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illustrations/W. Ralph Walters
Capitalism
originated in, and would have been impossible without, imperialism,
colonization, the international slave trade, genocide, and large-scale
environmental destruction.
Organized around profit and power
imperatives, capitalism is a system of slavery, exploitation, class
hierarchy and inequality, violence, and forced labor. The Global
Capitalist Gulag was fuelled, first, by the labor power of millions of
slaves from Africa and other nations, and, second, by massive armies of
immigrant and domestic workers who comprised an utterly new social
class, the industrialized proletariat.
As
Marx observed, the accumulation of wealth and the production of
poverty, the aggrandizement of the ruling class and the immiseration of
the ruled, the development of the European world and the
underdevelopment of its colonies, are inseparably interrelated. These
apparent antipodes are inevitable consequences of a grow-or-die,
profit-seeking system of exploitation whose ceaseless expansion
requires a slave class and an inordinate amount of cheap labor power.
The
transatlantic slave trade began in 1444 when Henry the Navigator began
taking Africans back to Portugal to serve as slaves. Africans already
were enslaving each other, but their labor market was more akin to
indentured servitude and nothing like the horrors they would later face
in British America. Prior to trafficking in African slaves, European
nations enjoyed positive relationships with Africa based on friendship
and trade. This ended in the mid-15th century when they were overtaken
by insatiable demands for gold, profits, and slave labor. As evident in
the brutal exploits of Columbus and Spain, many European states waged
genocidal war against dark-skinned peoples in order to appropriate
their land, resources, riches, and labor power. Over
the next few centuries European forces of "civilization," "progress,"
and Christianity kidnapped twenty million Africans from their homes and
villages. They forced inland captives to march 500 grueling miles to
the coast while barefoot and in leg irons. Half died before they
reached the ships and more expired during the torturous six to ten week
journey across the Atlantic to North America. The slave traders
confined their human cargo to the suffocating hell beneath the deck.
Blacks were packed into tight spaces, chained together, and delirious
from heat, stench, and disease. They were beaten, force-fed, and thrown
overboard in droves.
Marx
rightly saw European colonialism as the "primitive stage of capital
development" before the emergence of industrial society. From the 15th
to the 19th century, profits from the slave trade built European
economies, bankrolled the Industrial Revolution, and powered America
before and after the Revolutionary War. The glorious cities and refined
cultures of modern Europe were erected on the backs of millions of
slaves, its "civilization" the product of barbarism. The horrors of
slavery were the burning ethical and political issues of modern
capitalism. Over a century after the liberation of blacks in the 1880s,
however, slavery has again emerged as a focal point of debate and
struggle, as society shifts from considering human to animal slaves and
a new abolitionist movement seeking animal liberation emerges as a
flashpoint for moral evolution and social transformation.
 Both before and after the Revolutionary War, America was a slave-hungry system.
In its European form, the nation emerged from scratch, with no prior
feudal history or communal traditions, a product of British capital
ventures. As British colonists found no gold like the Spaniards did in
the Americas, they turned to agriculture. From the Indians they learned
to grow tobacco as a profitable crop, but planting and harvesting
required intense physical labor. For their sturdiness, vulnerability,
and cheap price, the colonists favored Africans over Native American
Indians and English laborers for the task.
The
first Africans arrived on the North American continent in August 1619,
a year before Pilgrims landed the Mayflower on the shores of
Massachusetts and decades before the British slave trade began in New
England. Exchanged for food, twenty blacks stepped off a Dutch slavery
ship to become the first generation of African Americans. Joining a
society not yet lacerated by slavery and racism, they worked as
indentured servants to British elites. As such, their status was equal
to poor white servants, and servants of either race could gain freedom
after their tenure. Like whites, blacks owned property, married, and
voted in an integrated society.
This
benign situation changed dramatically in the 1660s as ever-more
Africans were brought to the colonies to meet the growing need for
plantation labor. As slavery became crucial to capitalist expansion and
plantation economies organized around tobacco, sugar, and cotton,
British colonists constructed racist ideologies to legitimate the
violent subjugation of those equal to them in the eyes of God and the
principles of natural law. Having survived the shock of capture and
wretchedness of their journey, African men, women, and children were
auctioned, branded, and sold to white slave owners who grew rich from
trading, breeding, and exploiting their bodies. With no consideration
of blood ties or emotional bonds, black families were broken apart.
Stripped of rights, dignity, and human status, these African citizens
and their millions of American descendents were brutalized in the most
vicious slavery system on the planet, one whose ugly legacy continues
to dominate and poison the U.S.
As
colonists became increasingly autonomous from the monarchy abroad, and
British military occupation and oppression subsequently increased, the
conflict between Empire and its unruly subjects–dramatized in events
such as the Boston Tea Party in 1773–inexorably led to war. On July 4,
1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence
which asserted the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created
equal" and "are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights." Along with progressive whites such as Thomas Paine and Abigail
Adams, slaves were quick to denounce the hypocrisy whereby colonists
such as Thomas Jefferson railed against British tyranny while owning
slaves drawn from a system far more repressive than English monarchy.
Whereas
many blacks fought for the British who promised them freedom, others
fought courageously for the patriot cause and were crucial to its
victory. When the war ended in 1783, social relations and racial views
were in great flux. Tens of thousands of slaves fled to England,
Canada, Spanish Florida, or Indian camps. Many Northern slaveholders
who embraced the nation's egalitarian values without regard to race
freed their captives. In 1783, Massachusetts became the first state to
abolish slavery and from 1789 to 1830 all states north of Maryland
gradually followed suit. At the same time, however, slavery grew
stronger roots in Southern states that were becoming increasingly
influential economically and politically.
The
new nation stood at a crucial moral crossroads regarding the slavery
question and the true meaning of its professed democratic and Christian
values. It could end slavery and adhere to its noble ideals, or it
could perpetuate a vicious system of bondage to be an American
hypocrisy, not democracy. Tragically, the profit imperative triumphed
over the moral imperative. Although the North continuously pandered to
Southern slavery interests, the two cultures drifted apart
irreconcilably like shifting tectonic plates. Rather than pulling
together as one nation honoring the progressive values that led them to
war, the U.S. imploded through internal contradictions and in 1861
embarked on a bloody war with itself.  With freedom denied and justice betrayed, both free and enslaved blacks intensified their resistance to white oppression.
Increasingly, opponents of slavery turned from tactics of reform and
moderation to demands for the total and immediate dismantling of the
slavery system, and thus, in the 1830s, the abolitionist movement was
born.
Abolitionism
is rooted in a searing critique of racism and its dehumanizing effects
on black people. In the U.S. slavery market, a human being, on the
basis of skin color alone, was declared biologically and naturally
inferior to whites and thereby stripped of all rights. In such a
system, the slave is transmogrified from a human subject into a
physical object, from a person into a commodity, and thereby reduced to
a moveable form of property known as "chattel." Abolitionists viewed
the institution of slavery as inherently evil, corrupt, and
dehumanizing, such that no black person in bondage–however well-treated
by their "masters"–could ever attain the full dignity, intelligence,
and creativity of their humanity. Abolitionists renounced all reformist
approaches that sought better or more "humane treatment" of slaves, in
order to insist on the total emancipation of blacks from the chains,
masters, laws, courts, and ideologies that corrupted, stunted, and
profaned their humanity. The
most militant abolitionist voices advocated the use of violence as a
necessary or legitimate tactic of struggle and self-defense. In 1829,
David Walker published his "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the
World," a fiery eighty-page pamphlet excoriating slavery and calling
blacks to violent rebellion. Similarly, in his 1843 keynote address to
the National Convention of Colored Citizens, Presbyterian minister
Henry Highland Garnet enjoined the nationšs three million blacks to
demand freedom and strike their oppressors down if necessary, for
"there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood."
Along
with the Haitian Revolution of August 22, 1791, whereby black slaves
violently overthrew Spanish and British occupiers to establish Haiti as
a free black republic, such views panicked U.S. slave owners over the
possibility of slave revolts and violence. Their fears were justified,
as blacks throughout the country were plotting and carrying out
rebellions, achieving with bullets, machetes, or fire the justice
denied to them in the courts. Whereas rebels such as Gabriel Prosser
and Denmark Vesey were betrayed and executed before they could ignite
large-scale insurrections, others like Nat Turner and John Brown (a
white Christian) spilled the blood of many slave owners before being
captured and executed by the state, and resurrected as folk heroes by
the enemies of slavery. Other
influential voices urged militancy and direct action without violence.
William Lloyd Garrison, a former indentured white servant, started a
prominent abolitionist newsletter, the Liberator, on January 1,
1831, which he published for 35 years. Against those urging slow,
gradual, and moderate change, Garrison objected: "I
do not wish to think, to speak, or write, with moderation... Tell a man
whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately
rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to
gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;
but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present!"
Garrison
also brought Frederick Douglass into the abolitionist movement.
Douglass was born into slavery, became self-educated, and fled from
bondage. With Garrisonšs initial assistance, he became a star on the
lecture circuit and in 1848 began publishing his own abolitionist
newspaper, the North Star. In his electrifying speeches,
Douglass preached a potent "gospel of struggle," most eloquently
expressed in an 1857 speech that exposed the Machiavellian essence of
politics: "Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will... The
whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all
concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest
struggle... If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters."
A
vital part of the abolitionist movement was the Underground Railroad, a
furtive, illegal network of volunteers–white and black, male and
female, free person and slave–who violated pro-slavery laws in order to
smuggle thousands of slaves into northern free states and Canada.
Harriet Tubman not only was a "passenger" on the railroad, using it to
escape slavery in 1849 at age 25, she also became its celebrated
"Conductor." Risking jail or death, dodging slave hunters out for the
$40,000 bounty on her head, Tubman returned to Maryland numerous times
to free family members and seventy other slaves. She epitomizes the
courage, passion for freedom, and acute sense of justice driving the
abolitionist movement. After
the Civil War ended in 1865, Congress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th
Amendments, thereby banning slavery and mandating equal treatment for
blacks and whites. By the late 1880s, blacks throughout the nation were
formally "free," but in reality, they remained trapped in systems of
racist hatred, violence, exploitation, and poverty. Despite advances
during the brief Reconstruction Period, America reconstituted racist
discrimination in frightful new ways. As the U.S. became an apartheid
system organized around Jim Crow segregation laws, violence against
blacks increased dramatically through lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan.
Not until the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 did brutality diminish, the walls of apartheid
come down, and significant social progress become possible.  As
black Americans and anti-racists continue to struggle for justice and
equality, the moral and political spotlight is shifting to a far more
ancient, pervasive, intensive, and violent form of slavery that
confines, tortures, and kills animals by the billions in an ongoing
global holocaust.
We
speak of animal liberation no differently than human liberation. One
cannot "enslave," "dominate," or "exploit" physical objects, nor can
they be "freed," "liberated," or "emancipated." These terms apply only
to organic life forms that are sentient–to beings who can experience
pleasure and pain, happiness or suffering. Quite apart from species
differences and arbitrary attempts to privilege human powers of reason
and language over the unique qualities of animal life, human and
nonhuman animals share the same evolutionary capacities for joy or
suffering, and in this respect they are essentially the same or equal.
Fundamentally,
ethics demands that one not cause suffering to another being or impede
another's freedom and quality of life, unless there is some valid,
compelling reason to do so (e.g., self-defense). For all the voluminous
scientific literature on the complexity of animal emotions,
intelligence, and social life, a being's capacity of sentience is a necessary and sufficient condition for having basic rights.
Thus,
just as animals can be enslaved, so too can they be liberated; indeed,
where animals are enslaved, humans arguably have a duty to liberate
them. Answering this call of conscience and duty, animal liberation
groups have sprouted throughout the world with the objectives of
freeing captive animals from systems of exploitation, attacking and
dismantling the economic and material basis of oppression, and
challenging the ancient mentality that animals exist as human
resources, property, or chattel. Stealing
blacks from their native environment and homeland, wrapping chains
around their bodies, shipping them in cramped quarters across
continents for weeks or months with no regard for their suffering,
branding their skin with a hot iron to mark them as property,
auctioning them as servants, separating family members who scream in
anguish, breeding them for service and labor, exploiting them for
profit, beating them in rages of hatred and anger, and killing them in
huge numbers–all these horrors and countless others inflicted on black
slaves began with the exploitation of animals. Advanced by technology
and propelled by capitalist profit imperatives, the unspeakably violent
violation of animals'emotions, minds, and bodies continues today with
the torture and killing of billions of individuals in fur farms,
factory farms, slaughterhouses, research laboratories, and other
nightmarish settings.
It
is time no longer just to question the crime of treating a black person
or any other human victim of violence "like an animal"; rather, we must
also scrutinize the unquestioned but more fundamental wrong of
exploiting and terrorizing animals. Whereas the racist mindset creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior on the basis of skin color, the speciesist mindset demeans
and objectifies animals by dichotomizing the evolutionary continuum
into human and nonhuman life. As racism stems from a hateful white
supremacism, so speciesism draws from a violent human supremacism, namely, the arrogant belief that humans have a natural or God-given right to use animals for any purpose they devise.
Both
racism and speciesism serve as legitimating ideologies for slavery
economies. After the civil war, the Cotton Economy became the Cattle
Economy as the nation moved westward, slaughtered millions of Indians
and buffalo, and began intensive operations to raise and slaughter
cattle for food. Throughout the twentieth century, as the U.S. shifted
from a plant-based to a meat-based diet, meat and dairy industries
became giant economic forces. In the last few decades, pharmaceutical
and biotechnology companies have become major components of global
capitalist networks, and their research and testing operations are
rooted in the breeding, exploitation, and killing of millions of
laboratory animals each year
Of
course, as soon as Homo erectus began making tools nearly three million
years ago, hominids have killed and appropriated animals for labor
power, food, clothing, and innumerable other resources, and animal
exploitation has been crucial to human economies. But whatever
legitimate reasons humans had for using animals to survive in past
hunting and gathering societies, subsistence economies, and other
low-tech cultures, these rationales are now obsolete in a modern world
rife with alternatives to using animals for food, clothing, and medical
research. Furthermore, however important the exploitation of animals
might be to modern economies, utilitarian apologies for enslaving
animals are as invalid as arguments used to justify human slavery or
experimentation on human beings at Auschwitz or Tuskegee. Rights trump
utilitarian appeals; their very function is to protect individuals from
being appropriated for someone elsešs or a "greater good."  It
was not uncommon for a racist to argue that slavery was beneficial for
blacks or that they were biologically unfit for freedom.
Similarly, factory farm managers claim that pigs, calves, and chickens
are better off in conditions of intense confinement rather than in
their natural habitat as their "needs are met" in "managed
environments." Zookeepers and circus operators assert that their
animals live better in confinement that in the wild where they are
subject to poachers and other dangers.
Abolitionists
attack welfarism as a dangerous ruse and roadblock to moral progress,
and ground their position in the logic of rights. Nineteenth century
abolitionists were not addressing the slave master's "obligation" to be
kind to the slaves, to feed and clothe them well, to allow them on
occasion to read, and to work them with adequate rest. Rather, they
demanded the total and unqualified eradication of the master-slave
relation, the freeing of the slave from all forms of bondage. Similarly,
the new abolitionists reject reforms of the institutions and practices
of animal slavery as grossly inadequate and they pursue the complete
emancipation of animals from all forms of human exploitation,
subjugation, and domination. They seek not bigger cages, but rather
empty cages. To treat black slaves humanely is a contradiction in terms because the institution of slavery inherently
is anti-human and dehumanizing. Similarly, one cannot logically be
"kind" to animals kept in debilitating confinement against their will.
To "act responsibly" to animals in such a situation requires one to
liberate them from it. Talk of "humane killing"of animals is especially
absurd as there is no "humane" way to steal and violate an animal's
life. No accurately aimed bolt shot through the head of an animal
warrants pretense to any kind of moral dignity, however superior the
killing method is to dismemberment of an animal in a conscious state.
Killing–unnecessary and unjustified–is, in itself, inhumane and wrong.
While thousands of national and grass-roots animal welfare organizations help animals in countless ways and reduce their suffering, they cannot free
them from exploitation. Welfarists never challenge the legitimacy of
institutions of oppression and they share with animal exploiters the
speciesist belief that humans have a right to use animals as resources
as long as they act "responsibly." Moral progress and animal liberation
is premised on making the profound shift from human responsibility to animals to the rights of animals.
The
true obstacles to moral progress are not the sociopaths who burn cats
alive, for they are an extreme minority whose actions are almost
universally condemned as barbaric. The real barrier to animal
liberation is the welfarist orientation and its language of "humane
care," "responsible treatment," and "kindness and respect." Every
institution of animal exploitation–including the fur farm and
slaughterhouse industries–speaks this language, and animals in their
"care" are routinely tortured in horrific ways. Animal welfarism is
insidious. It lulls people into thinking that animals in captivity are
healthy and content. It promotes human supremacy and tries to dress up
the fundamental wrong of exploiting animals in the illusory language of
"kind," "respectful," and "humane" treatment. Attempting to mask and
sanitize the evil of oppression, animal welfarism perverts language,
corrupts meaning, and is fundamentally Orwellian and deceptive. Furthermore,
by trying to hijack and monopolize the discourse of moral
responsibility solely for its own purposes as it feigns ethical
behavior, animal welfarism strategically positions animal rights
discourse of any kind–because of the premise that animals are not our
resources to use–as extreme. And if an animal rights advocate or
organization transgresses conservative decorum or legal boundaries in
any way, welfarists denounce the tactics as "violent" and "terrorist,"
as measures that "discredit" an otherwise respectable concern for
animal welfare.  Although
abolitionism is rooted in the logic of rights, not welfarism, there are
problems with some animal rights positions that also must be overcome.
First, as emphasized by law professor Gary Francione, many individuals
and organizations that champion animal rights in fact are "new
welfarists"who speak in terms of rights but in practice seek welfare
reforms and thereby seek to ameliorate, not abolish, oppression. While
Francione underplays the complex relationship between welfare and
rights, reform and abolition, he illuminates the problem of obscuring
fundamental differences between welfare and rights approaches and he
correctly insists on the need for uncompromising abolitionist
campaigns.
Francione,
however, is symptomatic of a second problem with animal rights
"legalists" who buy into the status quo's self-serving argument that
the only viable and ethically acceptable tactics for a moral or
political cause are those the state pre-approves and sanctions. In
rejecting the militant direct action tactics that played crucial roles
throughout the struggles to end both human and animal slavery,
Francione and others use the same rationale animal welfarists employ
against them. Mirroring welfare critiques of rights, and serving as a
mouthpiece for the state and animal exploitation industries, Francione
criticizes direct activists as radical, extreme, and damaging to the
moral credibility and advancement of the cause. Like
its predecessor, the new abolitionist movement is diverse in its
philosophy and tactics, ranging from legal to illegal approaches and
pacifist to violent orientations. A paradigmatic example of the new
abolitionism is the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). The ALF advocates
illegal direct action tactics against animal slave owners; however,
because they define violence only as harm to living beings and not
objects, ALF activists eschew the violence espoused by Walker and
Garnet. Operating through underground cell structure, the ALF seeks to
eliminate or weaken exploitation industries through intimidation and
property destruction. In direct and immediate acts of liberation, the
ALF breaks into prison compounds to release or rescue animals from
their cages. By providing veterinary treatment and homes for many of
the animals they liberate, using an extensive underground network of
care and home providers, the ALF is a superb contemporary example of
the Underground Railroad. The new abolitionism also is evident in the work of "open rescue"groups like Compassion Over Killing,
who liberate animals from factory farms without causing property
destruction or hiding behind masks of anonymity. Moreover, ethical
vegans who boycott all animal products for the principle reason that it
is wrong to use or kill animals as food resources–however "free-range"
or "humanely" produced or killed–abolish cruelty from their lives and
contribute toward eliminating animal exploitation altogether. As
of yet, there are no active Nat Turners and John Browns in the animal
liberation movement, but they may be forthcoming and would not be
without just cause for their actions. Nor would they be without
precedent. According to the gospel of struggle: No justice, no peace.  Just
as 19th century abolitionists sought to awaken people to the greatest
moral issue of the day, so the new abolitionists of the 21st century
endeavor to enlighten people about the enormity and importance of
animal suffering and oppression.
As black slavery earlier raised fundamental questions about the meaning
of American "democracy"and modern values, so current discussion
regarding animal slavery provokes critical examination into a human
psyche damaged by violence, arrogance, and alienation, and the urgent
need for a new ethics and sensibility rooted in respect for all life.
Animal
liberation is not an alien concept to modern culture; rather it builds
on the most progressive ethical and political values Westerners have
devised in the last two hundred years–those of equality, democracy, and
rights–as it carries them to their logical conclusions. Whereas
ethicists such as Arthur Kaplan argue that rights are cheapened when
extended to animals, it is far more accurate to see this move as the
redemption of rights from an arbitrary and prejudicial limitation of
their true meaning. The
next great step in moral evolution is to abolish the last acceptable
form of slavery that subjugates the vast majority of species on this
planet to the violent whim of one. True moral advance involves sending
human supremacy to the same refuse bin that society earlier discarded
much male supremacy and white supremacy. Animal liberation requires
that people transcend the complacent boundaries of humanism in order to
make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the
moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity.
Animal
liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process
whereby human beings gradually realize that arguments justifying
hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are prejudiced,
baseless, and fallacious. Moral progress occurs in the process of
demystifying and deconstructing all myths–from ancient patriarchy and
the divine right of kings to Social Darwinism and speciesism–that
attempt to legitimate the domination of one group over another. Moral
progress advances through the dynamic of replacing hierarchical visions
with egalitarian visions and developing a broader and more inclusive
ethical community. Having recognized the illogical and unjustifiable
rationales used to oppress blacks, women, and other disadvantaged
groups, society is beginning to grasp that speciesism is another
unsubstantiated form of oppression and discrimination. Building
on the momentum, consciousness, and achievements of past abolitionists
and suffragettes, the struggle of the new abolitionists might
conceivably culminate in a Bill of (Animal) Rights. This would involve
a constitutional amendment that bans exploitation of animals and
discrimination based on species, recognizes animals as "persons" in a
substantive sense, and grants them the rights relevant and necessary to
their existence–the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In 2002, Germany took the crucial first step in this direction by
adding the words "and animals" to a clause in its constitution obliging
the state to protect the dignity of humans.
If
capitalism is a grow-or-die system based on slavery and exploitation–be
it imperialism and colonialism, exploitation of workers, unequal pay
based on gender, or the oppression of animals–then it is a system that
a movement for radical democracy must transcend, not amend. But just as
black slaves condemned the hypocrisy of colonists decrying British
tyranny, and suffragettes exposed the contradiction of the U.S.
fighting for democracy abroad during World War I while denying it to
half of their citizenry at home, so any future movement for peace,
justice, democracy, and rights that fails to militate for the
liberation of animals is as inconsistent as it is incomplete. •
Dr. Steven Best's new book, co-edited with Anthony J. Nocella, Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals is available from Lantern Books. It features leading eco-terrorists like Paul Watson, Rod Coronado, Kevin Jones, and Ingrid Newkirk.
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