Source: Liberation, no. 6, Summer 1995, p. 7;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
Revolutionary socialists fight for the liberation of humanity, in order to create a society free from exploitation and oppression, a society based upon human need rather than one based upon the needs of profits for the ruling elite.
Some animal rights activists would argue that this attitude is a form of chauvinism or "speciesism", since it places the needs of humanity above those of other animals.
What attitude should socialists take then towards animal rights campaigns? Surely we are against unnecessary cruelty, does this mean that we should support animal rights?
To understand this question, we must first look at what we mean by rights. History has shown us that the concept of "rights" is not an absolute. In different societies, the degree of rights that can be granted to all individuals within that society is limited both by the material resources available to that society, the way that society is organised and its level of development. As Karl Marx said "Men (sic) make history, but not in conditions of their own choosing".
For example we would argue that all people should have the "right" to decent housing with sanitary conditions, running water and so on. In the stone age, however, society was not organised to the extent that it could provide what is considered by today's standards as a necessity.
Marxism is based not upon just the emancipation of humanity but upon its self-emancipation. This is a sharp distinction that separates it from the nineteenth century liberal tradition. We would argue that the only rights that we have are the ones that we fight for and win.
Socialism is not about helping other people (though we're not against that), it's about organising ourselves collectively for the benefit of all. To talk about animals having rights would not just imply that for example, they feel pain, but that they can become conscious of their role in society and how to fight it.
None of this, however, implies that we should be unnecessarily cruel to animals, in fact there is a great deal to suggest that under a socialist society animals would be treated far better.
Capitalist society is by definition run for profit. People are not generally cruel to animals out of some form of sadistic pleasure, rather, they are acting upon the needs of the profit system. This means that massive resources are squandered as rival companies compete for profits. Rival drugs companies always try to keep their research secret from each other and so what animal testing is deemed "necessary" is repeated numerous times by different companies. Cosmetic companies do likewise, on top of the billions squandered by each company on advertising to convince us firstly, that we need their products and secondly, that their particular products are superior to the 1001 near identical products on the market.
Under socialism we would be unlikely to chose to continue wasting any of these resources, nor any of the unnecessary cruelty that goes with it.
It is also true that a particular area of land could feed more people by growing vegetables or grain than it could through grazing cattle. If people made a collective choice: should we use this land to feed one of us while the rest starve, or should we use it to feed all of us, it isn't hard to see what they would choose.
Despite the propaganda about the inefficiencies of socialism, based upon the myth that the Soviet Union was socialist, socialism is a far more efficient way to run society than capitalism, and as a consequence, far less cruel.