notes on a radical pamphlet #3: From Animals To Anarchism by Kevin Watkinson & Donal O’Driscoll

cw: suicide ideation, mental illness etc, non-normalised political ideologies

not so long ago I escaped the impenetrably dull, inarguably pointless and continually damaging “life” (lol no it’s not that!) that I am wasting in a place I don’t like and really struggle to exist in, and visited an uncharacteristically sunny Glasgow, a city filled with radical bookstores. I returned to the place where I do nothing but wait for death – good fucking god I hope it takes me soon 😜 – with a big stack of “radical pamphlets”. (What I’m calling a “pamphlet” is basically anything that is crazy cheap and is either a literal pamphlet or a tiny tiny book, and what I’m calling “radical” is anything that calls for any kind of broadly widespread [necessary] social change.) In this occasional series, I read through those pamphlets and reflect on how a shred of hopefulness is essential to being alive. And I don’t even have that whoops lol yeah.

This is another publication from Active Distribution and unlike many other texts they publish, this one names its authors, here Kevin Watkinson and Donal O’Driscoll.

From Animals to Anarchism is part of a series of “Open Letters”, and this letter is addressing the intersection of anarchism and animal rights/animal liberation (though neither of those terms are exactly right as they each have their own connotations and hypocrisies).

Taking a standard anarchist perspective that any form of oppression, of control, of domination, is inherently bad and best avoided, it applies this towards the way in which animals are treated by human society, in some detail.

There are the obvious examples – the meat industry, the dairy industry (which is basically the same connected thing, as much as many of us would like to pretend it’s not lol whoops) – as well as less easy-to-swallow ones (e.g. the ethics of pet ownership (which is a particularly tough one for me as my dog is literally the only thing I think I’m ultimately living for and – if I haven’t already died by then – I really can’t see a single reason for me to live after he (which hopefully – for him and the other people he brings joy more successfully to – won’t be for a while yet!) dies, and if the one thing that doesn’t make me want to jump in front of a train is arguably a sign of a catastrophic moral failure then I should kill myself today (I mean I should kill myself today, I should have killed myself yesterday, a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, longer longer longer, ideally before I was even fucking born)———–

Yes, it’s true, sadly.

The ethics of pet ownership are questionable, and probably should be interrogated. However, we can’t all just kill ourselves (apparently 😭), so we have to find ways in which to live. Maybe it has to be a final cessation of the occasional consumption of cheese (which I avoid basically everywhere except for when I’m getting free food in a workplace or I’m buying supermarket stuffed pasta or pizza or sandwich) as a moral counterweight against having a pet – needing a pet, sadly…

The argument of “impracticality” for full and constant (as opposed to nearly but definitely not constant veganism) is a pretty trite one and one that doesn’t hold up to any real scrutiny. Then again, is strictness and certitude a good thing or just another BPD symptom?

Having a pet, though, yes, involves the creation of a direct and explicit dominant relationship; there is “owner” and “owned”, and even though I would never use the word “ownership” to describe my relationship with my dog, the fact remains that he is – legally (i.e. within the bureaucratic frameworks of this fucking awful and desperately-yearning-to-be-burned-to-the-ground world) – my possession, and I (and my lover) do make every meaningful decision about his life…

We decide what he eats, other than what he “forages” (eats from near the bins in the park); we decide when he eats, when he walks and – because he has been psychologically indoctrinated (by me!!!) to not evacuate his bowels or bladder indoors unless he is too unwell to not do so, when he shits and pisses; we choose where he lives, when he gets a haircut, how and when he receives healthcare, when he goes on holiday, when he goes to work (unpaid) and how he gets there…

No matter how much I think about and act as much (as possible) with the proviso that I’m acting in a way to make him as happy as I’m able, I am still in control of him and his life; he came into my life because I exchanged a stack of pristine fifty pound notes for him (and some bits of paper to make it official) with a massive Tory somewhere in the countryside in Southern England three quarters of a decade ago…

I don’t know where I’m going with this…

But there is definitely a moral reckoning to be had…

Pets live involuntary lives. But so do we…

I don’t feel like I have any more control over my own life than my dog does over his… I feel like his hopes, dreams, desires are likely met… Certainly his needs are, including ones beyond the physical. Are my needs being met? Technical base needs are, yes, as I have access to food and shelter and don’t consider sex a need (which translates into meaning that either I do get enough of it or that I’m so trapped in a deeply repressed mindset that I will never be able to cover that base in the pyramid of needs and maybe that’s why I would rather effortlessly die than do absolutely anything else??? Is the deep hole within more complex, too complex, too———–

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“some humans assume the right of power over other groups of people, animals and the earth itself. […] we are in a pre-existing framework and through media and education we are indoctrinated from birth to believe it is the ‘natural’ order of things – including the use of animals as we see fit. / Domination and hierarchy are built into the very structure of many of our societies […] Yet […] domination over one is domination over all. We will not be made free one category at a time” (p 15)

While there is an obvious and very important understanding of the need for intersectionality in all liberatory struggles exhibited here, I think it is an unhelpful comparison to make in this context as the vast majority of casual readers (which I’m not necessarily sure I would include myself as any more???) will likely be offended by the comparison – which the writers do go on to make – between meat eating and racialised violence. I mean, I’m extrapolating from what the writers actually write because they’re not foolish enough to express that so bluntly (it’s a much tamer comment about using the names of animals as racist slurs (does that happen?) being offensive on multiple levels, but this comes down to a similar kind of “‘cunt’ being the most offensive word is offensive to women” kinda thing that sounds a little… underdeveloped (also “cunt” isn’t the “most offensive word”)).

But the point – even if not expressed in a very politic manner – does have resonance. It is not just the industrialised meat facilities that are a sign of humanity’s contempt for other living things, but it is the way in which we control (by accident and by design) and influence the natural world around us.

Not just pollution and climate change, this includes road building and concreting, this is building dams and canals that change water flow and water tables; this is not just environmental destruction that can be clearly and universally argued as “bad”, i.e. it’s not just deforestation and things like that, but it is gardens, it is invasive plant and animal species we’ve needlessly transported around the world, it is diseases we spread even when we’re not corralling animals together in “superfarms”, it’s basically everything we do as a species to maintain the rank status quo of this deeply corrupt society that has become deeply detached from natural and sustainable reality.

Fundamentalist readings of the ideologies of capitalist society will teach you to think that this (gestures around) is the natural state of humanity, that the way our species has organised itself is an inevitability, but this just isn’t true. As I’ve written in an early piece in the Radical Pamphlets series, we have had provable and historic examples of successful anarchistic living, and though the anarchist communes (check that word) in Spain during the 1930s were unable to persist for long enough for their sustainability to be ascertained, the example of pre-Columbian North American civilisations is proven to have maintained itself – sustainably and successfully – for thousands (I don’t have the exact number to hand (I’m typing this on the Tube at 7am (no, not on the way home (as one should be if both living in a meaningful way and on public transport at this hour)))) of years, and both were only stopped by extreme violence – one by Franco’s fascism, the other by British and French (and maybe a little bit of Spanish, but they mostly aimed their swords at people further south who lived in dully heirachical societies) violent colonisation.

Sorry, getting distracted.

But my point is that anarchism (when coherent and consistent) is a fundamentally hopeful movement; honestly I struggle to understand how people are able to live within the world – seeing its utter fucking shitidity – while believing that this – with bureaucracy and bad art and factory farming and abuse – is the best things could ever be. Such pessimism, such hopelessness, such a failure of imagination and soul———

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“It is also useful to point out that killing isn’t intrinsically wrong when it comes to necessity. So we believe it isn’t always wrong for a human to kill another animal, nor is it wrong for a shark or elephant to kill a person, or for a person to kill another person. However, the issue that it is not intrinsically wrong to kill does not in any way excuse the act of killing for pleasure or in cases that it is not necessary for absolute survival. The justification for killing another sentient being depends very much on context.” (P. 35)

Yes, I was also going to go on another riff from this quotation I pulled out of the book about the need for the potential of violence, the need to accept that there must be some understanding that a total commitment to pacifism at all costs removes a potentially unpleasant but necessary method of ensuring safety and the preservation of life… sometimes in the pursuit of a healthier, more sustainable future difficult decisions must be made, but those decisions must be wrestled with and not executed without thought, without consideration, without——

But this post is way too long anyway and no one seems to read my pieces about anarchy, so I won’t bother. Thank you, though, for persisting.

Order From Animals to Anarchism via this link