Presentation on Animal Rights/Welfare at Brooklyn Food Conference 5/12/12/ by Norman Markowitz
This Saturday, I participated in workshop at the Brooklyn Food Conference. I was invited by the Animal Issues Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. I write write more for the blog about this fascinationg conference, which brought together a wide variety of people from environmental, peace and other organizations, but right now I am posting a version of my presentation The workshop was titled “The Animal Food Industry” I thank Adam Weissman of Global Justice for Animals and the Environment for inviting me to participate.
We live under a system with dominant social classes, owners and investors, and subordinate classes, workers/employees/consumers. The former seeks to exploit the latter to both produce and consume goods and services for their profit, paying the latter as little as possible for the goods they produce and charging them as much as possible for the goods they consume.
This system is called capitalism, whatever euphemisms its defenders may invent for it—“free enterprise” being the most widely used in the U.S., and it has existed for centuries. It is a world system, and large national and international corporations, large factory complexes, and an increasingly global distribution of labor are but its modern and contemporary manifestations. Technology and mass quantity production have not does not change its essential character, make it better or more humane.
The food industry is one important expression of this global system, whose driving force remains profit maximization. Both animals and humans are in this system essentially commodities to be bought and sold, both as labor and in the case of animals as foodstuffs, to be penned up in wretched conditions, puffed up to increase their value, and slaughtered—essentially the model that Charles Patterson, in his splendid book, Eternal Treblinka, which I recormmend to all, saw for the Nazi slaughterhouse trains, concentration camp conditions, and removal of gold fillings from the teeth of corpses taken from the gas chambers.
While this may seem very harsh, if some species from another planet with large amounts of capital came here to purchase human flesh for their consumption, I have no doubt that some sections of international agribusiness, which currently produces high value crops in poor countries to be sold in the markets of rich countries, would begin to use the rightwing dictatorships and death squad groups that exist in many of their countries to export human flesh to extraterrestrial markets.
We should remember that the international slave trade(in which traders “estimated” the numbers of who perish in the journey across the Atlantic to as part of their net gain, and the international drug trade of the nineteenth century, which was “legal” in regard to exports to countries like China, are examples of what the capitalist market economy has done in the past
The capitalist food industry is incompatible with animal welfare. One can be critical of the practices of existing socialist countries, which have developed up to now in the context of poverty, war, and revolution in a hostile world, in this regard, certainly, but, our task is to deal with the food industry in the capitalist world. Crusading for example against policies of the Peoples Republic of China from Europe or North America does nothing to restrict the food industry in Europe and North America, or aid the peoples of Africa, Latin America, and areas of Asia from the predatory policies of transnational agribusiness
My primary interest is in animal rights/animal welfare and this cannot be separated from the food industry here and abroad and also questions of environment and ecology/ It also cannot be separated a value system that supports the hunting and killing of animals for sport, a desensitized approach to both domestic and non domestic animals, seeing the former as disposable toys and the latter as inferior species to hunted, killed and driven out of habitats based on the whims and for the “greater good” of humans, much like the Hitler fascists proclaimed both the “right and duty of superior, “Nordic Aryan” Europeans to hunt, kill and drive out of lebensraum(living space) Jews, slavs, and others deemed inferior races, while treating Hungarians, Italians, and others as the equivalent of pets in a greater German empire
In this regard we should remember that the Nazis brutalized dogs and used them in concentration camps to terrorize prisoners. On the night of the annexation of Austria(1938) as tens of thousands of people, anti-fascists and Austrian citizens of the Jewish religion were arrested, the Nazis brutally murdered thousands of house pets of their victims. The “master race” was also the “master species.”
Also we should remember that the movement to regulate capital and the movement for animal rights/ animal welfare were both linked to peoples democratic struggles and to the rise of socialist movements, albeit in anumber of cases non Marxist socialists in the U.S. and other countries. The first major modern work, Animal Rights(1892) was the work of the non Marxist socialist Henry Salt. Socialist novelists Jack London and Upton Sinclair and Charles H. Kerr, the leading socialist publisher in the U.S. championed the cause of animal rights, animal welfare. Sinclair who saw industrial capitalism both working workers to death and providing them with a mass produced diet that sapped their healtlh and strength, involved himself in a variety of diet reform and vegetarian groups and actions, which, and here I disagree with some scholars, were not a withdrawal from socialist political struggle but ultimately in enhancement of his understanding, which helped him in his later writing and also in his political action.
Henry Spira was also an animal welfare activist from a socialist political background whose reading of Peter Singer’s animal liberation inspired him to work organize campaigns against both the cosmetics industry, Revlon and Avon, and the conglomma. Ote Proctor and Gamble, against their animal experimentation, and with less success the food and fast food industry,Perdue and MacDonald’s
Let me say that late in life I have become a vegetarian but I am not here to preach the benefits of vegetarianism or to seek in any way to coerce anyone into a vegetarian diet, either on health issues, on moral and ethical issues concerning specism—a concept largely ignored in society, accepted as “normal” and even beneficial, the way racist thinking was used to justify slavery and colonialism as both normal and beneficial. Let me say though that the present transnational food industry destroys animals and wastes large amounts of land and water resources, contributing to malnutrition and outright starvation in poor countries and regions of the world, Africa, Latin America, areas of Asia and the Pacific, and an expensive and unhealthy diet for large numbers of people in the rich countries of Europe, North America, Japan, creating the absurdity that we all live under—organic foods, whole foods, health foods are produced often as “boutique foods” by the artisans of food production, sold at high prices to those who can afford them while the great majority of people go to the supermarkets and purchase produce sprayed with dangerous chemicals, processed foods filled with carcinogenic and other destructive addities, beef pork and poultry injected with hormones and other adulterations—a diet, to use a term that a mother of a friend of mine once used, of “empty calories,” one in which the capitalists make weight reduction into a vast industry to profit from the obesity their food stuffs create in the rich countries while they reduce the consumption of grains and other low profit foodstuffs in poor countries to produce high profit fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, and poultry and even healthy soy products for rich country markets while increasing malnutrition and outright starvation in the poor countries who people cannot afford to buy the foodstuffs they are producing
What can be done. Under an advanced mixed economy system, in a country as rich and developed as the U.S., an “industrial policy” that would reward the producers of healthy nutritional foods and punish the procssors of unhealthy foods
In the rich countries, like the U.S. heavily taxing poor quality processed foods the way alcohol and tobacco is taxed and using the revenues to subsidize nutritionally sound foods in low income areas
A policy of rewarding with financial incentives supermarket chains which market nutritionally sound foods over unhealthy foods. The use of revenues from taxing the industry to develop both in school and mass media campaigns to encourage sound nutritional practices.
The establishment of a national health service, a serious form of socialized medicine, with makes diet and reasonable forms of exercise an important part of its preventive care approach to health and educates and rewards doctors and other health care industry providers for advancing such policies
Serious comprehensive reform and regulation of truth in packaging legislation along with consumer education policies to enable the people to understand what they are eating so they can make rational choices—
For the poor countries, who are at many levels ranging from moderate to destitution poverty , the creation of international authorities(through a United Nations formation like what the Food and Agricultural Organization many hoped would be) which would function to regulate transnational agribusiness to prevent predatory policies that threaten the nutritional and environmental needs of societies. Here and in the rich countries also, moving away from an animal protein based diet is both sound economically and environmentally. Connecting such policies with environmental and wildlife preservation policies is also necessary.
These policies will require a shift away from planning for profits in private markets to using markets one set of mechanisms to plan for the nutritional and environmental needs of all species who inhabit the ecosphere and his interaction and interdependence determines theirs and the ecospheres future.
What we need through the world batalions of Henry Spiras who will through far-reaching economic and political changes, creating new power structures, be able to implement such policies.
Food cooperatives and collectives, groups seeking sanity in world of large corporate insanity, are wonderful, but by themselves don’t usually survive over long periods of time or survive by isolating themselves from the larger society unless the changes that I have discussed do not take place. And it will take broad united fronts of peoples movements on the national and international level to help them take place
