The Politics of Total Liberation

Revolution for the 21st Century

S. Best

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137471116
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137440723
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that there is an ongoing planetary crisis, in both the social and natural worlds, that is of urgent importance. This demands a new politics, a politics of total liberation, one that grasps the need to unite the disparate movements for human, animal, and earth liberation. In the book, Best outlines a way forward despite challenges.

CHAPTER 1

The Animal Standpoint

If 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, historical, 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 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 advance egalitarian arguments and liberation ethics, while debunking 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 philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.² Perception and cognition are always perspectival, 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 service 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 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 person or group can glean unique and important insights into the nature 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 transforming 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 capitalism. 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 tradition 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 peasants, 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 animal standpoint therefore provides the ultimate turning-of-the-tables narrative shift, for what group has been more oppressed, for the longest 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).

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 production, trade, labor, and class conflict. Whereas historiography was mired in the “idealist” view that history is driven by God or ideas, 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 examining the larger field of action that included human and animal interrelations and how animals—as an exploited labor power and productive force—decisively shaped history. Radical humanists like Marx congratulate 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 relations 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 decisive, role in shaping a wide array of phenomena, ranging from the emergence of bipedal evolution (hence predating our earliest ancestors) to the organization of human societies to varying psychological temperaments. Once introduced into the disciplines of anthropology, 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 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,” environmental determinists nonetheless discount the importance of animals in constituting both the natural and social worlds. As with humanists, 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, intellectual, 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, animals 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 animals 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 determined by biology and genetics, devoid of subjectivity and culture of their own. They frame animals as nothing more than resources, commodities, 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 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 various disciplines have started to challenge the absence of animals in human history, to rethink our past traditions and culture in terms of 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 coincide; 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 evolutionary position that reifies human agency as the sui generis of all things, nor as the autonomous actions of a Promethean species, but 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 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 without 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 revolution 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, castration, forced breeding, coerced labor, hobbling, branding, ear cropping, 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 to an expansionist and domineering way of life, rooted in the domestication 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 revolutionized societies and worldviews, changing forever the way people related to one another, to other species, and to the natural world as a whole. Everywhere that agricultural societies emerged, people produced 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 specie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1  The Animal Standpoint
• Chapter 2  The New Abolitionism: Capitalism, Slavery, and Animal Liberation
• Chapter 3  The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of Militant Direct Action
• Chapter 4  Rethinking Revolution: Veganism, Animal Liberation, Ecology, and the Left
• Chapter 5  Minding the Animals: Cognitive Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism
• Chapter 6  Moral Progress and the Struggle for Human Evolution
• Conclusion  Reflections on Activism and Hope in a Dying World and Suicidal Culture
• Notes
• Index