ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Chomsky has sent the following comment on the review of his book:
Thanks. It’s quite true that this talk (it’s a slightly expanded talk ) was not directed to the question of large-scale social change and what should we aim for (topics I’ve discussed extensively elsewhere). Rather, it kept to urgent issues that will have to be overcome largely within existing institutions, as comparison of time scales suffices to show. At the same time we should not abandon the Bakuninite task of building the germs of the future society within the present one.
“An omen? The Republicans win Congress seat in California from the Democrats.”
Of course under the undemocratic way of electing the US President, where the voters in each state elect representatives to an electoral college who then elect the president, a vote for the minority party in a state doesn’t count. What makes it worse is that (except in one or two of the states) it’s the winner takes all with the party with the most (not necessarily even a majority) votes in a state taking all its seats in the electoral college.
California is traditionally Democrat and it’s inconceivable that it would vote for Trump so any vote for the Republicans there is a wasted in the sense that it doesn’t count towards the election for the president (it’s not wasted of course as an expression of the voter’s political view). The same applies to all other parties. This has the advantage for leftists living in California and other safe Democrat states that they can vote for a minority party (like the new one mentioned on another thread) without splitting the anti-Republican vote. They can have their cake and eat it and vote Green or Progressive or whatever as this won’t split the anti-Trump vote while urging people in the swing states who think like them to vote Democrat.
The argument against meat-eating from the appalling conditions both for the animals and the workers in slaughterhouses under capitalism today is not an argument as to why humans should stop eating meat. At most it would be an argument against eating some meat under capitalism.
It is also unfair because I am sure Alan could trawl the internet and find many examples of the appalling conditions under which workers have to work today under capitalism to produce food from plants, on tea plantations or in processing factories for instances. But those conditions are not regarded as a reason for not it eating plants.
In both cases they are conditions that arise from capitalism and reflect its competitive pursuit of profits in which the firm that can produce the cheapest wins. These conditions would not exist in socialism.
The question “If you eat meat, would you be prepared to work in a slaughterhouse?” is similarly unfair. The same sort of question could be posed to plant-eaters: would you be prepared to pick tea leaves or root crops? In fact, would you be prepared to clean the sewers?
In other words, why can’t people take advantage of the division of work? Why do we have to be prepared to work at producing everything we use or eat?
In any case you are not going to get people to change their eating habits by criticism or argument. I wouldn’t dream of trying to convince a plant-eater to eat meat. That’s their choice. Them trying to convince people not to eat meat comes across as virtue signalling. Which gets up people’s noses.
J.O. has sent in this. He’s the second from the right. The rest of us are the one in front of him.
Be careful, JO, you are becoming addicted to this sort of exchange on the internet like others are to playing Candy Crush on their mobiles. It happens to all of us.
One thing we are all agreed on here is that each species is unique. Which is why it is invalid to draw conclusions about “human nature” from the way other animals behave, even other apes. If they are aggressive, hierarchical, territorial (or not) that does mean that humans are or have to be “by nature”. The argument from the behaviour of one species to that of another is invalid.
Desmond Morris called his notorious book The Naked Ape. In fact a more appropriate description of the human species would be The Clothed Ape as this brings out the species’s unique feature of being able to consciously change and improve their environment as a result precisely of their biological nature. Humans are culture-bearing, tool-making animals whose actual behaviour can and does vary immensely as they adapt to getting a living in different environmental and technological conditions.
I know I keep on repeating this but humans really are the only species capable of saving the plant and other animals. Ironically, though biologically humans are omnivores, our capacity for flexible behaviour means that some can choose to be herbivores. Personally, I don’t think all or even a majority of humans will adopt that lifestyle or need to. But no other animal is capable of deciding to give up hunting and eating other animals if doing so is part of their uniqueness.
That is why we shouldn’t run humans down by comparing them to bacteria or suggesting they deserve to become extinct as misanthropes are won’t to do.
Ok. Thanks. I will see if I can dig out that orange booklet.
The other views you list may well be examples of “speciesism” but you are not saying that they were expressed in the Standard, are you? It is inconceivable that views like those below would ever get past any editorial committee. In fact I can’t conceive of anyone expressing them except as a provocation.
A speciesist would see the extinction of all the gorillas on the planet as less of a tragedy than the death of one single human.
A speciesist will mock a man grieving the loss of a beloved nonhuman, and scoff, “It’s only a dog!”
A speciesist will say that if a trophy hunter is about to kill a lion, and the only way to stop the hunter is to kill him, then it is best to let him shoot the lion.
I don’t think most of those arguments have ever been expressed in the Socialist Standard.
Only three on the list offer some albeit vague details, one of which is to an internal document (and so did not appear in the Standard). It would be useful to have had an exact reference about “evolution’s supreme achievement” but even that would be an one-off. And that would hardly make it a view that was “rife”.
The remaining article does not “mock” those who believe that animals have or should have “rights” but is a general criticism of the concept of “rights”, offering an alternative theory as to why humans should not be cruel to other animals. It is not about vivisection and the subject is not even mentioned. Why would we want to mock those against it as that’s a reasonable view that most people share?
Anyway people here can judge for themselves as here it is:
The basic message and practical application of both animal righters and the article is “don’t be cruel” whoever said it and whatever the philosophical justification behind it.
Another leftist plea not to not vote for Biden:
https://www.nytimes.com./2020/05/13/opinion/socialists-support-biden-election.html
Some of the arguments he sets out to refute are ones we make too. For instance;
”The two major parties are merely the right and left wings of the capitalist system. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
Precisely.
What is this “speciesism” that is supposed to be rife in the Party and the Socialist Standard? It seems to be a philosophical theory, concocted by animal-rightist philosopher Peter Singer to morally justify being a vegetarian. Animals should have the same “rights” as humans so that eating them is as morally reprehensible as cannibalism.
But of course “rights” is a bourgeois concept and as we, as Marxists, deny that humans have rights we can’t be accused of favouritism towards humans when we say that animals haven’t either. I hasten to add that this does not mean that cruelty to humans and animals (or cannibalism) is ok. It merely means that this has to be condemned on some other basis than “rights”.
It’s true that most party members are not vegetarians and that the Party is not a vegetarianist party. So of course you are not going to find articles advocating this or condemning meat-eating in the Standard. (You will of course find articles condemning the mistreatment of animals under capitalism.)
So, the charge of “speciesism” is ill-founded, not to say specious.
Wez, I think we ought to challrenge him on his claim that Marxists are committed to the ladder theory of evolution leading to humans at the top as superior to all other animals. I think he’s probably picked this up from some anti-Marxist “animal-rightist” writer who has mistaken the Leninist ideology of the old USSR for Marxism (which of course he should know, and in fact does know, is not Marxism at all).
So, if he doesn’t mean “Leninism” when he says “Marxism”, he would seem to be claiming that this is the view of the Party or Party members. If so, we are going to have to ask him to quote chapter and verse. Stephen J. Gould, who he admires and is a critic of the ladder theory, is also quite popular amongst Party members (despite his being soft of religion). Here, for instance, is a review of one of his books.
Incidentally, that book review quotes this passage from Gould (which is making the same point as Pannekoek):
“the biological basis of human uniqueness leads us to reject biological determinism. Our large brain is the biological foundation of intelligence: intelligence is the ground of culture: and cultural transmission builds a new mode of evolution more effective than Darwinian processes in its limited realm—the “inheritance” and modification of learned behaviour.”
To denigrate the human species is counter-productive from his own seeming main concern of wanting to protect other animals since humans, thanks to the nature of their brain and the culture it permits, are the only animal that can take action to do this. Humans are the hope of other animals and of the biosphere generally.
Of course he can rail against humans and the working class for not doing what they could in this respect but that’s not going to get the world any nearer to socialism, as the only framework within which humans can act to save the planet and other animals on it.
I agree your argument could be sustained ie knowing that the poor would suffer most the government took steps to ensure it didn’t spread from poor areas (but did they know that any more than they knew it would affect men more than women?)
But I still don’t think that’s could be the real reason. It is much more likely to have to do with what might have happened to the economy and health care system if they did nothing. Also doing nothing would not have been possible politically. If any government had tried this here it would have been driven out of office by popular and parliamentary protests. Even now they are having difficulty in persuading all those who could return to work to do so.
Good advice when you are in a hole: stop digging !
Here is how the Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek put it in his 1944 Anthropogenesis.
Seems ok to me (except not saying that humans are animals too) and the points I have been trying to make.
”There are thee main characteristics which differentiate between man and animal. Firstly, there is abstract thinking. Although animals do show a certain measure of intelligence, and though mental processes do take place with them which have their seat in highly developed brains, the capacity for abstract thought is only found in man. This is the thinking in concepts which has elevated him to so high a level of theoretical knowledge and science. Secondly there is speech, there is the use of language. Although animals do produce sounds intended for mutual information, with man alone these sounds have significance as names, and thus are the basis of a high spiritual culture. Thirdly there is the use of tools made by himself. Even though animals do make use of dead things from their natural surroundings as aids to their own support, with man this has become an habitual use of implements specially made for a purpose and according to a preconceived plan. These implements are the basis of an ever growing technique, and therefore of our entire material civilization.”
If he wasn’t using the word “bacteria” as a term of abuse, why did he use it to describe humans? I never did biology in school but I think that biologists divide life-forms into kingdoms, one of which is animals and another bacteria. So it is inaccurate to describe humans, as animals, as bacteria. But in this case it is more than a error of taxonomy (for which Bijou’s observer from another planet might be excused). It was clearly to intimate that humans were just as “lowly” as bacteria, an appeal to the popular ascription of inferiority to bacteria.
