KEYNOTE SPEAKER

The keynote speaker is renowned international philosopher and activist Dr. Steve Best, who will be delivering a talk titled 'Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century'. Dr. Best is Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas, El Paso, USA.

Working in areas such as philosophy, social and political theory, cultural studies, science and technology studies, animal rights, environmentalism and biotechnology, he has written and edited 10 books and published over 100 articles and reviews. In addition to the books he has published on postmodern theory (many with Douglas Kellner), he co-edited (with Anthony J. Nocella II) Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Lantern Books, 2004) and Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006). Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/). He has been active in many political causes and has been interviewed by National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, BBC News, the Guardian Independent, The Chronicle of Higher Education and various media in Brazil, Barcelona and France. Currently he is completing a new book, 'Animal Liberation and Moral Progress: The Struggle for Human Evolution' (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008) and co-editing a volume on academic repression in post-9/11 US. Many of his writings are posted at his website: http://www.drstevebest.org/.

KEYNOTE SPEECH

Total Revolution: Revolution for the 21st Century

My friends, we are winning many battles in the fight for freedom, rights, democracy, compassionate ethics, peace, interspecies justice, and ecology.

But we are losing the war.

The war against greed, violence, plunder, profits, and domination. The war against transnational corporations, world banks, the US Empire, and Western military machines. The war against metastasizing systems of economic growth, technological development, overproduction, and overconsumption.

Despite recent decades of intense social and environmental struggles, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battles for democracy and ecology.

In the last two decades, neoliberalism and globalization have destroyed social democracies, widened gaps between rich and poor, dispossessed farmers, and marketized the entire world. Alongside good-old fashioned imperialism and resource extraction, people now confront genetic engineering, biopiracy, the patenting of genes, and the control of the seed supply. McDonaldization swallows up diversity as agribusiness engulfs the world’s farmers. Corporate power is growing as people power is shrinking.

Signs of ecological distress are everywhere, from shrinking forests and depleted fisheries to vanishing wilderness and rising sea levels. Throughout history, societies have devastated local environments, but only in the last two decades has humanity upset the planetary ecology to bring about global climate change. Moreover, we now live in the era of the sixth extinction crisis in the history of the planet, the last one occurring 65 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs. Unlike the last five, this one is caused by human activity; we are the meteor crashing into the earth. Conservation biologists predict one third to one half of the world’s plant and animal species might vanish in the next few decades.

The global capitalist world system is inherently destructive to people, animals, and nature. It is unsustainable and the bills for three centuries of industrialization are now due. It cannot be humanized, civilized, or green-friendly, but rather must be transcended through revolution at all levels—economic, political, legal, cultural, technological, moral, and conceptual.

In the last three decades, there has been growing awareness that environmentalism cannot succeed without social justice and social justice cannot be realized without environmentalism. This is clear in the environmental justice movement in the US, in Earth First! alliances with timber workers, the platform of the Zapatistas platform, and the 1999 Battle of Seattle against the WTO where turtles joined with teamsters.

But something is missing, the equation is not balanced, the strategy cannot work. The interests of one species are represented as millions of others go unrecognized except as resources to be preserved for human use. But in the last three decades a new social movement has emerged -- animal liberation. Its power and potential has yet to be recognized, but it deserves equal representation in the politics of the 21st century.

Progressives fighting for peace, justice, democracy, and ecology must recognize the validity of and need for the animal liberation movement for two reasons. First, on a moral level, the brutalization, exploitation, and suffering of animals is so great, so massive in degree and scope, that it demands a profound moral and political response from anyone with pretence to values of compassion, justice, rights, and nonviolence. Every year alone humans butcher 70 billion land and marine animals for food; millions more die in experimental laboratories, fur farm, hunting preserves, and countless other killing zones. Second, on a strategic level, the animal liberation movement is essential for the human and earth liberation movements. In numerous key ways, the domination of humans over animals underlies the domination of human over human and propels the environmental crisis. Moreover, the animal liberation movement is the most dynamic and fastest growing social movements of the day and other liberation movements ignore, mock, or trivialize it at their own peril.

It is becoming increasingly clear that human, animal, and earth liberation movements are inseparably linked, such that none can be free until all are free. This is not a new insight, but rather a lost wisdom and truth. Recall the words of Pythagoras, the first Western philosopher, who 2500 years ago proclaimed: "For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."

While I speak of the “liberation” and “freedom” of Earth metaphorically, I mean it quite literally for animals, for they are the oldest, largest, most exploited, and most neglected of all exploited groups and slave classes. Animals are sentient, conscious, feeling, and thinking beings; they have complex needs and relations; they have a will to live and a desire for a free and pleasurable existence; and they play key roles in ecological systems necessary for our own existence. Animals can and must be liberated from human exploitation in order to live become the free and complex beings they are and can be. [As humans are animals, animal liberation is human liberation too. Animal liberation is recognizing our commonalities as sentient beings.]

Given their symbiotic, holistic, and interlocking relationship, it is imperative that we no longer speak of human liberation, animal liberation, or earth liberation as if they were independent struggles; rather, we need to speak of total liberation. Theoretically, we must these liberation movements in relation to one another and identify commonalities of oppression, such as stem from hierarchy and capitalism. Politically, we need to form alliances against common oppressors, across class, racial, gender, and national boundaries, as we link democracy to ecology and social justice to animal rights.

So, I wish to assert the need for more expansive visions and politics on both sides of the human/animal liberation equation, and to call for new forms of dialogue, learning, and strategic alliances that are all-too rare. The kind of alliance politics one finds in South Africa remains weak and abstract so long as animal liberation and vegan interests are excluded. These can no longer be ignored, marginalized, mocked, and trivialized. Similarly, the animal liberation movement can no longer afford to be single-issue and isolationist, but must link to social justice and environmental movements. Each movement has much to learn from the other, and no movement can achieve its goals apart from the other. It is truly one struggle, one fight. The domination of humans, animals, and the earth stem from the same mindset and institutional forms that promote hierarchy, hostility to otherness, and the will to power. This can only be fully revealed and transformed by a multiperspectival theory and alliance politics broader and deeper than anything yet created.

Multiperspectival Theory

A diverse and comprehensive theory of power and domination is necessary for a politics of total liberation, for alliances cannot be formed without understanding how different modes of power overlap and converge. Power is diverse, complex, and interlocking, and it cannot be adequately illuminated from the standpoint of any single group or concern.

Note that the enemy is not simply class for class is not the only manifestation of power nor is it the font or earliest source; rather, class is a symptom not a cause of a larger system of domination organized around hierarchy. Hierarchy is both an institution and mindset that organizes differences into a rank of superior and inferior, such that the latter has no value for the sake of the former. The mindset and institutions of hierarchical domination spring from numerous phenomena such as patriarchy, racism, the state, and social classes and private property.

The origins of hierarchy are shrouded in prehistory, and naturally there are different interpretations and sharp controversies over when, where, and how hierarchy first emerged in society. For example, did the domination of nature lead to the domination of human beings, as Marxists argue, or did the domination of human beings lead to the domination of nature, as claimed by anarchist Murray Bookchin? Some theorists attempt to reduce all modes of oppression to one, such as gender, race, or class, which they privilege as the font of power from which all others spring. Most notoriously, classical Marxists subsumed all struggles to class. Other social concerns such as patriarchy and racism were reduced to "questions," dismissed as divisive, and to be postponed to post-revolutionary society where allegedly they would be moot anyway. The resurfacing of bureaucracies, sexism, and racism in “existing socialist societies” refuted this Procrustean outlook. Similarly, radical feminists claim that patriarchy is the fundamental hierarchy in history,

The best approach is to advance a multiperspectival approach that sees both what is similar among various modes of oppression and what is specific to each. There are a plurality of modes and mechanisms of power that have evolved throughout history, and that often overlap with and reinforce one another – as capitalism feeds off racism and sexism to exploit labor power and to divide oppressed groups from one another. However, since hierarchy was already established in human society thousands of years before the emergence of private property, economic classes, and the state, these are certainly two very important power systems.

Animal Standpoint Theory

According to feminist standpoint theory, each oppressed group has an important perspective or insight into the nature of society. People of color, for instance, can illuminate colonialism and the pathology of racism, while women can reveal the logic of patriarchy that has buttressed so many different modes of social power throughout history.

While animals cannot speak about their sufferings in human language, it is only from the animal standpoint -- the standpoint of how humans relate to and exploit animals-- that we can grasp central aspects of the origins and development of hierarchy and related pathologies involving violence, warfare, militarism, class domination, slavery, genocide, colonialism, the Holocaust, and ecological devastation. From the animal standpoint theory, we can see that the oppression of human over human and the human exploitation of nature have deep roots in the oppression of humans over animals.

The male domination over women seems first to have emerged 80,000 years back when men began organized hunting large animals with spear technologies. No longer hunting small animals with women and elevating their role in culture through hunting rituals, this might have been the earliest form of hierarchy. The power of men over women did not advance significantly, however, until some 10,000 years ago, with the transition to agricultural society and the domestication of animals. “Domestication” is a euphemism that disguises extreme cruelty and coercion that involved confinement, castration, hobbling, branding, and ear cropping. To exploit animals for food, milk, clothing, plowing, and transportation, herders developed technologies such as whips, prods, chains, shackles, collars, and branding irons. All of these technologies of control and conferment were later used on human slaves, such was especially true throughout the international salve trade of the 15-19th centuries.

People often now say that animals are “the new slaves." No, they were the first slaves. They're the first beings human oppressors used to confine, torture, cage, chain down, auction, and sell for labor and profit. The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual subjugation of women was modeled after the domestication of animals, such that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, to enforce repressive sexual norms, and to rape them as they forced breeding in their animals. Slavery emerged in the same region of the Middle East that spawned agriculture, and, in fact, developed as an extension of animal domestication practices. In areas like Sumer, slaves were managed like livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females. Whips, prods, chains, shackles, collars, branding irons and other brutal technologies of control and conferment used throughout the modern international salve trade were first perfected on animals.

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle formulated the first hierarchical philosophy. He propounded a worldview based on the teleological principle that everything exist for a purpose, which is to fulfill the needs of higher beings in the scale of perfection. The purpose of plants was the food for animals, animals to be food for us, and our purpose is to think about God and the universe. Humans have the highest minds and beings with inferior or lower intellects did not count as fully human or as human at all. Thus Aristotle justified slavery as part of the natural order of things. Thus the philosophy of rationalism was born; this is a dualistic logic whereby humans used the category of rationality to radically distinguish themselves from animals, and from other humans as well.

But once western norms of rationality were defined as the essence of humanity and social normality, by first using non-human animals as the measure of alterity, it was a short step to begin viewing different, exotic, and dark-skinned peoples and types as non- or sub-human. Thus, the same criterion created to exclude animals from the human community was also used to ostracize blacks, women, and numerous other groups.

The domination of human over human and its exercise through slavery, warfare, and genocide typically begins with the denigration of victims. But the means and methods of dehumanization are derivative, for speciesism provided the conceptual paradigm that encouraged, sustained, and justified western brutality toward other peoples. Throughout history our victimization of animals has served as the model and foundation for our victimization of each other. History reveals a pattern whereby first humans exploit and slaughter animals; then, they treat other people like animals and do the same to them. Whether the conquerors are European imperialists, American colonialists, or German Nazis, western aggressors engaged in wordplay before swordplay, vilifying their victims as “rats,” “pigs,” “swine,” “monkeys,” “beasts,” and “filthy animals.”

Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than white westerners, subjugated peoples were treated accordingly; once characterized as animals, they could be literally hunted down like animals. The first exiles from the moral community, animals provided a convenient discard bin for oppressors to dispose the oppressed.

Moreover, one can trace the origins of the pernicious “might is right” philosophy in the domination. Like racism and fascism, speciesism deploys a “Might is Right” philosophy that sees the ability of the powerful to rule over the powerless as its justification for doing so.

Hitler adopted the might is right worldview and as humans do to countless billions of animas he eliminated millions of Jews and other undesirables with the “final solution.” Indeed, it is interesting to note that the mass killing employed in concentration camps was modeled on techniques that originated in US slaughterhouses in the late nineteenth century, that Holocaust victims were shipped in stockcars and confined like battery hens, and that major killing zones such as Auschwitz had their own slaughterhouses on site.

Although German Nazism died, the might is right philosophy lives in mass consciousness. This outlook views human warfare, genocide, and mass slaughter of animals as natural and normal and believes that we have “clawed our way to the top” to “earn” our position of dominance. This Might is Right view continues to prop up human barbarity toward animals, and it has sedimented into a bland, unreflective “common sense” ideology that views veganism and animal liberation as alien to the laws of nature and the rights of Homo sapiens.

Indeed, we must also note that the mass killing employed in concentration camps was modeled on techniques that originated in US slaughterhouses in the late nineteenth century. The construction of industrial stockyards, the total objectification of nonhuman animals, and the mechanized murder of innocent beings should have sounded a loud warning to humanity that such a process might one day be applied to them, as it was in Nazi Germany. The first Holocaust was the animal Holocaust which people ignored at their own peril. Thus, Theodor Adorno noted: "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks 'they’re only animals.'"

A Critique of Left Speciesism and Humanist Single-Issue Politics

Amidst the violence, racism, war, and social turbulence of the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned a future “world house.” In this cosmopolitan utopia, all peoples around the globe would live in peace and harmony, such that religion fulfils their spiritual needs and capitalism satisfies their material needs.

But even if this sentiment could possibly be realizable within an economic system that breeds violence, war, destitution, extinction, and ecocide, until humanity radically alters its relation to animals King’s worldhouse is still a goddamn slaughterhouse¬ -- a concentration camp and extermination factory operated by and for the top predators. King’s “dream” for the human species is a nightmare for the billions of animals butchered each year for food, clothing, “science,” and other exploitative purposes.

The humanist nonviolent utopia will always remain a violent dystopia and hypocritical lie until society extends equality and just and equal treatment to other animals. Humanist “revolutions” are superficial by definition. Humanist “democracy” is speciesist hypocrisy. Humanism is just tribalism writ large.

To be sure, the move from a medieval world dominated by a violent, repress, patriarchal, Catholic Church to a modern world based on science, enlightenment, and a movement toward democracy, egalitarianism, and rights was progressive. But unable to carry enlightenment in deeper directions, humanism merely perpetuated Christian anthropocentric tradition that defines humans as separate from and superior to other animals, declares the world to exist for their purposes, and seeks to domesticate the wild. Under the spell of humanism, Western humanity elevated itself to a divine status and embarked on the reckless and hubristic project of mastering nature and advancing its empire. The alienation and arrogance of humanism was dangerous enough in the premodern world, but in modernity it informed the development of powerful sciences and technologies and an insatiable grow-or-die economy.

No different than the industrials and capitalists, the Left in unison championed growth, industrialization, and the domination of nature. Although Marx and Engels showed some sensitivity to ecological issues they lumped animal welfarists, vegetarians, and anti-vivisectionists into the same petite-bourgeoisie category comprised of charity organizers, temperance fanatics, and naïve reformists. Neither had the slightest understanding of the importance of these movements for promoting health, sound science, and compassionate ethics, and moral progress in general. While they appropriated Darwin’s theory of natural selection they ignored his emphasis on the continuity of life and the intelligence of animals and instead adopted mechanistic Cartesian models that reduced animals to simple instinct-governed organisms.

Anarchists are adept in analyzing hierarchy as a plurality of systems, but in relation to the animal question they are no better than Marxists. Murray Bookchin was pioneering in linking democracy to ecology, but he ignored the most important cause of global crisis today – the agribusiness industry. His category of ecological crisis is therefore rather thin and empty. No society can achieve ecological sustainability if it exploits animals on the scale of current capitalist societies. Factory farming is a principle cause of major problems such as water pollution, rainforest destruction, desertification, and global warming. Moreover, it is a highly inefficient use of water, land, and crops; it therefore exacerbates world hunger and the scarcities that lead to resource wars. Here we see a vivid example of how human and earth liberation would benefit from animal liberation and vegan ethics.

Across the board, the Left has failed to theorize the impact of animal exploitation on the environment and human society and psychology. They ultimately espouse the same welfarist views that promote the ethic of treating slaves kindly without recognizing the evil of slavery itself. In the discourse of oppressed peoples, one often hears the complaint that exploiters “treated them like animals,” as if it’s acceptable to torture and kill animals, but not humans. From the animal standpoint, the Left tradition in no way is a liberating philosophy, but rather Stalinism toward animals.

The spectacle of Left speciesism is evident in the lack of articles – often due to a blatant refusal to consider animal rights issues -- on animal exploitation in progressive journals, magazines, and online sites. In the early 1990s, for example, The Nation wrote a scathing essay that condemned the treatment of workers at a factory farm, but amazingly said nothing about the brutal exploitation of thousands of chickens confined in battery cages. Then again, in the January 2007 review of book on the history of modern vegetarianism, the author ignored the profound moral, political, and environmental arguments in order to ridicule vegetarians and to champion mass meat consumption as a triumph of human agency over scarcity, while oblivious to how animal agriculture produces scarcity.

Or consider the case of noted socialist writer, Michael Albert, who confessed the following in a 2006 interview with an animal rights magazine: “when I talk about social movements to make the world better, animal rights does not come into my mind. I honestly don’t see animal rights in anything like the way I see women’s movements, Latino movements, youth movements, and so on … a large-scale discussion of animal rights and ensuing action is probably more than needed … but it just honestly doesn’t strike me as being remotely as urgent as preventing war in Iraq or winning a 30-hour work week.”

It is hard to fathom privileging a work reduction for humans who live relatively comfortable lives to ameliorating the obscene suffering of tens of billion of animals who are confined, tortured, and killed each year in the most unspeakable ways. Like most within the Left, Albert betrays a shocking insensitivity to the suffering of billions of sentient individuals and he lacks the holistic vision to grasp the profound connections among the most serious problems afflicting humans, animals, and the environment.

Despite their platitudes about “respect of life,” Western Green parties and the Sierra Club ally themselves not with the animal rights and vegetarian communities bur rather with the hunting and meat-eating crowds. There has been a deafening silence on the relation between global warming and animal agriculture. One exception is Greenpeace, but their response was not to promote vegetarianism, but rather to eat kangaroos, whales, and other animals that do not promote the greenhouse gas emissions of cattle.

Social progressives in Africa are no less immune to speciesism. Recently, the country's first National Braai Day on Heritage Day was celebrated by shoving a steel bar through a live animal, form its mouth to its anus, and roosting it over a fire. Whereas the United for Animals group strongly objected to this, a prominent progressive defended the act as a way to unify blacks and whites. On his reasoning, "The nation has to eat. And if animals died in the process, at least it was for a great cause."

Progressives have legitimate critiques of western banks that do not share profits of wildlife tourism with villagers, but they frame elephants as no more that resources, assets, and commodities for human benefits. They seek not to end the exploitation of elephants by foreign banks and national elites, but rather to democratize it. Campfire Conservation Association member Stephen Kasere says: “We just want the elephant to be an economic commodity that can sustain itself because of the return it generates. Ivory is a product that should be treated like any other product."

In fact, there is something wrong – profoundly wrong -- about ownership of wildlife. It involves a reduction of animals to the status of property, thing, commodities, and slaves; it promotes and causes insensitivity to their pain, suffering, and true nature. Progressives speak enthusiastically of the economic benefits of killing elephants for human communities, they ignore the inestimable value living elephants have to their families and communities. Ironically, the critiques of western domination are cast in the very language of capitalist exploitation. So what is liberatory about this? This is instrumentalism – seeing living beings as useful only for exploitative purposes and not worthy in and of themselves. It is a form of objectification, violence, and hierarchy incompatible with a movement for rights, peace, and equality. As Alice Walker said: Just as women do not exist for the purpose of men, and blacks do not exist for the purposes of whites, so animals do not exist for the purposes of human beings.
If animals have basic rights -- a question that dogmatic humanist dismiss or dodge but rarely seriously engage -- their right to life is inviolable and trumps all utilitarian considerations. Whether fascist or socialist, white or black, Westerner or South African, rich or poor, human supremacist philosophies are universal -- and they are everywhere wrong. Victims of oppression cannot advance by oppressing and victimizing others.

Conclusion: Total Revolution

Human, animal, and environmental exploitation are tightly interconnected, such that no one form of exploitation can be abolished without ending the others. It is well understood, for instance, that human population rates drop where people are more educated and women have more rights. Also, where people are not desperately poor, they have no economic need to cut down trees or poach animals. If elephant killing is profitable, we need to eliminate economic incentives to kill by addressing the root causes of poverty that make the profits from actions like poaching alluring to the poor.

An effective struggle for animal rights, then, means tackling issues such as poverty, class, political corruption, and ultimately the inequalities created by transnational corporations and globalization. Any viable approach to save animals must also promote greater democracy such that decisions are not made by a corrupt few in positions of power, but by entire communities using democratic decision making procedures.

Largely apolitical or single-issue in scope, animal rights advocates fail to grasp how the animal abuses they decry result from the profit imperative, and are part and parcel of a social system that needs to be challenged and transformed in radical ways. To the extent that animal rights activists grasp the systemic nature of animal exploitation, they should also realize that animal liberation demands that they work in conjunction with other radical social movements.

Conversely, human rights advocates need to comprehend the myriad of social and ecological problems that stem from animal exploitation. When human beings exterminate animals, they devastate habitats and ecosystems necessary for their own lives. When they butcher farmed animals by the billions, they ravage rainforests, turn grasslands into deserts, exacerbate global warming, and spew toxic wastes into the environment. When they construct a global system of factory farming that requires prodigious amounts of land, water, energy, and crops, they squander vital resources and aggravate the problem of world hunger. When humans are violent toward animals, they often are violent toward one another, a tragic truism validated time and time again by serial killers who grow up abusing animals and violent men who beat the women, children, and animals of their home. The connections go far deeper, as evident in the relationship between the domination of human over animal and the hierarchy of sexism and racism.

Animal liberation is the culmination of a vast historical learning process whereby human beings gradually realize that arguments justifying hierarchy, inequality, and discrimination of any kind are arbitrary, baseless, and fallacious. Animal liberation builds on the most progressive ethical and political advances human beings have made in the last 200 years and carries them to their logical conclusions. It takes the struggle for rights, equality, and nonviolence to the next level, beyond the artificial moral and legal boundaries of humanism, in order to challenge all prejudices and hierarchies including speciesism.

Animal liberation requires that the Left transcend the comfortable boundaries of humanism in order to make a qualitative leap in ethical consideration, thereby moving the moral bar from reason and language to sentience and subjectivity. Just as the Left once had to confront ecology, and emerged a far superior theory and politics, so it now has to engage animal rights. As the confrontation with ecology infinitely deepened and enriched Leftist theory and politics, so should the encounter with animal rights and liberation.

Animal liberation is by no means a sufficient condition for democracy and ecology, but it is for many reasons a necessary condition of economic, social, cultural, and psychological change. Animal welfare/rights people promote compassionate relations toward animals, but their general politics and worldview can otherwise be capitalist, exploitative, sexist, racist, or captive to any other psychological fallacy. Uncritical of the capitalist economy and state, they hardly promote the broader kinds of critical consciousness that needs to take root far and wide. Just as Leftists rarely acknowledge their own speciesism, so many animal advocates reproduce capitalist and statist ideologies.

The human/animal liberation movements have much to learn from one another. Just as those in the Left and social justice movements have much to teach many in the animal liberation movement about capital logic, social oppression, and the plight of peoples, so they have much to learn about animal suffering, animal rights, and veganism. Whereas Left radicals can help temper antihumanist elements in the animal liberation movement, the animal liberation movement can help the Left overcome speciesist prejudices and move toward a more compassionate, cruelty-free, and environmentally sound mode of living.

A truly revolutionary social theory and movement will not just emancipate members of one species, but rather all species and the earth itself. A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will overcome instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking in every pernicious form, including that of humans over animals and the earth. It will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most profound values and goals of humanity. It will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and domination of all kinds. The slogan of the future must not be “We are all one race, the human race,” but rather, “We are one community, the biocommunity.”