This
is a letter sent by French readers to the authors of Beasts of Burden
(Antagonism Press, 1999, c/o BM Mahkno, London WC1N 3XX (www.geocities.com/CapitalHill/Lobby/3909).
This pamphlet has the merit of addressing a vital question: If communism
is to transform the whole of daily life, it can't leave out our relation
to animals and the way we eat. Beasts of Burden forces to rethink the
whole "primitivist" debate. We hope to tackle this some day.
As neither of us is PC, "man" here means man + woman, and "mankind"
means humankind.
Since our letter was written, Beasts of Burden has been reviewed in
Undercurrent, n.8 (Brighton & Hove Unemployed Workers' Centre, 4
Crestway Parade, Hollingdean, Brighton BN1 7BL, UK).
* * *
1. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A WRONG TURNING IN
HISTORY
It is impossible to determine when and how history went wrong. Primitivism
selects those facts that are supposed to prove its point, and rejects
one aspect of science (traditional history) in the name of others which
also belong to capitalist knowledge (anthropology). Instead of breaking
with "marxist" determinism, you shift the emphasis from economy to man/animal
contradictions. Whether written by Rousseau, you or me, any "discours
des origines" usually tells more about its writer than about the past.
History provides us with facts and events that contributed to turn man
into what he now is. Not all that many examples, but enough for anyone
to pick and elaborate on.
Why would the hunter be the prime villain ? You write agriculture led
to accumulation, hence to classes, etc.. What about gathering: why couldn't
someone accumulate what others collected ?
It would be just as logical to start from any similar fact (the wheel,
for example) and reconstruct 10.000 years on it.
No single thing accounts for everything. Value does not explain all
capital. One cannot choose one form of (inevitably alienated) life and
turn it into the cause of all others. Gathering as opposed to animal
domestication. Agriculture versus hunting. Village v. town. Sedentarism
v. nomadism. Individual v. society. Community v. individuality. Free
hunting and fishing v. farming. Elite v. the people. Central v. local
power. Women's condition. Children's submission. Technique and machines.
Not forgetting war ! A lot changed when "ritualized" warfare expanded
and prisoners were put to what later became "work". Most likely, much
happened at the same time, i.e. over a few thousand years. Agriculture
did not result in classes and political power. There was "primitive
communism", then there was agriculture + classes + politics.
Marxist determinism (sometimes present in our writings) explained history
by the appearance of a "surplus" that was grabbed by a minority. Freddy
Perlman replaces this with an hydraulical determination. But he does
not say why local communities split and gave birth to "classes" and
"the State". Couldn't they collectively build and manage dykes and canals
by themselves, instead of relying on "organizers" ? There was nothing
fatal in this technical evolution. Otherwise we have to admit mankind
will always enslave itself wherever it uses large scale irrigation.
There is evidence of hunting or fishing or agricultural societies which
did not become oppressive of human beings. Why ? Nobody knows. There
is no more explanation of why things turned bad, than there exists a
guarantee of how they'll turn (and stay) good in some future time.
We can't take up something we (usually most rightly) dislike and make
it into a universal cause. Why not choose cave painting? It is related
to language, therefore to symbolic power whereby humans entrap themselves,
as Zerzan argues. This is equally valid and irrelevant: it makes one
aspect of society into the cause of it all.
If we mistake the part for the whole, (pre)history can be called upon
to prove anything. Militant vegetarianism can easily trace social evils
to meat-eating, and contrast them with the seemingly better life of
vegetal-eating apes. Yet the opposite option is just as well documented.
Carnivorism has been seen as the origin of an essential part of humanity:
sociality. Like many predators, dolphins have some form of cooperation,
hierarchy, codes, etc. Just as you regard hunting as a major source
of oppression, others treat it as the origin of society. Intelligence
means being able to face new situations and adapt to constantly emerging
factors. Animals that kill usually have far more social relationships
than those they prey upon. Now, where does that lead us ? On a more
physiological level, it has been argued that the rise of animal proteine
eating small nations (ancient Greece, England, Japan) showed the superiority
of carnivorism. Again, what does that mean ? "Nature" provides us with
so much evidence that it proves any argument and becomes useless.
Isn't it because men were treated like things that animals and trees
were reified too ?
The car industry is not objectionable because it derives from the slaughterhouse.
Our critique of capitalism is precisely that value production turns
everything, whether meat or poetry, into commodity, and that it's no
use asking for more love poems and less hamburgers. As long as both
products are profitable, factories will keep on churning them out. It
could be a factory of anything. It's the conveyor belt society that
has to be understood and revolutionized, no matter if it's manufacturing
packed beef, wholemeal bread, or fridges.
2. DEALING WITH ANY ISSUE (HERE: CARNIVORISM /
VEGETARIANISM,
OR ANIMAL CONDITION) PRESUPPOSES ASKING WHERE THE QUESTION COMES FROM
Why is it that the average young urban Western European of the early
21st century hates the sight of khaki dressed men set out to shoot rabbits
or ducks ?
Nature awareness, ecological worries and reactions to animal abuse are
not signs of mankind at last getting conscious of its impact on the
rest of the planet, but of the necessity for capital to think globally,
and to take all past and present into account, from Maya temples to
whales and genes. Everything it dominates has to be controlled and classifed
in order to be managed. What is marketable must be protected. Capital
owns the world and no owner can afford to be too careless about his
possessions.
In the early 19th century, the bourgeoisie wasted the life and labour
power of millions of proles. Thanks partly to workers' action, this
changed into less destructive and more profitable exploitation. Now
capital can't go on squandering millions of monkeys or trees.
It's no coincidence that an acute sensibility to the condition of animals
comes up at the same time as industrialized food and concentration camp
style farming. Humanism and modern State power rose together. The industrialization
of everything (man, animal, as well as human and animal food) goes with
the protest against the wrongs done to everything. For the last 30 years,
vegetarianism has developed at the same pace as agro-business, and our
feelings too: we eat plastic wrapped ham sandwiches but refuse to wear
mink. Modern man wants meat without blood, tobacco without nicotine,
commodities without sweat stains, war without corpses, police without
truncheons, truncheons without bruises, money without speculation.
In
this respect, the most modern forms of exploitation help understand
the most backward ones.
What is happening to animals is a degraded product of "class struggle",
of the evolution of capital-labour relationships after the rebellions
of the 60's and 70's on the shopfloor. Managers try to make the workplace
safer and less destructive (= more productive) of a precious capital:
labour. Animal exploitation duplicates this process. It tends to experiment
less on animals in order to get more from them, painfully if it must,
painlessly if it can: "reduction in the number of animals sacrificed,
refinement of techniques that cause suffering and replacement of live
animals with simulation or cell cultures" (Newsweek, January 16, 1989).
Protests against animal abuse parallel the general demand for a multi-cultural,
more open, non-aggressive society.
The question itself has to be questioned. The emphasis on "cruelty"
implies that a "fair" treatment would be acceptable. The insistance
on "abject" labour conditions calls for tolerable work. The fight against
excesses logically supports moderation. Let us suppose these atrocious
(and often plain silly) experiments could be truly painless, and even
enjoyable for the animals involved. You and I would still object to
"stress" studies and make-up tests, just as we'd regard "happy" Ford
workers as even more alienated.
3 HUMAN AND ANIMAL CONDITIONS ARE ONLY GETTING
WORSE IN THE SENSE THAT EVERYTHING IS GETTING CAPITALIZED. THEREFORE
THE MOST VISIBLE HORRORS DONE TO HUMANS AND ANIMALS ARE BECOMING LESS
VISIBLY HORRIBLE.
Your
pamphlet starts with the assumption that not only the masses are suffering
from increased exploitation and growing impoverishment, but animals
are getting butchered and tortured more than before.
Life is worse, but not quite the way you say. There are no more famines
or mass killings of humans than in 1900 or 1945. Foodwise, the average
Western worker's diet is certainly richer and more balanced than in
Marx's time: he's getting as much industrialized food as industrialized
entertainment or travel. Life expectancy is still rising: if it's going
down in Russia, it's because Russia is suffering from backward capitalism.
Sweatshops are not the future of capital, nor are social benefits and
dole money the main source of income among the proles. We'd be mistaken
if we described as hell a place nobody regards as heaven.
What
is worse than 1848, 1917 or 1945, is that never before have so many
living beings and unliving things been turned into money and money-producing
processes. Never have humans been more dependent upon something above
themselves and... until now, unable or unwilling to change the situation.
As the SI said, what matters is the critique of the wealth offered by
this society, not of the poverty it inflicts on us. Because both go
together. There is as much horror in the politically correct sugary
animal loving image this society presents, as in the slaughters actually
taking place behind high walls. It was not the Thought Police and Room
101 that made the world of "1984" an abomination, it was its all encompassing
conformism. Winston's final love for Big Brother is at least as terrible
as the tortures he went through.
Capital maims and humiliates humans. It kills millions of animals. True.
But wherever capital develops and becomes more "purely" capitalist,
it resorts far less to torture and open violence. The essence (and therefore
the contradiction) of capitalism is not to be found in its extremes.
Genocide and cattle slaughtering are inevitable effects of capital:
they do not define it.
Just like animal exploitation, sexism and racism are necessary components
of capitalism. But only when it needs them. It periodically supersedes
them, replaces them by better adapted forms. Informal or institutional
racism will always surface again in some capitalist country, but is
nowhere essential to capital. For example, apartheid was not "the" form
of wage-labour in South Africa. Fifteen years ago, friends were telling
us that anti-apartheid struggles were fighting capitalism, as the South
African economy was based on racism, and could never do without. It
does now. And in fact business was among the driving forces that got
rid of apartheid.
You're right about McDonald's being at the crux of many aspects of our
present society. But precisely, McDonald's cannot be portrayed solely
as a concentration of horrors (bad food + degraded social relationships
for the customers, bad pay + appalling work conditions for the workers,
more animals killed, plus increased domination of US investment and
lifestyle). All this is true but, since you argue from a qualitative
point of view, you're missing out both the appeal and impact of junk
food and junk work. The concept of fast food is historically bound to
the ideas of safe food (such places have at least the same standards
of hygiene as most pubs or caf‚s we like), eat-alone-if-you-wish, non-commitment
to others, minimal physical contact and speech, speed, as well as providing
a casual job, mainly for the young. These ideas are more than an ideology,
they express the reality of leisure and work in the TV and computer
age. Exploitation indeed, but the underlying violence (to people and
animals) can only be understood as the flip side of fast food. McDonald's
is as exploitative and repressive as any other company, but claims to
be (and is, to some extent) consumer friendly, staff friendly, animal
friendly. Having a hamburger in a fast food can be less socially involved
than sitting in a pub or in Joe's Caf‚.
Capital takes life (in all forms, from human labour, trees and cows
to fairy tales and emotions), reproduces it and gives it back to us.
That's how it differs from past exploitation systems. There lies its
strength. Unlike a vampire, it sucks energy out of us but keeps us alive
and has us grow, produce, buy and act. Value production and consumerism
work because we're active as well as passive. Why are computers popular
? Why is sport ?
Meat was indeed a symbol of upperclassness. But aren't you putting things
upside down ? It's just as likely the rulers kept for themselves what
had more nutritional value. Anyway, the Western worker (male, particularly)
still believes in overeating and revels in red meat, whereas the elite
has now moved into far more balanced diets. Being rich now means going
to expensive health shops -- often vegetarian oriented. In California,
entering junk food corner shops for the lower classes, and then a large
"organic food" market for the middle classes, is like visiting two different
planets.
However, as we know, consumerism gradually extends to most what used
to be the privilege of a few, and, at the same time, massification downgrades
what it brings to every home. Technology can now make food products
of any shape, texture and taste. One day, there might be Christmas turkeys,
perfect with bones, flesh, skin and exact colour, made out of synthetic
living organisms, as tasty as the real one, good for your health, cheap
and plentiful. Slaughtering poultry would be reduced to a minimum, and
only for the upper classes, in supposedly painless and stressless conditions,
in old fashioned farms where hens walk around the farmyard, possibly
under RSPCA supervision. Of course, the marginalized masses of the semi-industrialized
world would still kill chicken in the most gruesome manner, and horrify
Westerm reporters. Sci-Fi ? No more than the non-violent, worker friendly,
factory.
The relation between man and (the rest of) nature reflects the relationship
between men. Capital does rely on abuse, constraint and repression.
But its essence is no more violent than non-violent. It's hard when
it has to, soft whenever it becomes more profitable. Forcing 5 year
olds to a 12 hour working day was necessary in 1830, but as history
showed, not consubstantial to business interests. Fighting for non-violent
forms contributes to shift oppressive forms from one level to another.
The prospect of synthetic food now enables capital to monstruously fulfill
the bio-food dream.
4 THE ANIMAL QUESTION CAN ONLY BE POSED AS A HUMAN
QUESTION
It
would be absurd to put the class struggle before nature. The communist
movement does not uphold the engineering worker against the cow. The
aim is not to recompose the proletarian class, but to decompose all
classes.
Still, the exploitation of McDonald's employees has more historical
relevance than that of the cows. Not because humans would suffer more,
or the suffering of cows would matter less. But because only humans
can put an end to McDonald's.
Animals do not work. It is misleading to call "work" what a horse or
a silkworm has been trained and is forced to do. Because then the word
is given a totally different meaning from the many variants of work
as we know it (slave or serf work, wage labour, housework, homework).
Work is organized by the master, boss, manager... but the worker always
has to play his part in this organization, and can interchange his position
with whoever organizes him, and question the organization. Animal "activity"
is neither the opposite of, or the same as alienated labour: it is something
else.
The communist movement does not react to the fate of victims -- whether
humans or animals.
How this world could change depends on what it is based upon.
Camatte, F.Perlman, primitivists, and to a large extent "autonomists"
start from the fact that there's a domination over everything: they
view this society as based upon the control (of which production is
only one part) of every life form. Therefore the common element between
man and animal matters more than the difference.
We maintain that capitalism rules, and that capital is based on value-producing
labour. Putting humans to work is the key to mastering everything.
All the examples given in the text (slavery, enclosures, clearances,
the assembly line) point to a social (= human to human) relationship,
whereby animals indeed suffer, but the motive of this suffering was
to put men to work (sheep don't shear sheep). One work organization
replaced another which was less productive. The animal industry did
not create a proletariat: the creation of a proletariat was one of the
conditions for animal industry.
5 NO LIFESTYLE IS SUBVERSIVE
Arthur
Cravan claimed to be a deserter of 17 countries. We are deserters. But
not because defecting from the world would change it. Simply, we don't
belong. If I abstain from voting, it's not because deep down in my heart
I'd rather have Callaghan than Thatcher as a prime minister, but forbid
myself to vote out of revolutionary principles. I don't have to force
myself. I genuinely believe Callaghan is no better than Thatcher. And
(contrary to the left-winger who votes Labour as a lesser evil), I am
well aware that my attitude has no immediate impact whatsoever. (At
the very best, its effect is to help keep alive some community between
those few people who don't vote for reasons similar to mine.)
Abstention from the world does not prevent it from going on. If I don't
want to take part in anyone's exploitation, the best is never to buy
shares, and to do without a bank account, so either spend all my money
as I get it, or keep it in cash at home. Why not ? At the end of his
life, Jean Genet had hardly any belongings, lived in hotels, and insisted
on being paid in cash, so he could use and circulate it the way he wished.
He was doing not the best, but his best to handle money in a money world.
Shall we ask ourselves to do the same? Shall we ask our friends ?
Like Genet's attitude, veganism is personal. Some attitudes may be definitely
"bad", yet none is superior to others. It is pointless to wonder what
is closer to communism. Genet's income came from being part of the literary
world. Where does soya grow ? Who grows it ? For what pay ?
The least uncommunist attitude might be not to choose a way of life.
To live with a minimum of fads, to remain as open as possible: sleeping
in an igloo in Greenland, a wigwam in North America, a council estate
flat in Rome, driving a lorry in Kenya and teaching English in South
Korea, shopping at Tesco's in Battersea with the local proles and fishing
with the villagers of a South Pacific Island. Adjusting to many food
and sex habits without tying oneself to any. This would be as different
from the "resister" who insulates himself from the world at large, as
from the alternative milieu person who shelters himself in a micro-world.
Such an (imaginary) "citizen of the world" or "traveller of mankind"
would not set himself as a model. No doubt he would bump into unpleasant
aspects of this planet: the Kenyan lorry might help disrupt local life,
some Battersea pub mate might dislike the Blacks, etc. We're not presenting
a new "On the Road" ideal. This unlikely character just helps us understand
that communism would open up every category to every other.
Perhaps the main flaw in veganism (as in any world vision based on a
specific diet) is the notion that man is what he eats. He is what he
does, which includes what he eats, and whatever he does is always done
with others.
People can be vegan and communist. They can be vegan and non- or anti-communist.
If punk rockers are likely to play a larger part in social upheavals
than opera goers, this has nothing to do with an alleged superiority
of the Sex Pistols over Monteverdi, and rather with the fact that punk
audiences are more lower class than Covent Garden. Punks won't be revolutionaries
as punks.
Veganism deals with the social and symbolic power of meat. No vegan
thinks he's aiming a real blow at the animal industry: he acts against
an image. Then why not refuse to drive ? (Which is of course easier
if you can afford to live downtown than in a remote suburb with inadequate
public transport.) Why not abstain from parenthood ? But if the criterion
is being antagonistic to society (as in ancient Greece, when refusing
to eat meat was an offense to gods/men/animals relationships, hence
a critique of social order), then in a Catholic country in 17OO or even
1900, it was subversive to eat meat on a Friday (as indeed some militant
atheists used to). It is impossible to make one particular behaviour
or gesture into a norm or anti-norm.
On the other hand, those who think mankind once took the wrong turn
are logically bound to fight for a world organized specifically against
the return to this original mistake, and for example to advocate a special
diet.
Therefore this discussion has one more merit. It reminds us that the
world does not revolve around one single big cause or sin. Carnivorism
is not the root of all evils. But neither was money, for example, the
origin of everything that goes wrong. Humankind is not suffering from
a disease which communism would cure. There is no medecine. We are doubters,
not doctors. We're not defending sanity against disease. Communism is
not production or life organized differently, without rulers, for instance,
or without exchange for value. It can only be defined as activity, as
community. People will not look for ways of circulating goods without
using money. They will live and make things differently, and this difference
will include the absence of money: there will be no need to calculate
the average labour time necessary to produce something. As long as people
keep thinking they have first and foremost to "suppress" money, or separate
political power, or any present evil, it's proof of them not imagining
and doing what can be done to live without those evils.
6 VEGETARIANISM NEGATES AND YET PROVES MAN'S RADICAL
DIFFERENCE
Nobody
asks the lion not to kill antelopes. People take it for granted that
nature must have its way. The call of the wild... Man alone is asked
to behave differently. Vegetarianism defines him as the animal who has
the choice, who can decide not to harm fellow creatures -- and therefore
must choose not to harm them. In other words, man is requested to act
in the name of the same superior status that he is denied. He is said
to belong to nature, to know it, and because he knows it he is supposed
not to take advantage of it. We're not pointing out an inconsistency
in order to refute vegetarianism. What is indeed refuted is the possibility
either to prove or disprove it. This logical contradiction is but another
way of defining "human nature", or rather of showing how "humanity'
evades definition.
"The only thing one really knows about human nature is that it changes.
Change is the only quality we can predict of it. The systems that fail
are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its
growth and development." (O.Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism)
"Man is the only being that kills for pleasure", we hear people say,
which implies that killing can't or shouldn't be enjoyable. We fully
agree, but asserting this only opens the fateful door onto the weird
boundless realm of pleasure. Who or what will set limits to it ? Reason
? The sake of the common good ? The understanding that my own pleasure
depends on expanding the pleasure of others, not crushing it ? How simple...
how na‹ve ! Sade knew better. So did Fourier. Nothing will ever completely
neutralize the anti-social and negative side of humanity.
Man is not physiologically fit or unfit to bite into flesh. In fact,
he wasn't "made for" anything. It is futile to defend homosex on the
grounds that it occurs in some animal species: that is true, but tells
us little apart from the (already known) existence of homosex. Man is
part of nature and distinct from the rest of nature. How much does this
have to do with his standing erect position and panoramic vision ? How
much comes from social factors ? Every period reinterprets available
data according to prevailing historical perspectives. Man is nature
and artifice.
Humanocentrism (man is superior to other species) and "naturalism" (
man is to reintegrate the rest of nature) both forget that human nature
is to look for human nature. Man is the being who never quite knows
what he is. Systems try to reassure him. When he is best reassured,
as in totalitarian society (and the capitalist megamachine is an all
embracing totality), he is most destructive.
Whatever made mankind human also enables it to fall and wander. There
is something impossible in humanity, and nothing will brush aside this
impossibility. If we were chimps, cats or so-called social insects,
we would have never known either the apple pie or the aircraft-carrier
-- nor this discussion.
7 IT WOULD BE AS POINTLESS TO HOPE FOR A PEACEFUL
COEXISTENCE BETWEEN OUR SPECIES AND OTHERS, AS TO EXPECT A NON-VIOLENT
HUMAN COMMUNITY
Although very few of us have been shown the inside of a pig farm, even
a kid has a rough idea of how a pig turned into the bacon he's eating.
Nobody tries to deny the connection. Every civilization deals with it
in its own way. Hunter societies totemized wild animals. Traditional
country life had the children play with the family pig whose killing
was a time of festivities. (An unedited film of such killing + merriment
would horrify TV viewers more than watching thousands of starving Africans.
No society has ever been as extreme as ours in its combination of mass
slaughter and hypocrisy. Animals are treated like men -- not the other
way round -- only a lot worse.)
The pessimist will reply that nothing can be done about it. The vegetarian
will try and promote the coming of a world where humans do not domesticate,
use and eat animals. Both miss a contradiction that animal life ignores
too (the cat does not wonder if it's right or wrong to kill the mouse).
Contrary to pessimistic or cynical recommendations, we can't just dismiss
the fate of animals. Contrary to vegetarian wishes, we can't treat animals
the way we treat a fellow human: we can only pretend to do so. And we
can't forget about it. Man is an animal unlike all others, forced to
be aware of it and to cope with it. Human existence is based upon such
contradictions. Thinking about us as future corpses may well cut down
our lust for life. Reflecting on the rise and fall of civilizations
may disturb our great historical expectations.
Communism will alter man's relation to man and to everything, animals
included, and therefore the terms, not the existence of the contradiction.
In the year 3000, humankind could be down to 5.000.000 people, who would
all be vegans. Perhaps... though a single diet seems as likely as love-making
reduced to one position and housing to one kind of habitat. Still, after
all, why not ! The trouble is, nobody knows. Anthropological data would
rather suggest the infinite variety and impredictability of ways and
means.
Empathy
with living creatures "naturally" extends to every form of existence,
even beyond "life". We've all felt shame and anger when some barren
hill has been ripped open or erased to make way for motor cars. (But
it's significant we don't feel sorry for the same type of hill that
has been turned into what we regard as an imaginative park where we
meet and have fun.)
From a holistic or cosmic point of view, we can share emotions with
the rose that shivers when it feels it is about to be plucked. Some
people have a unusual liking for plants. A friend once tried to "rescue"
a small tree from a moped somebody had thrown on top of its fragile
branches. Wild flower lovers can be more distressed at the sight of
cut flowers than when they hear about a slaughterhouse. "Have you no
sensibility ?" they ask. A common answer is: "Plants don't have a nervous
system." This is precisely where the problem lies: where shall we draw
the line ? On what criterion ? To a vegetal lover, it's the plant that's
silent and innocent, not the lamb that eats it. Shall we call him a
pervert ?! Horror against slaughterhouse divides beings between animals
and vegetals. Then what about Africans making a feast of ants or termits
? Most likely a thousand new classifications would blossom in communism.
As For a World Without a Moral Order tried to explain, this would not
mean that crossing the line would be easy and straightforward. If anything
was possible and painless at any given time, it would only prove that
everything had become the same, undifferentiated, neutral, worthless.
Nothing is at stake when nothing is at risk. Who wants a slumberland
where the reward for valuing and doing nothing is never getting hurt?
Who'd like to live in a TV commercial world turned real? Likes suppose
dislikes, and our preferences go along with disgusts. A major difference
between communism and present times, however, is that people would not
pretend their rules and habits and diets to be universal in time or
space.
The age-old debate between carnivorism and vegetarianism contributes
more to an understanding of "human nature", than it helps us to know
what to eat. There is no such thing as a "good" or natural diet (too
much vodka and chips is bad, though).
Communism reconciles man and man, man and woman, adult and child, man
and himself, human animals and non-human animals, humans and the rest
of nature... but not in the sense that it puts an end to confrontation.
It is impossible to foresee in what form violence would persist in a
communist world. What we know is that humans would neither regard and
treat themselves as beasts to be tamed, nor as possible angels. No inborn
guilt feeling. No innocents either.
One day, humans will stop treating animals the way animals have been
treated for millennia. But men and women won't be acting against themselves
and for the animals' sake, out of compassion. Humans won't sacrify their
food tastes, give up meat although they may love it, because they want
to put an end to the suffering of animals. They will transform their
attitude to the animal world for themselves as well as for the animals,
because their overall attitude to the cosmos will change. Likewise,
people won't stop working on Volkswagen assembly lines because, although
they might like cars, they'd go against their personal preference and
give priority to ecology. They'll stop because they'll invent a different
life, hence new means of transportation. To take a further example,
if rape is unlikely to happen, it won't be because men will refrain
from it for the common good or decide not to cause women's pain, but
because they won't feel the need for it.
We live between two dreams or nightmares. The "Everything is possible"
technological fiction, which "natural disasters", terrible as they can
be, fortunately shatter from time to time. And the Mother Earth myth,
usually more palatable, but often equally absurd: there's no going back
(where, by the way?).
Nature is not non-violent. Neither is humankind. No life would be sweet
enough to eliminate all possibility of aggression. Fortunately. We can
say as little about violence to animals in a future world as about violence
between humans. No doubt the evolution of the latter would affect the
former: a society where men and women would stop caging themselves would
no longer cage other beings as it has done so far. Can we say any more
? Everything would be subverted, from living in a house to reading a
book. Equally, there probably is something deeply human in houses and
books, something that would still be kept and fulfilled, possibly without
the "house" and "book" forms as we're used to them. All we know is,
another way of life that we now call communism would do without quite
a few past and present horrors, because people would no longer want/need
to perpetrate them. Let's not ask for other guarantees: there won't
or couldn't be any.
PS:
There
are a few more points we would have liked to deal with. One is some
anglo- or anglosaxon-centrism present in Beasts of Burden. For example,
in England, hunting is a privilege of the upper class. In France, it
is a (bourgeois) revolutionary conquest: after 1789, the peasants took
over the right to shoot game which until then belonged to aristocrats.
The elitist function of hunting is historical, i.e. relative. Only in
the 2nd century BC, Roman rulers got into the habit of hunting for fun
and prestige, partly to imitate Middle East kings. Today, a decaying
rural hierarchic England supports hunting in a lost battle against modern
waged classes who dream of a pacified equalized society.
Another
point we left out is your belief that Animal Lib is positive if and
when it goes against the Law and confronts the cops. But lots of strikes,
demos and riots led by leftists, CPs or reactionary unions have fought
the police, even sometimes reached the point of armed struggle, and
resulted in nothing but violent conservatism.