By this declaration we affirm that antispecism (which we define in more detail below) is
not a simple individual ethics but a foreign ideology of anarchism, and the two
ideologies, although using concepts and vocabulary sometimes similar, give them a
radically different contents which are two contradictory and incompatible ideologies.
We wish to clarify in the preamble that the position we develop is not based on a
misunderstanding of what antispecism (or somehow based on prejudice "on-expressed"), or
the ignorance of the various currents that make up the antispecism. The debate about these
issues is not new in the libertarian movement - and Lyon was notably one of the
theoretical centers antisp?ciste movement during its development in France in the 90s,
through the journal Les Cahiers Antisp?cistes Lyonnais renowned for Cahiers Antisp?cistes
and our activists have not only have direct access to the antisp?ciste literature, but
also to address their main theorists in France.
We could also observe the evolution and adaptation of these speeches, as reactions that
they caused in the libertarian movement, whether positive or negative reactions. Finally,
we had access to basic theoretical works antisp?ciste current, whether texts Tom Reagan,
Peter Singer and Charles Patterson. We base our argument on this corpus seems to be the
most representative of the current antisp?ciste, especially since it includes texts of its
founders.
Some definitions
We reaffirm that we distinguish between vegetarianism, veganism or vegetarianism and
antispecism. The first two are feeding practices / consumer, which may be based either on
religious foundations, mystics, either on ethical, moral, or ecological, or even dietary
and health considerations.
The antispecism, meanwhile, is an ideology, ie "a set of concepts articulated them
consistently, (...) a set of ideas, motivations, aspirations, values, a structure or a
system of concepts that have a direct connection with the action. " In this sense, if
there are different trends within this ideology, it is nevertheless possible to
distinguish the ideas, values, aspirations and therefore a structure of concepts common to
the antisp?ciste ideology beyond its undercurrents.
Finally, if veganism / vegetarianism is the logical consequence of antispecism, it does
not be reduced, in the sense that there are many v?ganNEs / vegans who are not.
Feeding practices / consumer
Vegetarianism is to refuse to eat animal flesh, whether meat or fish. Veganism is not only
refuse to eat animal flesh, but also animal products. Veganism meanwhile, is to refuse
eating animal flesh and animal products, whether for food or non-food use (one example
vegan refuse to buy leather clothes, etc ...) libertarianism is historically known
practitioners and practitioners as vegetarianism and veganism.
The antispecism
The term antispecism defined ideology emerged in the 1970s, based on the rejection of
speciesism, defined as follows:
"The speciesism is the case that racism and sexism are respectively the race and gender:
will not consider (or less taken into account) the interests of some for the benefit of
others, by claiming real or imaginary differences but still without logical connection
with what they are supposed to justify.
In practice, speciesism is the ideology that justifies and requires the development and
use of animals by humans in ways that would not be accepted if the victims were human.
Animals are raised and slaughtered for us meat they are caught for our consumption and are
used as biological models for our scientific interests, they are hunted for our sporting
pleasure.
The fight against these practices and against the ideology that supports them is the task
that gives the animal liberation movement. " 1
The antispecism therefore rejects any moral ethics distinction / between "human and
nonhuman animals" and any differences in terms of rights and treatment. He says "Animal
Equality" understood as the equality between "human and nonhuman animals" In this context,
he claims "animal liberation" defined as the end of any "animal exploitation" and any
"human domination" animal. Farm animal antisp?cistes hear the breeding and domestication,
or to use animals as a first food and industrial material as a source of pleasure /
leisure (bullfight, etc ...) is to use the "work" animals (animals lines for example).
The equivalent antispecism killing animals to produce meat as "murder," eating meat
"eating the corpse." The theoretical implications of this basic affirmation led some
theorists to compare antisp?cistes the meat industry to Jewish and Roma genocide. We will
return. 2
A significant part of antisp?ciste common, particularly near the party claiming or
stakeholder of the libertarian movement, considered the "speciesism" as "relations of
domination" initial on which all other "reports of domination" are based: that Whether it
racism and anti-Semitism, patriarchy, and capitalism. They see at minimum a 4th oppression
to add to the theory of 3 oppression (class, race, gender), or even structuring
oppression, which then explained or promoted the emergence of oppressions between "human
animals."
Our anarchism
At the risk of long, we feel it is important to reconsider our definition of anarchism, to
show more clearly the reasons that lead us to affirm the contradiction between antispecism
and anarchism.
Anarchism as we understand it is a continuation of the socialist labor movement,
specifically the anti-authoritarian tendency of the International Workingmen's
Association. This is important in the sense that if it recognizes the existence of
anti-authoritarian revolts and movements in human history before that period, as the
existence of libertarian ideologies, it is anarchism as an ideological current steeped in
history, not as a philosophical trend universally present in human history based solely on
the refusal of the principle of domination.
This does not negate the contributions of the different currents of thought with
anti-authoritarian dimension in the emergence of anarchist ideology, but to restore the
specificity of the latter, as a result of the Enlightenment materialist ideology based on
synthesizing acquired a working emancipation movement, and incorporating the acquired
other human emancipation movements also born of the Enlightenment such as anti-racism,
anti-colonialism and feminism.
Anarchism is a materialist current in that it rejects any separation between mind and
matter, and says that nothing is outside the area. In this sense also it is not only a
rationalist movement (like other philosophical movements from the Enlightenment such as
liberalism and Marxism), but it scored his ethical, political, economic and social
approach to the analysis of concrete historical and social relations. Thus, its ideas are
not abstract concepts tackles reality, but the concepts forged in relation to the social
relations that characterize human society.
The concepts of freedom, equality, rights, but also of domination, exploitation and
oppression are thus not designed as abstract and subjective concepts, but as concepts
related to social relations in the material reality of arrangement of human relations.
"Man has lost during its evolutionary path of "humanization" instinctual determinations
and substituted cultural determinations, that is to say, standards, rules, codes of
communication and interaction. It is in precisely this substitution is that the specific
human freedom at the highest level: self-determination. In fact, cultural determinations
are not given to man (by God or by nature) is the man who gives them. The standards are
not a simple reflection of natural necessities.
[...] The production standards is the central operation, the foundation of human society,
it is production of sociality and that even "humanity" as the man does not exist as a man
if not as a cultural product, that is to say as a social product" 3
The centrality of anarchist speech is thus clearly on power, understood as the ability to
produce standards (neutral sense rules of social, political and economic interaction) and
apply. It is thus obvious that anarchists seek a situation of "equal power for all": that
is to say when the regulatory function of social relations that constitute the power is
exercised by the community on itself and is not monopolized by one party (minority) of the
company (ruling class, caste, ...). So in that sense it should be understood the anarchist
opposition to any form of system (state, economic, racial, patriarchal ...) organizes an
asymmetry (unequal) access to power.
Thus the exploitation, understood anarchist sense, does not reduce the feeling of being
exploited, but is defined as a social relationship characterized by the appropriation of
the work and benefits of work, especially through the more - gain realized through private
property and market exchange in favor of a minority (the bourgeoisie). Domination is not a
feeling, but an asymmetry of power between individuals and / or groups of individuals,
organized by social, economic and cultural relations. Oppression is finally not a feeling
(a dominant can have the feeling of being oppressed, it does not make an objective
reality), but the actual negative effect of the asymmetry of power from the report or
relations of domination. Equality is not an abstract concept based on the "rights", but a
social, political and economic relationship, characterized by a relationship based on a
symmetry of power, ie the equal ability of human beings to exercise their political
capacity, which means that the freedom of one can not be at the expense of the other.
Freedom is thus not defined in anarchism essentially negative way: unlike the liberal
ideology, it is not for an individual to enjoy "a coercion" abstract, posing the
individual against society and placing individual freedom over society, and therefore
other individuals. It is not for the individual to exercise unlimited power, regardless of
the material conditions of its production and its impact on other human beings. As shown
Bakunin
"Individual liberty is not, according to them [the Liberals], a creation, a historical
product of the company. They claim it is prior to any society, and that every man brings
into emerging with his immortal soul as a divine gift. Hence it follows that man is
something that is not even completely himself, a whole being and somehow absolute and
outside the company. Free himself previously and being outside of society, necessarily
form the latter by a voluntary act and a kind of contract is instinctive or implied, is
reflected and formal. In a word, in this theory are not individuals that are created by
the company, they are the ones who create the contrary, driven by some external necessity,
such as labor and war.
We see that in this theory, the company itself does not exist, the natural human society,
the real starting point of all human civilization, the only medium in which can actually
arise and develop personality and human freedom it is completely unknown. " 4
In contrast to this view, anarchism defines freedom as a social product, located not at
the beginning but at the end of human history:
"Party of the state of gorilla, man sometimes very difficult to realize his humanity and
the realization of freedom. First, it may have neither the conscience or freedom, he was
born a slave and beast, and it humanizes and gradually emancipates that society is
necessarily prior to the birth of her thought, his word and his will, and he can do so
only through the collective efforts of all past and present members of this society is
therefore the base and the natural starting point of his human existence. It follows that
man realizes his liberty or his personality that are complementary to all individuals who
surround him, and only thanks to the work and the collective power of society, without
which, of all the beasts that exist on earth, there would probably still the most stupid
and most miserable. In the materialistic system which is the only natural and logical, far
from lessening the society and limit the contrary creates the freedom of human
individuals. It is the root, the tree and its fruit is freedom. Therefore, every time the
man must seek his freedom not at the beginning but at the end of the story, and we can say
that real and complete emancipation of every human individual is the true, the great goal,
the supreme end of history. " 5
Or
"The materialist definition, realistic and collectivist freedom quite opposite to that of
the idealists, is this: Man becomes man and happens to consciousness as well as the
realization of his humanity in society and only through the collective action of the whole
society it is emancipated from the yoke of external nature only by collective or social
work which alone is capable of transforming the face of the earth in a favorable living
developments of humanity, and without this material emancipation there can be intellectual
and moral person for emancipation. It can not emancipate itself from the yoke of his own
nature, that is to say he can not make the instincts and the movements of his own body in
the direction of his mind more and more developed, through education and education, but
one and the other are things eminently exclusively social, because apart from society man
would have remained forever a wild beast or a saint, which means roughly the same thing .
Finally, the isolated man can not be conscious of his freedom. Being free for man means to
be recognized and considered and treated as such by another man, all men around him.
Freedom is therefore not an isolated fact, but mutual reflection, not exclusion but rather
of connection, freedom of every individual being nothing other than the reflection of his
humanity or his human right in the conscience of all free men, his brothers, his equal.
I can not say and feel free only in the presence and vis-?-vis other men. In the presence
of a lower animal species, I am neither free nor man, because this animal is incapable of
conceiving and consequently recognizing my humanity. I am human and free myself as far as
I recognize the freedom and humanity of all men around me. It is only by respecting their
human character that I respect mine own. A cannibal who eats his prisoner, treating wild
beast, is not a man but a beast. A master of slaves is not a man, but a master. Ignoring
the humanity of his slaves, he ignores his own humanity. Any ancient society provides us
with evidence: the Greeks, the Romans did not feel as free men, they did not consider
themselves as such by the human right they thought privileged as Greeks, like the Romans,
only within their own country, as it remained independent, unconquered, conquering the
contrary, other countries, for the special protection of their national gods, and they
were astonished nor causes believed to have the right and duty to rebel , when defeated,
they fell themselves into slavery. ? 6
The roots of liberal ideology antisp?ciste
From the above definitions, we want to support our claim. The antispecism is part of a
liberal vision of freedom, equality, law and individual. Liberalism here, reviewing the
rationalist philosophical current from the Enlightenment, which raises human freedom as
"natural" (and not as the result of social life), intrinsic to the individual as an
independent atom of society and conditions social. This philosophical movement considers
freedom to the individual, as the absence of coercion on the part of society, and
therefore postulated as "infinite" regardless of the conditions of its realization.
Equality is regarded for its strict level of equality in law. The right is he considered
"natural", ie as a metaphysical principle existing independently of society, based on a
transcendent definition of justice. In this sense the "positive" right, ie the law is only
the translation of "immanent" existing law independently of the history and social
conditions. If the anarchist movement have referred to this question of positive law
tactically in emancipatory struggles, it never considered equal as reducing to obtain
equal rights. The issue of equal political capacity, ie decision-making power, has always
been central to libertarian socialism, in connection with the economic and social equality
(equal access to resources, equal consideration / dignity) as a support for human freedom.
It is from this liberal conception of freedom that antispecism developed the concept of
"animal liberation." Nonhuman animals are seen as individuals when the individual is
conceived in liberal thought as independent and prior to society (hence the positive or
negative original myths of the individual "virtuous" in Rousseau or "wolf for man "Hobbes).
Or anarchist thought, if she refuses idealist separation between humans and animals -
defining humans as "social animals", notably on the basis of evolutionary theory - also
emphasizes mutual intra-species as factor evolution, and defines freedom as a social
relationship, and society as the sum of social relations between human beings.
Human and nonhuman animals are they and society? To this question, anarchist thought says
no, since the company is not defined only by the existence of relations, or even
communication through language but by history and by the work and its dimension collective
(a gradual accumulation of knowledge, experience, transmission, but also mutual inter ...)
that allows individuals to develop their abilities since birth from absolute dependence
similar to their relative individual autonomy which is the product of the collective.
"The function to create and continually recreate sociality inventing, passing and amending
standards is by definition a collective function of the human race, that is to say
concretely groups and sub-groups that constitute it. " 7
In this sense, speak of freedom as regards the animals, in the absence of social
relationships, social and historical construction, returns to tackle an abstract concept,
devoid of any social sense, the same way the fact that n 'any liberal.
Similarly, the concept of central animal equality in antispecism, has no social meaning.
Equality thus defined is reduced to the notion of equality before the law, removing all
economic and social dimension. Again we find the liberal philosophical dimension, which
addresses the issue of inequality through discrimination, ie the difference in treatment,
designed primarily in a social context, and every thought system .
Oppression or confusion?
Back by the theory antisp?ciste 4 oppressions, that speciesism is similar to racism,
sexism (note also the frequent absence of any reference to the question of class,
capitalism although some post-modern thinkers speak of "classism" addressing the issue of
class and capitalism as a simple matter of "discrimination"), and in some cases the
"classism".
When antisp?cistes say:
"The speciesism is the case that racism and sexism are respectively the race and gender:
will not consider (or less taken into account) the interests of some for the benefit of
others, by claiming real or imaginary differences but still without logical connection
with what they are supposed to justify. "
they and they proclaim two things. On the one hand (and using the word "some") affirming
an atomic individuality of animals, regardless of social relations, and other definitions
of racism and sexism as a simple fruit individual "will" treatment by removing all
systemic dimension to racism and sexism, ie without any analysis of racism and sexism as
social reports produced by the system of patriarchy and racist domination. Far from
bringing a new dimension to the struggle against oppression, such an approach has several
effects:
impoverish basically theories and analyzes of domination, oppression and exploitation by
reducing it to a matter of "will";
introduce the possibility of an ethical relativism by drawing an equivalence between
domination, exploitation and oppression in human history and the relationship of humans to
other species.
During the early years of development antispecism in France, it has been repeatedly noted
the dangers of moral relativism. Peter Singer, the main promoter of antisp?ciste ideology
was able to defend on this basis eugenic logic and say in an interview on: 01/10/2000
given to Research:
"When a disability detected before birth is severe, it allows abortion: the embryo,
rightly, is not yet considered a full person. But the newborn can it be more? I do not
think so. It should also allow to put an end to the newborn life is discovered at birth or
shortly after, carrying a high handicap.
But such an argument raises the difficulty of deciding when an infant becomes a person!
It is in fact the real problem! The sentence you quoted also remains valid if you remove
the word disabled: I do not think that killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to
killing a person. But people cite this sentence without explaining what I mean by
"person." I hear a person being able to reason and especially with the meaning of his
existence in time we talked. That being said, the question of the transition from state
newborn to that person remains. This passage is obviously progressive. But we can at least
say that in the first months of its existence, a newborn is not a person. A month seems to
me a reasonable time to allow parents to decide whether their baby should live. "
To eugenics relativism can add amalgam of Jewish and Roma genocide and factory farming.
The main argument to justify antisp?cistes this parallel is that many and many
contribution it, including remote or children deported performed this comparison by saying
that the Nazis treated Jews and Jewish "like animals" approximation has led a number of
Jews and Jewish to engage in the struggle for animal rights. However, and this
approximation antisp?cistes who are forced to admit, it is from them that a purely formal
inversion, which leads to a fundamentally different way to reconciliation.
This travesty of logic means that if "the Nazis treated Jews as animals," it is quite fair
to say that the way we treat animals is equivalent, ethically, the Jewish and Roma
genocide. Ethical relativism that is in our opinion a chasm to the ideological war led by
those who trivialize the genocide. Revisionist strategy does not necessarily need to
completely deny the Jewish and Roma genocide, it can be satisfied quite make it a "detail"
of history. This is what had once motivated the comparison between the bloody bombing of
Dresden by the Allies and genocide, a recurring theme in the revisionist. With the ethical
and logical antisp?cistes pirouette, historical relativism takes on another dimension.
Because if since humans feed so meaty, there is an "eternal Treblinka" in which billions
of people have died, the Armenian genocide, Jews, Roma, Tutsi, are reduced to the level of
detail and the ethical imperative suppose created the best of all subordinate to the
primary objective of stopping the consumption of meat meat, worst of all consider as a
fate to which humans are generally powerless.
The antisp?cistes who claim otherwise progressive or libertarian currents (it is
explicitly claiming that the fascist movement, which has also created some problems with
"progressive" 8 ) exclaim course by saying that they and their It is also a punishable
together, or they and they only reaffirm the Jewish and Roma genocide as a standard of
absolute horror by using this approximation. Hell is paved with good intentions ...
The most immediate and obvious result of such a comparison makes an outstanding service to
all those who trivialize the Holocaust. And are not guarantees some Jewish brandished by
CAL or PETA that change the game and mass effect such a reconciliation. Isaac Bashevis
Singer, author of the phrase "eternal Treblinka" used by antisp?cistes who develop this
thesis, is also part of an anti-materialist mystical religiosity explains the ease with
which it operates these reconciliations.
In contrast to this mystical vision of the Holocaust, materialistic currents within the
Jewish community, have always developed a materialist analysis of fascism, including
anti-Semitism, unlike such a mystical revisited the " original sin. " It is finally not
surprising that one of the "animal advocate" German highlighted by Patterson in his book,
Helmut Kaplan, gave an interview without complex in Fahnentr?ger German right-wing
newspaper to address this issue. Kaplan said the same, (this part is quoted highlight text
Patterson)
"One day our grandchildren will ask: Where were you during the Holocaust animals. What did
you do against these horrifying crimes? We can not offer the same excuse again that we do
not know. "
The antisp?cistes activists who define themselves as "anti-fascists" like the collective
Panthers rabid, are obliged to recognize the consequent fascist presence in animal rights
struggles, and their presence they denounce, recognizing that these struggles
"[...] Are riddled with the presence of activists and racist groups, homophobes and
fascists. "
But rather interrogate a relativist ideology that gives such a boulevard to the fascists,
and they consider that they
"This situation can have several causes, one being that struggles on animal issues are
completely ignored by the anti-capitalist activists, anarchists and antifascists, leaving
all the way to the dissemination of these noxious ideas without unitary and powerful
response. The other issue is that a large majority of this fight is for animal welfare and
not for animal liberation, partitioning this fight to fight hand without political purpose
or intersectionality and therefore no problem accepting the presence, support, funding
anyone on the grounds that not everything needs to be done and think that in order to
protect the animals. "
The claim that the approach in terms of animal liberation rather than animal welfare would
decompartmentalize this fight and create intersectionality to face the fascist offensive
seems totally wrong: the notion of "animal liberation "defended by antisp?cistes, ethical
relativism that allows their ideology is not only not a barrier to accepting without
question the presence, support, funding anyone on the grounds that everything must be done
and suggests that in order to protect animals, such a posture is instead the most logical
declination. And slippage we have seen the vast majority of "libertarian" groups have
historically adopted antisp?cistes positions that led to progressively reduce their
concrete action and political activity solely animalistic ground - even when they always
proclaim the will to oppose "any form of discrimination" - only confirms the logical trend
resulting from such ideological assumptions.
We can add to this ethical relativism towards racism the same ethical shortcuts with
respect to slavery, the domestication of animals being blithely compared to slavery.
Finally, the same diarrhea have been observed regarding the issue of feminism. Thus we
have been confronted with a locally antisp?ciste activist claimed, moreover antifascist
saying us that fascists could do "more serious than rape activist" ie kill his dog.
There is also the same ideological gaps around the issue of abortion, part of antisp?ciste
movement on behalf of the "defense of life", joining the anti-abortion arguments. Among
those of antisp?cistes which are in favor of abortion rights, or emphasize their feminist
or pro-feminist approach, however, found ideological ambiguities that open an avenue to
this ideological offensive. Thus the collective Panthers rabid, which is defined as
"Collective antisp?ciste, anti-sexist, anti-fascist for Animal Liberation", in its three
fundamental points "refusal and fight for the destruction of the earth, its criminal
exploitation: its colonization to its natural resources. Defense of all forms of life. "
The defense of life is just one of the central axes of ideological anti-abortions. If the
Panthers say rabid oppose fascists and anti-abortions, they open their ideological boulevard.
Such discourse is far from trivial, and demonstrate ideological shifts. Of course, among
those who claim antisp?cistes a number disapprove of such shifts, but they are the logical
consequence of antisp?cistes arguments brought to their ultimate consequence.
PartisanNEs theory three oppression: Patriarchy, racist system of domination and
capitalism / statism, we believe that antisp?ciste theory, far from ideologically and
practically strengthen our struggle against this triple oppression leads only sabotage by
failing to deliver involved hierarchical social relations of domination and exploitation.
We reach about a fellow in the American asset emancipation movements against the triple
oppression when he says:
"The central analogy with the civil rights movement and the women's movement has
banalisateur effect and is ahistorical. These two social movements have been initiated and
carried out by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by men or
generous Artists-white on their behalf. Both movements were built specifically around the
idea of claiming and reaffirm our common humanity in a society that had private and had
denied them. No civic rights activist or no feminist has never argued that "we are also
sentient beings." They argued that "We are also fully human." The doctrine of Animal
Liberation, far from extending this humanist dynamics, directly undermines. " 9
Libertarian communist project that we defend is based on the collective control over the
production and distribution of goods and services necessary for the satisfaction of human
needs, which obviously implies a reflection on resources. Reflections around the local
meat consumption in Western countries, due to the current needs of the market system, we
seem quite legitimate: they relate to the consequences of our choices of consumption and
production of natural resources, environment, ie the material conditions of our existence.
Ethical considerations that may start a vegetarian or vegan food individual practice, we
also seem to be quite legitimate, since they covered by individual ethics, and not a
shareholder project based on the imposition of a Food social norm on the basis of a
dangerous ethical relativism.
The antisp?ciste approach, for its part, takes not only a collective dimension, but highly
political, and in this sense, it is based on ideological foundations and carries a social
project that we adorned totally alien to anarchism.
Coordination of Anarchist Groups
January 2014
1 definition available on the site antisp?cistes Cahiers Lyon,
http://www.cahiers-antispecistes.org/spip.php?article13
2 Peatterson see Charles, Eternal Treblinka, Calmann Levy, 2007, see also the issue of
March-April 2002 of "The Animals 'Agenda' magazine on the topic, or the PETA campaign" The
Holocaust on Your Plate "(cf. http://www.masskilling.com/ which includes a traveling
exhibition featuring side by side pictures of Holocaust victims and victims of animal
exploitation, and a TV spot. See also the transcript PJ discussions on the issue at a
recent debate Summertime Question Animal,
http://www.question-animale.org/sites/default/files/ComparaisonAbattoirsAuschwitz.rtf
3 Amedeo Bertolo, power, authority, domination: a proposed definition
4 Bakunin, God and the State
5 Ibid
6 Ibid
7 Amedeo Bertolo, op. cit.
8 See Appendix text AIDA addressed to antisp?cistes specifications, expressing their
disagreement with the presence of right-wing activists in the association.9 Peter Staudenmaier, Communalism, March 2003
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