Corporate Power, Ecological Crisis, and Animal Rights

Abstract

The global ecological crisis, deepening with each passing year, threatens the world as never before, an outgrowth of unrestrained corporate power that today colonizes every realm of human life. The crisis intersects with virtually every social problem, from declining public health to chaotic weather patterns, growing poverty, resource depletion, agricultural collapse, even military conflict. It goes to the core of industrialism and modernity, to relentless efforts by privileged interests to commodify and exploit all parts of the natural world, including most natural habitats and species within it. The power of a neoliberal international system based in the United States and a few other advanced capitalist nations is so great, moreover, that a crisis which earlier might have been contained now veers out of control, with few political mechanisms or counterforces to resist it. Living habitats are being ravaged at such an alarming rate that the carrying capacity of the earth has already been exceeded, a process of destruction justified by resort to such high-sounding virtues as social progress, material prosperity, and national security. Since transnational corporations, bolstered by immense government and military power, recognize few limits to their quest for wealth and domination, anti-system movements will be forced to adopt increasingly radical politics—progressive socialization of the state and economy, alternative modes of production and consumption, a new paradigm of natural relations. This means nothing short of a qualitative break with longstanding patterns of development if the planet is to be saved from imminent disaster. If a political shift of this magnitude seems utterly remote and utopian, that is to be expected: genuine alternatives to the global corporate-military tyranny are presently weak and fragmented, and what exists lacks strategic coherence. Some progressive forces retain the capacity to disrupt business-as-usual, others have the power to achieve limited reforms, but none pose any real threat to the power structure. There are no truly anti-system movements of any scope or permanence, including among the multitude of environmental organizations and groups, despite the urgency of the crisis. In the case of animal rights, three decades of popular struggles have shown that even modest gains have been won slowly, with great difficulty, and against imposing obstacles. Of course this problem is scarcely unique to the challenge of transforming natural relations: time-honored goals of disarmament, ending poverty, and conquering disease, for example, are today no closer to realization than they were many decades ago. Still, where struggles to dramatically uplift the world raise such compelling political and moral issues, pessimism or resignation is simply no option insofar as history shows that even limited victories can set in motion more far-reaching dynamics of change. In the existing state of affairs, moreover, an attitude of retreat makes less and less sense insofar as fissures and cracks in a seemingly efficient monolithic system have begun to widen as global capitalism reaps more and more of its own bitter harvest. (...)