Total Liberation, Green Anarchism and the Violence of Industrialism
Mara J. Pfeffer and Sean Parson
Much is going to be written in this book that connects animal liberation to anarchist critiques of capitalism, hierarchy and the state. Our goal in this short piece is not to reproduce these arguments, but to push them further.
In the short vignettes below we piece together this argument: if we are to be concerned with animal liberation and ending unneeded suffering, then we must go much further than attacking the state and capitalism. It is our assertion that there can be no total liberation: no end to colonization, genocide, or animal exploitation, without addressing the root problem of our era—industrial civilization.
We argue that animal liberationists, anarchists, and all people concerned with exploitation and suffering need to reject the dreams of techno-utopias, worker-run industrial factories, and post-scarcity eco-communism. Industrialism, as David Watson (1998) pointed out in his “We All Live in Bhopal,” is an extermination camp and if we wish to live and see life flourish on this planet, there is only one alternative: we must envision a politics centered around burning down the factories, dismantling the energy grid, and liberating all animals, human and nonhuman.
Our entire way of life is built on exploitation, emerging after massive social and political shifts during the 15th through 17th century (Federici, 2004; Marx, 1992; Thompson, 1966). Within a century the forests of Europe were transformed into factories and company towns; the peoples of the “new world” were exterminated or forced west in order to provide the colonialists unfettered access to the natural resources of the Americas; and millions of men and women were kidnapped from Africa and forced to work in plantation farms that fed the textile factories of Europe. In Europe and the America’s women’s bodies where tortured and burned alive during the witch trials, an event that was needed to accumulate and control the social reproductive labor of women (Federici, 2004). In other words, slavery, misogyny and genocide was central to the development of capitalism. For example, the sugars used by wealthy industrialists in England to feed their workers came from the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. This means that the sugar needed to spur the industrial revolution was planted on land stolen from native people and watered with the blood of African Slaves (Mintz, 1986).
Although the rise of industrial capitalism was built on the exploitation of labor and genocide, the European powers did not see their actions as “barbaric.” That term was reserved for their victims. Spanish conquistadores during their colonization of the Aztec people in the 15th century wrote fantastical stories about savage human sacrifices (Federici, 2014). According to the Spanish accounts, the sacrifices were gifts to the Gods to thank them for the creation of the world and were intended to keep the Aztec society functioning. The validity of such accounts are, understandably, questioned since the “barbarity” of indigenous people, either via human sacrifice or through priests’ accounts of cannibalism, was used to justify “civilizing” the native peoples. Regardless, the concept of sacrifice as being central to the maintenance of society has figured prominently in our collective social imagination for centuries.
According to anarcho-primitivist authors like John Zerzan (1998, 1999, 2004, 2008a and 2008b) and David Watson (1998), complex social systems require continual sacrifice. The difference between the modern sacrifices and the ones questionably detailed by Spanish priests is visibility. In the Spanish narratives, those sacrificed were done so publicly, their blood serving as a literal and visual reminder of the power of the gods. In our current world, the “sacrificed” are hidden away, fodder for the modern “gods” of technology, science, and the machine. For instance, the World Health Organization (2014) recently reported that at least 7 million people died in 2012 from direct exposure to airborne pollution. This conservative estimate does not include those who died from indirect exposure or who died from long-term exposure to airborne toxins. Nor does it include the millions who die each year from water, food, and soil toxicity, or those killed in “industrial accidents” such as mining disasters or factory fires. While media accounts refer to these deaths as “accidents,” in truth these people have been purposefully killed. These are not accidents, as an accident is an unintended event, and pollution deaths and industrial deaths are designed into the system as “acceptable losses.”
If countless millions of human animals are killed each year by the political, economic, and social system that has been created, how many billions of nonhumans are killed? This question seems to be, at its core, unanswerable. Since the majority of those in power have little concern for poor humans who suffer as victims of industrial society, the nonhuman victims are almost completely invisible—except for charismatic megafauna and endangered species that environmental groups use on pamphlets to help raise money. For instance, an estimated 50 billion chickens are killed each year to feed humans and at least 41 million cows are slaughtered each year in the U.S. alone (Purdue University, 2008). While historically these slaughters were visible, in recent decades in the United States the animal industries have been working to hide the suffering and death of these animals, going so far as to make videotaping the conditions in slaughterhouses and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) illegal (Potter, 2013). While slaughtering them for food is the most commonly discussed way that our culture “sacrifices” nonhumans, there are countless more who are killed indirectly in order to maintain our civilization.
For instance, the much maligned Tar Sands projects in Northern Alberta have not only poisoned native tribes, they have also killed an untold number of nonhuman animals as well. To extract tar sands, oil companies first must clear-cut the forests, drain the wetlands, and scrape away the vegetation and topsoil from the earth. After the land has been stripped of life the tar sand soil is collected and mixed with chemicals and hot water. This toxic water is then pooled together into “tailing ponds” which invariably leak into aquifers and into rivers. The oil is then sent, via pipelines and trucks, to refining plants. These pipes leak, poisoning the water and soil along its route, and the refining plants further pollute the air and water. As a brief example, in 2010, five hundred and fifty one migratory birds were killed after landing to feed at a tailing pond in Northern Alberta (Roth, 2012). This is not the first times that tailing ponds have killed migratory birds. According to a World Watch Institute Report (Block, 2014), an estimated 1,600 migrating birds die each year due to tailing ponds. Likewise, these tailing ponds have also been responsible for massive fish deaths (Mark, 2012) and there have already been scientific reports linking tar sands mining to the death of caribou and other large arctic mammals (Inkley, Kostyack and Miller, 2012). A similarly destructive fate for nonhumans follows all other forms of resource extraction—from the death of nearly all life with mountain top removal mining in Appalachia (Ward, 2008; 2009) to the death of spotted owls, marbled murrelets and voles with logging in the northwest (Barringer, 2007; Learn, 2012).
Even so called clean forms of energy are not safe for nonhuman animals. According to a Smithsonian report, an estimated 140,000 to 320,000 birds die each year in the United States from windmills (Eveleth, 2013), and birds and other desert life have been found cooked alive at massive industrial solar farms. Likewise, the components needed to make both the solar panels and the industrial windmills require intensive mining operations and are toxic when disposed of (Zehner, 2012). For instance, solar panels require the use of the toxic chemicals “Arsenic, cadmium telluride, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl” all of which are known carcinogens (Woody, 2010, para. 2). It is also well documented that dams have had devastating impacts on fish and bird populations (U.S Fish and Wildlife Service). By constructing a social and economic system that systemically leads to the devastation and death of certain species to function, we must conclude that even purveyors of “clean” energy have blood on their hands as well.
Returning our focus to food, we ask: how many animals are killed or displaced in order to produce soy and other massive food plantations? According to the World Wildlife Fund, soy plantations have been instrumental in expanding deforestation in countries like Brazil, endangering the habits of countless rainforest residents (World Wildlife Fund, 2014). In massive industrial farming in the amazon forest, land is converted to soybean plantations or used to graze cattle and in the process nonhumans die and humans are displaced. These expanded plantations take advantage of uneven economic geographies and are connected to colonial practices. In Sistah Vegan, A. Breeze Harper (2010) exposes the narrow self-interest of the “civilized” consumer:
I wonder, has America confused our addictive consumption habits with being “civilized?” The British who sipped their sugary teas considered themselves civilized, despite the torture and slavery it took to get that white sugar into their tea cups, along with the cotton and tobacco they used [p. 24, 28].
The quinoa that currently fills the shelves of natural food stores nationwide is being taken from rural Bolivians who have been eating the “superfood” for centuries. The spike in prices for quinoa has meant, according to the New York Times, that “fewer Bolivians can now afford it, hastening their embrace of cheaper, processed foods and raising fears of malnutrition in a country that has long struggled with it” (Romero and Shahriari, 2011). In this sense, the quinoa market has tapped into the long lasting colonial relationship between the U.S. and South America, one where the resources of the global south benefit wealth consumers in the United States to the detriment of local residents. The same story can be written for nearly any resource, from coal to “beef.” The industrial economic system is predicated on such colonial practices, requiring an economically exploited periphery to funnel resources to the elites at the core. In other words, industrialism requires ever-expanding sacrifice zones that now cover the majority of the world, all to allow for the luxury of the few. Under such a system those in power view those that fight back are seen as “primitive,” “barbaric” and “uncivilized,” all while the “civilized” elites sit on chairs built on top of a mountain of corpses.
The point is to learn to live in the planetary garden without control or authority. And if life is a voyage, it is necessary to let ourselves be carried along with the river’s current without imposing a control to stop it.—Jesús Sepúlveda, Garden of Peculiarities [2005].
Veganism is regularly considered to be the moral baseline for animal liberationists. The argument for veganism is clear: since killing and torturing animals for food is unneeded for our survival, it is ethically wrong to do so simply for taste preferences. If one really is concerned with ending animal suffering, the argument goes, it does not make sense to consume a nonhuman animal’s flesh or to eat their secretions. Under the rubric and logic of industrial capitalism, this seems to be a reasonable ethical baseline, but it does not go nearly far enough.
In some ways focusing only on the vegan discussion creates a liberal ethical framework that focuses on the individual and their consumer choices and avoids discussing the larger structural components of our lived reality. For instance, the consumer vegan industry is, as all industries are, deeply connected to the global neoliberal economic order—where Amazon tropical forests are clear-cut to create space for palm oil; where large agribusiness dominates the systems of production and distribution; where in the United States and Europe hyper-exploited migrant workers are paid a pittance while being threatened with deportation if they try to organize; where throughout the world people are thrown off the land they and their families have lived on for centuries and forced into cities where they work in industrial factories or scavenge off the waste generated by the affluent; where “food miles,” industrial fertilizers, and pesticides are ensuring climate instability. A focus on vegan consumerism does not allow space to address these larger structural issues.
As an example of the limits of a vegan centered politics we can look at the impact of ending native hunting for Inuit communities in Canada. These Inuit communities historically survived through hunting and fishing; this included killing seals for their flesh and fur, much to the horror of many animal rights activists. During the 1980s a well-coordinated and successful campaign was waged to stop indigenous sealing. According to George Wenzel (1991), the ban on seal hunting negatively impacted the Inuit communities he studied. Wenzel argues that by banning an important subsistence practice the activists actually increased the native communities’ dependency on the Canadian government and global capitalism. This means that their food— meat, dairy, and vegetables—are now shipped in from long distances and are most likely coming from massive agricultural plantations or from CAFOs that have little to no concern for nonhumans. This means that in stopping seal hunts, animal rights activists have arguably contributed to more nonhuman death since feeding these Inuit communities now means the expansion of roads and CAFOs, more Co2 and more processed food. It also means that the activists unintentionally helped the state colonize the native people, working with the colonial state to break up indigenous culture and to make indigenous resistance to capitalism and economic liberalism more difficult.
This does not mean that veganism is inherently wrong and that native hunting is inherently right; it means that the relationship between human and nonhuman animals is much more complex than is commonly assumed by mainstream, western animal rights movements (Anonymous 2014). Additionally, there are animal liberationists who are both native and vegan, whose existence and voices are often overlooked or disregarded while in rooms full of white people debating whether or not veganism is racist. As Claudia Serrato, founder of the blog Decolonial Food for Thought states, “Not only has our land been colonized, but so have our bodies. How? Through the imposition of a heavily meat, dairy, and processed food diet coupled with a capitalist, patriarchal food/agricultural paradigm” (Layne, 2012). Of course, this is not to say that indigenous veganism is the same as western veganism, or that all indigenous vegans support western veganism—but instead to recognize that there may be various types of veganism. According to Serrato (2011), indigenous veganism is about rejecting specifically those animal products introduced by colonizers and reclaiming a mainly plant based diet which “kept the land, our bodies, animals and our ecological relations in balance,” while non-indigenous veganism “does not carry these ancestral teachings, however, carries a strong weight on the liberation of these confined relatives” (para. 2). About western veganism, Serrato and Rodriguez (2008) also state,
Capitalism-the colonizer-has, once again, taken away and patented the ancestral knowledge that is our indigenous ways of living-eating. He stole it and keeps it only for his white families on the west side. He calls it “vegan” and “going green” while our gente, east of the river, continue to search for the roots and natural ways–Panche Be-amidst this chaos we call Diabetes (of ALL types), Heart Disease, Obesity, imbalance and the destruction of pachamama [para. 2].
This complexity of oppression demands that animal liberationists “recognize the critical intersections of animal liberation with justice for the earth and humans; and … find ways to practice groundless solidarity with all those resisting corporatism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, sexism, classism, ablism, transphobia, homophobia, and ecocide” (Pfeffer, 2014, p. ii). This means moving beyond veganism as a moral baseline, recognizing the entanglements of oppressions discussed above. Cultivating more holistic activisms demands both critical thinking about the implications of vegan consumerism and creative practices in order to develop a moral baseline that directly resists (rather than appeases) the industrialism that rages war on the earth.
To move beyond veganism requires a politics centered around being in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Practicing solidarity means taking responsibility and accountability for your words, promises, and actions. There is a need not only to discuss transforming society and the way we consume its products, but to deeply question industrial civilization and systemic oppression itself—to recognize that becoming “civilized” means dissecting our compassion, standardizing our imaginations, and conforming to institutionalized obedience and sightlessness in order not to feel the heavy pain perpetuated by privileged and “civilized” lifestyles.
Becoming civilized means dismembering ourselves from our deepest emotions, pains, and understandings, from mystery, from the animal world, from one another, and from ourselves as nature. It means taming our wildness, our sensuousness, our longing, our responsiveness. It means resigning to the state of things, adjusting ourselves to our reality by whatever means available rather than changing our reality. It means chopping ourselves and the world to pieces so that everything can be sorted into artificial categor-ies into which nothing actually fits—all for the sake of an efficiency and convenience never to be extended beyond “a narrow yet historically changing group of masters who give themselves the name ‘human’” (Kappeler, 1995, p. 334).
Arguments for animal liberation ask us to confront speciesism, and our own dismembering thought processes that are not unlike a slaughterhouse disassembly line (Adams, 1990). It follows that we would also need to recognize that animals are not just resisting being slaughtered, they are literally resisting machines. And not only are these animals resisting machines, they are resisting being treated as such. As Tashee Meadows (2010) articulates, “Unfortunately, unlike car parts on an assembly line, these ‘products’ are living beings that move, often causing the shooter to miss his mark. They are dismembered while still alive and conscious…. These beings resist at every point of their captivity and torture” (p. 153).
This is the case for the billions of cows who are raped by the dairy industry, whose reproductive systems are exploited, whose calves are ripped from them and given to the veal industry, while they are pumped until “spent” and sent to the slaughterhouse to be killed and bled out, their corpses to be dehided, beheaded, dismembered, carved into standardized slices, wrapped in cellophane, and shipped elsewhere. None of this could be carried out on such a wide scale without the machines, the “technology” of the dairy industry—from rape racks used to force impregnation, to vacuum pumps attached to their breasts, to the electric prods shoved inside of them and the trucks used for their transportation, to the metal walls that hold their shaking bodies still, to the knocking guns that are intended to kill them quickly, to the conveyor belts that move them along even if they are not dead, to the ripping and slicing machines used to turn a living being into a faceless, unrecognizingly swallowable commodity.
The slaughterhouse functions as a complex machine (Pachirat, 2011); the compartmentalization of labor necessary for it to function at such high levels of “efficiency”—killing as many as one animal every 12 seconds—also makes the slaughterhouse one of the most dangerous industries for workers, ranking higher than many other industries in worker injuries even though many injuries go unreported. It is the concept of the machine that allows workers and nonhuman animals to be dismembered on disassembly lines for profit, and workers to be disposed of and replaced like spare parts that make industrial capitalism go.
While many animal welfare and animal rights activists speak out against the conditions of “factory” farmed animals, vegans and animal liberationists decry all exploitation and slaughter of farmed animals, even those which are claimed to be “humanely” and “sustainably” farmed. Yet agriculture as an industry, a machine comprised of more machines, and the use of machines in general, remains largely unexamined by many (but not all) within these movements. While examining agribusiness’s “official” slaughterhouses is critical to animal liberation, “as long as the slaughterhouse is understood to be a specific location quarantined off from the rest of society, the rest of us are free to turn our backs, close our eyes, and continue consuming its products while concentrating blame on slaughterhouse workers. In reality, “the slaughterhouse is not a single place at all” (Pachirat, 2011, p. 236). Industrial society is both the fabrication department and the kill floor.
As pattrice jones (2011) argues, a primary way industrialized societies facilitate systemic animal abuse is through forgetting of that which makes us uncomfortable, forgetting our complicity. jones states, “The ease with which we forget facilitates animal abuse and all other atrocities that tend to make us sputter and reach for the word ‘unspeakable’: child abuse, nukes, poverty in the midst of plenty” (p. 53). Angela Davis argues that this lack of critical thinking about industrialism and human-animal relationships is a symptom of capitalism and colonialism:
The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken, without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underlie the commodities that we use on a daily basis. Ask yourself, what is it like to sit down and eat that food that is generated only for the purposes of profit and creates so much suffering? [quoted in Harper, 2012].
When industrial agriculture is examined by consumers and recognized as violent and exploitative for nonhumans, that violence is often not recognized in other industries, and it should. The suffering of killing of animals, and human and none, is important to criticize for any industry. Take the computer industry for example. In order to make a computer, raw materials such as silicon, copper, aluminum, gold, antimony, arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, lead, silver, zinc, iron, and more must be mined from all over the world, then shipped to refineries, factories, and smelters in other parts of the world to be turned into monitors, circuit boards, batteries, plastic cases, and voilà—a computer is born (Natural Resources Defense Center, 2011). Then it is wrapped in Styrofoam, plastic, and cardboard and shipped to stores and suppliers all over the world. Then it is used, and then several years later, it is thrown away. This process is enormously wasteful, exploitative, violence-fueling, and disastrous for peoples and wildlife all over the world. To create just one computer, an estimated “more than 500 pounds of fossil fuels alone are guzzled up—several times the weight of your computer—not to mention nearly 50 pounds of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water” (Natural Resources Defense Center, 2011, para. 5). Mining for these materials necessitates the destruction of habitats and homes, and as such often met with resistance from the peoples whose lands and ways of life are under threat; their resistance is normalized and frequently dealt with by armed force. We just really need those computers.
In the end the computer is not just a neutral commodity but comes pre-packaged with an entire social, political, and economic system; it is a system that requires mining, toxic chemicals, and massive amounts of electricity. For there to be computer and information system there must be economic and political system maintained with coercion since no one goes into the mines voluntarily and no community willing destroys their land base and poison their bodies. This entire structure requires coercion; it requires death. Those in the developed world just pretend those deaths are natural.
In the U.S. alone, people driving hit and kill an estimated one million nonhuman animals per day (Wollan, 2011). This is a kill rate of 11.5 animals every second of every day (High Country News, 2005). These statistics do not include animals that don’t die immediately after sustaining injuries from vehicles; nor do they include the injuries or deaths of human and nonhuman animals in wars fought over oil; nor the illness, injuries, or deaths of workers in the auto and oil industries. Eleven and a half deaths every second does not include the peoples or wildlife robbed of their homes or poisoned by these industries; nor those already feeling the effects of global warming. These deaths are not, as previously stated, accidents. These statistics are essentially guaranteed. These deaths are necessitated by industrial society’s illusion of convenience and need for speed. The moral baseline of veganism, uncritically accepted, is not sufficient to examine these deaths; simply avoiding the consumption of obvious animal products does not challenge an entire system steeped in slaughter. It requires animal liberationists to critically examine capitalism, statism, militarism, and industrialism, which luckily many do.
Critiques of industrialism alone are by no means enough. To move beyond the dismembered, reductionist thinking that labels the programmed slaughter of billions “accidents,” “production,” “necessary,” “for the greater good,” and “collateral damage,” we need to examine the structures that create these conditions and somehow imagine a way out that moves beyond mechanistic thought and action. Critically examining and challenging industrial civilization does not mean echoing the anti-vegan, transphobic, ableist, pro-collapse, noble savage idolizing stance of people like Derrick Jensen and his organization Deep Green Resistance. The anti-industrialism of Jensen is steeped in elitism and is the exact opposite of groundless solidarity practices (Earth First! Journal Collective, 2013). The kind of moral baseline that we propose for animal liberationists is one that recognizes and combats the horrors of industrialism, mechanistic thought, and vegan consumerism as well as recognizes the necessity for practicing groundless solidarity, from which more holistic solutions can be explored. “We need to practice fluid, compassionate, creative, spontaneous, and peculiar activisms that transcend single-issue politics and black and white thinking” (Pfeffer, 2014, p. 10–11). We need to de-program. We need to de-mechanize consciousness, action, and politics. We need to re-wild ourselves personally and politically, knowing that true solutions will not be made with machines, but with a vibrant open and feral politics.
“Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”
—Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life [2012]
To move beyond a politics of death, coercion and suffering, we need to embrace total liberation (Best 2011a; Best 2011b; Colling, Parson, Arrigoni, 2013). Central to the idea of total liberation is a belief that human liberation requires animal and earth liberation as well. It is simply the belief that liberation for one group cannot be gained by oppressing another; that whites cannot liberate themselves by stealing the labor of blacks; that humans cannot gain freedom while imprisoning and slaughtering cows and pigs; that no one can live sustainably on this planet while clearcutting forests and damming rivers. Total liberation, because of this, requires a move away from the ideas of “progress.” To Steven Best, the idea of economic and technological progress espoused by economists is often morally bankrupt. It is “progress” for only a few—the wealthy elites—and not for the majority of life on this planet. To fight for total liberation means rejecting this colonizing view of progress.
The depth of the struggle, as expressed in Best’s work, is repeated in the wonderful work of David Nibert. Nibert argues that agriculture is foundational in the rise of speciesist systems of domination (Nibert, 2002; 2013). To Nibert, the advent of agriculture leads to the creation of hierarchies, the accumulation of capital, and the rise of militaristic, sexist, and speciesist civilization. To Nibert, agriculture was, as Jared Diamond (1987) asserts, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” (p. 3).
That said, to both Best and Nibert, the struggle for total liberation seems to be disconnected from their historical analysis. For instance, Nibert argues that politically we need to push for world-wide veganism and global socialism in order to end animal exploitation; yet his own critique has shown that the roots go much deeper. If agriculture, industry, and hierarchy are the root causes of animal exploitation and statism, isn’t capitalism merely the current iteration of the problem? While the abolition of capitalism is, of course, a good first step, and one we should be fighting for, Nibert is wrong to not dream bigger. We need to rethink mass production and industrialism and move animal liberation away from a politics centered on consumer behavior. Purchasing Gardein (TM) meat analogue products is not humane or compassionate, though it might be the most “humane” choice we are giving at the store. By focusing radical activism and politics around consumer choices, we risk being blind to the larger structural systems we need to confront. While there are no easy answers, and we do not have a blueprint for what a green anarchist total liberation politics should look like, we do believe that total liberation requires the end of industrialism; that compassion cannot exist in a system built on sacrifice zones, exploitation, and commodification. A compassionate politics requires fighting against rape racks and slaughterhouses but also against resource extraction, roads, and industrial factories.
Likewise, a primitivist politics needs to be much more critical in examining the way they understand animality. It is not good enough to call for a politics of “rewilding,” where humans reconnect to their “natural” animality because colonialism, classism, racism, and sexism have worked in tandem to construct what the term means. To uncritically “become animal” means potentially reinforcing sexism, colonialism, and white supremacy. Likewise, it means turning ones back on the responsibility we, as humans, have to dismantle the economic and social systems that are killing this planet. What is needed is a primitivist politics centered on love, compassion, and solidarity where the goal is to dismantle the social and economic system that are killing this planet. In addition, we need a politics to create real and lasting communities, not only between humans but also between humans and the more-than-human world. To get there we need to not only throw wrenches into industrial machines, or burn down mink farms, but to hold out our hands and be willing to fight beside all peoples on this planet fighting against oppression, suffering, and ecocide.
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