veganarchy: liberation for all, not just the workers
April 13th, 2004
Without a doubt, those who seek to dominate others are fucking up the planet for the rest of us. No argument for the ‘greater good’ holds any water when greed and power-driven egoism are motivators. When Ruddock casts off refugees in genuine need in the name of security, when Howard gives out millions in corporate welfare in the name of jobs, when Bush bombs the crap out of innocents in the name of justice, the underlying reason is power and the money that affords it. This much is not in dispute amongst left thinkers. So long as any one person, any social institution, any organisation, has this kind of life and death decision making power over other people, injustice will prevail.
The hierarchy of power has been identified by anarchists, feminists and some ecologists as the root ideological cause of injustice. Power leads to resentment, to fear, to toadying, to violence, to desecration. Power can only be maintained by force, sometimes economic and covert, more often overt and actual as recent political events have shown. The power of one class of peoples over another is mirrored in human attitudes to one another right down to the family unit: in husbands over wives, in parents over children, and down there, at the bottom of the kicking heap, is the family pet. This hierarchy of oppression is institutionalised in schools, in politics, in industry.
· Work and consumerism are the institutionalised oppression of human freedoms: turning humans into workers, cogs in the economic machine so that an elite few may reap the benefits of their work while manufactured needs keep them chained to the work treadmill.
· Motherhood, marriage and pornography are the institutionalised oppressions of womankind: turning free thinking human beings into child-bearers, babysitters, free labour in the home, and sex objects.
· ‘Development’ is the instiutionalised oppression of the natural world: turns trees, mountains, rivers, the oceans - habitats - into wood, minerals, irrigation, seafood, pollution sink: resources for exploitation.
· Farming and hunting are the institutionalised oppression of animals: turn wildlife and domesticated animals into food, fibre, oil, sport, entertainment: resources for humans.
In such a system both morality and compassion are bereft. Domination is an effective tool in extracting the maximum profit from animals, nature, women, and workers alike. Visualise a power pyramid where the elite few hundred billionaires live extravagantly at the top. Each one of their luxurious lifestyles is supported by the blood, sweat and tears of millions upon millions of other people - workers, the free labour of women; and upon billions of animals who are labeled food & fibre resources - as if the suffering of the many is of no importance in the pursuit of economic gain to the select few. This is capitalism.
In the current political climate even human life seems to have decreased in value to many. Mass deaths of human beings under the bomb has become a daily occurrence that elicits less and less compassionate response. As the mass media depict the ‘just’ war, all our instincts to recognise the wrong and the suffering in that war are being ignored or suppressed. We begin to wonder if we are the ones who are at fault. Is not the history of humanity strewn with the bodies of innocents dying in ‘just’ wars? Perhaps the sacredness of human life does not really exist, that no one really has the right to live, that it is a ‘dog-eat-dog’ world? Yet at base we know a fundamental wrong is occurring. Time will show this war to be as bloody and filled with unjustified deaths as every other war in human history. We should not be complacent just because the majority have been deceived by the media to believe in this war. So too we should not be deceived into believing that it is better for the economic system and everyone as a whole if rampant free-market capitalism is allowed to rage unhindered. Clearly it is not: the vast majority of the world are poor. Now more than 80% of the world share less than 20% of it’s wealth and the gap between rich and poor widens yearly. We should not be deceived into thinking that the oppression of women everywhere is less wrong if it is done for religious or cultural reasons any more than we would tolerate Howard’s policy of trying to keep women in the home for economic reasons by making childcare an unaffordable luxury. Each person should have the right to live their life unhindered by the bullying of governments insofar as they are not hurting others. The UN Declaration of Human Rights insists on this.
So too we should not be deceived by industries into thinking we need things that we do not need. Production keeps the economic clock ticking over, but it decimates the natural world with pollution, deforestation and the exploitation and suffering of animals and people alike. The bulk of consumption does not fulfill vital needs, but feeds the grossly bloated economic beast and its masters holding the reigns.
All these forms of oppression are interconnected. They are systemic to a culture that puts money before morality time and again. So long as women and workers have to prostitute themselves for money, so long as the natural world and other species are killed and destroyed for profit - we should not be complacent. Neither should we be complicit. The consumer of luxury goods, the consumer of pornography, the consumer of animal flesh are all complicit in this systematic oppression for money. Compassion is of course the key. We resist this unjust war because we have compassion for the suffering of strangers on the other side of the world. How much easier is it to have compassion for the equally real suffering going on all around us in other species as well as our own?
To forgo animal flesh is obviously not the end of the revolution. Yet who amongst the left would feel comfortable about wearing Nike shoes or eating at McDonalds? We forgo these dubious pleasures for reasons of human and environmental exploitation. Veganism is but one step in building the personal integrity of non-participation in the unjust society we live in. I am a vegan because I have compassion for animals, so too I am an anarchist because I have compassion for human beings and an aversion for violence. The revolution in this way is as personal as it is political.
Categories: anarchist theory, environment, philosophy, war & peace |
