As Marxists, we fight for workers’ revolution to rid the world of the capitalist system and build a classless, communist society. This is a struggle of humanity, by humanity and for humanity. Its aim is to, for the first time in history, achieve a society in which human essence and potential is made real and actual.
The historical materialist worldview defines itself, from the very beginning, within the context of human society, sharply counterposing its understanding to that of idealist philosophies, which subordinate both humanity and nature to other-worldly fabrications: God, Spirit, etc. In so doing, it clearly defines what distinguishes the human from the animal. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology:
“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”
In the course of history, humanity has alienated itself from its own productive essence, placing power in the hands of a series of oppressive, minority classes. This transitory epoch in human development was necessary so long as humanity suffered from material scarcity. If nothing more than bare survival was possible for the many, the lion’s share of our production of actual material life would go to the few. But now, class society, in its final, vicious, capitalist phase, has long since outlived its own necessity. The technical prerequisites for the final elimination of material scarcity, and the achievement of a truly human existence, are already in place.
Yet no ruling class in history has gone quietly from the stage. Capitalism, in its decadent, imperialist stage, thrashes about desperately to preserve itself, confronting the workers and oppressed people of the world with barbaric atrocities in every possible form. These horrors are neither ends in themselves, nor incidental occurrences. They are an integral part of the system’s drive to preserve itself.
A system requiring the artificial maintenance of scarcity must constantly reinforce the cutthroat behavior and mindset that goes hand-in-hand with a perpetual struggle for mere survival – “the war of all against all.” Thus, whipping up barbaric, degrading, anti-human acts serves not only a material purpose for capitalism, but a psychological one as well. To prolong the life of a decadent system, the class which bears within itself the potential for human self-emancipation, the proletariat, must be made to see itself as bestial. As we put it in the COFI Political Resolution:
“Capitalism offers no solution: only one savagery after another, in order to make a genuinely human existence appear hopeless.” To crush and degrade the human spirit, capital’s crimes primarily and purposefully victimize humanity. Yet it is not surprising that this anti-human barbarism begets acts and forms of cruelty that go beyond the bounds of our own species and inflict suffering on other species of animals. Human cruelty toward animals is a reflection of human cruelty toward fellow humans. Particular instances of savage human cruelty toward animals can sometimes be vivid examples of the anti-human drives of capitalism. Yet the fundamental significance for us remains human-centered.
Once we have settled accounts with capitalism, and set to work building the communist future, it is likely that abuse of animals, and of the natural world generally, will decline sharply. In the struggle to overcome the last vestiges of material scarcity, the full resources of human science will be required to establish an ecologically balanced metabolism between the fulfillment of human needs and the processes of the natural world. The heartlessness and cruelty which capital so carefully cultivates will lose their social basis of existence. But we cannot now decide on a program for humanity’s relations with the natural world. Those will be decisions for the future generations of a mature human species.
It is a testament to the development of human consciousness that we are capable of feeling empathy with the suffering of other species. Yet this itself points to the fundamental reason for the primacy of the interests of humanity over animals. We have developed the capacity to master our environment, through planned labor and a scientific awareness of the natural world. We have the power to create a world free of scarcity, the desperate struggle for mere survival, and the merciless savagery that it engenders. No animal has such powers.
The very misuse of the term “liberation” for animals reflects the capitalist drive to degrade humanity. The growing disparity between mounting oppression and the objective potential for its elimination has engendered and inspired a host of liberation struggles: “Black liberation,” “women’s liberation,” “gay liberation,” etc. Each such struggle, while ultimately only capable of lasting success if it becomes part of the central working-class struggle against capital, expresses the growing self-confidence of the oppressed, the knowledge that they can, will and must act as conscious fighters for their own liberation. Each oppressed group has this capacity because—all reactionary lies that say otherwise aside—we are all human. No animal will ever be an agent of its own “liberation.”
To give lip service to these many forms of human liberation, and yet simultaneously champion “animal liberation,” is to corrode the very meaning of the word liberation. In protecting an animal from cruelty, a human being cannot but act toward the animal as a savior. Yet the watchword of the struggle of workers and the oppressed fighting for our own liberation must be, “We need no condescending saviors.” Any analogy between human liberation and “animal liberation” implies an understanding of human liberation dependent upon “condescending saviors,” individuals—most often from the intellectual middle classes—who falsely imagine themselves to have risen above the everyday pressures and cruelties of class society.
The left today is rife with “condescending saviors,” some who accept the slogan of “animal liberation,” and others who oppose it. The recent vogue of “animal liberation” is not a cause, but a symptom of the hegemony of middle-class strata within the left. In practice, the middle-class left, despite its “socialist” or “anarchist” garb, serves to reinforce the sense of powerlessness, weakness and unworthiness that capitalism so painstakingly cultivates among workers and the oppressed. Despite all its best intentions, it serves not to undermine class society, but to preserve the rule of capital and the survival of the state.
The ideology of animal liberation plays a small supporting role in this service to capital. It posits the fundamental division between humanity and other species, not on the basis of humanity’s capacity for productive self-expression, but rather as a relationship of oppression. For consistent advocates of “animal liberation,” all use of animals by humans for any purpose – such as consumption of animal products for human survival, or scientific experiments on animals to save human lives, or the keeping of domestic animals – is wrong and must be stopped. Since all anthropological and archeological evidence indicates that humans have used animals at every stage of development in order to enhance our mastery of the natural world and overcome material scarcity, such a worldview, if taken seriously, amounts to a doctrine of original sin.
One example of the animal liberation ideology taken to its extreme but logical conclusion was those members of the radical environmentalist group Earth First who promoted a “voluntary human extinction” campaign in the early 1990s. Humans should stop procreating, they argued, since the human race was threatening the existence of other species of life on the planet. They later claimed that the whole thing was a joke – but the jokes people tell reveal much about what they believe. The logic of their ideology is indeed to see humanity itself as the problem. For them, barbaric cruelty and devastation of the environment are inherent aspects of human existence.
A cynical, pessimistic view of human nature is not unique to the ideologists of “animal liberation.” It is endemic under capitalism, particularly in its decadent epoch of imperialism, and boils down fundamentally to the notion that the working class cannot be entrusted with the power necessary to bring class society to an end. It manifests itself in the “common sense” that communists combat daily, that a classless society is “a nice idea” that “will never work” because “people are too greedy.” It permeates the left, whether in the form of the anarchist fear of power’s essential corruption, or in the myriad varieties of opportunist “socialists,” whose various theories and programs and tactics share a common commitment to maneuvering behind the backs of the working class.
There can be no place for any toleration of anti-human ideology in the Marxist movement. Marxism is a science, but it is founded upon one crucial, as yet unproven hypothesis. That hypothesis is that humanity, cleansed of all oppression and liberated from the daily struggle for existence, can create a world that is truly human, truly worth living in. We are engaged in a titanic experiment to prove that hypothesis true. To join with us is to join, as a conscious, militant, self-confident human being, in the struggle for humanity.