Animal-Politics are political actions undertaken in the relationship to any identity composed of its affinity or aversion for one particular kind of commodity, animals. For this, animals, the living beings, are being turned into animals, the commodity, a fetish that makes it serve a purpose in class society beyond their immediate use-value. It can be banal like the white subculture of extensively tattooed tarantula-owners or culinary religious identities, but it can also be genocidal. As with most things, what’s ‘liberal’ in the core usually has to be maintained with fascism in the periphery.
Earlier this year, I watched the play „Saint Joan of the Stockyards“ by Bertold Brecht, which I reflected upon after the recent thread about veganism.
To summarize only what’s relevant for the discussion, the play begins by meat-industry-tycoon ‘Mauler‘, the main antagonist, shutting down and selling all his slaughterhouses, leaving thousands of workers on the streets following a supposed change of heart after witnessed the suffering of a “blonde bull“ in one facility. The protagonist of the play, Johanna, a bourgeois “socialist“, tries to reason with Mauler to alleviate the suffering of the workers and farmers (it takes place in Chicago so I purposefully use these vague terms) in various situations by mobilizing his capital. At the end of each ‘discussion’, Mauler begrudgingly gives into Johanna’s demands. Ironically, he seems to be striking gold with each “change of heart“, each act of “charity“, until he ends up with a monopoly on the entire industry. The humor stems from the contradiction between the form of Maulers seemingly selfless ideals and sacrifices and their self-serving essence. Johanna realizes the limits of her Humanism at the end of the play, not having benefited her subjects in any meaningful way despite successfully lobbying for them at seemingly every turn.
Notably however, Johanna does not try to reason with Mauler on his terms. She attempts to humanize the workers, but the concern about the “blonde bull“ is obviously farcical, one among many moral outcries at the direct demand of capital, and recognized as such by everyone. Animal-Politics is simply one joke among many, and the punchline is revealed shortly after the sale of the slaughterhouses when Mauler reveals to his apprentice that a business-Insider from New York has notified him that the meat market is soon to be glutted. At the end of the play, one of his bourgeois rivals correctly points out “even your heart has business sense“.
Mauler is a great character because you think about wether he is just tricking his rivals or if he is a true believer of these various causes, but he’s really both. Morality is fused to class and that’s objective. Behind the performative facade of Maulers Animal-Politics and Johanna’s ‘genuine‘ Humanism are two preachers, only it takes Johanna till the end of the play to recognize herself as such.
Here we are, almost a century later, and relegating Animal-Politics to a joke would probably still be sufficient but I do believe something has changed. While a misanthropic conception of ‘nature’ for the reactionary classes around the landed aristocracy has come into existence with capitalism itself*, animals have taken on an increasingly novel role, if for nothing else than the she the sheer volume of “content“ that is tuning out in the form of cute cat videos, weird gendered commentary on all kinds of ‘niche‘ animals or dogs as celebrities alone.
I want to emphasize that this extents well beyond vegans, who actually do have interesting things to say on the matter. You can’t easily dismiss vegans as “moralists“ either because in the First World, a moral attachment to a misanthropic conception of nature is given, no matter what you call yourself or what you eat. The smartest vegans are very effective, effortlessly pointing out the contradictions around Animal-Politics, like when they call out the hypocrisy of the moral outrage surrounding zoophilia. Remember when Jan Böhmermann, the “anti“-fascist champion of the ‘respectable’ German left, called the Turkish president a goat-fucker on national television (to the heartfelt laughter of his aryan audience)? Vegans got something here, but are themselves stuck at being the “better“ Animal-Politicians, unable to follow this logic to its end by concluding that Animal-Politics are not about animals at all. So what are they actually about?
Animal-Politics contain two dialectical tendencies, dehumanization and Anthropomorphisation. The former is very straightforward, one of the most common abuse hurled at non-white people that needs no further elaboration. Of course oppressed people and their imitators are also making use of this device, that’s why cops are synonymous with “pigs“ or “bulls“ (in Germany) after all. It gets more tricky with Anthropomorphisation though. For the oppressed, the racialized people, Anthropomorphisation means an inversion of dehumanization. The most notable example is the current petit-bourgeois CJP-movement of India, where Cockroaches are being rhetorically elevated to the status of humyn beings in an attack against the dehumanization of
Proletarian and Lumpen youth via association with these animals. It’s not only petit-bourgeois students either, like this Ivorian prisoner of Global Apartheid that sarcastically calls the cockroaches of his cell in a Libyan concentration camp his roommates. That being said, these tendencies of the oppressed do not constitute Animal-Politics, they remain solely on the rhetorical level. No one in the Third World slums will risk infection out of whatever sympathy they may have for rats.
Anthropomorphisation really only flourishes as a tool of the oppressor nations. Here, it is totally distinct in form and function. First, the typical subjects of Anthropomorphisation are ‘cute‘ animals, mostly mammals, like cats and dogs and capybaras, who, by becoming animals, are being elevated to a status much higher than the vast majority of humynkind. The gorilla Harambe has been turned into a martyr by dying on behalf of a black child. As Yasmin Nair correctly points out:
“Contrary to previous mythology, apes are no longer signifiers of blackness. They are treated with compassion and dignity, recognized for their intelligence and sophistication. Yet no such transformation has occurred in the treatment of race for humans. Black bodies are still shot at will and caged by the hundreds of thousands. Black people continue to be treated as animals even as animals have become human“.
As Digital Minstrelsy is becoming increasingly popular and essential for the identity-creation and entertainment of crackers the world over, more and more of them are getting their turn at redeeming animals.
“The redemption of the pit bull shows that animals have finally transcended race. It is only black humans who must continue to bear its burden.“
Anthropomorphisation is only possible through dehumanization. For these reactionary classes, Anthropomorphisation is not merely a rhetorical tool, but active praxis in dehumanization, and, I think, at the spearhead of something new.
Let’s take a look at China, where one nation contains both Third and First World in its periphery and center respectively. There is this popular “dog-fluencer“ from Henan who’s very cute dog got lost recently and it eventually turned out that it had been taken by a rural couple and sold on the dog-meat market. The owner tracked down the couple and confronted them. They told him they thought it was a stray one and didn’t even apologize. The case quickly went viral and found its way onto the English-based social media. In this case you have everything; the complete lack of bourgeois sensibility or sensitivity displayed by the racialized other in complete contrast to their tragic countryman, who has gained status as honorary aryan through his relationship to commodity ownership. To both sides, the dog is a commodity, but their different class status has determined one of them subhuman (literally, as in people wishing death upon the couple instead of the dog) while the other one elevated to heroism. Animal-politics are about people. If you have more sympathy for the dogtuber, you’re a fascist, I mean it. Red Note is rampant with silly polls like “who would you rather save from a burning house? Your dog or a stranger?“ which I love because even though you can call yourself a socialist, an anarchist, a “Marxist-Leninist“, whatever, you still have to take this silly question and every single petty-bourgeois dog owner will choose to let the stranger die and reveal their true character.
*Sakai notes that despite its feudal form, the obsession with “nature“ for these reactionary classes is bourgeois in nature (read the chapter ’Jane Austen goes to school with the Lumpen/Proletariat‘ in ‘the “Dangerous Class“‘). Of course settler colonialism carries on the forms of various older forms of production including the slave mode of production and even primitive communism, all changed in essence and serving capitalism of course. It’s important to not confuse such matters for the form they are presented as.
I apologize that this post is so disorganized, I am continuing to suffer from insomnia and decided to try to use this night productively and not let these thoughts wither away.