Marxist Animalism
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Notions of “race” began with the human manipulation of other animal species, breeding them to suit human exploitative purposes. By the 18th century, “race” had entered the language in justification of the Atlantic slave trade and, sadly today, the term “race” applied to humans of different geographic ancestry is now mainstream.
People still practise the Nazi grading of animals in terms such as “thoroughbred” and “mongrel” when speaking of dogs, prize the former and often abandon the latter. “Cow” ,”pig” and “bitch” are popular terms of abuse.
Much is made, by rampant human supremacists of the Left, of Hitler’s “love of animals”, vegetarianism and anti-vivisectionism – in order to neutralise any ethical argument in favour of vegetarianism and anti-vivisectionism.
A reading of Boria Sax’s Animals in the Third Reich should enlighten those who would equate such ethical positions with Nazism.
“Jewish” dogs (mongrels) could be shot on sight, whilst “Aryan” dogs (thoroughbreds) were prized. The pig was a “Jewish” animal, ripe for slaughter, and the S.S. in the east lived and feasted culinarily like kings (see Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka.)Racist, sexist, and speciesist objectification all justify exploitation, and the manipulation and oppression of our own human race originate in the manipulation and exploitation of other animals.
“the manipulation and oppression of our own human race originate in the manipulation and exploitation of other animals.”
I would have thought it’s more the other way round, isn’t it?
I would say that domestication in the Neolithic era took us on the road toward class society. No?
I’d say took us on the road that will eventually lead us to socialism.
But what do you mean by “manipulation and exploitation”? If you mean killing and eating then this would have started a lot longer before then; even before Homo sapiens evolved. In fact our species wouldn’t even have evolved biologically let alone socially if our preceding species of Homo hadn’t eaten animals.
Eating animals has nothing to do with class society, You could even saying that it is part of biological human nature as it is of other omnivores. Cruelty to animals is a different matter and could well be linked to class society. Certainly there will be no reason for it in the classless society that socialism will be.
I mean domestication : breeding of other animals for food and work; the keeping of livestock (cattle = chattel), was the first form of private property, leading to the emergence of classes. From the owning of nonhuman chattels came the owning of human chattels; from the objectification of other animals came the objectification of other humans, as property, underlings, subordinates.
I am not referring to scavenger – (more common than hunter-) gatherer primitive communist societies, which are the same as other animal societies.
Yes, even they would have to objectify a prey when required, but the animal was not objectified the rest of the time, and rituals by way of apology and respect would follow a hunt, as in the case of the Plains tribes.I am saying that from livestock keeping and seeing animals as property arose property in all its later forms.
Yes, class society will lead us to socialism. But socialism will end class society, and property – including animal property!
Party members (many) have an hierarchal view of nature, and while they do, they are ill equipped to build socialism.
They are equipped to be part of the political revolution, but their attitude toward nature and other species could well be a factor in their inability to interest and attract the progressive young.
An hierarchal view of the natural world goes hand in hand with the hierarchal human society we suffer under now. The two complement each other.
Our much vaunted human intelligence could yet prove to be the CAUSE of an early self-extinction!
Without it, we wouldn’t have created capitalism.
Every life form is unique , Wez.
Luckily we are not going extinct any time soon and are the only animal species capable of taking to steps to avoid extinction — and to prevent other species going extinct. This is something self-hating humans ignore.
You can’t say we are capable of postponing our extinction until we do, which will mean we could not have done otherwise.
As to avoiding extinction, we definitely will become extinct at some time. We can no more avoid that than we can stop stars from being born and dying.
Your species arrogance is your biggest failing.
So it’s arrogant of humans to want to establish socialism and so control their destiny (and that of other animals). What crap.
Of course humans can’t stop the sun imploding or exploding or whatever it’s going to do but how many millions of years away is that?
I was talking about any more immediate threat. Faced with the threat of extinction other animals can’t do anything about it. Humans can. And we, and only we, can do something to stop other animals from becoming extinct. I don’t know why you regard this as being “anthropocentric”. Other animals are better than humans in seeing, hearing, smelling and many other things but humans are better than them in thinking. That gives us the capacity to plan ahead and to control our environment rather than being entirely controlled by it. That is a fact of biology.
Humans are the only consciously-acting life-form that has happened to have evolved. This doesn’t give humans a right to dominate or be cruel to other animals, though of course we have to consume some other life-forms even if only plants to survive. In fact, if you want to go all philosophical, it means that only humans can save the biosphere. Even you accept in practice that only humans are capable of enforcing the “animal rights” you want respected. Otherwise why carry out a campaign amongst your fellow humans to get them to do this? It might help convince them if you didn’t keep on running down humans.
It seems to me a big supposition that a species barely one million years old will still be the species it is now when the sun implodes. A bit of humility seems required here! One million years ago your ancestors were not homo sapiens sapiens, and it isn’t likely that your descendants will be, several million years hence.
“Better” is subjective, because you exist within your own species-specific thinking. We do plan and change our environment. So do many other animals. They project, as we do, in performing tasks essential to them, as we do in what we feel to be essential for us. Other animals have even saved human lives. We have species-specific abilities too, but, like everything in nature, our wills are determined by both external and internal factors. For instance, the bourgeois apologist will say we are incapable of making socialism. You say we are capable. I say that we will only have been capable if we make socialism, and will have been incapable if we never do.
Humans are not the only consciously-acting life form. What arrogance, and ignorance! All animals are conscious.
You really should read more. Mark Bekoff. Jane Goodall. Modern ethology. Marx is for economics. He knew sod all about modern ethology and zoology.
“Rights” is a bourgeois term, as you know.
Yes, it is humans who must cease persecuting other animals, and the best surety of this is, apart from the abolition of capitalism, the recognition that all is one and interconnected, and that there is really no species barrier – that it is fluid and ever-changing, and that we are within nature, not above her.
I’m not running down humans; just deflating those with prejudices.
I fight equally against human-haters who blame things on “human nature.”
In your eagerness to do down the human species you are overlooking the difference in quality of human thinking compared with that of other animals. Of course other animals think and pursue goals but only humans are capable of abstract thinking ie of thinking of something in the absence of its perceived presence. Insofar as some animals might be able to do this in some rudimentary form the difference between what they can do and what humans can do is so great that the difference turns from one of quantity into one of quality.
Humans alone are capable of abstract thinking and of being able to think about thinking. I repeat this is a biological fact, a product of biological evolution. I don’t see why it is “anthropogenic” to accept this; in fact it’s denying this that is odd and open to question:
It would seem that our species is the only one conscious of itself as a species. We may well be a very rare, possibly unique, example of nature becoming conscious of itself.
It should migrate to “Marxist Animalism.”
So, finally, ALB, I am not eager to do down humans, just the arrogance which sees different species’ consciousness in terms of rank and contest, “better” and “inferior” – as though other animals are inferior steps on the way to us and not complete in themselves.
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The cat that lives with me has better sight and hearing than me so is superior to me in that respect. On the other hand, my capacity to think is better than hers and so I am superior in that respect. What’s wrong with stating these facts?
No point in migrating this discussion somewhere else as, the subject having been exhausted, I am prepared to drop it.
I never understood the title of this thread. I think it is meant to suggest that animalism is a bad thing but according to this, it doesn’t sound so bad:
”Animalism is a communist philosophy of all of the animals being treated equal and sharing equally in both the responsibilities and rewards of the farm. Communism is defined as follows: Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, stateless and revolutionary socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production.”
There are clearly differences between humans and other species on the planet, this does not make them “better” per se, but the things that humans are very good at appear to be unique to humans.
If an observer from another planet were to observe the planet I don’t think the “tool maker” factor would stand out, other animals make tools, not to the extent humans do, but they do make them. I would also say it is not abstract thought, I believe other animals are capable of that. My dear departed cat (and I do use the words my cat, as I am sure I was his human) could clearly think abstractly. He could think about the consequences of me opening a door for him, he could think about what might be in the fridge, even though he could not see it. That is abstract thought.
What humans have is language, the importance of which is not only in terms of communication, it has a more profound impact on the way we think. Once we become verbal, at about the 2 year old stage, we start to think primarily, but not exclusively using language. I do some work teaching those who work with troubled children and young people and I often ask them “who is the person you speak to most in your life”. The answers come back, mother or father or partner. However the answer is yourself. It follows that the vocabulary you have the greater ways you can express yourself to yourself, if you can’t say what you think to others, it follows that you can’t say it to yourself. Through the process of his internal talk (technically known as the intrapsychic conversation) we refine and develop our thoughts and understandings, not only of the world outside, but also of our selves and our internal world. But more importantly we can store memory in language form and pass it on to other humans.
The mother cat has to show the kitten how to catch a mouse by demonstration, the mother human can tell her child how to carry out task as well as demonstrating it. Through this process of language use, internally and externally, the knowledge of generations can be built on and passed down, initially through the use of such things as story telling and verbal remembering, and latterly through the use of writing and reading. The sum total of cat knowledge is not that much greater than it was a thousand years ago, because once a cat has learned something, it is difficult for the cat to pass it on to the next generation, humans can do that through the use of language. This does not mean that humans are superior to cats, but their use of language means that their cognitions are vastly more sophisticated.
This does not mean that animals cannot think, they just cannot think to any extent, using language. It also doesn’t mean that humans are “better at thinking” than cats, as any cat would tell you (if they could speak).
Many thanks Bijou. I agree, except in the definition of language.
Fellow animals do not use human spoken language, butthey have language of their own, most of which we do not understand.
Elephants communicate by vibration across many miles. They grieve and have rituals. Insects communicate via drumming etc., and whales via sonar. This is language.
Complicated body language, as those who form friendships with lions know, can make the difference between life and death. Our human spoken language is limited itself. We communicate mainly via words, and that is our language, as other species have theirs.
Our ape species obviously needed to develop spoken language. Others did not need to. That being said, the manual alphabet was taught to a gorilla by humans, and he used it to communicate with them.
And, whereas we came to rely on reading and writing, many human cultures did not. Similarly, other animals pass down knowledge without such means. Chimpanzees do not have Voltaire, but they never needed anyone to fulfil that role.
And, for all our activity, unique to humans or not, we will be absorbed back into the cosmic soup and leave none of it behind, one day, just as surely as all other beings.
But language is no more unique to humans than tool-making (since other animals do use sounds and signs to communicate with each other). Human language, however is qualitatively different in that it is based on abstracting in the mind parts of experience and naming them; it is with these named abstractions (“symbols”) that humans think enabling, as you say, humans to pass this on to others especially future generations, so that knowledge accumulates.
It is the same with tool-making. Some animals do this but on nothing like the scale that humans do; which explains the evolution of human society in line with the development of tool-making and tool-using.
So I think that a visitor from another planet would classify humans as unique not only in terms of language and thinking based on abstractions but also in terms of the extent of their tool-making as a result of this. If political correctness didn’t exist on their planet they might even venture to describe humans as being better at this than all other animals.
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