ANİMAL RiGHTS & THE CLASS STRUGGLE How should socialists respond to the politics of the animal rights movement? David Coen looks at some of the issues. course in dog psychology is offered by Harvard University. Ine global pe industry is huge - from gourmet foods to jewellery to day-care, and growing. Some canines may be having a 'dog's life' but counselling and support are now available. Other animals do not have it quite so good. But there are large and influential campaigns on a range of issues from hunting and factory farming to whaling. And these are beginning to represent themselves politically. In December, two animal rights activists were elected to the Dutch Parliament and they were present in London recently for the launch of Animals Count - an animal rights party. One of the most determined and arguably successful animal rights activities of recent years is the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign which prevented Cambridge University and Huntingdon Life Sciences from opening a primate research lab at the university. The campaign led New Labour to bring in specific provisions against animal rights protestors in the Serious Organised Crime & Police Act 2005, which extended the offence of 'economic sabotage' to effectively criminalise protest of any kind. Though SHAC and the Animal Liberation Front do not advocate violence, many on the left might question their methods, and while their determined campaign in the Huntingdon case stopped the building of a lab for animal testing and significantly slowed progress on others, the direct intervention of the state meant that these were partial and perhaps temporary victories, and it is easy to see that stopping animal experiments requires a political mobilisation which draws in much wider forces than the animal rights movement could achieve, despite the strong latent support in the population. Though this poses the limits of direct action as a strategy, we might pose the question differently in relation to the anti-war movement, which did have mass support: how is it, that despite some of the largest ever demonstrations and strong anti-war sentiment, the anti-war movement was unable to have any significant effect on Blair and Bush's attack on Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing war? Supplies, armaments and munitions were flown or shipped to Iraq without any significant effort to prevent them by protestors or any visible action by workers. Undoubtedly, some of the tactics used by the animal rights movement could have been used by the state to divide the anti war movement by branding such actions 'terrorist' and the usual condemnations of 'violence'. A further question, which needs to be answered, is what a successful mass campaign would look like and whether the left has any lessons to learn from the animal rights movement. Anti Science? One of the founder members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 was William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery campaigner. One of its influences was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who argued that the issue was not whether animals could be distinguished from humans by their inability to reason but whether they were capable of suffering. Over the course of 18 the 19th century the RSPCA became more influential in persuading governments to pass laws prohibiting cruelty to animals. The RSPCA's general approach is an animal welfare rather than animal rights one: it is permissible to use animals provided that no unnecessary suffering is caused. However many of the most vociferous campaigns against animal testing do so on the basis of an explicitly animal rights as opposed to an animal welfare position. Many of these activists are young, energetic and frustrated by the 'proceduralist approach on the left. In 1898 the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) was formed. Its main concern was working class sports such as bull baiting and cockfighting, though its mainly upper and middle class supporters appeared much less concerned with blood sports such as fox hunting. The lower orders were also assumed to be crueller to animals and there was the worry about the threat to the social and moral order because of the drinking and gambling that accompanied their sports. The BUAV was partly rooted in a longer tradition of romantic anti-industrialism and an idealisation of rural life by the intelligentsia and layers of the middle class, portrayed most recently in the
film Miss Potter. Their criticisms of factory production and the urbanisation that accompanies it, harked back to a pre-industrial age when, it appeared, that humans and animals had a more 'natural' relationship. By attributing human characteristics to animals, they obliquely argued out the battle between new and old attitudes to animals. Anti-industrialism was also reflected in opposition to the idea of scientific progress, favouring belief over reason and a general dislike of anything considered 'modern'. Nowadays it is the alleged anti science approach of those opposing animal experiments that causes sections of the left to dismiss them as potential allies. Animal Rights Though the concept of animal rights has an equally long philosophical pedigree, it was the publication in 1975 of Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation that marks the beginning of the contemporary debate about animal rights. Singer follows Bentham in arguing that reason or intelligence cannot form the basis for a claim to rights: rather any being with the capacity for suffering is deserving of consideration of its interests. Experiments can be justified if the benefit outweighs the harm done. Following the logic of his position, a human infant and a monkey could be used in any experiment that passed this test. If a human infant could not be used, then neither should a monkey. Leaving aside the philosophical issues about 'speciesism', , animal rights (as with human rights) are completely meaningless without a means to enforce them. Human rights in bourgeois law reside in the individual, not in the collective and the major capitalist countries frequently use the abstract notion of 'human rights' as a justification for attack. Animal liberation is not a class demand that would be enforced by a proletarian government though the abolition of commodity production would mean a socialist society would have a different relationship to the animal world. Science and capitalism Animal rights activists opposing the commodification of animals in the production process also necessarily come to understand something of the workings of the capitalist economy, in particular the ways in which the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class under the guise of aiding the progression of medicine or science. Though animal rights activists can sometimes be criticised for neglecting larger issues such as war, oppression and exploitation (though many are involved in other anti-capitalist activities) joint opposition to the efforts of the British state to criminalise political opposition can point to ways in which a shared understanding of capitalism can develop, giving the left the opportunity to mobilise wider anti- capitalist layers. Many of these activists are young, energetic and frustrated by the 'proceduralist' approach on the left. Their fundamentally anti-capitalist outlook is not one the left can ignore. The left sometimes takes its distance from the animal rights movement on the basis that the latter is largely opposed to scientific progress, while ignoring the 19 Some hardcore activisis pursue their beliefs by 'Whatever Means Necessa: fact that their opposition centres Tar.. on opposition to the profit-inspired misuse of animals under the guise of scientific research. A long-standing strain of Marxism understands science as somehow standing outside the class struggle, a neutral arbiter of truth and knowledge which can lend itself as easily to a worker's government as to the capitalist class; that history is capable of being 'fixed' by science and technology. Such confusion does not in general afflict the animal rights movement who seem to understand that 'scientific progress' is often the name given to the increased opportunities for profit resulting from animal experiments in the same way that, for example, genetic engineering is promoted as the means to end world hunger. Finally, there is the issue of the conditions in which mass action could prevent the ruling class taking us to war. If 'direct action' along the lines of the animal rights movement is open to the criticism that it depends on the heroism of individual actions as opposed to the difficult task of winning mass support, what would it take to win support within the trade unions for strikes, boycotts and bans along the lines of those which in the early 20th century held up supplies for the counter-revolutionary White army in the Soviet Union or for British troops in Ireland? Cautioning 'patience' to advocates of direct action is not an answer.