By Dr. Steven Best
11/13/09
I.
The nonhuman animal advocacy movement is at a crucial crossroads where truly it is now do or die. In the early 1980s, a new animal rights movement glowed bright with potential; in just a few years, however, the light faded to black as corruption, opportunism, and bureaucracy snuffed out the promise of genuine change. As they evolved, it became increasingly obvious that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other groups emulated the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to become corporate behemoths and mainstream machines. Increasingly co-opted and compromised, animal rights groups frequently worked with, rather than against, the exploitation industries in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.
In the last decade, for instance, PETA pressured McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC to increase cage size and adopt "less cruel and more profitable" slaughter methods,[1] while HSUS aggressively campaigned for "humane meat" and "cage-free eggs." These groups ultimately serve corporate exploiters' interests and champion capitalist principles generally. But whereas PETA began as a grassroots organization in 1980, and continues to defend the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and to promote veganism, HSUS has been a bureaucratic welfare group since its inception in 1954, it consistently denounces the ALF, and has always capitulated to carnivorous culture as it barely gives support even for vegetarianism.
Lest anyone in either the industry or advocacy camps had any doubts, HSUS President and CEO Wayne Pacelle put them to rest in a sycophantic July 2009 interview on Agritalk radio. Pacelle virtually apologized for being vegan in his private life and assured the flesh, vivisection, hunting, zoo, and circus industries that they had nothing to fear from HSUS, as his goal is to promote "decency and mercy toward animals" and not to close their operations.[2]
II.
In direct response to the wretched reformism and opportunism of bureaucratic "welfarism," a new movement emerged to reconstruct nonhuman animal advocacy unequivocally as a struggle for animal rights, not "welfare"; for the total abolition of nonhuman animal slavery rather than its regulation; and for veganism, not "humane" animal-derived products of any kind. To a significant degree, the new vegan abolitionist movement has been shaped and defined by the work of Gary Francione, professor of law at Rutgers University. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Francione exposed the duplicity of "new welfarists" who use the term "animal rights" but pursue "welfarist" policies. These policies, Francione argues, are incoherent and dilute 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; it only aggravates, rather than alleviates, speciesism and the plight of nonhuman animals in horrific systems of exploitation.
Francione tapped and mobilized growing dissatisfaction with corporate reformism and sparked a growing vegan abolitionist movement. More accurately, he revived a vegan movement first created by Donald Watson in 1944, and was sustained by vegan societies such as in the UK and US. These societies maintained Watson's broad and political vision of veganism not merely as a diet but rather as an ethical and political commitment to the abolition of nonhuman animal exploitation and, indeed, to all systems of oppression.[3] Francione wedded the pacifist ideals of ancient Jainism, Watson's vegan viewpoint, and the philosophy of animal rights first systematically developed in 1983 by Tom Regan, merging these influences in a new matrix of pacifist vegan abolitionism.
Francione typically speaks as if he invented veganism, and sycophantic followers such as Roger Yates claim that a bona fide "animal rights movement" only began in 2006 with the ascendant influence of Francione's work.[4] But Francione mostly returned to Watson's original teachings, albeit often in diluted form that retains the ethical vision linking food choices to moral commitments to oppressed nonhuman animals, but without a consistent political commitment to working against all forms of oppression and exploitation. Abolitionist approaches toward speciesism began within the nineteenth century feminist-antivivisectionists, were deepened in Watson and emerging vegan societies, informed the hunt saboteur movements in the UK from the 1960s to the present, and were advanced in historically momentous ways in 1976 when Ronnie Lee founded the Animal Liberation Front.
While Francione advanced a forceful critique of "welfarism" and took animal rights philosophy to a new level, he has nonetheless proved to be bereft of political vision and incapable of forging a genuine resistance movement that can evolve beyond the marginalized position currently embraced by less than one percent of the human population. In Francione's religious, tepid, and apolitical rendering, vegan abolitionism remains an elitist, white, Eurocentric consumerist lifestyle easily co-opted by capitalism and dominant ideologies. Moreover, Francione has spawned a cult-like following - "Franciombes" - who parrot his fundamentalist, rigid, bellicose, and Manichean positions; with slavish devotion to their Master and his hostile manner, Franciombes defame his critics in a style more suited to Machiavelli than Jains.
III.
The Guru and his disciples come together in a dance of doctrine and dogma. Like Christian fundamentalists, Francione and his followers believe they possess the Truth while all others struggle in error. As Francione argues there is literally "no alternative," only chaos and ruin, except for their approach based on obedience to law, peaceful education, and focus on individuals and consumption habits over institutions and productive imperatives stemming from global capitalism. For them, the world is black and white, answers are cut and dry, and complexity is reduced to the Procrustean bed of either/or, rather than enlivened through the dialectical logic of both/and.
According to the pacifist party line, militant direct action (MDA) tactics such as economic sabotage are ALWAYS wrong and NEVER effective. Excusing themselves from the work of analyzing the complexities and unique specific situations, Franciombes fashion a handy a priori "truth" and apply it mechanically to every action that has happened or will happen. Their ignorance of history is matched only by their mental rigidity. For over three decades, in dozens of countries throughout the world, in countless thousands of actions, liberators and saboteurs have freed hundreds of thousands of captive nonhuman animals; permanently shut down numerous breeders, "fur farmers," and vivisectors; and convinced countless numbers of individuals to find gainful employment in careers other than nonhuman animal exploitation, while inspiring people worldwide to join the animal liberation movement.
In all this, Franciombes see no value or gain and, despite operations closed forever, they can only repeat the baseless claim that all damaged property is rebuilt and all liberated nonhuman animals are "replaced." This may happen in some cases, but in light of the many operations shut down for good, this clearly is a false claim; even when animals are replaced and property rebuilt and restored, rising insurance costs are enough to weaken and jeopardize the viability of small and moderate operations at least. Whereas dogmatic pacifists hide under the cover of ignorance and denial, corporate exploiters themselves have testified to the effectiveness of ALF actions.[5]
By vilifying sabotage tactics as "violent," and by conflating attacks on property with assaults on people, Franciombes adopt the reactionary discourse and position of the FBI and the corporate-state-media complex. They needlessly and divisively pit education in opposition to illegal tactics (even open rescues), as if the two tactics were irreconcilably opposed rather than complimentary aspects of a revolutionary process.
