ROLAND VINCENT, Special Editor for Ecosocialism & Animal Rights
with Patrice Greanville
[T]he Animal Rights movement is presently, and has been, a collection of organizations. Each organization attracts activists and supporters across a wide spectrum of issues and causes. Most activists and donors support more than one organization.
The result of such a rudderless movement is to lurch from one crisis to another, as money can be raised and activists activated.
There are a few iconic figures who enjoy personal fame and loyalties, but they have no claim to lead the movement as a whole.
And leadership of the movement as a whole is sorely needed.
That will not happen if current organizations can prevent it. Each group jealously guards its fund-raising lists, competes for activist support, postures for media attention, claims victories beyond its accomplishments, and serves the egos of board members and directors.
Philosophically and politically—in the strictest objective sense—let me repeat that, objective— the AR movement is a Leftist movement. The disconnect between activists and the leadership of current organizations could not be more stark. Rank and file activists are inclined to radical politics, or at the very least, very Liberal politics. Current organizations are perfectly happy working within the system, as raising money is the bottom line for almost every group.
There is no money in being revolutionary. While capitalism is the enemy of animals, certain capitalists fund AR organizations. And many AR organizations attempt to work with officeholders, whose support would disappear were the movement to call for the end of capitalism or political revolution. This is not unique to the animal defense movement. The environmentalists are probably more heavily corporatized by now (and rendered practically useless by such association, as the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico clearly showed) than any animal rights organization, and that includes HSUS, which is often indistinguishable in style and practice from a large corporation.*
The blueprint for radicalizing the AR movement is to ignore current organizations, however well intentioned they may be. Only by activists themselves organizing at the grass roots level will the movement coalesce into a formidable political force.
Just as the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s movement, and the Gay Rights movement each put fundraising aside in politically organizing themselves, so must the Animal Rights movement.
What will emerge is a movement built on consensus and Leftist politics, a movement with leaders empowered to speak for the whole, a political force to be reckoned with, and one that can build coalitions with other progressive movements in furtherance of a Socialist transformation of society and an eventual broadening of the sphere of moral obligations, none of which, by definition, can ever happen under capitalist rule.
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* See CHRISTINE MACDONALD, Green, Inc. How an Environmental Insider Reveals How A Good Cause has Gone Bad, The Lyons Press, 2008