If the left is to broaden its appeal to working people, it must begin to see them more holistically and appeal to them on issues of human rights. There is a long tradition in U.S. history upholding 'human rights,' the rights of labor and the whole people, as against 'property rights,' the rights in the 19th century of 'the rich and the well-born' in the twentieth of corporations and investors. Along with labor, movements for environmental protection, consumers rights, and public planning were forces in the U.S in the progressive, New Deal, and Great Society eras, when reformers defined human rights more broadly than the rights of selected political dissidents in foreign countries.

Partisans of socialism and feminism were often in the forefront of these movements, which continue to be a force in U.S. life. But one progressive movement with substantial support today tends to neglected in left circles – the movement for Animal Rights

Like earlier social movements challenging dominant ideas that were considered 'normal' and rational, the 'natural inferiority' of Blacks used to justify slavery and segregation and the 'separate spheres,' both secular and religious, used to deny women citizenship rights in most of the world, animal rights educators and activists have been caricatured as cranks, demonized as terrorists and generally dismissed as other worldly dreamers.

But mass movements struggling against exploiters and oppressors have made equal rights for women and minorities, and humane treatment and social welfare rights for all people part of a world human rights agenda, enshrined in the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and carried forward by a wide variety of national and international organizations through the world.

While Human Rights, like Democracy itself, may exist only in varying degrees and be subject to diverse interpretations, ideals to aspire to and struggle for are being globally established. Under capitalist leadership, such definitions are narrow, often hypocritical, and largely silent on questions of economic and social rights. Yet, the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights itself was a victory for the forces that had both defeated Fascism and were emerging from colonialism after WWII. It is in the interest of the working class movement internationally to revive and strengthen those parts of the Declaration which address economic and social rights of all people while defending the civil rights and civil liberties present in the declaration.

As such ideals spread, it becomes possible for the diverse definitions of human rights, political-juridical and socio-economic, to develop and, perhaps, begin to merge. It also becomes possible to develop standards for the protection of interdependent species and environments.

History shows, for example, that the movements against slavery and for women’s rights intersected in the decades before the civil war and were part of larger movements to reform prisons, establish free schools, and provide for the handicapped.

In the twentieth century, activists with backgrounds in the labor and socialist movements brought forward campaigns for equal rights for Blacks, other minorities, and women, and the right to organize unions and live with economic and social security for all people. In these movements, the central idea was always that rights and welfare were one and indivisible – that an injury to one, in the old IWW slogan, today used by many animal rights activists, has inevitably meant an injury to all, and that the 'strong' benefited themselves by strengthening the week.

What, many may ask, has all of this to do with animal rights, since no one argues that animals are in their cognitive skills the equals of humans; nor can they accumulate property that can be turned into stocks, bonds, or real estate, however territorial they may be, and however skilled at ferreting away foodstuffs.

It can be shown, however, the movements for animal rights are connected to the same conceptions of rights and welfare, the same humanist impulses, and the same tensions between liberal and radical or revolutionary strategies that have characterized the diverse movements for human rights. Interest in and support for the welfare and security of animals in the U.S. developed as part of the larger reformist movements of abolitionists, feminists, educational and social reformers, united in the belief in universal harmony and human perfectability. In the reformist upsurge following the end of slavery, both the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1866) and the Humane Society (1877) were founded.

The concept of animal rights itself was first put forward by the non-Marxist British Socialist, Henry Salt, in his work Animal Rights (1892), while American socialist novelists Jack London and Upton Sinclair and publisher Charles H. Kerr championed animal rights before WWI, as did feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who supported Vegetarianism as they focused on women’s suffrage. Feminist writers like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward also popularized the movement against vivisection, and others campaigned against the use of feathers and fur in luxury clothing.

Since the end of the 1960s, animal rights activists have struggled in grass roots coalitions with environmental activists against the luxury fur industry, the hunting and gun interests, and the corporate and 'scientific' defenders of animal 'experimentation.' Animal Rights activists have also pointed to the enormous waste of public land and funds to sustain the meat industry and, in the words of old environmentalists and socialists, Scott and Helen Nearing, its cancer producing 'slaughterhouse diet.'

As such the modern animal rights movement, which has used consumer boycotts effectively to protest animal experimentation by cosmetics firms, protected endangered species, and played an important role in criticizing the environmental damage, economic waste, and assault upon both human health and morality represented much of the existing order. Animal Rights activists have been in the forefront of the fight the NRA and its hunter allies long before it became fashionable, large cosmetic and pharmaceutical corporations, and the heavily subsidized meat industry since the 1960s.

In the 1970s, Henry Spira, a longtime left activist awakened to cause of animal rights after reading Peter Singer’s classic study Animal Liberation. Spira, who had and loved a cat, became an organizer of demonstrations against the use of cats in 'experiments' at the Museum of Natural History, a coordinator of campaigns against Revlon, McDonald’s Perdue Chickens for their treatment of animals as commodities to be used and destroyed.

As an organizer of Animal Rights International, Spira went on to direct campaigns that led Revlon and Avon cosmetics firms to end their animal experimentation policies in 1980. From that victory, he and the ARI moved forward to pressure Proctor and Gamble to commit to phase out animal experimentation in 1984. Subsequently led a campaign that compelled the USDA to end the face branding of cattle as a policy. With less success, he sought to have McDonald’s and other fast food empires sign agreements that would delimit their abuses of animals.

At a time when labor and progressive movements generally were in retreat, Henry Spira applied the methods of organization, militant, committed, and coordinated struggle that he had learned in the labor and Civil Rights movements to force employers and bosses whose businesses led them to abuse animals to retreat from some of the worst manifestations of their abuse. In an interview in 1998 shortly before his death, Spira summed up his philosophy in this way: 'I spent a quarter century fighting for human rights, and it is basically the fight against exploitation, against domination, against the strong pushing the weak around. And in this whole hierarchy it is basically the animals who are at the bottom of the pile. Singer [philosopher Peter Singer] pushed the issue of Animal Liberation as an extension and an expansion of fighting for human rights.'

Sociological scholarship has also shown that those who abuse animals are much more likely to abuse people, from serial killers who often begin by torturing and murdering small animals to those who whose contempt for animal welfare spills over into contempt for the welfare of humans of different ethnicities and nationalities. Some in the tradition of Peter Singer and Henry Spira have even contended that educating people toward policies that plan for animal welfare, provide for the neutering rather than the murder of deer and other creatures rather than encouraging hunters is an important step in making human rights something more than a phrase manipulated hypocritically by ruling classes.

Certainly the working classes of the world who suffer from the environmental degradation and maldistribution of precious land and water resources that derive from a meat industry which slaughters animals often in poor countries for shipment and consumption in rich countries has much to gain from the establishment of international animal rights/animal welfare standards. The working class also has much to gain morally and ethically from the elimination of the hunter subculture, from aristocratic fox hunts to general population bird shoots and deer hunting, which 'unites' rich and poor in what are feudal games of killing living things for sport rather than for necessity of food.

An ecological outlook that stresses the interdependence of all living things on the earth and a commitment among those with the highest cognitive powers, humans, to protect and preserve the environment and living things as a matter of rights and justice is necessary for a working class movement that fights against a capitalist class which literally tries to make their world view, competition and Social Darwinian 'survival of the fittest,' the 'law of the jungle,' the way in which workers view the world. Animal Right as an extension of and expansion of human rights deserves to be an integral part of that holistic working class world-view.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.



» Find more of the online edition.