Francione and his acolytes don’t reject direct action, they define it exclusively in terms of veganism; their focus is on veganism as a necessary and sufficient condition of animal and social liberation. Veganism is not only a form of direct action, it is privileged as the form, and what we term militant direct action is ruled out from the start. Broadly understood, veganism is arguably the single most powerful and effective thing an individual can do to lighten their ecological footprint and promote positive change on both social and environmental levels. But Francione takes a sound argument to untenable extremes by decontextualizing veganism from its larger social context and reducing it to a mechanistic logic. He makes grandiose claims about the efficacy of nonviolent vegan direct action as a panacea and technofix for the social-environmental crisis threatening the entire globe. Francione advances an evangelic, Salvationist, determinist vision that the vegan revolution will spread worldwide and will revolutionize human society.[22]
In a stunning series of non sequitor and determinist fallacies, he assumes not only that (1) the vegan revolution is unstoppable, but also that (2) it will trigger the abolition of other forms of exploitation, and, by implication, it will (3) undermine other forms of oppression and revolutionize society as a whole. One can identify this type of thinking clearly in one of Francione’s faithful followers, Jeff Perz, who writes intelligent commentary on the violence/pacifism debate but tends to erase the nuances of his analysis in favor of totalizing generalizations and mechanistic thinking. “As a result of our efforts in abolitionist vegan education,” Perz writes, “fewer and fewer non-human animals will be eaten, killed or otherwise harmed. This will lead to the eventual abolition of all non-human animal exploitation. Exclusive non-violent animal rights activism is ethical, realistic and absolutely necessary to create the world we are seeking. Let’s do it!”[23]
Perz assumes that if one form of exploitation (food production) is abolished, all others (such as vivisection) will follow, like falling dominoes, and that once speciesism vanishes so will follow all other forms of prejudice, hierarchy, and domination. Defying the complexity of history and social change, Francione reverts to single-issue reductionism and clumsily attempts to shift the burden of explanation, writing: “Anyone who says that vegan education is ‘not enough’ [i.e., a sufficient condition of change] must have a crystal ball. There has never been a movement that has been directed at clear, unequivocal vegan education. Let’s try that first, and then we will be in a better position to judge its efficacy…my experience is that it is the most efficient and cost-effective way of proceeding.”[24]
What Francione, Hall, and others fail to acknowledge, at least in general pronouncements such as these, is the fact that practices such as flesh consumption and vivisection, while part of the same fabric of speciesism, do not fall together in logical sequence, as society may decide (however erroneously) that eating animals is unnecessary but experimenting on them is vital.[25] Needless to say, the connections among veganism, animal liberation, and progressive social and environmental change are even more tenuous, complex, and problematic.[26]
Similarly, James Crump commented (#45) on “Pacifism or Animals” by stating, “Once we have recruited all those who are amenable to vegan education, then we can worry about the hardcore speciesists.” Apparently, Crump is looking to base his revolution on the fringes of the fringe, and the strategy is simple and breathtaking: first take the easy marks, then go for — or rather worry about — the hardcore programmed! Crump seems to know a law of history we don’t, one that is linear and progressive, allowing you first to persuade the pliable and then conquer the most firmly entrenched opposition. Never mind the fact that billions of people have identities, traditions, lifestyles, and livelihoods heavily invested in speciesism and exploitation. Somehow, according to Crump’s logic, the Force of Reason will win them over and reach their true inner goodness and moral soul. Here we see a stellar example of the Socratic-Enlightenment metaphysics running through the Panglossian paths of abolitionist veganism.
Thus, in Francione, Hall, Crump, and countless others, there is a presumption that vegan revolution – in its fullest sense, including a moral gestalt shift away from anthropomorphism and speciesism – will somehow trigger the social revolution that will topple global capitalism, the overarching socioeconomic structure that embodies and enables myriad hierarchies and exploitations. It would seem that fundamentalist pacifists and Procrustean vegans are the ones who believe they possess Francione’s “crystal ball,” as they move in the faith that vegan education mainly or alone will revolutionize humanity , transforming Homo sapiens – whose history began with the slaughter of the Neanderthals in Europe and proceeded to systemic global genocide and destruction — into a peaceful, loving, cooperative, and non-exploitative species living in harmony with itself, other species, and the Earth as a whole.
Dan Cudahy completely missed the point of our critique and failed to acknowledge, as did everyone else, the full extent of our positive and systemic vision of social transformation. As he writes:
Best misrepresents Francione a number of times and only magnifies this in his hyper-rhetoric. The biggest misrepresentation of Best’s is that Francione sees veganism as a “diet change.” Francione does NOT see veganism as merely a diet or a diet change (Francione has said this dozens or hundreds of times), but as an entire moral paradigm shift. Francione’s also presents his arguments against violence much more cogently than the arguments Best sets up as straw men, a brief summary of which one can read at the following link: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/?p=92 . Best focuses on the “evil corporate-state complex,” and “the man” as the culprit, but 98.6% of the individuals in our society share the blame. Corporations and governments make bad decisions, but ultimately they are little more than a reflection of our nasty society (i.e. individuals) in the mirror.[27]
We did not suggest that Francione views veganism as a mere change in diet. We fully acknowledge that he is doggedly pursuing a legal and moral paradigm shift and applaud his contributions to the animal rights movement. However, Francione’s goal of revolutionizing society through vegan education and outreach alone is hopelessly idealistic and pragmatically untenable. As a follower of Francione and Hall, Cudahy advances a liberal model of change that is individualistic, reformist, and idealist (in the Marxian sense that moral change is sufficient to drive social change). The liberal model lacks a systemic critique of capitalism and modes of oppression and places the burden of blame and change on individuals rather than on social structures and powerful institutional forces. Certainly every person on planet Earth contributes to the depletion resources, extinction of species, and breakdown of the environment, but how Cudahy arrives at his 98.6% figure is beyond us, but that means that corporations are only responsible for 1.4% of the global social and environmental crisis!
Clearly, Cudahy’s emphasis on individual responsibility is informed by capitalist ideology he has yet to scrutinize and individual responsibility is a reifying abstraction unless key distinctions are made. Just as carnivores leave a much heavier ecological footprint than vegans, and people in Western “developed” nations contribute to ecological entropy many times more than those in the “undeveloped” world, so corporations are far more responsible for rainforest destruction, global warming, air and water pollution, desertification, and so on than is any individual, but Cudahy’s ultra-individualist outlook shifts the burden of blame from General Electric, ExxonMobil, and Monsanto to a faceless populace, from the timber, oil, mining, and agriculture industries to statistical individuals. We shudder at the political consequences of this regressive liberalism and inverted form of thinking.[28]
Francione, Hall, and their followers want to have their vegan cake and eat it too. Convincing themselves that focusing strictly on vegan education and outreach will ultimately end the abject torture and murder of animals they abhor enables them to feel good about their commitment to animal liberation while simultaneously preserving the reprehensible system that facilitates such horrors against the animals. Capitalism and its myriad attendant ills of corporatism, imperialism, consumerism and the like must go if we hope to empty the cages and, just as importantly, mitigate or end the impending eco-crisis. It is no slur on the “integrity” of reason to say that it cannot “carry the day,” rather it is a vital character of reason and a movement’s lucidity to recognize the limits of rational persuasion amidst a force-field of violence, irrationality, and entrenched economic interests, and to develop the tactics adequate for this unfortunate human and social reality.
As noted anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan observed, “It is important to question ideological limitations stemming from a place of extreme privilege. Most people on earth do not have the comfort to decide what the most 'righteous’ response to domination should be, and often the stakes are life and death.”[29] The institutional rewards and privileges enjoyed by Francione, Hall, Feral, and other liberal vegans are those of the professional, white, Western elite class who project their nonviolent philosophies onto the entire world as if everyone enjoyed the rights and privileges they do. But these biases have gone unquestioned by a legion of abolitionist followers who share Francione and Hall’s fundamentalist pacifism and liberal-reformist politics.
Zerzan is not a vegan and we are not primitivists, but his prescriptions for slaying the beast of Westernized socioeconomic rape, pillage and plunder, as just the head of the monster of agricultural society and “civilization” are far more palatable to us than Francione’s because Zerzan recognizes the depth and urgency of the apocalyptic situation in which we find ourselves after ten thousand years of “civilization.” Saving the animals is futile if the Earth is rendered uninhabitable by the techno-industrial machine, or rather by agricultural society and its inexorable logic of growth, expansion, and violence, an economic-political-military system of imperialism inseparable from a conceptual system of imperialism based on a hierarchical ordering of difference that informs every pernicious form of bias, prejudice, and discrimination.
Single issue, bourgeois, liberal, white upper middle to upper class people are NOT going to carry out a successful revolution by becoming vegans and trying to teach others to do the same. They are going to become touchy-feeling, electric car-driving, organic gardening, Whole Foods shopping consumers. The vegan lifestyle championed by Francione, Hall, & Co. is devoid of political and environmental content and is reactionary by default. The vanilla white faces of most of the US neo-abolitionist movement are emblematic of the lack of ethnic diversity in the modern vegan, abolitionist, and “animal whites” movements, as their legal backgrounds and middle-class status smack of class privilege.[30] And yet Francionites are oblivious to how this insularity impedes “vegan revolution,” and they make few visible efforts to build bridges from privileged white communities to the poor, people of color, and the oppressed in southern nations such as South Africa (a country to which Best personally has ventured three times to promote veganism, animal rights, and awareness of the interconnectedness of human, nonhuman animal, and environmental issues).
Although a vegan society of any significant dimension would have a massive positive impact on human health, social justice, and planetary ecology, these pseudo-abolitionists burdened with the Superego of the state fail to acknowledge how their vegan version of lifestyle politics can be easily co-opted by capitalism (as is already clearly evident in the many lines of vegan foods, restaurants, clothing, and merchandise) and be transformed into just another individualist, new-age, spiritualist, consumerist mindset and lifestyle that promotes market growth, labor exploitation, and environment destruction (e.g., whether through clear cutting needed to grow soy crops, long-distance transportation of organic fruits and vegetables, or support for an inherently repressive and anti-ecological global economic system).[31]
Violence: Vilified and Verboten
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