Conclusion: Total Liberation in the Era of Ecocrisis
“Let’s be honest. The animal rights movement as we now know it will never become a revolutionary struggle because the representatives of the oppressed enjoy enough privilege from the system they oppose to prevent them from supporting, let alone engaging in actual revolutionary activity that would risk those comforts.” Rod Coronado, former ALF activist and political prisoner
In summary, we salute the efforts of Francione, Hall, and a host of others who are part of a growing new abolitionist movement with roots in the US anti-slavery movement of the nineteenth century and the human and animal rights traditions. A galvanizing force for the growth of the new abolitionists has been the welfarist and collaborationist campaigns of HSUS and PETA that in the attempt to reduce the horrific suffering animals experience within modern conditions of confinement and slaughter have abandoned and arguably forfeited the struggle for the elimination rather than amelioration of nonhuman animal exploitation.
The new abolitionism is a decisive advance over the dominant welfarist and pseudo-rights tendencies in the contemporary animal advocacy movement. Our purpose, however, had been to uncover the highly problematic nature of new abolitionism which has been uncritically received throughout the world, specifically as evident in the work of leading voices such as Francione and Hall.
We want to emphasize that, despite the patronizing and pontificating dogma of Hall, there are other forms of abolitionism besides one-dimensional vegan pacifism, forms more true to the pluralistic character of nineteenth century abolitionism. This movement included whites and blacks, men and women, privileged and non-privileged, free person and slave, and nonviolent and violent elements. Its social composition and alliance politics character (common throughout the nineteenth century, uniting movements militating for women, workers, African-Americans, children, and nonhuman animals) was more complex and advanced than the single-issue “animal protection” movement, and pacifist doctrinaires did not straightjacket abolitionist tactics.
From the 1840s and for decades to come Frederick Douglass preached the Gospel of struggle. Harriet Tubman pioneered the Underground Railroad that freed dozens of slaves to the North in blatant violation of slave “ownership” laws, and she advocated nonviolence, although she provided aid to John Brown. A white Christian who loathed slavery as a violation of the will of God, John Brown led a failed armed rebellion on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, yet Brown and his courage and commitment to equality inspires resistance to this day. And in 1831, lay preacher Nat Turner led a slave uprising with a band of over 50 people. For 30 hours, they travelled from house to house freeing slaves and killing over 60 white people and striking fear into the hearts of all white oppressors. In fact, we suggest that the Animal Liberation Front, which has its own Underground Railroad to shuttle liberated animals to place they can receive care and shelter, is a more authentic contemporary example of nineteenth century abolitionism than the timid and tepid form that Francione and Hall represent.
The main problem with their position, as should be evident, is dogmatism, which takes forms such as what we are calling fundamentalist pacifism. In their outlooks, nonviolence is more of a theology, metaphysics, and religion than a critically reflexive ethical, political, and tactical philosophy. The vehemence of this worldview is well captured by Francione’s declaration that he is “violently opposed to violence.” The dogmas are encased with essentialist definitions of “animal rights” and “veganism,” such that they, and only they, command the true and real understanding and praxis of these concepts which, as if through divination of a Natural Law, are wedded to nonviolence. We thank Shishkoff – who Zeus-like threw down a thunderous pronouncement that we, despite decades of abstinence of animal-derived products between us, are NOT vegans – for making this point more eloquently and powerfully than we could have done ourselves. This essentialism is particularly virulent in Hall’s worldview and it informs her excoriation of the MDA movement – comprised of a quilt work of distortion, misrepresentation, inaccuracies, misunderstanding, slander, and ad hominems.
This studied caricature in our view constitutes nothing less than a betrayal of the movement and nonhuman animals themselves. Indeed, even if one consults the propaganda of animal exploitation industries and corporate front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom – it is hard to find a more distorted and venomous characterization of militant direct activists. Capers in the Courtyard certainly assists FBI efforts to repress, jail, and annihilate militant direct action. It is most ironic that Hall blames groups like SHAC and the ALF for bringing on repressive laws such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, when her polemics have a regressive effect that contribute to the vilification of MDA groups and facilitates the very state repression she bemoans. We defy any objective reader (e.g., someone not an employee of Friends of Animals) to read Capers and not find evidence of the Stockholm Syndrome in Hall’s mindset, such that she sympathizes more with animal exploiters than hard-core animal activists.
Whereas Francione and Hall think the task is to steer between welfarism on one side and MDA on the other, we see a different way to proceed. Against a dogmatic and one-dimensional abolitionism we propose a methodological and tactical outlook based on pluralism, contextualism, and pragmatism. Against a one-dimensional, single-issue veganism, we advocate a multidimensional alliance politics. Opposed to the elitist, white, Western-centric standpoint of Francione and Hall we advocate a radical extension of veganism to communities of the poor, working classes, and people of color, and beyond into South Africa, Brazil, China, India, and elsewhere.
Francione and Hall are reformists at the grand level of working within capitalism, seeking change within the system. Given that they are both lawyers, each has an inherent professional bias and institutional advantage to seeking change within the constraints of the capitalist state, legal system, and mode of production. Moving from animal rights to the more general level of society overall, they are much closer to HSUS and PETA than they think. In fact, at this level, they are all reformists; they want us all to have a bigger cage in the Global Capitalist Gulag. They are all liberals, seeking piecemeal change and trying to abolish animal exploitation in a vast global animal industrial complex whose profits increasingly are dependent upon whipping up new “carnivorous” desires, opening up flesh markets throughout the world, and becoming more, not less, entrenched, more, not less, materially wedded to the destruction of all life and the planet, and more, not less, fiercely committed to stopping ragtag vegan organizing if necessary. And it will never willingly relinquish its death grip on this planet. Certainly not to 100 white professionals from Friends of Animals who might protest against it, and who approach on friendly and respectful terms, proudly proclaiming their allegiance to soulforce and disavowing the use of a potentially stronger force that might actually be able to challenge an exploitative industry. And so the purveyors of death extend their hand in friendship, knowing that they have absolutely nothing to worry about with the ahimsa-beholden minuscule numbers of a marginalized vegan subculture.
We defend a form of animal liberation that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state to be a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, such that human and nonhuman animal liberation are ultimately one and the same project; and thus (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes.
Throughout the world today we find runaway “meat” consumption in China, India, Brazil, and throughout the world, as fueled by capitalism, the “livestock” industry, “factory farming,” and the agricultural-industrial complex. This is a cancerous system growing out of control and must be stopped, but it will not stop, stall, or slow down simply because merely 2% (and barely growing) of the US population is vegan.
Despite their attempts to effect a break and paradigm shift from welfarism and to position themselves as antithetical to groups like HSUS and PETA, Francione, Hall, and their flock of digital devotees share more similarities with the welfare movement than differences because they all speak to elite white audiences almost exclusively, pursue single-issue and non-confrontational politics, might utter a peep against capitalism but ultimately endorse it with a roar, advance dogmatic pacifist philosophies, and, in the case of HSUS and Hall in particular, denigrate MDA in official corporate-state language and help demonize them so the FBI can then criminalize them.
Despite the fanfare of Francione and followers who tout their abolitionist approach as radically different from welfarism, whether “old” or “new,” both share core assumptions and values. These enemies are ideologically and socially inbred in fundamental ways. Pacelle – one of their arch foes – is actually their doppelganger. Pacelle and Francione-Hall are wedded to the state and to capitalism and pursue no larger social changes and no confrontational politics. Again, all speak to elite white audiences almost exclusively; all think in terms of fragments not whole systems; all are single-issue in their politics (despite Francione and Hall’s occasional lip-service support of alliance politics). To be clear: the problem is not that Francione and Hall never talk about capitalism, state power, and commonalities of oppression, they do; the issue rather is that they talk only in the abstract and do not systematically or concretely incorporate larger social and environmental issues into their work, let alone their practice. Whatever intentions to the contrary they may have, their work is overwhelmingly one-dimensional and single-issue and certainly to our knowledge they never mediate any such insights with practice.
The problem with their gradualist approach, like the problem with the incremental approach of HSUS or anyone else, is this: although a widespread vegan revolution will not grow roots for many decades, a century, or perhaps longer, the narrowing window of opportunity to stave off total ecological crisis is a few decades or only years away. The situation of dwindling oil supplies, rising food prices, and skyrocketing levels of flesh consumption by China and India should alert us to a crisis condition, not lull us into a condition of complacency. To reference The Matrix, they are peddling the blue pill of complacency over the red pill of knowledge, outrage, and radical action. We’re hurtling into an apocalyptic abyss and they are trying to sell us a vegan “revolution” that stacks up One Plate at a Time and is expected to reach a “critical mass” sometime in the indefinite future. But global catastrophe is here and now.
To be as blunt as we need to be: the vegan “revolution” pushed by Francione, Hall, Friends of Animals, and countless others in the vegan and animal rights/abolitionist movements is a myth, a fantasy, and a narcotic that lulls people into the deep sleep of complacency. Mainstream vegan politics is a one-dimensional, single-issue, Western-centric, white, elitist, consumerist, capitalist concept that this movement needs to shed quickly.
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