Letters: Pseudo-scientific? (2013)

Letters to the Editors from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pseudo-scientific?

Dear Editors

[Re Pathfinders, November] It is of interest, but sadly only to see how many and deep the misunderstandings are that plague the pseudo-scientific literature. That is unfortunate because articles like these contribute to divisiveness and hostility rather than promoting a search for a caring, supportive world that protects people from being exposed to violence.

The notion that socialism and democracy are somehow dependent on proving that chimpanzees are as peaceful as bonobos (a fantastical concept to anyone who knows both species) is completely absurd. Freedom and democracy depend on reality, not on some lovely fantasy of how we wish apes or humans would behave

I cannot imagine where you would get the idea that if there are some biological tendencies towards aggression, no one should be found guilty of war crimes. Frankly to spread such ideas seems to me deeply irresponsible.

Can I recommend that you read my book with Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence? It would dispel many of the ideas that you report in your article.

Richard Wrangham

Reply:
Professor Wrangham doesn’t seem to have read the article very closely, since it doesn’t say any of the things he thinks it says. It doesn’t say or imply that socialism depends on proving that chimpanzees are as peaceful as bonobos. Instead it disputes the claim that chimpanzee violence is innate, on the grounds that the evidence is both weak and hotly disputed by other scientists. If it is ‘pseudo-scientific’ to quote scientists who disagree with this view then we plead guilty.

The article does not indulge in wishful thinking about how humans ought to behave. Instead it questions the assumptions of those who seem to be guilty of ‘demonic’ wishful thinking, that is the defenders of innate aggression. Professor Wrangham may profess himself shocked that alleged biological tendencies could ever be used as a get-out-of-jail-free card for war criminals, but such alibis are the inevitable subtext of the debate and to wish away that unpleasant fact seems to us more irresponsible than highlighting it. Capitalism’s rulers are always keen to justify their system and its warlike ways, and will seize hungrily on the pronouncements of Professors Wrangham, Pinker and others to that end, whatever the evidence really says. Socialists meanwhile cannot be accused of the opposite ‘sin’, because we don’t claim that humans are innately peaceful, merely that we are innately adaptive. – Editors

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Don’t agree

Dear Editors

The editorial in the November issue of Socialist Standard mentions Le Guin’s Dispossessed in a positive light. I am always astounded that otherwise intelligent people with impeccable views on everything else can be so brainless on this subject. It is a vile book, constituting, regardless of whatever the intentions of the author might have been, the very zenith of anti-socialist propaganda. It describes a society not unlike what Marx called ‘barracks communism’, with ideologised (through, for example, Odo’s: ‘excess is excrement’) repressive egalitarianism. A (‘free-market’) Libertarian wanting to show that ‘any attempt at socialism/communism can inevitably only result in’ poverty and eradication of the individual could hardly do better than this for a masterpiece.

And there are logical problems. For example, if the syndics of Production and Distribution Coordination are chosen at fixed periods by lot, how is it possible that they constitute (as Le Guin through her characters say) a ‘bureaucracy’? Or, another: how did Sabul’s position come about? Was he elected by his fellows, or was he ‘down-posted’ from Production and Distribution Coordination? (Thus a sort of democratic centralism, or is it lottery-centralism?) And to those who think it’s a great story, we might also ask: what kind of model is this in which the new society is one materially so limited as to eternally demand never ending sacrifice in consumption and work, like on some from-scratch ‘intentional community’, which even Kropotkin knew to oppose.

Opposite to this, a truly excellent socialist story is Voyage from Yesteryear by James P Hogan, which takes place in a stateless free-access world, a story in which anarcho-communism (never called such) is victorious over the forces of Market and State. Unfortunately there are people who think with their knee reflex instead of their brains: they look up the author’s name in Wikipedia, see that later in life he adopted non-popular positions in relation to the topics covered by the buzzwords ‘Global Warming’, ‘HIV’, ‘Holocaust’, assume that he was simply a rightwing crank, that anything written by him is untouchable, and will not go near this fine book.

Name and email address provided

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Questions

Dear Editors

Here are one or two questions that come to mind that I would like answered.

1: What is the SPGB view on workers cooperatives?

2: What is the socialist response to the concept that this world is not just for we humans, but that we share it with other species. Is it their world too? Or are they there just to be used by humans?

3: I have some insurance policies and a bank account that pays me interest. Does that make me a capitalist?

4: There are many countries that call themselves “socialist”. Is there a nation that truly is socialist … or close to it?

Some of these questions may seem light hearted, but they are serious questions that came to me while reading your books and magazines.

Ian McRae, 

Dundee.

Reply:
Socialists have no problem with workers forming cooperatives if that’s the best way they can survive under capitalism. However we disagree with the sometimes-made claim that they can be a route to socialism because, aside from any political consideration, unless they are in a small market niche with no competition, they tend to be outcompeted by the brutal cost and wage-cutting tactics of conventional companies (for more on this, see our review of The Co-operative Alternative to Capitalism, page X).

We are not unsympathetic to the plight of other animal species and we imagine that socialism would take a more responsible view of their welfare than does capitalism, however we don’t have a sentimental view of nature and think that our first concern needs to be the human population, many of whom suffer worse than animals.

Your bank account would only make you a capitalist if you were able to live on it without working. Even then, this wouldn’t mean that you were a ‘bad person’. The distinction between worker and capitalist is economic, not moral.

There are no countries even close to socialism, since all have market systems, money, hierarchical state regimes and nationalist politics. –Editors.

Hoo R Ower Dumm Frenz? (1949)

From the March 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every few years well over a thousand men and women push themselves forward in an effort to get elected to parliament. The six hundred odd successful candidates assume the responsibility, so they would have us believe, of looking after the interests of us all. They place themselves before us as men and women of intelligence and integrity, who are best able to deal with the manifold problems of modern society. Of course, there is no shortage of these problems today. We humble members of the working class have no doubts what these problems are. In a world in which there is so much poverty, with its attendant evils, ill-housing, malnutrition, overwork, etc., and in which the threat of ever greater wars is always imminent, we have decided views about the relative importance of these problems.

But our legislators have different views. The abolition of war and poverty are apparently not items of paramount interest for these parliamentary pundits.

With the re-introduction of the pre-war practice whereby members may introduce private Bills for consideration by parliament, some of these individuals have had a recent opportunity of showing what they are really interested in. And how they have enjoyed themselves!

Altogether, 26 of them have prepared Bills and nine of these 26 have given up mankind in despair in favour of other members of the animal kingdom. The Daily Express (28/1/49) tells us about them and their doings.

Brigadier C. Peto (Conservative, Barnstaple) has turned his back on the problems of working class housing conditions in favour of better conditions for pussies and puppy dogs in pet shops.

Mr. J. A. Sparks (Labour, Acton) is believed to have a Bill for restricting blood sports but we are confident that he will not include the well known blood sport of compelling members of the working class to slaughter one another in millions in their master's wars

Mr. Seymour Cocks (Labour, Broxtowe) wants to abolish the hunting of deer, badgers, otters and hares. (Maybe he is after their votes, too.)

"Do not dock the horses* tails” is how it might be put by Sir Dimoke White (Conservative, Fareham), Please note "horses’ tails” not “workers’ wages.” These are but a few examples of the efforts of these Westminster political buffoons. The prize clown of the lot is undoubtedly Mr. Mont Follick (Labour, Loughboro) who really believes that a scheme of spelling reform (see example above) will help the chances of international peace.

We wonder; are we supposed to laugh or vomit? We have a feeling it will be the latter.

W. and G.

Horses and Men (1952)

A Short Story from the August 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The Manchester Guardian, in a series of articles dealing with the transport of horses for slaughter, to France and other parts of the Continent, excited a good deal of horrified attention from humanitarians and animal lovers who protested in letters to the Press and by questions in Parliament The articles described the pitiful journey of these animals in overcrowded railway trucks, and told how they were led to their death along halls filled with the smell and groans of their dying fellows. Impelled by a deep sense of gratitude at the altruistic nobility of the human beings who had espoused his cause we have received a request from a horse to publish the result of an investigation he has conducted into the lives of mankind. We do so gladly.

Altruism Unlimited

I began my investigations early one morning when, seeing huge crowds making for some stairs which seemed to lead to the bowels of the earth, I decided to follow and find out what I could. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I saw these men and women jostling each other to get to some monsters with strangely small mouths and illuminated eyes. Everyone was trying to put some pieces of metal into the monsters’ mouths and those who succeeded received what looked to be a square piece of leaf. I thought at first that 1 had stumbled across some strange religious rite, and seeing the printing on the leaf I thought it was some motto whereby the people who propitiated these monsters received absolution. After getting the pieces of leaf they made their way towards a small gate where a man in uniform whom I at first took to be an acolyte, cut pieces of leaf out with a pair of horse clippers. “Ah,” I thought, “ they are going into an inner temple.” I tried to follow but when I reached the gate the man in uniform refused to let me through. I had no pieces of metal with which to propitiate the monsters so I jumped over the barrier and found myself on a platform marked “Inner Circle.” It appeared that I had penetrated into the very holy of holies. But I found by eavesdropping that these people were all going on a journey. The train arrived and pandemonium broke loose. Pushing, shoving and wrestling, every man and woman on the platform tried their best to enter the train (I did this successfully as my four legs proved an asset.) It was so jammed that it was barely possible to move or breathe. The train started with such a jerk that we should have fallen had it not been for the fact that so crowded was it that there was no room to topple over. After a few minutes the train stopped and again pandemonium reigned. People pushed and fought to alight. Suddenly a frightening thought froze my blood. Was it possible that we were being taken to the slaughter and that that was why there was this panic. Using my four legs I made my escape and dashed furiously up into the street. I made some enquiries about these strange phenomena. What I learned filled me with wonderment. These people were not going to the slaughter but to their work.

My investigations into transport being as I thought completed I walked along the street alert for any phenomena which needed investigation. I came to a place called Victoria. In the forecourt were hundreds of men all dressed alike and being shouted at by other men with stripes on their sleeves. At the first shout the men arranged themselves briskly into long rows. Each carried a pack on his back (just like a horse) and held a long metal tube attached to a carved piece of wood, firmly against his shoulder. At another shout the men marched off and I followed. Again I found myself on a platform and again I was almost carried off my feet as the men rushed to get into the train standing alongside. Soon the train was packed with the men who were singing and whistling all sorts of tunes. The train moved off and after several hours we arrived at a quayside where we were all embarked on to a ship. It was a very rough journey and I was glad when it was over. Had I but known what was to face me my gladness might have been tempered. We were all loaded—this is a strange word which is used to describe goods being put on vehicles for transport and is also used for human beings in the same context—into huge carts drawn by mechanical monsters. The men were by this time tired and did not sing as much as when they left Victoria. After some hours of travel we heard from the distance peals of heavy thunder and saw lightning and flames leaping into the sky. We were soon in the thick of it and all the men jumped off the carts and began running for cover while huge birds dropped eggs which exploded as they fell. Men collapsed to the ground all around me with great bleeding holes in their bodies and the air was filled with the stench of blood and the groans of the dying. Terrified I hid under one of the carts. Had I been able to I would have run away. I lay there waiting for the butcher to come with his knife and carve the choicest joints from the bodies that were lying about. 1 felt sure that we had been transported for slaughter so that the meat could be sold for the benefit and profit of their masters. 1 waited for some hours but no butcher arrived. Only men carrying litters on to which they loaded the bodies and moved them into white trucks with red crosses painted on them. I was told afterwards that these trucks should never be molested out of respect for the dead and dying. It appears that among human beings the living get no respect or consideration.

By the intervention of providence I made my escape and found myself back in England. For days thereafter I could not speak of my adventures so stunned was I by what I had seen. Human beings were protesting vigorously at the treatment meted out to horses and here were human beings treated almost in the same way.

I recovered my composure and by dint of much enquiry discovered that what I had seen was an almost regular occurrence in some part or other of the Globe. Men called it war. The dead bodies were not eaten, for this, I was told, would be immoral and cannibalistic. They were either buried or left to rot

My horse friends with whom I discussed this would not believe me. One suggested, and this seemed the most popular belief, that I had mistaken jackasses for human beings. But my oldest friend agreed with me when I insisted I was not mistaken. “You can’t be wrong,” he neighed, “it couldn’t have been jackasses. Only human beings could invent such things."

With this I concluded my investigation into the life of human beings, and I am more than ever convinced that Man is the “noblest work of God.” For who other than noble unselfish creatures would concern themselves with the sufferings of others when they themselves were subjected to the same treatment. There are many other facets of human life I would like to investigate and perhaps at some later date you will give me the courtesy of your columns in which I could publish the results of my enquiries.

A. Sarna.

A day at the circus (1988)

A Short Story from the November 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

On a breezy March day my two youngest children and I went to the circus. We had been given vouchers to obtain half price tickets and as live circuses are now a rarity my children were keen to go. To avoid being late we decided to eat at one of the fast food places which have sprung up everywhere in the last few years.

The eating place (it would be an abuse of language to call it a restaurant) was gaudily decorated, noisy and overcrowded and although I managed to find seats for Angela and Jermaine, I had to stand throughout the meal.

I was struck by how young the staff were; labour costs were obviously being kept to a minimum by avoiding having to pay adult rates The orders were shouted through to the kitchen from the self-service counter and. in a matter of seconds, cardboard containers slid down a chute from the kitchen to the servery. There were no plates, knives or forks - everything was disposable. Hot drinks were not available so we settle for "root beer" which looked and tasted like weak disinfectant.

Whilst we ate the teenage staff, dressed in brightly coloured uniforms and paper hats, constantly moved around the room sweeping up and clearing away the vast amounts of rubbish generated by the disposable containers.

The food was out of this world: it tasted unearthly! We ate square lumps of fish type food in doughy rolls that tasted like chewy plastic. The whole process of ordering, paying for and eating this unsatisfying "junk food" took less than twenty minutes but cost nearly as much as a proper meal at a restaurant. We left, consoling ourselves with the thought that the next meal would taste wonderful by comparison The fast-food places epitomise capitalist values; money is taken from the customers in the shortest time possible and the fact that the product is unpalatable and lacking in nutrition doesn't matter as long as it is profitable.

We caught the 'bus to the circus ground The "Big Top" was situated on a patch of muddy, waste ground; the booking office was a caravan adjacent to it. Everyone in the queue appeared to have half-price vouchers; perhaps that was why the prices were so high the issue of vouchers all over town gave the customers the appearance of getting in cheaply but the tickets, even at half price, were more expensive than cinema seats.

The "heated" Big Top had two electric heaters. each about the size that would be used to heat a small bedroom and we were thankful that the afternoon, although quite windy, was not colder.

We bought a programme with more misprints than the Guardian, which stated that it was the circus's first British tour. Certainly the East European-sounding names of the artistes made it all sound quite exotic but their North of England accents contradicted this somewhat.

At the bottom of the programme there was a note stating that some towns refused to let circuses perform because of cruelty to animals, but claimed that all of their animals were well cared for. Cruelty or neglect of circus animals is usually not the result of individual culpability or sadism but the need to operate as cheaply as possible in order to make a profit.

A sudden gust of wind caused some of the tent props to collapse, rocking the Big Top and knocking over two or three tiers of seats which, fortunately, were still empty. The scene shifters rushed to shore it up again. More recently four people were taken to hospital when 200 seats collapsed at a circus at Tunbridge Wells, safety always takes second place when profits are threatened

After a delay and an only partly coherent explanation announced over the Tannoy system the circus began. Some clowns, dressed as Disney cartoon favourites ran around the sawdust covered, muddy ring in old, patched outfits spoilt further by mud stains. The jugglers came on next, one of whom was the programme seller. The old adage about being Jack-of-all trades and master of none certainly applied here as she dropped one of her rings and her exclamation of annoyance was clearly audible. Next came the Apache chief (who judging by his accent probably came from Leeds) and his fire pony. After a flame swallowing act the pony was supposed to jump over a bar on which rags, soaked with methylated spirits and ignited, were tied. The pony refused and the Apache said despairingly to the Ringmaster: 'It's no good, he won't do it.'

To cover up the confusion the baby camel and llama were brought on quickly and scampered round the ring. Both of these animals smelled worse than a politician's promise and. for a few minutes, we regretted having ringside seats. The Ringmaster took a turn as a magician, performing all the tricks that can be seen in second-rate amateur talent shows. Then it was the turn of a "ghost" to torment the clown who turned out to be the "Apache" chief, his hands still blackened from the flame swallowing act and making an incongruous contrast to his white makeup and red nose.

After a girl performed an act with pythons, there was an interval in which we bought home-made popcorn which tasted like sweetened rubber but was much more expensive We were served by the two jugglers who had changed into overalls.

Following the interval the artists who had performed the act with the pythons had knives thrown at her. But this was no ordinary knife-throwing act; the knife thrower was the only member of the circus troupe who looked over twenty one. He looked much nearer to seventy one. was white haired, bowed at the shoulders and had no teeth. The knives were thrown from a distance of about four feet and missed the girl by nearly as big a margin so that, unlike most knife- throwing acts, there was no need to feel apprehensive for her safety.

A trapeze act, no more than eight or nine feet from the ground, performed by one of the jugglers was followed by more clowns. All ten acts, announcements and moving of props had been performed by about half a dozen people My children had enjoyed the circus because it had been a new experience to see a live show instead of the television and the cinema. I had enjoyed the comedy of errors, but it was tinged with nostalgic sadness that live shows cannot compete with the vast sums of money that go into making up the glossy entertainment of the mass media and the huge profits to be made from them.

The youngsters who performed did so cheerfully and worked hard to entertain the public, the fact that they had to try and master every circus act (not always successfully) is an indictment of the capitalist system in which everything is reduced to a commodity and has to be commercially successful to survive.

Under socialism, live shows will be performed for the pleasure that they give; it will no longer be necessary to exploit teenagers to make a profit.

Carl Pinel

Dumb, defenceless, tortured (1988)

From the January 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Animal rights is an emotive subject and concerns a growing movement. It's no longer cranky and it's not going to fade away so what are the facts and where do socialists stand on the issue?

One issue of the animal rights campaign which affects every one of us is the exploitation of animals for food:

The human attitude to living creatures exemplified by factory farming inevitably finds its parallel in our own level of responsiveness to our own species. A genuine concern for life should extend to all creatures. (Assault and Battery: Mark Gold)

"Factory farming" is the term used to describe everything from milk production to battery eggs. In economic terms it can be defined as an attempt to attain the most efficient ratio of growth time to feed cost. In agricultural terms it means animals are viewed as machines:

Cows must go through yearly pregnancies in order to yield up their milk, cream and cheese. Hardly any cows in dairy herds are allowed to suckle their calves for more than three days. (Voiceless Victims: Rebecca Hall)

In addition cows are subject to genetic breeding through either artificial insemination or embryotomy. But what happens to the calf after its removal from the mother? It may well end up being processed by the infamous veal industry. The pale, tender, white meat much prized by the connoisseur is arrived at by rearing these animals in small wooden crates on a liquid milk diet, deliberately deficient in iron to ensure the unnatural colour of the meat. Rennet, the enzyme extracted from the stomachs of calves, is used in the production of hard cheese.

Pigs, which are as intelligent as cats or dogs, may spend their entire lives in dry sow stalls - a narrow metal stall preventing the sow turning around or lying down properly and where the pig may be permanently chained to the floor. Tail docking and darkness are employed to deal with the problem of aggression created through the boredom and discomfort of this restricted lifestyle. Females may become victims of the graphically named "rape racks” to ensure impregnation. In confinement the pig's instincts such as nesting, rooting about and the maternal instinct have no outlet for expression. Castration of male pigs may also take place because of the fear of "tainted meat".

What about eggs and chickens? Well, for a start, “farm fresh" and "country fresh" eggs are a myth. About 90 per cent of the eggs sold in the UK come from hens confined in battery cages. They are "factory fresh” eggs. Hens in battery cages cannot fly, perch, nest, scratch, stretch or walk. The average wingspan of a hen is 32 inches. The average battery hen will share a cage 18 inches by 20 inches with five other birds. There is a natural pecking order among chickens, to counteract which chickens may be given spectacles to reduce their field of vision. To minimise damage among the stock, debeaking may take place routinely. Battery hens which are no longer economically productive are sold off to be used in soup, pies and other convenience foods as they are fit for little else. Male chicks are the natural casualties of the egg industry, of course. Economically useless, they are killed off at around a day old by crushing, gassing or suffocation, or they may be made into pet food.

Animals and poultry, at the end of their short, miserable lives, are transported, sometimes over thousands of miles to be slaughtered. Live transportation of animals saves on refrigeration and packing costs. As a general rule of animals in transit, those with the least commercial value suffer most. Humane slaughter is another myth of the meat industry. Animals are stunned in different ways according to species. The general rule is that “the equipment is required to leave the animal with its heart still beating in order that the blood shall pump from the body to produce meat which has a minimum of blood in it" (ibid). Cattle, for example, will be led to the stunning box where they are shot by a captive bolt pistol supposed to render the animal insensible to pain. In practice, around 30 per cent of the animals will be fully conscious when the side of the box opens, the animal rolls out and is hoisted by its hind legs to have its throat cut and be bled out.

Workers in slaughterhouses are usually paid on piece rates which obviously militates against any great degree of time or care being taken over stunning. Sheep have to have electric tongs applied to the sides of their heads for seven seconds or longer in order to effectively stun. Anything less and they may be paralysed but fully conscious or improperly stunned and come round as they hang upside down waiting to have their throats cut.

Whether or not socialists are vegetarians, they can still recognise the horrific suffering and concentration camp conditions of the factory farm. Where we differ from reformist organisations is in our treatment of the problem. We do not view it in isolation from the cause. The disgustingly inhumane factory farm system propped up by the fantasy world of advertising is one aspect of an economic system concerned only with making profit, a system where all life is cheap and will always be a secondary consideration in the drive to make profits. Not only humans suffer under capitalism.

Cathy Gillespie

The Last Word: The right to eat landowners (1997)

From the August 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The good old English sport of sending hungry hunting hounds to chase aristocrats through the woods, catch them and rip them to pieces, has been slow to take off as a popular pastime. Despite claims that these predatory parasites are a foul rural presence, serving only to infect the countryside with their conceited greed and indolence, it has been hard to find dogs with sufficient brutality to enjoy the so-called sport. Those who favour such hunts claim that it is nothing more than a healthy rural tradition, misunderstood by town-dwellers, and that ripping duchesses and viscounts to shreds is the most humane way to rid nature of those who have only survived historically by plundering and murdering others. The Royal Society for the Protection of Useless Aristocrats has been long split on the issue, with one section accepting that such blood sport is "just a bit of harmless fun", while others prefer the idea of culling — or permanent quarantine in the House of Lords. 

This laboured account would be funnier were it not for the harsh reality that rich, privileged, barbaric bullies, most of whom are brutalised at birth by hereditary right and public-school conditioning, do indeed defend their right to chase around the countryside with packs of hounds in order to savage and tear apart defenceless animals. Their callous defence is mounted in the name of sport. And because it is traditional for these parasitical killers to dress up in the costumes of their class and indulge their pleasure in watching deer, foxes and other animals being ripped apart, they respond with well-rehearsed cries of arrogant immunity to humane behaviour when their ritualised sadism is opposed. 

I happened to be wandering through Hyde Park last month when this distasteful rabble of blood-sport enthusiasts gathered to demonstrate their right to be human vultures. A stench of hypocrisy pervaded the polluted city air as they cried for Freedom—not for their fellow humans, but for their cruel "right" to indulge in a sport of supreme inequality. The freedom of the armed hunters and horse-backed chinless wonders with their packs of hounds to pick on animals which stand no chance in opposition to them is not simply about sick behaviour. More than that, it illuminates the very descent into "the law of the jungle" which such people define as freedom. It is the same freedom which allows the very land on which we live, and the earth from which we are fed, to be owned and controlled by a minority of parasitical grabbers who believe that it would be the height of effrontery to invade their freedom by letting the earth belong to the people who inhabit it.

These depraved beings, who rejoice in their right to inflict pain on animals, are in the same class and historic tradition as those who proclaim the inviolable right to cast the peasant off their land and into destitution and starvation. The same haters of freedom who smashed down the communal utopia of the Diggers when those early communists sought to hold the land in common as a store of wealth for all; the same bullies who until a century ago enjoyed the propertied right to flog peasants and rape their daughters, and still today treat those who work on the land as if they are indebted to the landowners who steal the fruits of their labour. Looking at this savage minority of ruthless parasites, bleating their message of outrage against those reformists (destined to parliamentary defeat) who dared question their freedom to kill for pleasure, it was hard not to wish on them the fate of a frightened cornered fox, surrounded by a pack of dogs trained for the kill. 

But that is not the socialist way. Why should we lower ourselves to their brutal customs? As Shelley reminded us: "We are many, they are few." They are not worth the bullets which it would take to shoot them. Nor are they important enough to lead us from our hostility to the cause of violence, however guilty the victim has been conditioned to become. No the aristocrats need not fear our blood sports; the victory of our consciousness of human solidarity over theirs of class oppression will be reward enough for us. 

But look what these parasites are doing to the land. They spray it with chemical pesticides, killing off whole species of birds, butterflies and plant life in their quest for profits. They have fed cattle upon cheap and lousy diets, creating the BSE crisis and whole varieties of food adulteration which makes us and our children all the potential victims of their profit-lust. They have dumped millions of tons of soil into the rivers which pollute the water which we are charged to drink. They have pursued, in the name of efficient "factory farming", the most obscene practices of cruelty to animals which are tortured for the sake of making a few more pounds for their avaricious owners. They have contracted out farm management to City firms which seek to push down agricultural wages, casualise skilled farm work, thrown wage-slave-farm-workers onto the scrap-heap of the unemployed, and destroy whole rural areas in the name of agribusiness. 

The landowners, who protest for their freedom to enjoy themselves in exhibitions of collective brutality, remain free to rape and vandalise the countryside. As Graham Harvey, the agriculture adviser to The Archers (of all things) has written in his incisive new book, The Killing of the Countryside, "they [the landowners] favour a countryside devoted entirely to industrial-scale food production, with the products traded on world commodity markets in exactly the same way as coffee and copper . . . Since this 'progressive' view of farming is supported by big business and the City, it is the one most likely to prevail. If so, the current losses of birds and flowers from our landscape will turn out to be merely the first casualties in a long process of attrition." 

The beneficiaries of this rural plunder are the very few. One percent of the population owns half the land in Britain and two percent owns three-quarters of it. A mere 600 landowners own half the land in Scotland. These capitalist-farmers are subsidised by huge grants to support their manipulation of the market. They receive millions of pounds and euros in return for taking land out of cultivation so as to keep profits up. 

A horsy woman of uncertain age, with a voice like Ann Widdecombe and a designer-label outfit, approached me as I strolled through the Hyde Park demonstration and asked me if I would sign her petition to save traditional country sports. I asked her whether she had ever tried to emphasise with a sensate being chased by howling dogs and threatened with being ripped apart. "Oh, you're obviously a socialist do-gooder," she spat, as she drifted towards the next recruit. Which, as a contrast to a capitalist do-harmer, is not the worst thing in the world to be.

                                                                                                                                        Steve Coleman

Livestock liberation (1979)

From the June 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Were Socialists an endangered species, a society for our protection would soon emerge, for there is no shortage of people ready to deplore the exploitation of, and cruelty to, the four-legged and feathered in our midst. Recently, a group of animal welfare and protection societies combined into the General Election Co-ordinating Committee for Animal Protection (GECCAP). Now is the time, they claim, to "put animals into politics". They asked those interested in animal welfare to seek an assurance from all General Election candidates that they would support action on animal welfare, and to ensure that all MPs returned in the new Parliament were aware of the strength of the animal welfare lobby. 

The next government must accept its responsibility for animal welfare. We hope that MPs of all parties will press the next government to set up an independent Council for Animal Welfare—there is urgent need for legislative reform in all our areas of concern.

But successive legislation on maltreatment of animals has not contained the problem, which spreads and takes on new forms, is global in extent, and ranges from deliberate cruelty and exploitation to indifference and ignorance. Is it surprising that in a society whose basis is the exploitation of one section of humanity by another, that the same attitudes reveal themselves in the treatment of animals? Just as members of the working class are regarded primarily as mere productive and service units—"factory hands", "staff' , "labourers", "machinists", "assemblers", "typists", "domestics", so animals are primarily commodities produced for buying and selling, and the fact that they are able to suffer discomfort and pain becomes secondary to the realisation of profit.

CAGES FOR ANIMALS—BOXES FOR WORKERS

Modern farming has little in common with the cosy image derived from our nursery rhyme books. Capitalism draws all forms of production into its orbit, undermining and destroying traditional methods. Stock rearing has produced the factory farm. Battery hens are kept four or more in a cage 15in x 19in, where they spend day and night on steeply sloping wire floors, unable to stretch their wings and legs. Veal calves are kept in individual cubicles or multiple calf pens where movement is severely restricted. They are maintained on slatted floors and fed exclusively on milk substitute liquid (although their ruminant stomachs crave roughage) so that their flesh will not lose its pale colour. Pigs stand on concrete floors, in total or semi-darkness day and night, and pregnant sows are kept permanently in cubicles unable even to turn around. To prevent epidemics, animals incarcerated in such conditions require routine doses of drugs which can be transmitted to the consumer.

The same callous treatment occurs in the transport of animals for slaughter or further fattening. Cattle sent to mainland Europe or North Africa are crammed into open transporters, exposed to extremes of temperature, for long journeys by road and sea; sometimes left unwatered, unfed. Members of the working class who endure rush hour travel in buses, trains, and underground, will know the feeling. 

But bad living conditions are not suffered by animals only. Look around the world and see the shanty towns, tenements, back-to-back slums, tower blocks, and jerry built council and private housing estates. The majority of the working class live and die in. cramped, overcrowded, unhealthy conditions, lacking privacy or quiet, and often in an environment of depressing ugliness. There are some workers who can negotiate a level of wages that enables them to live in some degree of comfort, rather as the race-horse or pedigree breeding animal may be housed in special quarters. More than a century of agitation and legislation have not however eradicated cramped and inadequate living conditions for the majority of humans.

Yet it would seem a simple matter to provide comfortable living conditions for people—and for animals. The arguments against doing so are couched in accountant's jargon—alternative methods are dismissed as "uneconomic", "too labour intensive", "not viable", "unprofitable". Members of the working class hardly need reminding that resistance to higher wages is the first principle in the code of every employer. Economic self-interest and competition override all finer feelings.

WHOSE BEST FRIEND?

The single largest industry in the world today is the killing industry and enormous quantities of raw materials and human energy are poured into the manufacture of weapons of destruction. In a civilisation where people can be persuaded to don uniforms and fight and kill each other—and where such action is justified and glorified—is it any wonder that there are people who justify killing animals for fun?

Practices involving the needless slaughter of animals include the hunting of threatened species for the luxury fur trade so that Madam can parade in rare pelts. Experiments on animals to assess testing cosmetics and other non-medical products. Some of the experiments in the realms of Behavioural Research are so bizarre one must question whether the scientists concerned require behavioural investigation. Many psychological experiments involve subjecting the animal to severe deprivation, abject terror, or inescapable pain. A "will to live" experiment forced animals to swim non-stop until they gave up and allowed themselves to drown. How relevant is this work to humans?

Most humans feel an affinity to creatures that live and breathe as ourselves, and many humans take a delight in animal companionship. But even in the treatment of pets, where the motive is not profit and exploitation, we find many aspects of the neurosis and sickness of capitalist society. The novelty of a pet wears off and unwanted cats and dogs are callously abandoned. Some pets are used as a status symbol with the docking of tails, the clipping and dyeing of coats, to suit the owner's vanity or whim. Selective breeding takes place, especially of dogs, in order to emphasise some feature which appeals to the eye of the breeder but is biologically damaging to the animal. Guy the gorilla—a social animal—died in 1978 after thirty years in a cage in London Zoo. Was his confinement consistent with a regard for animals?

PUT SOCIALISM INTO POLITICS

Can there be an explanation, a solution? Capitalism is a society where the ownership of wealth production is concentrated in the hands of a minority, and where the ethos of competition and self interest permeates all social relations. Change that foundation to one where production is determined by the needs of society, where economic competition ceases to exist, where the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled and people will live in harmony and co-operation—with each other as well as with other species.

There the analogy between the treatment of the working class and animals ends, for while the latter must rely on the goodwill of human society, members of the working class can and must look to themselves to solve their problems by organising politically.

The human race and society are not superior to, or apart from, nature but a product of the universal process of evolution. As the only living creatures on this planet capable of consciously changing the environment and with an insight in to the laws of nature we have a special interest in protecting and conserving the earth which is our means of life. Such an outlook will permeate socialist society—a true respect for our environment and fellow living creatures.

Alice Kerr

Man and the Natural World (1987)

Book Review from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keith Thomas: Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Penguin, 1984)

In his book Keith Thomas surveys the changing view of nature in England between 1500 and 1800. He uses a wide variety of contemporary sources to show what people thought about the landscape and its flora and fauna. He makes the point that whereas:

Nowadays one cannot open a newspaper without encountering some impassioned debate about culling grey seals or cutting down trees in Hampton Court or saving an endangered species of wild animal.

Only a few hundred years ago the idea that human cultivation was something to be resisted rather than encouraged would have been unintelligible.

What was it that altered the way people view the natural world? The author's answer is that although the intellectual potential for concern for the natural world had always existed, the attitude only flourished with changes in the way society organised its production. Talking about the emergence of the animal rights movement, Thomas says:

the triumph of the new attitude was closely linked to the growth of towns and the emergence of an industrial order in which animals became increasingly marginal to the processes of production.

Similarly, the growth of towns led to a new longing for the countryside and the progress of cultivation fostered a taste for weeds, mountains and unsubdued nature. Even then, the concern did not extend to the point where actual human well-being was threatened (for example, butchers whose livelihood depended on slaughtering animals did not share the new compassion) which goes a long way towards explaining why even today when many people are concerned about animal welfare, river pollution and rainforest depletion and so, the problems still persist.

The world's resources are not owned by everybody. They are owned by a small minority who use nature to produce goods to be sold in order to make profits. Production for profit means that costs must be kept as low as possible. In this atmosphere the cheapest methods of production must be used and the cheapest methods are rarely those which have a minimal impact on nature. (Take battery farming for instance, which is a direct outcome of the search for higher profits).

As long as production is carried on for making profits and not for needs the same problems of pollution, resource depletion and species extinction will remain. But the message of Keith Thomas' book is that peoples' ideas and outlooks can and do change and the fact that more and more people are becoming concerned about the way the environment is abused is encouraging. But campaigning for new laws and more conservation areas is not the answer. We need to get rid of a society where a small minority can manipulate nature for their own ends and replace it with one where we all have a real say in how nature is used.

John Morgan

Meat Into Veg (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strange how cultural ideas evolve, or don’t. As far back as records go, four thousand years ago in India, people were arguing about vegetarianism versus meat farming. How one should treat animals depended on how one saw them, and this in turn depended on one’s practical experience of them. The pantheist view of them as sentient beings with ‘souls’ clashed directly with the more down-to-earth farmers’ view of them as brainless kebabs on legs. With the rise of monotheism came an anthropocentric view of nature and animals which has persisted ever since. The Christians repudiated the notion that any non-human creature had a ‘soul’, thus suffering was impossible and any treatment was justifiable. Since then the debate has moved from ‘souls’ to ‘intelligence’ but science for all its advances has not really resolved the question how one should regard, and by implication treat, non-human species. If anything it has blurred whatever species distinctions did exist. Chimpanzees make and use tools, parrots can invent word-phrases, dogs can feel a sense of injustice, and rats can get depressed.

The debate is likely to re-heat. While many parts of today’s developing world are rapidly increasing their meat consumption in aspiration of Western living standards, advanced capitalist countries are coming to just the opposite conclusion. After the success of the pan-European smoking ban, and imminent plans to tax sugar products in an effort to fight obesity, attention is now turning to another key ingredient of the power food and sedentary lifestyle equation responsible for so much pressure on health services.

As the global meat industry grows, the pressure is mounting. To feed the world’s population on a western meat diet would take 5 planets because it is inherently such an inefficient use of land. It is also reportedly responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, prompting the UN to brand meat production as bad as fossil fuels. Following recommendations from the 2007 Stern report the UN is pushing for a wholesale dietary reduction (‘UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet’, Guardian, 2 June). There are already almost ten farm animals for every human alive and the figure is set to double by 2050 while the human population increases by a mere third (See here). Reaction against this blatantly unsustainable growth is surely not an if but a when.

One indicator of the force of the propaganda campaign now getting started is the tendency of some adherents or opponents to overstate or distort the arguments. Never shy of a controversial cover page, New Scientist clearly felt unable to resist doing so with a recent headline grabber ‘What happens if we all quit meat? Why eating greens won’t save the world’ (17 July). But if readers were hoping for a vindication of the meat lifestyle they were in for a disappointment, because the magazine did nothing of the sort. Instead it provided the same damning statistics that it had done on many other occasions, with the rather paltry proviso that there might be a place for a few scrawny chickens living on kitchen scraps and perhaps a few goats here and there on small fractions of marginal land that could not be used for grain crops.

But what of this claim that ‘eating greens’ would save the world? Are there vegetarians so self-obsessed that they go around telling everyone that a soya chunk casserole is the road to earthly salvation? Well, it’s possible. Lierre Keith, a dispirited ex-vegan, seems to have been one of them. She describes the disillusion that drove her to become a born-again carnivore and write a book attacking the very ‘earth-saving’ ideas she had apparently subscribed to for 20 years: “... a desperate and all-encompassing longing to set the world right... to save the planet... to feed the hungry...” (introduction to The Vegetarian Myth, 2009). But more fool her for such grandiose illusions in the first place. Meat reduction could be part of the solution, but it’s not the solution, as any veggie with their finger on the pulse would readily admit.

The Vegetarian Society does argue that meat reduction would reduce carbon emissions, but does not claim that such a lifestyle will ‘feed the hungry’. Just as well, because land freed from meat production would probably not be used for grain production but more likely for biofuels, since engines are owned by people with money while empty bellies are owned by people with no money and who are otherwise known as ‘ineffective demand’. A meat-free diet can’t change this. A capitalist-free diet could.

What will become of the meat and dairy industry in socialism? At present the socialist case focuses necessarily on the emancipation of the human species from capitalist-induced oppression and suffering, while the ethical question of how we should regard and treat animals remains as one of the iceberg of other issues submerged below the waterline. What is clear to socialists if to nobody else is that humanity’s relationship to nature was never really anthropocentric but in fact ‘oligocentric’. Nature and everything in it including the vast majority of the human species existed for the sole purpose, use and disposition of the few members of the ruling elites. In the view of those elites, we humans were simply clever animals. Once this highly destructive oligocentric principle is overthrown, a new ethical framework will inevitably emerge in relation to resource exploitation. Quite what this will be and whether it will become genuinely anthropocentric or alternatively expand to encompass considerations beyond the species barrier is at present an open question. If socialists expect a large-scale meat industry they will have to face the fact that there is no ‘ethical’ way to do this. The New Scientist article points out that free-range farming is the most inefficient method both in terms of land use and greenhouse gas emissions, and argues that intensive factory farming is the only logical choice.

No reasonable person today really questions the fact that animals, or at least farmed animals, are capable of fear and pain. Most people do not visit abattoirs nor do they really want to know what goes on in them, yet there is an unspoken knowledge behind the sterile and sanitized supermarket packaging. As the Nobel Prize winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer put it in The Letter Writer (1968), speaking of factory farming: ‘In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.’ The rise in demand for ‘cruelty-free’ products in Western countries shows that, given the luxury of choice, people prefer not to be responsible for inflicting such suffering.

At all events, without a global revolution in the way society collectively owns and controls its resources people are never going to get the luxury of choice over this or any other resource question. Unless and until the welfare and humane treatment of humans is first attended to the question of the ethical treatment of animals must remain an issue waiting for its moment. They still shoot people, don’t they?

PJS

Food For Thought (2008)

Book Review from the April 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bob Torres: Making a Killing. AK Press

Some Socialists are vegetarians, but others are not. We have never seen a reason to take a stand on this issue as a party, however strongly some individual members may feel. In this book, though, Bob Torres makes a political case for veganism, in keeping with his support for social anarchism.

Torres begins by accepting a Marxian economic analysis of capitalism, as commodity production involving exploitation. But he then goes on to claim that animals perform unwaged labour and are super-exploited living commodities. In Marxian economics, however, they are a part of the means of production, i.e. of what Marx called “constant capital”, which does not create new value but merely transfers its value to the product. Just as slavery involved some humans being the property of others and hence treated just as means to the end of the owners, so animals are under the power of humans. They are bought and sold, kept and killed in appalling conditions, experimented on, and used to provide milk, meat and eggs. This is speciesism, he says, integrated into society as much as racism once was (though note that there are separate species with identifiable characteristics, but no distinct races).

The ‘animal rights’ movement comes in for heavy criticism. For one thing, it is dominated by large organisations that employ professional activists earning high salaries. As such, it can be co-opted by the meat and animal products industry. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has even given awards to someone who invented a more ‘efficient’ kind of slaughterhouse.

In contrast, Torres argues, the advocacy of animal rights needs to become part of a wider movement that challenges all hierarchy, domination and exploitation, whether of other humans, animals or nature. We do not need to eat meat or animal products in order to live, therefore we should not do so. Vegetarianism is not sufficient, since the production of both milk and eggs involves cruelty (e.g. cows must constantly be kept pregnant in order to provide milk). Veganism, which involves making no use of animal products at all, ‘must be not only the foundation and baseline of any movement to end the domination of animals, but also the daily practice of anyone who seeks to live their life free of all domination and hierarchy’.

There can be no dispute that many animals are treated abominably under capitalism. One question is to what extent their treatment is due to capitalism’s demands for profit and for constantly cheapening the costs of production. For it does not follow that mistreatment is a hallmark of all use of animals for food. It is perfectly possible that a Socialist society would involve less eating of meat and eggs, and any animals kept for food purposes would certainly be treated as humanely as possible. It’s all very well to talk about opposing all hierarchy, including that of humans over animals, but if it came to the crunch I suspect almost everyone would regard the life of a fellow human as more important than that of a non-human animal. So there can be no real equality of treatment between humans and animals.

Paul Bennett

Further Reading:

From the August 2003 Socialist Standard 'Animals For Profits'

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog 'Cages for animals - boxes for workers'

Cages for animals - boxes for workers

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog:

Mary Riddell is just one of many journalists who have passed comment of late on the 'nasty, short and brutish life' of the factory farmed chicken. She is certain that Jamie Oliver's and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's related tv programmes will convince people to pay an extra £1 for the 'high-welfare' variety. Jim Plumley, head of sales and marketing for the Channel Islands Co-operative Society, disagrees:

"There are people who are less fortunate than others and are concerned about the price of free range chickens,' he said. 'People who are perhaps more fortunate will have a better choice."

Indeed. People starve while food rots. But what is interesting about Riddell's position in the reformist quagmire is that she goes on to compare the cramped living conditions of the 855 million meat chickens reared in the UK every year with those often suicidal unfortunates in that country's overcrowded prisons. This is, alas, as far as it goes. She does not come close to recognizing that the profit system is the cause of such animal and human suffering. As D.H.Lawrence said, earning a wage is a prison occupation. She does not, therefore, make the more pertinent comparison: cages for animals - boxes for workers:

"...But bad living conditions are not suffered by animals only. Look around the world and see the shanty towns, tenements, back-to-back slums, tower blocks and jerry built council and private estates. The majority of the working class live and die in cramped, overcrowded, unhealthy conditions, lacking privacy or quiet, and often in an environment of depressing ugliness. There are some workers who can negotiate a set of wages that allows them to live in some degree of comfort, rather as the race-horse or pedigree breeding animal may be housed in special quarters. More than a century agitation and legislation have not however eradicated cramped and inadequate living conditions for the majority of humans.
"Yet it would seem a simple matter to provide comfortable living conditions for people - and for animals. The arguments against doing so are couched in accountant's jargon -alternative methods are dismissed as 'uneconomic', 'too labour intensive', 'not viable', 'unprofitable'. Members of the working class hardly need reminding that resistance to higher wages is the first principle in the code of every employer. Economic self-interest and competition override all finer feelings.

". . . The human race and society are not superior to,or apart from, nature but a product of of the universal process of evolution. As the only living creatures on this planet capable of consciously changing the environment and with an insight into the laws of nature we have a special interest in protecting and conserving the earth which is our means of life. Such an outlook will permeate socialist society - a true respect for our environment and fellow living creatures." (From the article, 'Livestock Liberation', Socialist Standard, June 1979)

Rob Stafford

'The Right To Hunt Landowners'

From an undated 1990s issue of the Socialist Standard (and also used as a text for a leaflet for a Countryside Alliance march)

The good old English sport of sending hungry hunting hounds to chase aristocrats through the woods, catch them and rip them to pieces, has been slow to take off as a popular pastime. Despite claims that these predatory parasites are a foul rural presence, serving only to infect the countryside with their conceited greed and indolence, it has been hard to find dogs with sufficient brutality to enjoy the so-called sport. Those who favour such hunts claim that it is nothing more than a healthy rural tradition, misunderstood by town dwellers, and that ripping duchesses and viscounts to shreds is the most human way to rid nature of those who have only survived historically by plundering and murdering others. The Royal Society for the Protection of Useless Aristocrats has been long split on the issue, with one section accepting that such blood sport is "just a bit of harmless fun", while others prefer the idea of culling – or permanent quarantine in the House of Lords.

This laboured account would be funnier were it not for the harsh reality that rich, privileged, barbaric bullies, most of whom are brutalised at birth by hereditary right and public-school conditioning, do indeed defend their right to chase around the countryside with packs of hounds in order to savage and tear apart defenceless animals. Their callous defence is mounted in the name of sport. And because it is traditional for these parasitical killers to dress up in the costumes of their class and indulge their pleasure in watching deer, foxes and other animals being ripped apart, they respond with well-rehearsed cries of arrogant immunity to human behaviour when their ritualised sadism is opposed.

These depraved beings, who rejoice in their right to inflict pain on animals, are in the same class and historic tradition as those who proclaim the inviolable right to cast the peasant off their land and into destitution and starvation. The same haters of freedom who smashed down the communal utopia of the Diggers when those early communists sought to hold the land in common as a store of wealth for all; the same bullies who until a century ago enjoyed the propertied right to flog peasants and rape their daughters, and still today treat those who work on the land as if they are indebted to the landowners who steal the fruits of their labour. Looking at this savage minority of ruthless parasites, bleating their message of outrage against those reformists (destined to parliamentary defeat) who dare question their freedom to kill for pleasure, it is hard not to wish on them the fate of a frightened cornered fox, surrounded by a pack of dogs trained for the kill.

That, however, is not the socialist way. Why should we lower ourselves to their brutal customs? As Shelley reminded us: "We are many, they are few." They are not worth the bullets which it would take to shoot them. Nor are they important enough to lead us from our hostility to the cause of violence, however guilty the victim has been conditioned to become. No the aristocrats need not fear our blood sports; the victory of our consciousness of human solidarity over theirs of class oppression will be reward enough for us.

But look what these parasites are doing to the land. They spray it with chemical pesticides, killing off whole species of birds, butterflies and plant life in their quest for profits. They have fed cattle upon cheap and lousy diets, creating the BSE crisis and whole varieties of food adulteration which makes us and our children all the potential victims of their profit-lust. They have dumped millions of tons of soil into the rivers which pollute the water which we are charged to drink. They have pursued, in the name of efficient "factory farming", the most obscene practices of cruelty to animals which are tortured for the sake of making a few more pounds for their avaricious owners. They have contracted out farm management to City firms which seek to push down agricultural wages, casualised skilled farm work, thrown wage-slave-farm-workers onto the scrap-heap of the unemployed, and destroyed whole rural areas in the name of agribusiness.

The landowners, who protest for their freedom to enjoy themselves in exhibitions of collective brutality, remain free to rape and vandalise the countryside. As Graham Harvey observed in his book The Killing of the Countryside, "they [the landowners] favour a countryside devoted entirely to industrial-scale food production, with the products traded on world commodity markets in exactly the same way as coffee and copper…Since this 'progressive' view of farming is supported by big business and the City, it is the one most likely to prevail. If so, the current losses of birds and flowers from our landscape will turn out to be merely the first casualties in a long process of attrition."

The beneficiaries of this rural plunder are the very few. One percent of the population owns half the land in Britain and two percent owns three-quarters of it. A mere 600 landowners own half the land in Scotland. These capitalist-farmers are subsidised by huge grants to support their manipulation of the market. They receive millions of pounds and euros in return for taking land out of cultivation so as to keep profits up. Their protest for the right to hunt and murder animals for fun is no more worthy of support than a campaign to reintroduce slavery or to bring back the deportation of criminals. What is a worthy campaign is the one to rid the world of the parasites we have described above and their counterparts the world over, who will stop at nothing to make a profit, whether through our toil and sweat or the plunder of the natural environment. This same campaign envisages the workers of the world uniting to take control of the planet on behalf of its rightful owners, to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to establish a global system of society in which each person has free access to the benefits of production. If you agree with us, even only slightly, then please get in touch.

Steve Coleman

Animals For Profit

From the August 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nearly two hundred years ago Percy Bysshe Shelley, famous for powerful, provocative poetry such as Queen Mab, The Masque of Anarchy, The Ode to Liberty, Prometheus Unbound as well as prose writings describing humans' exploitation of their fellows, felt compelled to write of the cruelty inflicted on livestock:

"How unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised towards these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery" (quoted in R D Ryder Animal Revolution).

Shelley was not alone in recognising the plight of other animals, and in the year of his death, 1822, the Animal Protection Act was passed. It was the first such piece of legislation in the world and outlawed cruelty to horses, sheep and cattle. Soon afterwards, in 1824, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was formed, its inspectorate preceding the establishment of the British state police by two years.

Since those distant days, and despite the growth of vegetarianism, at first amongst the bourgeoisie, the explosion of animal rights groups, the passing of reams of related legislation, the cruelty which so shocked Shelley has evolved and today affects billions of animals in ways of which even Mary, his wife and author of Frankenstein, could not possibly have conceived.

The author of Animal Farm, George Orwell, commenting on the genesis of this work, stated: "Men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat". But neither he nor the Shelleys envisaged a world in which humans and other animals are harvested for their organs – the plight of the poverty-stricken individual selling one of their kidneys or the transgenic pig. All three authors would have been familiar with the horrors of war and the use of cavalry, but what of specially-trained dolphins and sea lions being sent to the latest scene of mass murder in the Middle East? In Wales, Percy Shelley is reputed to have killed several sheep he found suffering terribly, much to the ire of local shepherds. No doubt he would have been shocked by the modern practice of winter shearing, which has been found to "provide farmers with fatter and, hence, more valuable sheep to take to market, it also allows them to squeeze more animals on the trucks that take them there"(Sunday Times, 6 December 1998).

Ruth Harrison, author of Animal Machines (1964), recognised that sheep and other livestock are raised in ways designed to cut production costs to the bone, with little or no regard for the consequent suffering. Commenting on animal farming methods, Harrison observed:

"The first instinct the farmer frustrates in all animals . . . is that of the newborn animal turning to its mother for protection and comfort and, in some cases, for food. The chick comes out of the incubator and never sees a hen; the calf which is to be fattened for veal or beef is taken from the cow at birth, or very soon after; and even the piglet is weaned far earlier now than it used to be. The factors controlling this are mainly economic" (our emphasis).

Mulesing is just one specific example of a cruel practice carried out for reasons of profit and involves the use of sharp shears to remove the very wrinkled skin from around the anus of Merino sheep. This procedure, the purpose of which is make them less susceptible to fly-strike (maggots like warm, moist and food-rich conditions) is carried out as rapidly as possible. This is not to minimise suffering – an anaesthetic would be employed if that were the case – but because time is money. And let us not forget that Merino sheep have been bred this way on purpose: more wrinkles means more wool. Harrison, who died just three years ago, was a campaigner for animal welfare who exposed the horrors of intensive farming. As the Times (5 July 2002) put it in their obituary of her:

"Harrison drew attention to changes in breeding, feeding and housing that aimed at ever greater production at whatever cost to the animals' well-being. As many as 20,000 broiler chickens could be kept in a shed together. Egg-laying hens were kept five to a cage, each with floorspace smaller than a sheet of A4 paper. Other poor creatures were kept in isolation, unable to turn around in their crates or cages. Furthermore, Harrison described the routine use of farm operations such as castration, tail-docking, beak-trimming and de-horning."

By the time of Orwell's death in 1950, more and more of the small farms in the UK were being consumed by the factory variety. For the animals and workers involved farming became even more unpleasant. Today, in the UK alone over 750 million cattle, sheep, pigs, turkeys, ducks, geese and rabbits are slaughtered annually. Pollution of the environment as a result of farming intensively for profit is massive: millions of tonnes of a potent, noxious cocktail containing nitrites, antibiotics, heavy metals, pesticides and parasites are washed into UK rivers each year. Farm animals are also the second largest source of the greenhouse gas methane. BSE and its human-variant CJD are just two of the diseases attributable to the production of animals as food items produced for sale with a view to profit.

How have the reformists reacted to these issues? Some, like the RSPCA for example, have of late pushed the concept of "freedom foods". Essentially, this is the Orwellesque name for a marketing exercise in which products from certain farms are given the seal of approval if they offer slightly less intolerable conditions for the animals involved. But cut-throat competition does not guarantee animal machines even this basic standard.

Another long-established organisation, the League Against Cruel Sports, hoped Labour would listen to its plea to, as Wilde put it, stop the unspeakable chasing the uneatable. In a letter to the Times (24 May 1997) the Chairman, John Cooper, wrote: "The Labour Government, which has at its heart the development of a moral, caring, compassionate society, instinctively rejects any activity which results in the needless and gratuitous carnage that is the hallmark of the hunt."

This display of breathtaking ignorance was followed more recently by a contribution of just over £1 million from the International Fund for Animal Welfare to Labour Party coffers as an inducement to have more animal-friendly laws. But such legislation is slow to come, rarely enforced and often ineffective. The battery cages which Harrison wrote about will not be banned in Europe before 2012. Veal crates, banned in the UK in 1990, continue elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, for some concerned groups this legal approach is frustratingly slow. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the largest group of its kind in the world with over 350,000 members and a multi-million dollar yearly budget, has undertaken a variety of propaganda activities that its older cousins would be unlikely to consider – one campaign involved naked women – but it is still on the reformist misery-go-round: writing, for instance, to the Ministry of Defence with the suggestion that the Grenadier Guards use fake fur in their helmets.

More worryingly, PETA's president, Ingrid Newkirk, is on record as stating "mankind is the biggest blight on the face of the earth". Such misanthropy is not uncommon amongst animal "rights" activists. Many would never support giving poultry workers, for example, a few more crumbs or better conditions. One wonders how such misanthropes reacted to the news that in March 1992 twenty-five people, mostly female immigrants, died when a North Carolina chicken "processing plant" burned. The owners of the plant had blocked the fire exits to ensure that the workers did not try to steal any chickens. But twenty-five deaths are nowhere near enough for Ronnie Lee, founder of the Animal Liberation Front:

"True animal liberation would mean massive changes in society. You would have to have deindustrialisation. The problem is the extent of the human population together with industrialisation. The impact of those two things together means that other animal species are oppressed. The human population needs to be drastically reduced" (Guardian Weekend, December 5 1998).

Truly a dystopia worthy of Orwell. Little surprise then that such groups are attracting the attention of fascists. But what is the socialist response? Well, in our literature we regularly expose the futility of reformism and counter such nonsense as overpopulation. A huge task indeed, but sometimes help comes from unexpected sources. The Meat and Livestock Commission, in reply to the question of whether eating meat deprives the Third World of grain, stated:

"There is already a world surplus of grain and so if it was simply a matter of availability of grain supplies then there would not be a problem. The problem of hunger lies in poverty and not availability" (their emphasis, quoted in the Socialist Standard, January 1993).

Further, we contend that humans and other animals do not have rights (see "Do Animals Have Rights?", Socialist Standard, April 1995), but this does not stop some socialists responding to the cruelty that the profit system inflicts on the vast majority by becoming vegetarian or vegan. The Socialist Party, however, does not have a position on this but would agree with William Morris that "a man can hardly be a sound Socialist who puts forward vegetarianism as a solution of the difficulties between labour and capital, as some people do" (Commonweal, 25 September 1886).

Those who advocate animal rather than human liberation put the cart before the horse! Marjorie Spiegel in The Dreaded Comparison – Human and Animal Slavery draws many emotive comparisons between the way animals past and present are used and the lives of slaves in, largely, pre-civil war USA. She has nothing to say about wage slavery. In the global capitalist system which robs, slaughters and degrades, we, as socialists, are the Human Defence Society. We say:

"Cruelty to animals will go the way of all forms of cruelty, when a real civilised existence becomes a possibility to everyone" (Socialist Standard, February 1926, in an article on the Animal Defence Society).

Robert Stafford