A cornerstone of the historical-materialist theory on the liberation of animals
In 2005, I published the »Nine Theses on Anti-speciesism« for the first time on an obscure website run by former members of the Italian Communist Party with animalist sympathies called »Liberazioni«[1]. I had just completed a long and complex essay titled »Marxismo e Animalismo«[2]. In it, I tried, for the first time, to show the limits of the moral approach to the animal question adopted by animal rights advocates (in short: their misunderstanding of Marx and of the fundamental concepts of Marxism), and to demonstrate how the Frankfurt School offered indispensable theoretical tools to provide an »animalist« inflection to Marx’s own theory—the inclusion of the suffering of »tormentable bodies«[3] within the perspective of socialist emancipation.
The »Theses« emerged suddenly, as a kind of addendum or reconsideration of what had remained unspoken—because not yet thought—in that long essay. Their composition, however, was prompted by a different event: An anarchist magazine had just published a questionable reconstruction of the history of speciesism, claiming that all forms of domination historically derived from the prejudice of species. Having criticized bourgeois animalism, I thus found myself compelled to criticize what called itself »anti-capitalist« animalism. And I immediately realized that the underlying ideas were not profoundly different, since even Peter Singer himself, in »Animal Liberation«, had written a history of speciesism that was just as abstract, ahistorical, and idealistic.
Driven by the force of that intuition, and by the desire to go straight to the essentials so that the reader would not be distracted by a text that was too complex, I decided to give the piece a paradigmatic and peremptory form modeled on Marx’s »Theses on Feuerbach«. The same comrades from the Communist Party who hosted my early writings found the »Theses« unorthodox, but could not help noticing that they presented the animal question in a »strange and unsettling light«. And this, despite the fact that the guiding theoretical idea was actually not »new«: I had merely formulated in materialist terms what even communists like them had started to discuss in the terms of Tom Regan’s moral philosophy.
Both texts immediately provoked fierce polemics within Italian activist circles. And it could hardly have been otherwise, since they struck directly at the idealism and moralism that defined the position of almost all animalist militants in those days—both »bourgeois« and liberal, and »anti-capitalist« (that is, mostly anarchists). The »Theses«, however, had a longer and more fortunate history than their elder sibling, and they are the reason why, twenty years later, I find myself speaking of them again.
In the years that followed, they began to circulate above all within the German-speaking activist milieu. Those were years of intense intellectual ferment, when a serious theoretical debate among groups, militants, and journals—in Italy as well as in the rest of the West—seemed to restore philosophically and politically dignity to the reflection on animality. Not only in academic settings, which were soon to produce their own »animal studies«, but also within militant movements, one could find passionate and rigorous discussion, driven by the conviction that the animal question demanded a theoretical elaboration adequate to its historical and social implications.
In that context, the »Theses« found an unexpected echo: Translated and disseminated among German, Swiss, and Austrian groups, they sparked a debate that led me to present the results of my research, in particular during the »…dass das steinerne Herz der Unendlichkeit erweicht« conference, which was organized by Tierrechtsaktion-Nord in Hamburg in 2006. It was on that occasion that the distinction between metaphysical and historical anti-speciesism took the shape of an actual theoretical paradigm. From that initial nucleus grew a historical-materialist approach to the animal question which, over the years, developed autonomously and gained international recognition. Today there exists a current of thought that explicitly refers to that perspective, continuing and critically elaborating the intuitions that had first taken form in those few, peremptory theses.
The »Theses« were originally titled »On Metaphysical and Historical Anti-speciesism«. Their central core consisted in the critique of the metaphysical conception of Peter Singer and, more generally, of all animalists inspired by him. I recall that, already during the congress in Hamburg, a »Singerian« objected that Singer could not be considered a metaphysical thinker, since he had held explicitly anti-metaphysical positions: ethical secularism, rejection of the »sanctity of life«, critique of vitalism and of the soul.
What escaped that objection was that, as in Engels’s »Dialectics of Nature«, my use of the term metaphysical was neither ontological nor theological, but Marxian and materialist, that is, internal to the critique of political economy. »Metaphysical«, in this sense, designated any approach that ignores the social structure in the formation of ideas and ideological processes, inverting the relation between the real and the spiritual, between the material and the ideal—in other words, one that takes prejudice to be the cause of historical events rather than their effect.
Another crucial aspect of the »Theses« concerned the collective nature of social structures. Against methodological individualism, I maintained that the metaphysical standpoint is one that reduces society to a mere sum of individuals, of »moral atoms« whose choices are presumed to be self-sufficient and decisive. By contrast, the historical and materialist perspective recognizes that only collective structures—economic, institutional, symbolic—make social action possible, determining its limits, its forms, and its meaning.
As for the position I intended to defend, it did not, at the time, have a single term to define it. On the one hand, it was »historical«, but only in the sense of a history understood materialistically. On the other, precisely for that reason, it was also materialist. Finally, I hoped it would be recognized as dialectical, because dialectical is, first of all, the relation between the human and the non-human that underlies those »Theses«. The negation of animality within the human—as already shown by Adorno and Horkheimer in the »Dialectic of Enlightenment«—leads inevitably to the self-suppression of the human itself. Anti-speciesism, to be consistent with this insight, had therefore to be historical, materialist, and dialectical.
What later spread in the Italian context, however, was the notion of »political anti-speciesism«, a concept I myself supported but which eventually gave rise to a series of misunderstandings. The »political« nature of anti-speciesism, after all, can be claimed by both anarchists and liberals, and the formula risked obscuring the decisive point: The issue was not one of ideological allegiance, but of method.
The anti-speciesism I intended to propose was a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of animal alienation through the lens of historical materialism and the critique of political economy. At the same time, it was a practical proposal to build, within the workers’ movement, a current capable of linking human and animal emancipation as moments of a single process of liberation of nature from domination.
It was a perspective far from mystical, as in certain religious currents, and equally distant from the vague and Utopian formulations of authors such as Steven Best or from the moralistic and idealistic tendencies of the anarchist milieu. It rather aimed to deduce from within the analysis of capital the conditions of possibility of a universal liberation, one that would include human beings, animals, and nature in their reciprocal process of emancipation.
I am glad that, twenty years later, these »Theses« are being republished. They belong to a long debate that is far from over and that, indeed, finds us today increasingly engaged within the workers’ movement in the effort to bring the animal question to the forefront of the critique of capitalism. The contradictions that now erupt before us — social, ecological, economic — must drive us not only to the necessary action for their overcoming, but also to think more deeply, to continue and complete that process of theoretical elaboration which we had then only just begun.
Marco Maurizi
- - -
[1] The first English translation of the »Nine Theses on Speciesism« was made for and then distributed as a leaflet at the Congress »…dass das steinerne Herz der Unendlichkeit erweicht«, which was organized by Tierrechtsaktion-Nord in Hamburg in 2006. In the following, the »Theses« were made available on the blog »Apes from Utopia«.
[2] The English translation of the title is »Marxism and Animalism«. The essay later on became part of the book »Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism, and Critical Theory«, published in 2021. In German it was called »Marxismus und Tierbefreiung« and published as a contribution to the anthology »Das steinerne Herz der Unendlichkeit erweichen. Beiträge zu einer kritischen Theorie für die Befreiung der Tiere« edited by Susann Witt-Stahl in 2007.
[3] Adorno uses this notion in his »Negative Dialectics« but he assigns it to Bertolt Brecht.
