Vegan education is not going to bring down powerful corporate exploiters alone; that formidable task also requires MDA tactics and larger social objectives as well. As a SHAC proponent states:
The really powerful tool we have as activists is that they never know what we will do next, and that if we all act in a united cohesive way we can take out parts of their infrastructure that they cannot afford to lose. It basically boils down to three things:
1. Putting the fear of God into them.
2. Costing them financially.
3. Dragging their name through the dirt.
Don’t waste your time appealing to their better nature - it doesn’t exist among the people who really matter in a company. What you appeal to is how much money you are going to cost them, how you are going to destroy their morale and how they are never going to know when and where you will turn up next with a new, disruptive and embarrassing tactic they can do nothing about. Always changing tactics and hitting them at different points keeps them confused and disoriented so they cannot fight back properly.[16]
We do not advocate violence as a tactic so much as we argue that there are strong justifications for the use of violence, such as in a “just war,” to intervene on behalf of genocide victims, or in self-defense. And we advance the concept of “extensional self-defense” to say that humans can be legitimate proxy agents for animals who rarely can defend themselves against their tormentors. For those shocked by our frankness, we are not saying anything more than what mainstream animal rights philosopher Tom Regan says in his essay, “How to Justify Violence,” in which he specifies conditions in which violence is a legitimate tactic in the struggle for rights and justice.[17] Just as violence is not always right, so it is not always wrong. Only from a fundamentalist pacifist standpoint, or a position of complete historical ignorance, can one deny cases where violence has worked on behalf of social change and instances in which violence is legitimate and necessary. After all, if not for the American Revolution and the colonists’ war of independence from an oppressor, Shishkoff (were he living in the US rather than Canada) might be wearing a fancy white wig, britches, and a red coat, while paying respects to the King and Queen.
To paraphrase John Lennon, all we are saying is give pluralism and contextualism a chance. And our position goes far beyond defending the rear-guard actions of sabotage. As effective as they are in many cases, obviously these tactics alone cannot bring down speciesist capitalism, but nor can tactics that rely on state legislation and reforms (e.g., HSUS) and vegan education (e.g., Francione and Hall). Everyone has missed the key point that we are not promoting one tactic over another within a narrow field of animal advocacy politics; rather we are conceptualizing large-scale, systemic social change that includes strategic alliances amongst many social justice, anti-capitalist groups – quite unlike Karen Dawn’s vision of an apolitical, non-partisan, cater-to-all, and maximize-benefits-for-book sales approach to animal advocacy.[18]
So far from advocating violence and destruction, we are championing the positive norms of peace, equality, sustainability, and ultimately social revolution to abolish both the conceptual and institutional roots of hierarchy, domination, and exploitation. We need every arrow in our quiver to defeat speciesism and exploitation, very much including both nonviolent resistance and MDA, each applied in the situations where they are most effective. Like MDA itself, veganism is a necessary but surely not a sufficient condition of revolutionary personal and institutional change.
One cannot judge the most efficacious tactics through the application of a general principle; one needs to make such evaluations through analysis of specific situations. In some cases (e.g., banning circuses and rodeos from one’s home town or city) education, gentle pressure, protest, or legislative change may be the best tactics, whereas in other cases (e.g., rescuing laboratory or factory “farm” victims) liberation and/or sabotage may be the right and only approach. Whether or not the tactic would be strategically sound and not incur a massive blowback from the state and alienation of public support, violent resistance against animal exploiters in (extensional) self-defense of animals is defensible on strong grounds.
To be absolutely clear: We are not claiming that all MDA is always warranted, tactically sound, or done intelligently – such blanket pronouncements violate our contextualist approach. Nor are we recklessly advocating violence and a “tear the house down” approach. We certainly agree with Mary Martin’s recommendation on her Animal People blog discussion of our essay that “readers consider both sides of the militant direct action (MDA) debate before jumping in as an ardent fan of either side.”[19] Rather we advocate careful scrutiny of each situation and thinking not only of actions but also consequences. A contextualist position tends to disarm pacifist dogmas and open up the vistas of tactical thinking, and not only in US, European, or Western contexts, but also globally.[20]
Ultimately, we assert that to win this war — or to put it another way, to stop this ongoing Holocaust and genocide against nonhuman animals — we have no choice but to employ every means at our disposal, including militant direct action and violence. While the formidable power of the enemy, the corporate-state-military complex, dictates that we engage them using asymmetrical tactics with violence as a last resort, we can ill afford to forbid ourselves from employing militant actions against an entity predicated on institutionalized violence and one that, like a sociopathic giant wielding a razor-sharp hatchet, slaughters nonhuman animal after nonhuman animal in a horrifyingly efficient assembly-line fashion. As for dogmatic pacifism, were Gandhi alive today and hunger striking against the flesh industry, they’d probably laugh and tell him to eat “Beef! It’s what’s for dinner!”
The Pipedream of Vegan Revolution
“If we say rational debate cannot carry the day, or that the violent acts of exploiters necessitate response in kind, we mock a movement’s core principle, we deride its integrity.” Lee Hall Capers in the Churchyard.
“Tactics based solely on morality can only succeed when you are dealing with people who are moral or a system that is moral.” Malcolm X
The vast network of Francione followers are digitally linked and multiplying throughout the Internet and blogosphere. There are definite positive advantages to his growing influence given the abysmal state of the US “animal rights” movement, mired in welfarism, collaborationism, and corporate models of development, but the disadvantages to the pacifist and liberal-individualist aspects of Francione’s (and Hall’s) approach are serious. Francione, Hall, and mainstream vegan proponents make a fair point that it is premature for any final judgments on the efficacy of veganism and nonviolent civil disobedience because neither tactic has been tried at any serious level given the reformist, welfarist, and collaborationist approaches that dominate the US animal advocacy movement.[21]
So we are not saying that vegan education and nonviolent tactics have failed or should not be developed to their maximal potential. We argue, in fact, that Francione and Hall do not even promote their own tactics enough, given their blatant failure to reach out to communities of the poor, working class, marginalized, disenfranchised, people of color, and other parts of the world, especially China and India (see below). In this respect, we are urging them to develop their positions more, not less, to be consistent, non-elitist, and far more effective. But these should not be the only approaches to receive the abolitionist seal of approval and be fully utilized in the struggle against a universal and deeply entrenched human supremacism.
Whereas Hall peddles the narcotic of patience in order to inch down the road of Love, singing kumbaya arm-in-arm with our oppressors, as happy shiny people with faith in the Peaceable Vegan Kingdom, we are asking everyone to get real, to wake up, to get angry, and to understand that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing. The dire emergency of the global ecological crisis means that slow and purist methods of change are not going to cut it. And we are saying that in their formulation veganism has become a religion, a dogma, and a simplistic and mechanistic formula for change.
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