Rethinking Revolution: Animal Liberation, Human Liberation, and the Future of the Left
BY STEVEN BEST
A “downed” cow dragged to slaughter. Transportation to the slaughterhouse is just the culmination of her awful fate. “Downers” are animals who have been severely injured or become ill in the process of being raised “for food.”
Other “downers”—this time a couple of hogs, one of which cannot stand at all, also waiting to be taken to the abattoir. How much suffering must transpire before humans start paying real attention to our species’ atrocious tyranny over fellow creatures? Although many will surely deny it, including quite a few on the Left, it’s clear that human supremacist attitudes easily qualify as the earliest and least recognized form for fascism. Factory farms, by treating living, breathing animals as mere cogs in an ruthless industrial profit machine, are one of its most obscene manifestations. How long are we going to allow this to go on?
“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” —Peter Singer
“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” —Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer
Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue
It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet – animal liberation – that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it. [Read more →]
