176n13 Porphyry, 154
post-humanist, 108, 140, 151, 152
Naess, Arne, 156, 179n20 postmodern, 27, 103, 138, 139,
Naghan, Gary Paul, 168n8 140, 149, 151, 152, 153, 167n1,
Nash, Roderick Frazier, 169n24, 174n1, 178n1
179n16 pragmatic standpoint, 62–3, 69–73
new abolitionism, 23, 36–41, 47 principled standpoint, 62–7
new social movements, 79–80 progress, xiv, 8, 13, 22, 28, 29, 46,
Nibert, David, 174n14 58, 75, 90, 92, 93, 99, 137–58
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 57, 63, 74, Prosser, Gabriel, 27
115–16, 117, 118, 167n2 Ptolemy, Claudius, 112
nonlinear history, 153–7 Pythagoras, 154

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186 M Index

Quinn, Daniel, 12, 169n23 Social Darwinism, 110, 114, 115

social justice, xi, xii, 31, 41, 80, 81,
racism, 11, 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, 29, 85, 102, 103, 152, 158, 166
31–3, 88, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, social movements, xi, 41, 44, 48,
134, 154, 164 54, 72, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 88,
Regan, Tom, 25, 41, 42, 64, 155, 89, 91, 94, 101, 102, 103, 135,

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169n3, 172n5 158, 159, 163, 171n1, 173n1
resource scarcity, xiii, 32, 45, 65, species extinction, xiii, 45, 65, 131,
69, 81, 97, 128, 157 132, 133, 137, 138, 149, 160,
Rifkin, Jeremy, 8, 168n14, 174n10 162, 164, 165
Rights of Nature, 156, 169n24 speciesism, 2, 3, 6–11, 17, 19,
Roth, Gerard, 127, 177n23 30–4, 43, 73, 75, 77, 82, 86,
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 145, 154 88, 90–1, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101,
Royal Society for the Prevention of 105, 109, 110, 114, 117, 118,
Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 123, 133, 134, 135, 140, 143,
41, 72 148, 154, 157, 164, 167n1
Rumbaugh, Sue Savage-, 177n24 Spencer, Herbert, 114
Ryder, Richard, 118–19, 175n6 Spiegel, Marjorie, 30, 170n11
Stockholm syndrome, 49, 78, 84
Salt, Henry, 154
Stoics, 155
Sargis, John, 170n14
sustainability, xii, 5, 19, 135,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 12, 169n21
153, 155
Schweitzer, Albert, 154, 156, 179n18
Sessions, George, 156, 179n20 Thornton, Philip, 178n8
sexism, 32, 188, 102, 105 Tolstoy, Leo, 154
Shakespeare, William, 154 total liberation, xi–xiv, 46, 47, 49,
Shaw, George Bernard, 154 74, 81, 82, 88, 95, 103, 105, 153,
Shelly, Mary, 12, 169n22 158, 164
Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 154 Truth, Sojourner, 28
Sierra Club, 98 Tubman, Harriet, 28
Simon, Julian, 179n12 Turner, Nat, 27, 40
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 12, 169n20
Singer, Peter, 41, 65, 156, 172n6, universalization of rights, 37, 155,
179n17 179n16
single-issue, 26, 46, 48, 53, 55, 73,
83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 100, 102, 105, veganism, xi, xii, 43–9, 53, 56, 79,
163, 167n1 81, 86, 87, 90, 95, 98, 100, 101,
Smuts, Barbara, 177n20 109

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 Index M 187

Vesey, Denmark, 27 Weber, Max, 138

violence, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, White, Caroline Earle, 154
21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 37, 40, Whitehouse, David, 176n16
52–78, 91, 92, 94, 98, 99, 100, Wise, Steve, 175n11
104, 109, 131, 132, 154, 159, World Wildlife Fund, 98
169n26 Wrangham, Richard, 175n8

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Voltaire, 154
X, Malcolm, 58, 63, 67–8, 172n4
Walker, David, 26, 169n4
Washington, Booker T., 47 Zapatistas, 80
Watson, Paul, 16–17 Zerzan, John, 151, 179n13

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