Our understanding of liberation
I READ Paul D'Amato's article "Socialism and 'animal rights.'" I thought it presented many important points and its overall thesis was a sound one: humans are fundamentally different from animals, and while animals certainly deserve decent treatment, talking of animal rights and animal liberation as being the same as for humans is not correct or useful--and more importantly, it misunderstands human liberation as well.
I was a little surprised to see so much disagreement in response, so I thought I'd comment.
But first, here are a few quotes from the article which I think clarify some of the article's main points:
All species evolve and change, biologically speaking; only humans evolve culturally and socially. Indeed, the only reason we can have this discussion about animals is because we have something they don't have--language...They cannot "liberate" themselves or demand "rights" from us, either; they can't even formulate what a right or a demand is...
Non-human animals are helpless and, as I pointed out earlier, incapable of organizing and fighting for their rights. To compare the condition of animals to that of women, Blacks and other groups for freedom and equality is to view the latter through a paternalistic lens, rather than a lens of human liberation...
In order to put that concern in the right perspective, we need to insist on the essential differences between human beings and other animals, and reject the idea of "animal liberation."
First I'd like to point out, in response to a couple of the letters, that none of this is arguing that animals are somehow not "deserving" of human rights, but simply that human rights, such as free speech, are of no use to animals, even if they were somehow guaranteed them. Some lesser subset of "rights"--or to state it correctly, some basic standards of decent treatment--would be in order in any decent society; however, in our present society, the profit motive prevents this.
But I think the more important disagreement with many of the responses lies in the understanding of "liberation"--what it actually means, and how it actually happens.
Den's response shows exactly why this point is so important when he/she states that "animals cannot liberate themselves or demand rights. Well, neither can the world's poor. Rich human beings are arbiters over other poorer people, who are just as disempowered as animals."
If that were the case, both human liberation and animal liberation would be completely impossible. As Den is also a socialist, I wonder what his/her actual strategy consists of. If the world's poor are literally as passive and helpless as pigs being lead to the slaughter, how is their liberation even possible? (I also wonder how any socialist can have such a patronizing view of the world's poor, but I'll stick to issues of practicality rather than of tone.)
IN CONTRAST to this view of people as helpless victims, Marxism rests on "the self-emancipation of the working class" as its foundation. As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
This is quite a different vision of the oppressed than as being "just as disempowered as animals." And it's also more historically correct--from the Roman slave rebellions, to the Diggers, to the Paris Commune, to the civil rights movement, and on to today--oppressed and exploited people of every type and in every era have proven themselves quite capable of fighting back, and in many cases they've won important victories.
Marxists, of course, argue that the only way society can be fundamentally changed and an entire new society created is through the working class taking political power and expropriating the means of production to be used for rational, socially beneficial purposes.
But workers have no monopoly on political self-organization and self-activity--any successful movement for social or political rights, for any group, has always been initiated first from within, and then has found allies and built solidarity. The process of developing a political ideology and a strategy is also centrally important to this process, and so is learning the lessons from the movement's history.
This isn't some kind of formula, of course--it's just a description of a dynamic process, which is constantly interacting with all sorts of external forces. This process can be found throughout human history, occurring every time the oppressed organize and fight back, but this entire process is one that any non-human animals is fundamentally not capable of beginning.
Animals certainly deserve decent treatment, but to compare that to human liberation is fundamentally misunderstanding what human liberation actually means. This kind of confusion about self-activity and self-emancipation will not only lead to such specious ideas as "speciesism," but more importantly, it will lead to misunderstanding the most important struggles and victories in human history, and to poor strategies in the struggles that are still ongoing, or have yet to begin.
It's important that we think through these ideas and come to the correct conclusions--for humanity's sake.
Mike Iannacone, Atlanta