Francione's approach is complacent, detached from reality, and irrelevant to the massive and complex struggle necessary to forestall biological meltdown and ecological catastrophe. Pacifist lifestyle veganism is another dead-end and groundless hope, totally inadequate to the unprecedented challenge of a planet in crisis. If once progressive, Francione's approach is now clearly reactionary. It is a pseudo-abolitionist movement, bourgeois lifestyle veganism; it is a one-dimensional, single-issue, Eurocentric, white, elitist, consumerist, capitalist construct that vegans and abolitionists need to shed quickly.
Where Franciombes seek to trademark abolition and revile as mere "welfarism" any vision not their own, this group aims to blow the doors off their cultish theology in order to reinvigorate thinking, restore common sense, situate veganism in its broadest political context, and revitalize possibilities for revolutionary change. Our options are not confined to either the "welfarism" of HSUS or the pseudo-abolitionism and lifestyle veganism of Francione. There are other ways, such as history reveals and the future requires.
V.
We need a far richer and more radical concept of abolitionism that draws from and revitalizes the strength and power of the nineteenth century anti-human slavery movement that erupted in the US (and of course earlier in the UK). Unlike the pale imitation and caricature espoused by Franciombes, the version of abolitionism we champion is far more in tune with the radicalism, pluralism, and alliance politics (imperfect and impermanent as it was) of nineteenth-century abolitionism. But eschewing nostalgia and outmoded political models, this approach also draws from numerous other contemporary theories and political movements. We recognize the need for radical social change and we understand that the fight against speciesism, capitalism, the state, and hierarchy in all forms will be waged on many different fronts simultaneously. We seek to reinvigorate a movement sold-out by corporate opportunists and paralyzed by pacifists who sympathize with the latent "humanity" of oppressors and demonize the militant wing of animal liberation, a perverse inversion of loyalties and misguided sentiments manifested in the Stockholm Syndrome mindset evident in the mindset of fundamentalist pacifists who enjoin activists to respect the humanity of murderous oppressors as they demonize and vilify militant liberationists[6]
We cannot stop the speciesist and corporate war on nonhuman animals and the planet with blogging, leafleting, tabling, and recipe books alone. Capitalism is inherently destructive, and change will never come solely through education and persuasion, nor without a movement more powerful than the agents and institutions of omnicidal destruction. As radical pedagogy theorist Paulo Freire himself insisted - education can only be part of a much broader and multi-pronged movement of resistance, struggle, and change. Thus, like all priorl revolutions, human and nonhuman animals will not win liberation because oppressors suddenly see the light, but rather because enough people become enlightened and learn how to rock the structures of power, to shake them until new social arrangements emerge.
It is not only the content of Francione's positions we challenge, but also the very form and method of his approach. We cannot progress in the struggle for liberation or hope to be politically relevant unless we abandon Francione's dualistic, either/or logic for a dialectical both/and logic, one that abandons all bogus dichotomies and false separations. Thus, we need education and agitation, mainstream and militant tactics, peaceful resistance and confrontation and sabotage, and aboveground/legal and underground/illegal means of weakening speciesist capitalism.
We need more, not less, vegan education, of a kind that shatters the enclaves of white privilege in which Franciombes entomb abolitionism and reaches out to the poor, working classes, inner cities, less-industrialized nations, and, crucially, the emerging crisis flashpoints in the burgeoning population giants of China and India. And, despite one of his most persistent and vapid imposed false options, those who work underground to liberate nonhuman animals through raids can and do rescue other animals from "shelters."
While we support the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front, and defend the importance of economic sabotage, we also recognize that property destruction is only a rear-guard and minor means of resistance that has to yield to a broad social movement.
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