Marxist Animalism
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I have nothing against vagens and vegetarians – live and let live – as long as they don't take over the world….. A revolution marches on its stomach
Bijou Drains wrote:Alan I don’t care what you say, my mother tried, my partner has tried. I’m not eating fucking Brussels sproutsBrussel sprouts are OK with beef and Yorkshires and a glass of devil's liquor
Vin wrote:Bijou Drains wrote:Alan I don’t care what you say, my mother tried, my partner has tried. I’m not eating fucking Brussels sproutsBrussel sprouts are OK with beef and Yorkshires and a glass of devil's liquor
if you have to add all of these different ingredients to them (bacon, butter, gravy, whiskey, etc.) to make them taste nice, it’s because they don’t bloody well taste nice! QED
https://vimeo.com/251618816Against the term "anthropocene".
Against the word "anthropocene": http://www.sternberg-press.com/cms.php?pageId=1771
I think Stephen Jay Gould would have called the term "anthropocene" the ultimate in human arrogance, naming a geological era after one (us) species of animal.
I stopped contributing to this thread as i believe it had said all that needed to be said. In the intervening period, numerous articles has cropped up to confirm what i believe a rational planned society would implement concerning food production and animal welfare but i declined to post.We have never sought popularity over principle and despite many members own reservations i now personally believe it is time to call-out our dietary choices, and place planet before party. This latest research, the biggest analysis to date cannot go without mentioning.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earthAvoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet. The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife. While meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.“Converting grass into meat is like converting coal to energy. It comes with an immense cost in emissions” For those of us who still feel reluctant to commit the Party to endorsing a vegan/vegetarian future, there is one silver lining in this article.Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, noted: “There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our meat consumption.”Coal will remain in the hole, oil stay in the soil, and meat will off the menu
<p dir=”ltr”>A Dose of Reality for Marxist Traditionalists.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>(An internal SPGB memo from decades ago said something along the lines of Man being the supreme achievement, and nothing of greater interest remaining to evolve on Earth …)</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>”Homo Sapiens <i>may be the brainiest species of all, but we represent only a tiny twig, grown but yesterday on a single branch of the richly arborescent bush of life. This bush features no preferred direction of growth, while our own relatively small limb of vertebrates ranks only as one among many, not even as </i>primus inter pares. Homo Sapiens<i> is a single species among some two hundred species of primates, on a branch of some four thousand species of mammals, on a limb of nearly forty thousand species of vertebrates, on a bough of animals dominated by more than a million described species of insects. The other boughs of life’s bush have longer durations and greater prospects for continued success – while bacteria build the main trunk and have always dominated the history of life by criteria of diversity, flexibility, range of habitats and modes of life, and sheer weight of numbers.”</i>
– Stephen Jay Gould,
<i>Rocks of Ages.</i></p>
<p dir=”ltr”>I in fact gave up long ago attempting to make Marxists – and mainstream Anarchists too – open their eyes and ears to the anachronistic nature of the old progress-daubed, anthropocentrist ladder model of evolution.
I reason instead, that, even were <i>everyone</i> in the movement for socialism a human-supremacist bigot, <i>the economic revolution</i> that socialism would be would free nonhuman animals from <i>most</i> of the suffering which capitalism inflicts upon them. (So the prejudices of socialists on the matter would be irrelevant, material reality instead doing the talking).
However, it would not be the case, in spite of party members’ prejudices today, that all workers making the revolution would be rabid human-supremacists, because even now that is not the case.
Which means that socialism, unlike capitalism, would be fertile ground for rapid progress in the emancipation of fellow animals from human tyranny; even though most Marxists are speciesist, “ladder-ist” bigots.
The unfortunate aspect, today, is that Marxist speciesism alienates many who would otherwise join the movement, causing them to dismiss the fact of Marxism’s correct <i>political and economic</i> analysis of human society.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>Socialist Standard</i> , July 1987:</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>[It] would be an irony indeed when we consider that the dinosaurs, animals which tended towards <i>having very limited brain power,</i> nevertheless managed to exist for about 125 million years, and yet <i>the supreme achievement of biological evolution</i> (meaning us – !.) would have become extinct after only about one 3000th part of that time.”</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>To speak of “supreme achievement” here is to endow biological evolution with human values, human consciousness and human pride in the same way theism imposes humanity on the cosmos and calls it God. Both secular speciesism and theism demonstrate our reluctance to let go of the need to see ourselves at the centre of everything: our inability to objectively comprehend our place in the cosmos. This conceit – evolution as a ladder of progress – is the last bastion of human arrogance: the secular, pseudoscientific version of the creationist view of “Man” made in God’s image, now evolution’s “supreme achievement.”</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>In his books <i>Wonderful Life</i> and <i>Life’s Splendour</i>, Gould demonstrates the fallacy of the traditional, destinarian, view of evolution, which still has currency with most people: Darwinism tailored to suit human arrogance. The “ladder of ascent” typifies conventional teaching in evolution and comfortably retains “Man” at centrestage in the saga of life. Of course, in sociology humans are at centrestage and it is human issues with which socialism deals; but to impose human requirements, hopes, mentality and consciousness on biological evolution and the rest of nature is patently absurd.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>Socialist Standard, </i>April 1982 (my italics):</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>”Homo Sapiens is not <i>merely an animal repeated</i>, but is qualitatively <i>something higher.</i> Humans have an ability to think conceptually and this enables us to determine our own mode of existence.”</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>No animal is <i>merely an animal repeated</i>, but each is unique in his or her own right. Yes, humans have abilities other animals do not have, and they have abilities we do not have. Yes, humans have the ability to think conceptually and to determine their mode of existence – <i>within what is possible for humans</i>. To be trapped in an imperialist terminology of <i>dominance, superiority, inferiority</i> etc. is however a weakness denoting that humans have yet to see themselves objectively as one animal species among many, regardless of their abilities.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>The reason Darwin was reluctant to use the word<i>evolution</i> was that it can easily be misinterpreted to mean progress, whereas darwinian evolution means merely adaptation to environment – <i>descent through modification.</i> This is not necessarily always a progress from simple to complex – unlike <i>social</i> evolution, not to be confused with biological evolution. It was the Social Darwinists who elaborated the view of evolution as progress, already current in the Victorian popular mind. In the same way that the ideologues of capitalism distort and misuse darwinism to falsely locate bourgeois marketplace values within biology, so the Marxist devotees of human supremacy also avail themselves of the mythology of biological progress to falsely read a darwinian parallel in biology to their correct Marxist evaluation of human <i>social</i>,<i>economic and cultural</i> evolution.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>So much for the Victorian anthropocentrism which talks about “biological evolution’s supreme achievement” – looking down on other species. One can be a Marxist in politics without being a human chauvinist.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>Despite socialists’ vaunting of scientists like Gould and others over the years, I believe they ignore the conclusions of these scientific writers when they contradict their speciesist prejudices.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>Gould demonstrates that if there is “success” in evolution, it is richness and variety of species on evolution’s tree, and the twig which is us, if it is even a twig, and which we share with our fellow apes, is in fact already ripe, in biological terms, for extinction.</p>
<p dir=”ltr”>From “Darwin’s Dilemma” by Stephen Jay Gould, in<i>Ever</i><i> Since Darwin:</i></p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>”In a famous epigram, Darwin reminded himself never to say “higher” or “lower” in describing the structure of organisms – for if an amoeba is as well adapted to its environment as we are to ours, who is to say that we are higher creatures?</i></p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>”… to a smug Victorian, what principle other than progress could rule the developmental processes of the universe?</i></p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>”…the father of evolutionary theory stood almost alone in insisting that organic change led only to increasing adaptation between organisms and their own environment </i>and not to an abstract ideal of progress defined by structural complexity … <i>never say higher or lower </i>(my emphases).</p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>”… scientists … long ago abandoned the concept of necessary links between evolution and progress as the worst kind of anthropocentric bias. Yet most laymen still equate evolution with progress and define human evolution not simply as change, but as increasing intelligence … or some other measure of assumed improvement.</i></p>
<p dir=”ltr”><i>”This fallacious equation of organic evolution with progress continues to have unfortunate consequences. … Today it remains a primary component of our global arrogance, our belief in dominion over, rather than fellowship with, more than a million other species that inhabit our planet.”</i></p>Could you refrain from using the tools here, italics, bold etc.
There is a bug which results in your posts being difficult to read.
Article on the crimes of a game-keeper. But what struck me is that the owners of the grouse moor and his employers who he was acting on the behest of are not named.
The gamekeeper is the fall guy taking the rap for the shooting industry
“If you were to believe newspapers and dietary advice leaflets, you’d probably think that doctors and nutritionists are the people guiding us through the thicket of what to believe when it comes to food. But food trends are far more political – and economically motivated – than it seems.”
Nothing new for us here, but an interesting read.
Ridiculous language again.
When reporting the discovery last week of the oldest known cave painting (40,000 years), they say “half animal half human creatures” shown hunting.
This is like saying “half mammal half elephant”, or “half snake half viper.”One for John Oswald
You’re Not So Different From an Octopus: Rethinking Our Relationship to Animals
“We are on the cusp of either destroying this sweet, green Earth — or revolutionizing the way we understand the rest of animate creation,” Montgomery said. “It’s an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures.”
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