On Alliance Politics

Animal Rights Africa (ARA) was launched last month in South Africa, "ushering in a brand new era of strengthened activism for animals. ARA is committed to the promotion of inclusive justice, showing compassion across species and building a better future through campaigns, research and analysis." (Check out the flyer for the event) This was the first time someone went to South Africa and urged that they see the importance of animal liberation/vegan politics for their own struggles. A diverse panel of human rights/social justice activists attended, along with over 300 people and members of the media (including documentary filmmakers).

The Keynote Speaker was Dr. Steve Best, who delivered a talk titled, "Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century."

Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

It is becoming increasingly clear that human, animal, and earth liberation movements are inseparably linked, such that none can be free until all are free. This is not a new insight, but rather a lost wisdom and truth. Recall the words of Pythagoras, the first Western philosopher, who 2500 years ago proclaimed: "For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."

Given their symbiotic, holistic, and interlocking relationship, it is imperative that we no longer speak of human liberation, animal liberation, or earth liberation as if they were independent struggles; rather, we need to speak of total liberation. Theoretically, we must view these liberation movements in relation to one another and identify commonalities of oppression, such as stem from hierarchy and capitalism. Politically, we need to form alliances against common oppressors, across class, racial, gender, and national boundaries, as we link democracy to ecology and social justice to animal rights.

So, I wish to assert the need for more expansive visions and politics on both sides of the human/animal liberation equation, and to call for new forms of dialogue, learning, and strategic alliances that are all-too rare. The kind of alliance politics one finds in South Africa remains weak and abstract so long as animal liberation and vegan interests are excluded. These can no longer be ignored, marginalized, mocked, and trivialized. Similarly, the animal liberation movement can no longer afford to be single-issue and isolationist, but must link to social justice and environmental movements. Each movement has much to learn from the other, and no movement can achieve its goals apart from the other. It is truly one struggle, one fight.

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Largely single-issue in focus, animal rights advocates fail to grasp how the animal abuses they decry result from the profit imperative, and are part and parcel of a social system that needs to be challenged and transformed in radical ways. To the extent that animal rights activists grasp the systemic nature of animal exploitation, they should also realize that animal liberation demands that they work in conjunction with other radical social movements.

Conversely, human rights advocates need to comprehend the myriad social and ecological problems that stem from animal exploitation. When human beings exterminate animals, they devastate habitats and ecosystems necessary for their own lives. When they butcher farmed animals by the billions, they ravage rainforests, turn grasslands into deserts, exacerbate global warming, and spew toxic wastes into the environment. When they construct a global system of factory farming that requires prodigious amounts of land, water, energy, and crops, they squander vital resources and aggravate the problem of world hunger. When humans are violent toward animals, they often are violent toward one another, a tragic truism validated time and time again by serial killers who grow up abusing animals and violent men who beat the women, children, and animals of their home. The connections go far deeper, as evident in the relationship between the domination of human over animal and the hierarchy of sexism and racism.

Animal liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process whereby human beings gradually realize that arguments justifying hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are arbitrary, baseless, and fallacious. Animal liberation builds on the most progressive ethical and political advances human beings have made in the last 200 years and carries them to their logical conclusions. It takes the struggle for rights, equality, and nonviolence to the next level, beyond the artificial moral and legal boundaries of humanism, in order to challenge all prejudices and hierarchies including speciesism.

Animal liberation requires that the Left transcend the comfortable boundaries of humanism in order to make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. Just as the Left once had to confront ecology, and emerged a far superior theory and politics, so it now has to engage animal liberation. As the confrontation with ecology infinitely deepened and enriched Leftist theory and politics, so should the encounter with animal liberation.

Animal liberation is by no means a sufficient condition for democracy and ecology, but it is for many reasons a necessary condition of economic, social, cultural, and psychological change. Animal rights people promote compassionate relations toward animals, but their general politics and worldview can otherwise be capitalist, exploitative, sexist, racist, or captive to any other psychological fallacy. Uncritical of the capitalist economy and state, they hardly promote the broader kinds of critical consciousness that needs to take root far and wide. Just as Leftists rarely acknowledge their own speciesism, so many animal advocates reproduce capitalist and statist ideologies.

The domination of humans, animals, and the earth stem from the same mindset and institutional forms that promote hierarchy, hostility to otherness, and the will to power. This can only be fully revealed and transformed by a multiperspectival theory and alliance politics broader and deeper than anything yet created.

The human/animal liberation movements have much to learn from one another. 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 overcome instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking in every pernicious form, including that of humans over animals and the earth. It will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most profound values and goals of humanity. It will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and domination of all kinds.

The slogan of the future must not be "We are all one race, the human race," but rather, "We are one community, the biocommunity."

I don’t know about you, but I have tiffs with my environmentalist friends now and then–and they’re not vegans. They get that factory farming is devastating for the environment, but they’re convinced that eating SOLE (sustainable, organic, local and/or ethical) food will solve that. They don’t consider it unethical to dominate, control and slaughter nonhuman animals when you don’t need to.

My enviro friends are compelled to defend the Earth with passion, but they aren’t similarly intense about defending sentient beings, and I don’t understand that. They think it’s our moral obligation to stop destroying the planet with our selfish practices, but they don’t feel a moral obligation toward nonhumans.

Finally, I consider myself a feminist, and I think veganism and feminism are both struggles for nonviolence and social justice, yet most of my friends who call themselves feminists are not vegans and are in fact insulted by the comparison of domination of women and domination of nonhuman animals. They proudly consider themselves animal welfarists and don’t see the irony in that.

Where do you stand on alliance politics and a multi-perspective theory?