Chapter 2 : The greening of revolution -------------------------------------------------------------------- People : ---------------------------------- Author : Anonymous Text : ---------------------------------- 2: The greening of revolution Animal liberation There’s a certain volatility to resisting oppression in all forms. This is exactly the kind of project that can easily run away from you, vastly exceeding one’s familiar terrain. Let’s do our best to keep up: throughout the last decades, one of the most distinctive developments among social struggles in the West has been a dawning of concern for other animals and the environment. Many radicals have been keen to drag their heels, passing off the oppression of nonhumans as irrelevant to our prospects for revolution; the Left, after all, is firmly rooted in the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment, something unquestioningly reproduced by Marxism as well as orthodox anarchism. Yet the weighty tradition of a bygone era is no excuse for closing down possibilities in the present. The critique of social hierarchy, besides deepening the scope of human liberation, applies just as well beyond our own species boundary: animal and earth liberation are no less integral to the new revolutionary mosaic than any other aspect of the struggle. The first half of the greening of revolution – animal liberation – can be traced somewhat to the onset of the radical animal rights movement in the UK. As early as the 1960s, hunt saboteurs had been intervening to disrupt bloodsports across the country, focusing on the legally sanctioned practice of fox hunting. From the outset, this cultivated an understanding, realized by so many liberation struggles in the past, that the law was designed to protect the exploiters and therefore had to be broken. This brimming emphasis on direct action – on achieving political goals outside of mediation with formal institutions – was then gradually applied to an ever broader spectrum of targets. Not only were hunts targetted whilst underway, their facilities and vehicles were often sabotaged as well, the point being to prevent the hunt from beginning at all. During the early ‘70s, one group of hunt sabs based in Luton – calling themselves the “Band of Mercy” – even began attacking hunting shops, chicken breeders, and vivisection suppliers. Perhaps most memorably, in 1973, the Band burned down a vivisection lab under construction near Milton Keynes, pioneering the use of arson for the purposes of animal liberation. Such activity soon gave rise to an even more formidable threat. In 1976, members of the Band of Mercy created the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), calling for the application of sabotage tactics to prevent any form of animal exploitation. More of a banner than an actual organization, anyone can do an action and claim it as the ALF, so long as they adhere to a few basic principles. Lacking official members or branches, the front is composed mainly of small, autonomous affinity groups; acting in the style of a clandestine guerrilla movement, participants strike mainly under the cover of darkness, only to subsume themselves back within the population at large. This informal, leaderless terrain of struggle is exactly what allowed the resistance to proliferate so effectively, all the while minimizing the risk of state repression. Hundreds of thousands of raids have been completed worldwide, liberating countless animals from the facilities that enthralled them, either by transporting them to sanctuaries or simply releasing them into the wild. No less, those profiting from the misery have suffered incalculable losses, with the companies targetted – vivisection labs, livestock breeders, fur farms, factory farms, slaughterhouses – often being driven straight out of business. The vast majority of these raids have resulted in zero apprehensions. Amid a steady decline in courage and militancy from the Left over the last decades, groups such as the ALF have often been exactly the ones to keep the flame of revolutionary struggle alive. Rather than biding time with parliamentary procedures or marches that go in circles, the ALF refuse to wait for historical conditions to improve, instead setting out to immediately begin dismantling the physical infrastructure social hierarchy depends upon to function. We’re faced with an age in which power has no center: revolution isn’t merely a matter of storming palaces, but also of confronting this order of misery on every front, especially those most blatantly ignored in the past. Every single day, literally millions of animals are confined, mutilated, and killed for the purposes of food, clothing, entertainment, physical labor, and medical research. Were it humans being massacred as such, the death count would exceed that of many holocausts – merely in a matter of hours. Of course, it isn’t humans on the other side of the barbed wire, so we turn our backs to their wretched treatment, quite confident such concerns just don’t matter. Yet that’s quite the grave response: what on earth if we’re wrong? The most influential case for the baselessness of this indifference came from Peter Singer in the book Animal Liberation (1975). Centering on a seminal discussion of the notion of speciesism, the term is there defined as “a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” To this liberal definition, we could add that speciesism, aside from manifesting in the dispositions of individuals, is strongly rooted in a pervasive ideological framework – reproduced by institutions such as mass media, the law, and public education – that serves to detach humanity from the enslavement of billions of animals. Indeed, many professed radicals continue to cast aside the topic of anti-speciesism, even if they’re committed to fighting oppressions like racism or sexism. Yet that makes little sense, given that each of these relies on the very same logic: a particular group is morally excluded not on the basis of their actually held capacities, but simply because they appear to be members of a different biological category. Clearly we would reject this kind of reasoning in the case of assertions of white supremacy over non-whites – skin color just isn’t a morally relevant quality. What needs to be noticed, though, is that speciesism operates in almost exactly the same way; the only difference is that it singles out species, not race, as the relevant biological category. That said, few would admit to maintaining such a crude speciesist outlook. The assumption here – again, as with white supremacy – is that the relevant moral exclusion is grounded in science, not prejudice. In particular, the capacity to reason is normally singled out as the prime candidate for justifying human supremacy. Such an approach contends that, rather than relying on an arbitrary biological category to distance ourselves from other species, we’re instead doing so on the basis of our actually held capacities. But this commonplace justification is really nothing more than a ruse. Far from being an inherent aspect of human cognition, the capacity to reason is merely a trait that most of us hold (and to varying degrees). There are many humans who lack the capacity for abstract cognition, such as ordinary infants and adults with certain mental disabilities; however, no one serious about fighting oppression would take that as an excuse for their moral exclusion, especially not if it meant treating them as we do other animals. That can only mean that rationality isn’t what we really care about when making moral considerations – rationality is just an excuse. The thing that matters here is sentience: the capacity to feel both pleasure and pain. It should go without saying that sentience is accessible not only to humans, but also the vast majority of nonhuman animals. Nor is the kind of sentience involved here some watered down version of the human experience. Many or even most animals lead extremely rich emotional lives, characterized intensely by all the highs and lows that color our own states of mind, including excitement, joy, awe, respect, empathy, boredom, embarrassment, grief, loneliness, anxiety, fear, and despair. In other words, access to all the feelings that have defined the best and worst moments of our lives – that determine most fundamentally whether one’s life is worth living – vastly transcends the boundaries of our own species. Animals are aware of the world, and of their place within it; their lives are intrinsically valuable, irrespective of what they can do for us. To morally exclude them on the basis of species membership is only the kind of thinking that sets aside skin color as a valid justification for human slavery. But we can’t deny the logic of domination in one case whilst relying on it so whimsically in another: animal liberation must be fought for just as ardently as we fight for our own. Anthropocentrism was suited to an age in which most believed God to have created humans in His own image, commanding us to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Come the 21st century, however, numerous leaps in human understanding – the Copernican revolution, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Freud’s theory of the unconscious – have significantly dethroned the idea that human culture somehow inhabits a world apart from Nature. Clearly we differ from other animals in many of our cognitive abilities, but this is a matter of degree, not kind; our evolutionary history merely upgraded the mental functions already present among nonhumans for millions of years, rather than conferring humanity with radically unique capacities. Other animals are able, if only to a lesser extent, to grasp language, demonstrate self-awareness, use tools, inhabit complex societies, appreciate humor, and enact rituals around death. Not only that, many seem to easily outdo humans when it comes to the capacities of memory, navigation, and sociability. In terms of ecological integration, finally, any notions of human supremacy start to get embarrassing: bees pollinate so many of the world’s plants, phytoplankton photosynthesize half of its oxygen, fungi and bacteria are the primary decomposers of organic matter. And what of the human contribution to the planetary community? The highlights include climate change, radioactive waste, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Apparently narcissism marches in lock-step with incompetency: the idea that Nature somehow requires the imposition of human order has only ever meant her ruination, and that all too clearly includes our own. To make something explicit, though, note that it’s not humanity that’s laying waste to the very fabric of life. Vulnerable human groups hardly stand to benefit from speciesism; animal agriculture, for example, is the leading cause both of water pollution and carbon emissions, besides being responsible for some of the most atrocious workplaces on earth. All so that capitalism can supply its human captives with so-called “food” loaded with growth hormones and antibiotics. In essence, all creatures who find their home on this dear planet, including those oppressed within our own species, suffer in common at the hands of a disease – equal parts antisocial and ecocidal – called social hierarchy. This is the moment to abandon our speciesist assumptions, from which the disconnection of human and animal liberation struggles results. The struggle for liberation admits of no final frontiers. Earth liberation The emergence of animal liberation has been mirrored by an additional trend, no less vital for the ongoing greening of revolution: earth liberation. In this case, the extension of political concern to nonhumans goes even beyond the domain of sentience, here being applied to ecosystems altogether, if not planet Earth as a whole. Many relate to the oppression of the land least easily, given that the value beholden to ecosystems is the most far removed from the kind we ourselves possess. Yet this stubborn attitude is doing us no favors: as we move into the thick of an uneasy century, for the first time unsure as to whether we’ll even make it to the next, we can only begin to reconsider the human presumption of supremacy over all things. Compared with the radical animal rights movement, the origin of radical environmentalism tells a different story, arising as it did in response to the failings of the mainstream movement. When Greenpeace, for example, was established in 1971, its explicit purpose was to overcome the conformity of groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. But it wasn’t long until Greenpeace, too, ended up looking like any old political party or corporation. By attempting to build a centralized mass movement, the bureaucratic division between campaigner and supporter was continually reinforced, swapping the commitment to direct action for an uninspired focus on fundraising. The radical image was maintained as a winning advertising technique, even though illegal actions were typically condemned in favor of institutional engagement. Actual change was supposed to be brought about not by ordinary people, but instead by lawyers and businesspeople, their salaries (and indifference) soon growing out of all proportion. Despite access to untold funds and resources, therefore, groups like Greenpeace failed to offer much trouble to the growing surge of environmental devastation, often halting certain projects only at the expense of openly endorsing others. The presumed sincerity of its founders were ultimately irrelevant: playing by the rules of a system that takes economic growth as inviolable can only mean complicity in the ecocide. Faced with this largely symbolic environmentalism, one definitive response was the formation of Earth First! in 1980. Set up initially in the US, and spreading internationally a decade later, the point was to exceed the limitations of the mainstream movement by focusing instead on grassroots organizing and direct action. This opened up a terrain of struggle in which dialogue with the state, and bureaucratic procedures more generally, became completely unnecessary. Committed from the start to offer “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” Earth First! encouraged people to take matters into their own hands, quite aware that obeying the law would only guarantee defeat. In doing so, countless ecosystems were protected from the likes of logging, damming, and road-building, in spite of activists having never spent an hour in a boardroom meeting. To note, similar direct action tactics were already being used, for example, by anti-nuclear activists in Germany and the UK; yet Earth First! made a point of applying this approach much more broadly, setting out not only to oppose new projects, but also to roll back the frontiers of industrial civilization altogether. Another key event in the development of radical environmentalism was the creation of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) in the UK, 1992. Modeled along the lines of the ALF, the ELF set about utilizing the very same emphasis on informal organization and sabotage, only this time in the defense of the environment. This allowed aboveground groups like Earth First! to publicly dissociate itself from more militant actions, concentrating instead on mass demonstrations and civil disobedience, even though strong ties were maintained between the two movements. The ELF soon spread capillary-style across the globe, firstly throughout Europe, and then to North and South America. From the forests of Khimki and Hambacher, to the sprawling metropolises of Mexico City, Santiago, and Jakarta, the fires lit for earth liberation continue to land on fertile ground; hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage have been caused to ecocidal industries, including targets such as logging infrastructure, biotechnology labs, power lines, retail sites, car dealerships, luxury residential projects, and ski resorts. Already in 2001, the effectiveness of the ELF had been confirmed beyond all doubt, with the FBI declaring them “the top domestic terror threat” in the US, despite having never caused physical harm to a single living being. What set groups like Earth First! and the ELF apart from the mainstream movement was not, however, merely a matter of tactics. In many cases, the refusal to compromise on the defense of the planet was underpinned by a philosophy Arne Næss called “deep ecology,” namely, the view that ecosystems possess value in and of themselves, irrespective of their utility for human beings. As a replacement for anthropocentrism, Næss endorsed biocentrism, the idea that life itself is the locus of moral value, and that such value is equal in weight to that which we ourselves possess. The human experience is but a single facet of a vast, interconnected web of life, all members of which – from forests, to insects, to mountains, to oceans – have just as much right to exist and flourish as we do. Biocentrism thus contends that richness and diversity within the biosphere can be reduced only in order to satisfy the most vital of human needs. The exploitative assumption that wilderness is wasted unless made profitable must be turned on its head: the wild is intrinsically valuable, whether or not humans are there to enjoy it. Life exists for itself, not merely for us. Deep ecological thinking is often contrasted with what Næss described as “shallow ecology,” which is the tendency to respect the need for ecological protection, but only insofar as doing so can be justified as promoting human interests. All that shallow ecology offers, therefore, is a more prudent take on anthropocentrism: given that our own long-term survival as a species is dependent (to a degree) on a healthy environment, it would be foolish to devastate it too severely. Which might sound like a benign view, but it brings with it severe implications. If ecological concern is taken only as a means towards promoting human wellbeing, it follows that, in those cases in which the two fail to coincide, no basis whatsoever can be provided for worrying about the environment. Without adopting a deep ecological position, we couldn’t explain, for example, what the problem would be with wiping out every last trace of wilderness on earth, presuming that doing so had no adverse effect on humans. Nor should we see anything wrong with the idea of artificially altering global weather on purpose, so that rain or sunshine could be triggered with the touch of a button. Neither does shallow ecology treat climate change as a problem in itself, meaning that, if humans could somehow relocate to another planet in the future, we could quite happily choke this one to death. These are only thought experiments, but for most of us they stir an important intuition, rooted in the part of ourselves that hasn’t yet been fully domesticated: humanity is but a part of Nature, with no higher right to inhabit reality than anything else. Besides, there’s something about shallow ecology that’s inherently paradoxical: an authentically ecological sensibility can only be grounded in respect for the horizontal symbiosis of all life, something that treating the earth merely as a pool of human resources necessarily violates. Whilst the terminology invented by deep ecology is recent, however, the wisdom it invokes is not. As long-standing ALF/ELF warrior Rod Coronado explains, in light of his Native American heritage: “The world that our people come from and that still exists for many indigenous people – and non-indigenous people too, if they choose to recognize it – is a world that sees every human being, every animal being, every plant being, as part of a whole and equal to each other.” Understanding deep ecology isn’t so much a matter of learning something new, but of remembering that which was once as obvious as anything. The intrinsic value of life itself must be rediscovered and fought for until the bitter end, not as a distraction from other liberation struggles, but instead as an inseparable component of a single, multifaceted fight against all forms of oppression. The last few decades divided the struggle; at this point, these separate strands are invited to converge, offering a glimpse of an entirely new revolutionary horizon. Some of the most revolutionary texts penned in recent decades – think of Alfredo Bonanno or the Invisible Committee – possess at their core a profound affirmation of life. This is exactly what inspires that eagerness to see the existent cast in flames: the order that professes to rule over us is, in essence, a system of death, capable of persevering only to the extent it grinds down all that’s wild and free. Far too often, though, an appreciation of this sentiment is limited to a discussion of human life, forgetting that life in general is what’s really at stake. By reproducing human supremacy within revolutionary struggles – that is, by predicating the liberation of our own species on the enslavement of all others – we fail to challenge the common enemy on every front, inviting it to recuperate where our backs are turned. The struggles for human and nonhuman liberation do not compete, precisely because they aren’t separate. In the 21st century, the only fault line that splits the entirety of society, including each of us, is that which affirms life compared with that which destroys it. From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org Events : ---------------------------------- Chapter 2 -- Added : January 31, 2021 About This Textfile : ---------------------------------- Text file generated from : http://revoltlib.com/