How to put truly An end to animal exploitation?
What anti-tech brings to anti-speciesism
We wanted to share a brochure that was circulated to the universities of Mallouestan in the summer of 2024. This one is meant to be a reflection strategic on the ineffectiveness of speciesist control.
If ATR (peasant movement aimed at dismantling the technological system) does not share the anti-speciesist objective, it is still necessary to build a maximum of convergences with every environmental struggle.
It is an observation: animal exploitation is progressing despite our efforts.
Two explanations can be raised. Either we have already chosen the best strategy and the strengthening of animal exploitation is explained by the fact that the enemies will always be too strong; or we are partly complicit in the defeat animalist.
Two possibilities then emerge.
That of reformism, which consists in slowing down animal exploitation.
That of the revolution, which requires a strategic change, equal to the challenge.
It is for this second way, it is for animals, that we are arguing here.
First, to think about strategy, you must (1) know what you want politically, that is to say Set yourself a goal to reach, which (2) is possible to achieve under material conditions of the current world.
This is basically the same as identifying (3) allies, (4) enemies, and (5) a understanding social mechanisms, so mechanisms that have caused animalism to lose, and the means that can be put in place according to our concrete possibilities for winning.
(1) Quite simple in reality. We want to end the animal carnage that causes great unnecessary suffering.
This carnage is mainly perpetrated by industrial fishing (at least one billion people die PER DAY) and factory farming, but also by ecocidal ravages such as global warming or urban expansion, which kill an uncountable quantity of non-human animals every day (perhaps a thousand times more if you count insects and other species that are difficult to quantify).
Concerning the place of peasant hunting and breeding, if they remain speciesist institutions, they are good more marginal numerically and therefore less priority for the fight antispeciesist. I will talk about this later.
(2) What are the conditions of possibility now to put an end to all this?
(3) The allies we have are not numerous.
Overall, radical antispeciesists have fully understood that (4 and 5) it is not through the state apparatus, capitalism and its colonial logic that we will be able to end the carnage — neither in farms, nor in the oceans, and not in forests razed to set up cereal fields like in Brazil.
We also have other people from other struggles who understood these mechanisms. There you go. Other antispeciesist groups such as passive vegans or welfarist groups only participate in an exploitation system that annihilates, recovers and strengthens their existence (through the legitimation it acquires and by reducing the tension around these issues), to increasingly exploit, deforest, colonize lands and seas far from sight and out of heart.
So we will always be in the minority to really fight against animal exploitation. Proof of this is the huge media coverage of the atrocious L214 videos and the parallel increase in meat consumption in our societies: Awareness has its limits.
These limits are systemic and are based on three factors: Speciesist ideology is growing stronger faster than antispeciesism ; economic exploitation mechanisms are being strengthened more quickly than anti-speciesist practices are spreading (increase in the presence of dead bodies in stores, in the production of dead bodies on farms and oceans (see pig farming towers in China)) — basically, for a person converted to veganism, a factory farm opens up.
And above all, because fighting in this way neglects structural exploitation mechanisms: one cannot fight specifically against speciesism without also fighting against the State, colonialism, etc., but also and ABOVE all against the concrete material needs of the techno-industrial system (which harmoniously orchestrates all oppressions). I'll come back later to explain this thing.
As for the tactics of (a) liberating and (b) blocking slaughterhouses, more specifically, two considerations are necessary, despite the advantages that they a prima facie have on awareness-raising tactics.
(a) First of all, concerning animal liberation, let us first identify its strategic meaning.
It consists in taking one or more individuals out of their condition to place them (but not always) in shelters or sanctuaries. The meaning of So this tactic is a renunciation : it is impossible for me to free all individuals one by one from all the cages on the planet (especially since farms open more quickly than the release of exploited non-human animals), but I can allow through these meager liberations a wider change in mentalities — because the individual in question then becomes an ambassador for his peers who have remained locked up [Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka “Farmed Animal Sanctuaries”: the heart of the movement?” , 2015]. More marginally, this tactic allows activists to find themselves in unifying places, to create a political link with a few individuals and to mediate certain unknown disorders linked to genetic selection. Paradoxically enough, The tactic of animal liberation is therefore mainly a tactic of awareness-raising., which then necessarily fails for the reasons mentioned above.
(b) The slaughterhouse blockade tactic is more interesting in this respect.
By causing an economic downturn in a just-in-time sector, the blockade of slaughterhouses has the advantage of do not fall into a logic of slow immediacy.
The logic of immediacy is, for example, that by having the political objective of saving animals as a political objective, we save one animal. There is an immediate side to this way of doing things, slow and blind to the deeper logics of the mode of exploitation non-human animals.
The blocking tactic, on the other hand, is therefore in the interests of exploited animals by slowing down a chain and by looking beyond the individuals to be released, because it considers the benefit further upstream in the hardware operating system. But while inspiring, However, this tactic is failing to be effective. for several intertwined reasons.
This tactic does not recognize structural frameworks that go beyond those of animal exploitation: the supply chain animals in the slaughterhouses, the delivery chain to the stores then, the farms and the slaughterhouses in between, and overall that's about it. It is not recognizing that the animal exploitation sectors are in fact interconnected with the other extractivist, state, electrical, transport, information, etc. sectors., which exist and which underlie animal exploitation on farms and by fishing boats. It is also not recognizing that animal exploitation is based on a social order shaped by this infrastructure entanglement in which we live, whether it is the factories in which we are forced to work — including some people working in slaughterhouses, fishing boats and struggling with this system, who have no other means of subsistence than wages —, mobile phones that put our thinking skills to sleep, energy-intensive industries and that strengthen the states and dictatorships in these countries, the exploitation of habitats for animals such as rivers that have become resources for electricity, forests that have become resources for electricity, forests, resources for wood (which is used more than one might think for industrialization and the anthropization of spaces [the use of wood has in fact increased since the beginning of the industrial era, contrary to what the theory of energy transition wants us to believe, contrary to what the theory of energy transition wants us to believe, cf. J-B Fressoz Sans Transition, 2024]), etc.
We can also mention the key element of the repression. Indeed, how can we hope to put an end to animal exploitation on an international scale without facing the repression allowed by the technological superiority of soldiers and keufs, armed to the teeth, with databases of records, with drones, with tanks to subdue rebellions? In the end, these networked industries shape societies and almost all of the exploitation of animals for human consumption and their killing in wild environments.
To attack slaughterhouses is to attack only one element of this system..
A system that, however, maintains and locks this social order, both in its cultural and material aspects, and whose Animal exploitation is now only a subsidiary. Despite the effort to think in this interesting strategic direction, Blocking a slaughterhouse is not attacking the right targets because it does not go far enough up the causal chain that allows animal exploitation. A very good example can illustrate this, that of the strategy put in place in the 1980s by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the United States, against the fur industry.
You will find better summaries of this story than mine [the memoir by Mathis Poupelin We Want Empty Cages, 2024, is circulating a bit in the community, just ask for a digital copy from classmates]. Animal Liberation Front activists decided with PETA to specifically attack the mink fur industry. This was seen as relatively easy to do since mink are wild animals and there would be no need to place them elsewhere in shelters or sanctuaries. This strategy seemed good because achievable within a defined timeframe, with means that it is possible to implement to achieve it. Activists then opened breeding cages, which took an economic blow as soon as the first release of detained mink was released, and in general went bankrupt after the second. As a result of these types of actions, the fur market almost collapsed in the United States. But that was not to mention the resilience capacity of the sector, however weak it may be (a prima facie). Indeed, fur manufacturers have simply responded by relocating their production to China, Hong Kong and South Korea.
What this famous example should lead us to necessarily recognize is that speciesist farming should not be uncorrelated from the rest of the system : speciesism cannot be fought exclusively, because in the current mode of production, it amounts to a wrestling partial against an element of the system [I am not saying that speciesism as such is a consequence of this systemic functioning of industries, energies, technologies, but that its current form is a consequence of the incorporation of speciesism into this system which has greatly amplified it and made it stronger in its infrastructures and has indeed made it an element within it].
Such a systemic vision, recognizing the necessary intertwining of its elements that maintain each other, can only lead us to seek to put an end to what is holding us back in our efforts, whether it is repression or the dependence that all humans have on it in order to survive and therefore participate in its reinforcement (by putting us to work in factories for example). We must admit this sad conclusion: despite all our efforts, we are not yet in the strategic phase where material conditions allow us to abolish all forms of breeding, fishing and hunting. The current struggle must be fought differently, by first identifying the right targets, the ones that brake us to go up a gear, by stopping and dismantling the techno-industrial system. In other words, the stopping of an infrastructure system operating as a network, allowing the resilience of some of its sectors (fur), but including the interdependent parts therefore make it very fragile on certain sectors on which a multitude of other sectors depend (oil, transport, electricity, etc.).
The arguments developed so far were mainly based on the need to destroy this system in order to abolish speciesism.
I have not yet addressed the more obvious arguments in detail: the abolition of the techno-industrial system would save the lives of several thousand billion animals per day (including insects and wild animals), which, within the framework of a realistic strategy attacking identified targets that are responsible for almost all animal carnage, would be drastically in the interests of animals (without being explicitly linked to anti-speciesism). It would be an unforgivable shame for anti-speciesist activists not to join the most effective movement to stop this 99% of animal carnage at once and in the medium term. (when not to lay the foundations for the realistic speciesist struggle in the future). Even so Some would say that we must now go into anti-speciesist movements that promote a radically and uniquely anti-speciesist discourse to protect non-human animals [which should also include many other injustices that almost all anti-speciesists have not even thought about, such as the inherent problem of the existence of cities, such as the inherent problem of the existence of cities, especially with regard to rats, cats, pigeons, or roads for hedgehogs, badgers, cats again., or airplanes for birds, medical science for rats, monkeys and others, and all these problems of civilization which mean that a genuine anti-speciesist struggle only involves the abolition of these infrastructures linked to technologies and industries], let's do a brief calculation to show that this position is less effective.
Let us imagine that by persisting in this type of struggle, animal exploitation would end within 200 years (a very optimistic hypothesis); we can conclude that during this entire period, at the rate of five hundred million animals that die per day on average over this period (low hypothesis), we would reach by then 36 500 000 000 000 000 deaths. With the same data set to a proportion of 99% instead of 100%, because hunting and “recreational” fishing represent approximately this percentage of dead animals, out of the number of animals dying per day, If the fight against tech succeeds, let's say in 50 years, we would reach 9,100,000,000,000, or nearly four times fewer animal deaths. These are only sketchy estimates but they give an idea of the responsibility we have in front of us. The fight for exploited animals is a serious issue, not a symbolic or egoistic issue. Nor to find yourself, for example, in the good company of vegan people. Given the time it takes for the fight against speciesism to produce results (for the moment zero or even negative), and the impossibility of putting a material end to all the carnage in the short term, the need to reflect calmly (but keenly and effectively) on a defined timeframe is necessary. Even if participating in the liberation of one or a few individuals gives the impression of making progress in this direction, it is never just an illusion. Recognizing all this gives a glimpse of the seriousness of the situation and the responsibility we now have to get on the right track with the story.
So let's stop wanting to chase the cheetah, to fight Goliath in boxing, to forbid the carrying of arms to soldiers on mission or to convert the pope to Hinduism. After having made us depressed by showing our weaknesses and strengths, let's see what to do concretely by identifying our strengths and the weaknesses of the system this time. First of all, it should be noted that despite what we may have said about him in the previous part, This techno-system is a colossus with feet of clay. Indeed, despite the resilience it offers to certain economic subsidiaries, Everything it's based on is in interdependence : certain sectors determine the transport, production and maintenance of a whole host of materials and energies on which all other economic subsidiaries depend.
And unlike the fur market, which can appear in one place, disappear in another and reappear elsewhere, and which does not determine the rest of the system, some elements of the system are almost unique key points that can set this whole system in motion, permanently preventing him from any possibility of resilience.
We can think of oil, whose extraction is determined in certain specific places in the world and which cannot be done elsewhere. But we can also think of specific and difficult points to avoid in international commodity transactions in a circuit that operates on a just-in-time basis. End or To greatly slow down the oil sector, for example, this means the end of a whole lot of materials and transport on which the agri-food sector depends, whether it's the transport of animals to the slaughterhouse (whose vehicles would run out of gas), but also, when we think of cascading effects that the end of oil will cause, on the extraction of minerals necessary to operate the AIs that calculate us in files, we well understand all the exponential advantages of this strategy that attacks an entire system.
To conclude on this, comrades, we must fight differently. by hitting “where it hurts” [Theodore Kaczynski, 2002], recognizing the systemic and material nature of what kills, tortures, and prevents us from fighting effectively.
To go further:
- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial society and its future.
- same author, Anti-tech revolution: why and how?.
- On the Regressism blog: “Ted Kaczynski responds to the 'anarchist' left”.
- Aric McBay, Full Spectrum Resistance.
- Anti-Tech Resistance, “For a revolution against the technological system”.
- The whole Anti-Tech Resistance site and blog https://antitechresistance.org/blog/
