Total Revolution: Revolution for the 21st Century

by Dr. Steven Best, Negotiation Is Over

My friends, we are winning many battles in the fight for freedom, rights, democracy, compassionate ethics, peace, interspecies justice, and ecology.

But we are losing the war.

The war against greed, violence, plunder, profits, and domination. The war against transnational corporations, world banks, the US Empire, and Western military machines. The war against metastasizing systems of economic growth, technological development, overproduction, and overconsumption.

Despite recent decades of intense social and environmental struggles, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battles for democracy and ecology.

In the last two decades, neoliberalism and globalization have destroyed social democracies, widened gaps between rich and poor, dispossessed farmers, and marketized the entire world. Alongside good-old fashioned imperialism and resource extraction, people now confront genetic engineering, biopiracy, the patenting of genes, and the control of the seed supply. McDonaldization swallows up diversity as agribusiness engulfs the world’s farmers. Corporate power is growing as people power is shrinking.

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From a strict ideological stand-point, Steve Best is less “dangerous” than me…

One of 50 billion reasons we support militant direct action: Park rangers at Zakouma National Park, in Chad, Africa, investigating the hacked face of a 20-year-old elephant.

By Jason Miller, 2/14/10

In light of my close alignment with Dr. Steve Best, the spurious and maliciously defamatory accusations leveled against Steve by Gary Francione (an ostensible ally since he labels himself a vegan abolitionist), gross misrepresentations of my own philosophical positions, and false allegations about my praxis, I decided it was necessary to clarify some of these matters.

Rethinking Revolution: Animal Liberation, Human Liberation, and the Future of the Left

“Animal liberation may sound more like a parody of other liberation movements than a serious objective.” Peter Singer

“Animal liberation is the ultimate freedom movement, the `final frontier.’” Robin Webb, British ALF Press Officer

Introduction: Framing the Unframed Issue

It seems lost on most of the global anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist Left that there is a new liberation movement on the planet ―animal liberation― that is of immense ethical and political significance. But because animal liberation challenges the anthropocentric, speciesist, and humanist dogmas that are so deeply entrenched in socialist and anarchist thinking and traditions, Leftists are more likely to mock than engage it.

New Earth Liberation Prisoners in Mexico

From our friends at the Earth Liberation Prisoner Support Network:

ELP Information Bulletin (17th January 2010)

Dear friends,

As some ELP supporters may be aware, there have been some arrests in Mexico recently resulting in a number of people being accused of ELF activity. Below is an e-mail about the case.

ELP understands that e-mailed messages of support can be sent to the prisoners via cna.mex@gmail.com

Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism

Dr. Steven Best

With few exceptions, Leftists have systematically devalued or ignored the horrific plight of animals as a trivial issue compared to human suffering, and they have therefore mocked or dismissed the animal liberation movement that emerged in the 1970s to become a global movement more dynamic, powerful, and widespread than virtually any human cause or liberation movement. Despite their affirmation of Darwinian theory, which views human beings as natural beings who co-evolved with other animals in an organic continuum, the humanist elements of Leftist culture ― which emphasize the radical uniqueness and singularity of humans as “superior” animals ― prevailed over the naturalist elements ― which emphasize the continuum of biological evolution, even as it phases into social evolution and cultural development.

This essay raises various questions concerning human identity politics ― the social, political, and environmental implications of how humans view and conduct themselves as members of a distinct species in relation to other species and the Earth as a whole ― and situates Left humanist views as a variant, rather than rejection, of Western anthropocentrism, speciesism, and the pathology of humanism. As part of the problem rather than the solution, I argue that Leftist humanist theories (including “eco-humanist” variants) fail to advance a truly revolutionary break with the mindsets and institutions underpinning hierarchy, oppression, violence, species extinction, and the current global ecological crisis. I claim that because of the atavistic, unenlightened, pre-scientific, and discriminatory views toward nonhuman animals, such as led them to miss some of the most profound scientific and moral revolutions of the era, Leftists cannot regain their place of pride in progressive culture until they jettison their shopworn hierarchical and exploitative views, a process that can be catalyzed by engaging the major themes and findings of ethology.

Read more at Inclusive Democracy…

Who Is Winning the Battle for Food Regime? Vegans or Carnivores? Dare To Know

By Dr. Steven Best, Negotiation Is Over

We often hear about the many “victories” the vegan movement is piling up with new products on the shelves, new restaurants, growing coverage with celebrities and talk show hosts, and evolving consciousness in general.

As this article shows, an expanding awareness that meat production is environmentally devastating means that vegans have grounds for hope and optimism.

But the big picture and full context brings sobering realities to light; the fact is that this is all too little and too late and, while we win some battles, we are badly losing the overall war to save the planet from ecological collapse. Consider just a few of many grim facts and narratives:

1) As Carl Boggs notes “Animal-food production in the United States alone has increased no less than four times since the 1950s, despite the more recent spread of popular knowledge concerning the harmful effects of meat consumption. At present there are an estimated 20 billion livestock on earth. In the United States more than 100,000 cows and calves are slaughtered every day, along with 14,000 chickens. The Tyson plant at Noel, Missouri kills some 300,000 chickens daily while the IBP slaughterhouse at Garden City, Kansas and the ConAgra complex at Greeley, Colorado both disassemble more than 6400 steers a day. All told 23 million animals are killed worldwide to satisfy human and food demands daily. In a McDonaldized society Americans now eat on average 30 pounds of beef yearly, with seemingly little concern for well-known health risks. Conditions of factory farming, said to be improved owing to reforms, are in fact worse by most standards — more crowded, more painful, more disease-ridden, more drug-saturated even than at the time of Upton Sinclair’s classic The Jungle (written in 1906).

Read more at Negotiation Is Over…

Direct Action, Liberation and the Need to Persist

Miller (left) poses with “Bambi,” one of the props that he and activists Anthony Marr (right)–the most hated anti-hunting activist in North America–and Anthony Damiano used in a campaign Miller spear-headed against a deer cull as they gathered in Kansas City to found the Global Ant-Hunting Coalition, of which all three are board members.

An interview with Jason Miller exploring radical dissent and animal liberation

By Frank Joseph Smecker, 11/3/09

Jason Miller, Senior Editor and Founder of the radical blog, Thomas Paine’s Corner, is a tenacious forty-something vegan straight edge activist who lives in Kansas and who has a boundless passion for animal liberation and anti-capitalism. Addicted to reading and learning, he is mostly an autodidact, but he has also studied liberal arts and philosophy at the University of Missouri Kansas City.

An accomplished and prolific essayist on social and political issues, his writings have appeared on hundreds of alternative media websites over the last few years. He is also a press officer for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office and the founder of Bite Club of KC, a grassroots animal rights activist group.

Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary

By Dr. Steven Best, 11/13/09

I.

The nonhuman animal advocacy movement is at a crucial crossroads where truly it is now do or die. In the early 1980s, a new animal rights movement glowed bright with potential; in just a few years, however, the light faded to black as corruption, opportunism, and bureaucracy snuffed out the promise of genuine change. As they evolved, it became increasingly obvious that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other groups emulated the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to become corporate behemoths and mainstream machines. Increasingly co-opted and compromised, animal rights groups frequently worked with, rather than against, the exploitation industries in order to regulate, not eliminate, the ongoing nonhuman animal holocaust.