OpEds / Annotated

Roland Windsor Vincent
with Branford Perry

[T]he Industrial socialists of the 19th and 20th Centuries failed in their goals. The Soviet Union is gone. Capitalism won. Industrial socialists had little regard for the environment, and none for animals. Their interest focused on whether it would be capitalists or workers who owned and operated polluting factories, not whether the factories should be polluting the air, rivers, or oceans in the first place.

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This was not inherent in socialism. Patrice Greanville, in an article for his Animal Intelligencer column (The Animal’s Agenda) on the Soviet Union, written in the 1980s, noted that much of the blindness toward animals (and the environment) stemmed from a variety of longstanding forces at play, both political and cultural, including the forced march to industrialization (to assure survival in the face of Western warmongering); the anachronistic super humanism (now wholly obsolete) of 19th century Marxism; the misguided imitation of Western industrial and factory farming models in the name of an insufficiently understood “efficiency,” and the absence of any but the most primitive ecological consciousness, an ill then afflicting all nations. It is therefore unclear how a non-capitalist society would or could behave under normal conditions today or in the future.

That said, capitalism has never been stronger than it is today. Socialism is arguably at near its weakest point in decades.And capitalism is now more brutal than ever. It has economically enslaved the world, its tentacles are felt in every nation, it conducts the Animal Holocaust, despoils and degrades the environment, is the cause of global warming and rainforest destruction.

Even the most optimistic socialist would have to concede that the class struggle envisioned by Marx is not likely to be the pathway to revolution in the next iteration of socialism. Labor is no longer a revolutionary force, certainly not in the United States. Improvements in working conditions and government subsidies of impoverished workers have dulled the working class into acquiesence to their lot, although such momentum forward is now clearly arresting and in many quarters has already stopped and is in frank reverse. However, labor remains largely disorganized and poorly led, at best in the hands of capitalism’s accomplices, the social democrats or corporatized Democrats.
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Similarly, women are achieving equal status under capitalism, albeit slowly, as are minorities. Most Western nations ensure the rights of women and people of color. This has been achieved after long and hard struggles, and was finally granted because in reality it meant no reshuffling of the terms of power, class wise. There are certainly exceptions, and constituencies that are still fighting for their rights. Probably the most maligned people in society for centuries have been homosexuals. Yet, even gays, and the entire LGBT community, are experiencing major gains in acceptance and understanding. And as long as progress is being made for these constituencies, revolution is never going to be part of their agendas.

The next wave of socialism must be therefore championed by environmentalists and animal rights activists, the only anti-capitalist constituencies in the world that have the moral authority and the revolutionary ardor to bring about fundamental change, and who remain by and large on the margins of even “respectable” leftwing politics. What’s more they both movements represent “mute”, nonhuman constituencies, and face battles for recognition of grievances which the capitalist system or any established industrialized system devoid of morality is loath to grant. Enfranchisement therefore implies a long and hard confrontation.

Many environmentalists —by that we mean the rank and file, not the sellout corporatized leadership of Big Green, Inc.—are acutely aware that capitalism is the cause of human destruction of the environment, and the primary obstacle to curbing the excesses of human exploitation of the Earth and its natural resources. They see capitalism in direct opposition to protecting the environment. Socialist writer Joel Kovel has even written a book aptly called, The Enemy of Nature. Guess which system he indicts.

Animal Rights activists are even more tenacious if rather a politically obtuse lot. Many are beginning to see, however, that capitalism is the main and non-negotiable engine of animal cruelty, as profit remains the main cause of animal suffering and death under its paradigm. The Animal Holocaust, the endless profiteering on the lives and deaths of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, etc, the list and diversity of victims is mind-boggling, results every year in the murder of 50 billion animals in slaughterhouses alone, all in service of Big Agriculture and profits. This figure is likely to grow significantly as more humans arrive on the planet and some huge nations —like China—experience a rapid rise in per capita consumption levels.
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The more enlightened animal rights advocates are universal rights advocates, and support the struggle of those human rights normally embraced by the political Left and enlightened socialists. Their basic tenets —which sound utterly fantastic right now—are that government should democratically ban the ownership, exploitation, and murder of animals, even as government should ban the ownership, exploitation, and murder of people.
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A socialist world for animal rights would therefore be eventually a vegan world, or equivalent, encouraged by a socialist government. No dictatorial coercion is needed nor is it necessary or practicable. The adoption of such posture is not only a question of compassion, a virtue scarcely used in hard-boiled policy calculations, but strict necessity since the expansion of human population and higher consumption of animal products are impossible in a finite world already at the breaking point, ecologically speaking.
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The next wave of revolutionary attempts to take back the world from capitalism must be free of the failed ideology and speciesism of the industrial socialist dinosaurs who still can be found mindlessly parroting the 19th century’s old views on human superiority, “man” the measure of all things, and similar sterile dogmas.
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While capitalists are the primary cause of animal suffering and exploitation, the old guard industrial socialists are as philosophically removed from the plight of our fellow Earthlings as are the corporate fascists who profit from their misery and death.
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Time for old guard failed socialists to give way to the new paradigm: Eco-socialists, who embrace a far more inclusive worldview of the rights of all, including our fellow earthlings; a community of activists that places the environment and its innocent passengers above other pettier human concerns, and that will work tirelessly to end the exploitation of the Earth and its inhabitants.
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The best of Marxism will remain in the struggle for a better world, since Marxism remains an irreplaceable tool for political and historical analysis, but the ambivalence toward the Earth and Earthlings will not stand. And that is as it should be.

Roland Vincent and Branford Perry are members of this publication’s editorial team.