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.

Polemics

Apes from Utopia
Being a reply to Ben Watson's polemics on animals, politics and philosophy.

Includes:

Echos of Regyptian Evolution
Zizek vs. Vegetarians
A punk intermezzo
"Animals ain't matter" (Union of Marxist Musicians)
Fragments of an unsent letter (1)
"Please" (Marco The Pelvis Maurizi)
Fragments of an unsent letter (2)
Kant vs. Vulgar Materialism
"Unwanted Papers" (Union of Marxist Musicians)
But Despair?
What exploited filipino workers do for a living
Coda

_________________________
 

Union of Marxist Musicians:

Marco Maurizi, voice, guitar
Michele Dal Lago, guitar

Other music used (stolen, sorry guys!) in this recording:
Lendormin (drums, guitar, electronics)
THF Drenching (dictaphone)
Sonic Pleasure (bricks)
Luca Miti (piano)
Renato Ciunfrini (sax)

¿Qué es el antiespecismo?

Marco Maurizi

¿Qué es el antiespecismo?

traducción: Valerio Cruciani (www.valeriocruciani.com)

 

 

1.  ¿Qué es el antiespecismo?

El antiespecismo es la teoría y la práctica de lucha contra el especismo, así que para entender qué es el antiespecismo, es necesario tener una idea de éste. Del especismo se puede ofrecer una interpretación “reducida” y otra “ampliada”.

La primera viene directamente de la obra de Singer, y puede resumirse en la expresión: “prejuicio moral basado en la pertenencia a una especie”. El “especismo”, en esta primera acepción, se manifiesta como atributo de proposiciones morales y como consecuencias de las acciones que a éstas se inspiran o que por ellas están justificadas. En pocas palabras, Singer nos muestra muy bien, cuando nos preguntamos qué justificación moral tenemos para tratar de forma distinta a los humanos y a los no humanos, cómo cada argumento moral se reduce (o se puede reconducir) a la simple pertenencia a una especie.^[1]

La famosa cuestión de los “casos marginales” (retrasados mentales, niños) sólo sirve para mostrar esto, y es una polémica exclusivamente instrumental. En realidad, es totalmente indiferente que se haga una distinción moral entre ser humano y animal basada en la racionalidad, el lenguaje, el alma, etc., puesto que si fuera verdad que el animal no posee en absoluto una de las características consideradas fundamentales para entrar en el ámbito de la consideración moral, esto significaría dar el estatus de sujeto moral exclusivamente a los seres que participan de esta característica, por tanto y de hecho, sólo a los humanos. Es la estructura de la argumentación que es especista, no su contenido. De hecho, hablar en abstracto de “seres racionales” o de “seres dotados de lenguaje”, o “de alma”, como de los únicos subjetos morales posibles, es una operación de extensión indebida de las cualidades que se reconocen exclusivamente al ser humano.^[2]

La teoria “reducida” del antiespecismo muestra de forma inequívoca que existen argumentos morales “especistas”. Pero no muestra en absoluto que exista una entidad como el Especismo. Esto pertenece a la teoría “ampliada” del antiespecismo que, a partir de la naturaleza especista de determinados argumentos morales, defiende la existencia de una actitud mental o de un habitus que se pueden indentificar con el Especismo.

Se trata de una esencialización que no funciona por sí sola (de la existencia de argumentos especistas a la existencia del Especismo), y que presenta dificultades incluso en un plano lógico, sobre todo cuando del Especismo -es decir del resultado de un procedimiento de abstracción de los casos particulares- se hace la causa de estos mismos casos particulares. O lo que es lo mismo, los argumentos especistas existen porque existe el Especismo. El Especismo, en este sentido ampliado, se puede definir de varias formas: la reducción de los animales a cosas, la idea de que el hombre es el centro del universo, o que tiene la primacía sobre cualquier otro ser vivo. En general, el especismo se transforma en este sentido en un sinónimo de “antropocentrismo”.

Por último, existe una versión aún más brutal del antiespecismo que considera al Especismo, entendido como habitus moral, la causa de la explotación y de la violencia sobre los animales y que, por tanto, cumple un pasaje ulterior, puesto que no derivan los argumentos morales especistas simplemente de una cualidad que, a su vez, se deriva de ellos, sino que esta cualidad -esencializada y convertida en una entidad autónoma- es también la causa de las prácticas reales de prevaricación contra el animal. Con el resultado de que toda la historia de la civilización, testigo de esta constante prevaricación, se convierte en manifestación del Especismo. Lo que no es escandaloso de por sí, si no fuera porque este criterio de interpretación se muestra totalmente incapaz de explicar la complejidad de la historia real. Defino estas derivas del antiespecismo como formas de antiespecismo metafísico.^[3]

2. ¿Cuál es el origen del Especismo?

Sin duda existe una actitud mental o un habitus moral que sitúa el interés humano por encima del de cualquier otro ser vivo. Pero existe socialmente y no individualmente. Es decir, es el producto de la interacción entre los seres humanos y una determinada organización de la sociedad, no se puede explicar en términos biológicos o psicológicos (como un deseo de prevaricación innato en la naturaleza humana o la expresión de una violencia innata). La explotación animal que está en la base de la supervivencia económica de la sociedad actual, de hecho, se justifica y se presenta como “natural” de la cuna a la tumba y, por ello, determina el horizonte cultural en el que cada consciencia moral se constituye. Se puede incluso afirmar que los argumentos especistas han sido causados por el Especismo -entendido, en el sentido “ampliado”, como habitus mental-, pero a condición de que se reconozca, como acabamos de decir, que este último es a su vez algo derivado y no algo primario y originario. A menos que no se quiera decir que el Especismo es la causa de la explotación animal y que la cultura especista es también una creación del Especismo. ¡Pero con ello nos encontraríamos en el más absoluto idealismo! Es una equivocación absoluta poner el Especismo en la base de la explotación animal ya que, en la medida en la que se puede hablar de Especismo, es una consecuencia más que una causa de éste. Dicho de otra forma, no es verdad que explotamos a los animales porque los creemos inferiores, más bien los creemos inferiores porque los explotamos.

La cuestión del origen del especismo hay que ponerla de forma histórica y poniendo atención a las relaciones reales entre humanos y no humanos. Así que hay que plantearlo de la siguiente forma: ¿cuándo empieza la explotación animal? A esta pregunta se puede contestar -de una manera algo general pero correcta- remontando al pasaje del nomadismo (es decir, de la forma esencial que los antropólogos definen como “sociedad recolectora y cazadora”) a las sociedades sedentarias (fundadas en la agricultura y en la ganadería). De hecho, desde el punto de vista del intercambio entre sociedad y naturaleza, la fase nómada está caracterizada por una relación de casi total integración entre seres humanos y medio ambiente, mientras que las sociedades sedentarias obran -por medio de los procedimientos de domesticación de animales y plantas- un control sobre este último, que pierde toda autonomía y se hace “recurso” a disposición del ser humano. A este fenómeno se acompañan históricamente importantes cambios en el orden social y en el simbólico, que acaban por retroactuar también en la relación entre hombre y naturaleza, y por proveer las bases materiales e ideales a lo que hoy en día definimos como especismo. Las sociedades que abandonan el nomadismo, de hecho, abandonan también el igualitarismo que caracteriza la sociedad de la recogida y de la caza y originan formas de jerarquía social. La civilización no nace sólo gracias a la explotación de la naturaleza, sino también gracias a la explotación humana que la hace posible y que se intensifica de forma exponencial. Esto tiene grandes consecuencias en el plano simbólico. De hecho, allí donde en la cultura mágica, propia de las sociedades nómadas, hay una frontera sutil entre lo humano y lo no humano, en las sociedades patriarcales y muy jerarquizadas sólo puede nacer el fenómeno de la divinización del ser humano. El abismo entre hombre y animal tiene aquí su origen, pero es un abismo que no crea el hombre en general hacia los animales, sino que lo crean los que están en la cumbre de la pirámide social y lo dirigen hacia todos los seres que están en su base: hombres y animales. Opresión humana y opresión animal están fuertemente entrelazadas, tan fuertemente que sólo de su unión nace el fenómeno que Singer llama “especismo” y que es una realidad derivada y secundaria con respecto a la explotación real. Dicho de otra forma, sin explotación animal no hay sociedad de clases, pero sin sociedad de clases no hay especismo.

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation

John Sanbonmatsu (ed.), Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, Rowman & Littlefield, Plymouth: UK, 2011.

The growing field of animal studies has become an important part of the academic activity all around the world. The times when writing about animal suffering could be labeled as a sort of “crankiness” (Adorno) are gone. Yet, as always happens when a new subject of study emerges from the mist of the unknown to become “normal” science in Kuhn’s terms, a lot of repetitive (and often boring) work becomes a stable part of the publishing activity. Critical Theory and Animal Liberation surely does not belong to such standardized routine. As a matter of fact, editor John Sanbonmatsu has managed to gather several impressive contributions, different from style and method, all unified by the common goal of criticizing both human and nonhuman exploitation from a political point of view. In a word, Critical Theory and Animal Liberation aims at broadening the theoretical concerns of animal advocacy, while at the same time making its praxis more influential and effective. The book, thus, presents the reader with a set of interesting attempts to endorse animal liberation from the Left, including two outstanding authors that opened the path of critical animal studies in the late 80s: Ted Benton (whose classic “Marxism = Specisism?” is here reprinted and made accessible for the younger readers) and Carol J. Adams (whose influential book The Sexual Politics of Meat: a Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory for the first time associated the term coined by Max Horkheimer in the 30s and the animal liberation movement).

The book’s perspective

The editor’s Introduction opens the volume with an intriguing and carefully constructed overview of the themes developed in the following chapters. Without ambiguity, then, it strongly takes side in favor of an anti-capitalist understanding of the struggle against animal abuse. According to Sanbonmatsu, “animal liberation and capitalism […] are mutually incompatible modes of civilizational development” (26). Such thesis implies a partial revision of the traditional theoretical and practical arrangements of animal right activism. The classical attack on speciesism – grown on the field of analytical philosophy – is here criticized since it fails to see the connections between animal liberation and “other systems of power and dominance”. The important contributions given by Singer and Regan to understand and criticize the ethical bias of speciesism are to be seen inside the largest political framework that made them possible: a thesis lately developed by Gardner, who openly admits that neither socialism, nor feminism, nor ecology offer a sound background for animal rights and that we should therefore be content with the liberal discourse. As Carl Boggs observes, though, the limits of traditional animal rights theories are at least three: first of all, the line of inquiry is often “narrow” and the animal concerns are “isolated from broader social and ecological problems”; secondly, the concept of “right” itself is excessively tied to questions of individual moral choice (a consequence of the fact that liberalism underestimates problems involving social structures, power and ideology); finally, few critical analysis of speciesism have produced the “political articulation” needed to avoid ethical individualism and implement more general strategic choices (87). It is true that the Left has been often blind to the violence committed against animals, but the main thesis of this book is that such blindness does not depends on an intrinsic incapacity of the socialist tradition to empathize with nonhuman nature, but it is rather the effect of historical contingency. As Renzo Llorente has convincingly proven in his contribution (“Reflections on the Prospects for a Non-Speciesist Marxism”), all the “alleged incompatibilities” between animal liberation and socialism are “largely spurious”. A unified theory of oppression, then, should point at the “basic affinity between Marxism and animal liberation”, an affinity that Llorente finds “in the radical egualitarian orientation that defines both perspectives” (122).

"Just in case society crumbles". George A. Romero and Marxism

1	Meeting necessities. A historical necessity brought forth Night of the Living Dead and made it a worldwide success. Only by grasping the multifaceted nature of this necessity — as sedimented in the film's form and content — is it possible to explain Romero's stylistic power and the critical potential of his horror. The first episode of the Dead Trilogy — already glowing with the desperate fatalism of its successors — finds itself at the crossroads of fatal epochal trends. It succeeded, though, in turning itself into an expressive vehicle for these necessities, instead of impotently falling victim to them — a failure to deal with the dialectic of freedom and necessity that often ruins both "light" culture-industry products and "obscure" artistic cryptograms. Its frightening chiaroscuro showed a third way that the post-modernists, enchanted by the high art status they long for and unable to understand the real nature of the market, desperately were looking for but never really found. Like other American subversives — Frank Zappa, Philip K. Dick —  Romero questions the schematic oppositions between art and commercialism, showing how artistic consistency can be actually achieved by responding with real-time creativity to the reified demands of the market.
	Far from being a b-movies assembler, Romero lived and lives on the dream of being a fine director (Gagne, 1987: 23). He was notoriously driven to direct Night of the Living Dead by economic necessity, after the commercial failure of a pretentious picture entitled Whine of the Fawn. This subjective necessity to "sell out" reached its goal thanks to an objective necessity, i.e. the existence of that push-over audience, ferociously longing for novelties, that shapes the horror movie market. The very existence of this market witnesses the persistence of a collective desire to experience monstrosity. Such a desire has a double, schizophrenic meaning: it both satisfies the general need for escapism — promptly fulfilled by Hollywood and its cheaper ramifications — and expresses the urge for a sort of hallucinated realism, the need to face what lies behind everyday life and its cinematic double.
	Horror has always played this eccentric role inside the culture industry: its negativity brings to expression the vague and yet insuppressible instinct for truth from an audience perpetually filled with lies by media. For those who cannot avoid the culture industry's prefab pleasures and don't want to suffer the self-flagellation of the avant-garde, this need for truth manifests itself sensually as self-punition, the masochistic pleasure of seeing oneself tormented by fear and gore. However, rather than endless repetitions of an infantile shock (regression), such masochistic thrills look for an access into the real beyond capitalist deception. Horror movies try to dissipate the opium populi dialectically, i.e. through the extremization of filmic illusion. A progressive element is involved: schizophrenia does not so much characterize the movie-goers as well as reality itself. Romero's idea of filming Dawn Of the Dead (1978) in a shopping mall was not a product of his schizophrenic imagination: "[T]hey had sealed-off rooms upstairs packed with civil defence stuff, which they had put there in the event of some disaster — and that's what gave me the idea [...] I mean, my God, here's this cathedral to consumerism, and it's also a bomb shelter just in case society crumbles" (Romero, quoted in Colson, 2004: 9).
	The whole environment of contemporary society is, in fact, designed to exorcise "horror" — a by-product of its own cultural, political and economic logic — but since horror can't be annihilated, its traces are perceptible almost everywhere. Subsequent anguish — the vague and yet frightening intuition that something "out there" could make our usual world fall apart — is a concrete historic-sociological condition rather than an existential category.
	No less important than "what" the film showed, was the way it did it, i.e. how the film fitted the audience's need for thrills. Turning a lack of means into a possibility for creative solutions, Night of the Living Dead (1968) resulted in an Aufhebung of the form-content opposition. Budget restrictions and "artistic integrity" forced Romero and his talented collaborators to avoid the cheap renditions of 1950s "rubbers monsters," opting for a more realistic approach to gore (Gagne, 1987: 23). The stylization of gore that resulted reveals its specific social essence post festum. Whereas traditional scary movies used to mask reality in order to make it horrible, Romero strips the flesh off of it, revealing its grim and sick bones. Simplification, a brutal and obsessive reductionism, gives Romero's nightmare its astonishing formal power.

ECCE ROBOT
Go Nagai meets Adorno, or how to philosophize with an atomic punch

1

After Auschwitz ... World War II came to an end with two massive nuclear explosions and the horrors of Auschwitz revealed to the general public. Symbolizing both the destroying power and the desolate impotence of Western civilization, these events were soon taken for absolute moments: their atrocity was perceived as a deep fissure in the ongoing flow of history, opening up a black hole in which Reason couldn't stare without being overcome by a deep feeling of nausea. Humanity was facing the abyss of its scientific mastery of the world, unable to tell the life-improving marvels of technological progress from the perverse logic of mass destruction, indoctrination and repression. This shock definitely made clear that mankind was facing an epochal turn and that it was running toward extinction unless some things would change radically. This thought moved scientists, writers and philosophers alike into action, which for most of them meant writing books and pamphlets in an appeal to public opinion. In an attempt to understand the role played by innocent looking bureaucratic zealousness in the extermination of the Jews, Hanna Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil." Time and again Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell — among others — warned against the dangers of nuclear weapons.

2

... all Culture is rubbish. Not all intellectuals, though, were equally convinced that these events, as shocking as they were, represented a unique and anomalous tragedy, and that a recurrence — or even worse — could be prevented, nor that change could be brought about by cultural efforts. To this small group the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno certainly does belong. Yet, though his Dialectic of enlightenment claimed that Culture had proved its own impotence long before Hiroshima and Auschwitz, even he once sadly remarked that writing a poem after Auschwitz was an act of barbarism (Adorno, 1955: 30). Criticized for such defeatism, he corrected his statement by making it even stronger and applying it to his own writings. Actually, as he wrote in his Negative Dialektik (1966: 359), "... after Auschwitz all Culture, including its urgent critique, is rubbish." So, few intellectuals seemed to be immune from the contagious idea that a decisive fracture in the course of history had occurred, even if Krupp and Heuss — who voted for Hitler's "Enabling Act" in 1933 — could continue their economic and political career in the German Federal Republic. In the meantime, though atomic radiation was still far from being dispersed from the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, life in Japan quietly went back to normal — with most people there still unaware that on September 6, 1945, Go Nagai had been born in Wajima City.

Marco Maurizi
ON THE GENESIS OF SPECIESISM
Towards a Political Approach to the Man-Animal Relationship


The ambiguity of Speciesism

After the publication of Peter Singer’s most famous book – Animal Liberation – the word ‘speciesism’ has become largely acknowledged in the Animal Rights Movement. Even if many animal rights activists never read Animal Liberation, certain general assumptions derived from this book have indeed become the lingua franca of the whole movement.

Animal Liberation defines speciesism as the moral privilege given to one’s own species, i.e. we assume the interests of human animals to be more important than that of not-human animals, just like white racists do with black men (or sexists with women).[1] This is a strict theoretical definition of speciesism. But Singer himself introduces a historical description of the origins of speciesism in his book; his sources are indeed poor but he cunningly manages to quote Aristotle, Augustin, Saint Thomas, Descartes and Kant to unveil the speciesist nature of Western civilization.[2]

Yet, speciesism is a praxis and not only a moral prejudice: it has a material and not only an ideal side. It is not clear whether Singer is here describing how speciesism as a praxis came to existence in history or how different human societies justified a posteriori their concrete attitude towards animals. I assume that the fallacy of Singer’s speciesism is that it doesn’t make such distinction, because it cannot. First of all, because he doesn’t seem to see it. In his ‘Short History of Speciesism’, Singer merely juxtaposes the ideas of philosophers and the material treatment reserved to animals as if the latter was produced by the first.[3] But the real reason for such confusion and inversion of the material and ideal aspects of speciesism is that Singer’s starting point is the abstraction of philosophical ethics rather than the concreteness of history and politics. Singers must suppress the distinction between material and ideal in order to present our modern society and its values as something ‘given’, because abstract moral theory only makes sense in an abstract and static world. Universal principles cannot apply to a world that is conceived in perpetual change. This is evident when we think that Singer is not even preaching new moral values but simply asserting that our society contradicts itself if it doesn’t extend its already existing values to not-human animals.

In a word: the real problem with antispeciesism is that it lacks any historical understanding of human society and it lacks any social understanding of human history.[4] This may seem a wordplay but it is not. Such moral theory is not interested in the historical and social conditionings of man; Singer is of course aware that such conditionings do happen and his own moral theory is possible under certain obvious historical circumstances. If the category of ‘speciesism’ was first elaborated in the 70s and not in Ancient Greece it is only because modern society forged the concepts of ‘universal rights’ and ‘egalitarianism’, while Pythagoras was more concerned about not eating the souls of his dead friends; Singer simply demonstrates how illogical it is not to extend such concepts to not-human animals once Western Civilization has imposed his values – and, indeed, its economic and political hegemony – over the whole world. Consequently, many Animal Rights activists seem not to be worried about such hegemony, they simply accepts it as a fact; the moral values they play with are not questioned, their origins are uninvestigated.

History could tell us when did speciesism begin. A critical look on Society could tell us how. ‘Apolitical’ antispeciesists have good reasons not to answer to these questions: their theory only works when we forget them. These two mistakes can be also expressed synthetically as the lacking of any political understanding of human history and society. It is not surprising that many animal rights activists dismiss political change, preaching animal liberation as a moral and intimate choice that concerns ‘everybody’: it is not important to know who s/he is, where and when s/he lives or even if this ‘everybody’ does factually exist. According to such vision, Polar hunters and New York policemen should both join a vegetarian diet and advocate animal rights, even if this means that the first should try to grow plants on ice or become a New York policeman himself.[5]