Welcome to my Nightmare

The International Animal Rights Movement doesn’t show a real interest in Marxism. Its basic theoretical, moral and political concepts usually borrow from the liberal debate on ‘civil rights’ and ‘political correctness’. From their part, although it can be questioned whether they sponsored a total domination of man upon nature, neither Marx nor Engels did ever show any real interest in animal liberation. Animal rights activists can therefore keep on ignoring Marxism, since every attempt to find a critique of anthropocentrism in it  seems  hopeless. There’s more than a reason to believe that such reciprocal indifference has to change. This site hopes to show how much Marxism and Antispeciesism could gain from engaging in a serious dialogue on the real origin and structure of “dominion relationships”.
     Although I believe that Marxism has much to learn from the critique of Speciesism, I think such acquaintance with animal suffering would only complete its already deep understanding of history and of capitalism, making its politics more coherent and unambiguous. From the other hand, the Animal Rights Movement shows no real understanding of human society and its basic political tenets are, at best, naïve. No “revolutionary” movement (if we understand the term “revolution” as a brand mark of “radicality”) whose main interest is a deep transformation of man’s self-representation should ignore the fundamental laws of social reality. Every action that aims at the transformation of the world without understanding the very structure of this world is condemned to re-action.
       I believe that a ‘Marxist’ critique of Marx’ and Engels’ anthropocentrism has already been elaborated by the Frankfurt School in the 40s. Among the most important results of Adorno’ and Horkheimer’ Dialectic of Enlightenment is their progressive interpretation and critique of Naturbeherrschung [‘Domination upon nature’]. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, humans had to take control upon nature in order to defeat their own fear; such domination implies what Marx called the ‘appropriation’ [Aneignung] of outer and inner Nature, i.e. the exploitation of animals which traces an important breakpoint in the process of alienation of the ‘Spirit’ from the ‘material’ world. This is the fundamental structure of Civilization – i.e. the history of hierarchical societies – the hidden core of both material and cultural progress. Such structure cannot be destroyed unless its basis – the domination of nature – is also put aside. As Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse cleared, a free, not-capitalistic society (the one that Marx and Engels wanted to realized), cannot be imagined without the liberation of nature.