Steven Best Quotes

Today we call this planetary monolith "global capitalism," but humans became global animals tens of thousands of years before the onset of capitalism. Humans created hierarchical and growth-addicted societies some ten thousand years ago and their ecocidal proclivities stretch back millennia more into prehistory. And just like every political empire of the past, the human empire has possibly reached its zenith and begun its downward spiral toward collapse. This empire's peak and slide into catastrophe marks a new epoch not only in human history, but also the history of the earth. Debates over whether advanced societies have entered into a new "postmodernity" pale in significance to the scientifically-based proposition that human activity has created a new epoch in geological history--the age of the Anthropocene. This epoch characterized by the dominance of human influence over earth's systems and has led to, among other colossal events, a sixth mass extinction crisis and runaway climate change.

A civil war is unfolding — one between forces hell-bent on exploiting animals and the earth for profit whatever the toll, and activists steeled to resist this omnicide tooth and nail. We are witnessing not only the long-standing corporate war against nature, but also a new social war about nature.

By no means is globalization to be understood as an inherently negative dynamic or consequence of human history, as if the desideratum is fragmentation, isolation, provincialism, and nationalism. Ever since Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and dispersed itself globally across the continents, human existence has been a global dynamic and knowledge, culture, and technologies have spread in all directions, such as with the influence of Islam on the West. Certainly, from the standpoint of the natural environment and the countless animal species driven into extinction, the rapid global growth of human populations, technologies, and economies has not been a positive development. But dissemination of knowledge, culture, and people is a positive and enriching process; indeed, it is now urgent that the paradigm shift from economics and growth to ecology and sustainability take root on a global scale. A salient distinction to be made here is between globalization from above (as dictated by multinational capital) and globalization from below (as realized in self-organizing and democratic ways by people in cultural exchange and open movement).

We consider this a case of how nonviolence leads to violence when pacifists refuse to intervene when violence is occurring, as the capitalist speciesist butchers bash the brains and carve up the planet knowing their violence is protected by the shield of nonviolence practiced by opponents with dulled instincts and a slave mentality, opponents who throw down their weapons before entering into battle. The fundamentalist pacifist argument is an ideal pertinent to communities of saints but not to a society of human beings rooted in both a social and biological past riddled with violence, murder and genocide. Nonviolence should be the first option, but not the only option.

But it is important to clearly distinguish between such groups and the ALF, and to keep in mind that when a "radical" animal rights group threatens or commits violence, it is not acting in conformity with the ALF philosophy. Indeed, it could easily be a framing action by the state or an animal exploitation industry, intended to discredit the cause of animal liberation. True, ALF spokespersons and supporters have sometimes expressed violent sentiments against animal abusers, and phrases such as "do whatever it takes" and "animal liberation by any means necessary" can give credence to charges that the ALF has a violent edge. But given the enormity and magnitude of animal suffering, and the righteous anger that animal liberationists feel, one should notice that the ALF has demonstrated remarkable restraint in their war of liberation.

In addition to becoming vegan, the second powerful choice a person can make is the political choice to broaden resistance and become part of a planetary justice and liberation movement. First, veganism has to be connected to broader social issues such as food justice, community empowerment, class, race, and sustainability. Second, we need to create a broader shift from veganism to anti-speciesism, which facilitates real political action. This creates a profound paradigm shift, for veganism has already been thoroughly co-opted and commodified by capitalist industries, media, and culture. The mainstreaming of veganism removes it from the sphere of inter-species justice and politics to the zone of human health and individual consumption, into a lifestyle practice that challenges neither consumer nor speciesist identities. In direct contrast, anti-speciesism assaults human supremacism and shifts the focus from products and markets to the animal holocaust and the need for political struggle. Unlike “veganism,” anti-speciesism is also . Thus, third, we need to connect the anti-speciesist/animal liberation movement to other social and environmental movements, with an emphasis on the emergency and systemic consequences of climate change. This two-fold shift in focus transforms veganism from a domesticated, toothless, apolitical form of consumer capitalism to vital leg of a new total liberation movement.

Despite the inspirational platitude, we must realize that failure is an option. Our future is problematic at best and doomed at worst. There is no inherent purpose we are here to fulfill, no destiny at which we are assured to arrive at in glory, however tardy, tattered, bruised, and blackened we might be. There are no guiding angels to protect us from failure and no God to save us from an apocalypse. Countless millions of species have been annihilated in past , our Homo ancestors are gone forever, we are dispatching thousands of other species into oblivion, and there is nothing but the determination of aware, concerned, and committed peoples to save Homo sapiens from vanishing into nothingness as well. As Michael Boulter notes, the earth is a self-organizing system that strives toward balance, and species lose out, if necessary, to the larger dynamics of ecological imperatives. "Extinctions are an essential stimulus to the evolutionary process," and humans are not only expendable in the overall calculus, their demise would be a positive and necessary event.

There can be no full or even adequate understanding of the systemic problems of capitalist society, of the origins and dynamics of hierarchy, and of a future rational, autonomous, ethical, and ecological society until we address the 10,000-year legacy of speciesism and the barbaric exploitation of other animals.

In a global setting, contextualism asks this question: How can we best defend all life and the entire planet from the massive and unrelenting assault of global capitalism, centralized political rule, militarism, and the metastasizing growth of the human empire colonizing the earth and monopolizing its resources? Questions concerning the legitimacy and efficacy of physical force cannot be answered in the abstract, but only in specific contexts. Whereas partisans on both sides want to read the history of moral progress as driven exclusively by nonviolence or violence, the fact is that social change unfolds through the entire arsenal of pressure tactics, which include strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, sabotage, liberation, education, legislation or even armed struggle.

A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will grasp the ancient conceptual roots of hierarchy and domination, such as emerged in the practices of early agricultural societies. It will incorporate a new ethics (ecology and animal liberation) and politics of nature that overcomes instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking and institutions in every pernicious form possible. It will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most profound values and goals of humanity. It will build on the achievements of democratic, socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate , feminist, LGBT, and indigenous struggles. It will repudiate ideologies and unequivocally reject alliances or association with the . It will merge human, animal, and earth liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and domination in of all kinds.

Whereas the unconscious operations and blind forces of the planet have provoked turbulent changes over the last 4.5 billion years of earth’s evolutionary history, now change is being directed by a conscious and volitional agent – "humanity." We cannot speak of humanity equally, to be sure, as the problem was caused by the industrialized capitalist West and the poorer nations who contributed least to will be hit the hardest. But nations such as China, India, and Brazil are major contributors, and the cumulative impact of 7.5 billion people on the planet is causing extinction and collapse everywhere. The stability of the is now gone, changes are accelerating beyond our understanding and control, and chaos waits at our door.

Walls solve nothing. They don’t stop desperate people, address the causes of migration, or blot out promise of a better life. They are a feeble technofix for deep-rooted social, political, and economic problems. They benefit no one but the nefarious agents, agencies, and corporations behind the migrant-industrial complex. Any serious policy approach to immigration would address the systemic causes of migration, not tinker with its effects. For the mass migration of desperate peoples are driven by global capitalism, neoliberalism, the imperialist reordering of , and the military-backed plundering of underdeveloped countries. The current global order requires harsh exploitation, drastic inequality, political violence, suffering and immiseration — all now exacerbated by runaway .

One of the key contradictions of capitalism is that its expansion rates are so rapid and vast that the system consumes ever more of the life systems necessary for humans to survive. Capitalism destroys its own conditions of reproduction – the biological foundation of life on which it parasitically depends.

Increasingly, calls for moderation, compromise, and the slow march through institutions can be seen as treacherous and grotesquely inadequate. With the planet in the throes of dramatic climate change, ecological destabilization, and the crisis in its history (this one having human not natural causes), "reasonableness" and "moderation" seem to be entirely unreasonable and immoderate, as "extreme" and "radical" actions appear simply as necessary and appropriate. After decades of environmental struggles in the west, we are nevertheless losing ground in the battle to preserve species, ecosystems, wilderness, and human communities. Politics as usual just won't cut it anymore