by Rabi’a Al-dhi’ba
Per the Associated Press, two enormous poultry processing facilities, one in Texas and one in Michigan, temporarily halted production due to avian influenza being found among their stock[1]. After the bird flu was detected at a Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. facility in Parmer County, Texas, two million of the company’s chickens were reportedly “destroyed” as a security measure; a euphemistic reference to their slaughter. This announcement comes one day after another announcement that a person also in Texas had contracted bird flu from contact with cows, the first known case globally of a human being contracting bird flu from a mammal[2]. These announcements demonstrate a number of fundamental truths about industrial animal agriculture. Firstly and most obviously, the response to bird flu detection at the Parmer County facility demonstrates that the lives of the hundreds of billions of non-human animals around the globe imprisoned in the industrial food production system are forfeit. These animals exist solely to fulfill human consumption habits, and if they threaten the smooth functioning of this system, they will be terminated in their millions swiftly and without mercy. Furthermore, while two million chickens were exterminated for bird flu, even that enormous number is only a small fraction – 3.6% — of the animals Cal-Maine keeps industrially confined across their euphemistically named “processing facilities.” Just like every other large industrial animal agrocorporation, Cal-Maine has tens of millions of chickens crammed unsanitarily and unceremoniously in these industrial confinement centers, and it is only natural that these confinement centers thereby serve as breeding grounds for waves of disease — the facility in Michigan where bird flu was discovered has reportedly already had four such breakouts in only the last two years[3]. Such disease breakouts and the resulting culling of millions are simply an unavoidable result of the industrial animal agriculture system, and as the bird flu case in Texas shows, it is a question of when these diseases will cross over to human beings, not if. Given this unavoidable spread of disease in the industrial non-human death camps, industrial animal agriculture is not only a brutal and genocidal denial of non-human life, it also poses an existential threat to human life as well[4]. Even if one is completely cold to the daily slaughter of millions, even if one does not give a single shit about non-human animals, clearly on a self-preservation level alone this industry is unsustainable and must be abolished.
Individual consciousness raising and heroic, uncompromising acts of direct action against industrial animal agriculture facilities are certainly a necessary start to this process of abolition, but if we wish to consign this all-devouring blood machine to the past, we as human beings are going to have to organize to bring down this system. It is through the historical process of centuries of enclosures and dispossession that humanity arrived at this juncture[5], and it is only through the reversal of this process, of the full-scale reestablishment of the global commons, that we may achieve food sovereignty and self-determination for human and non-human animals[6]. The great majority of those working in industrial animal agriculture are superexploited workers and peasants who end up traumatized from the process and who are treated with little more dignity than the non-human animals confined and slaughtered in the death camps. In order to abolish this industry therefore it is not only necessary but actively strategic to approach this question through the framework of popular power and labour organization, as counter-intuitive as this may seem at first blush. The history of “green bans,” of militant organized labour action with environmental goals in mind, in so-called Australia is instructive in this regard[7]. Through militant organized labour action, workers and peasants across the global chain of exploitation, those actually responsible for the production and maintenance of humankind’s basic necessities, must cultivate a widespread culture of refusal, forcing off the grip that industrial agrocorporations hold over food production and in their place constructing federations of productive assemblies that produce the necessities of life on a communal and non-exploitative basis, non-exploitative not only in regard to human workers but in regard to non-human animals and the surrounding biosphere as well. In order to construct these productive assemblies of course, the organized labour struggle must work in tandem with the struggle of the dispossessed for housing and land against the landlord class as well as the struggle for the preservation of green spaces and wilderness. The dismantling of the global commons through which capitalism was born and through which it continues to function is the fundamental driving force behind the all of these interrelated fields of struggle, and it is through federated alliances of workers, peasants, and the dispossessed organizing to reassert themselves in these avenues; in production of the necessities of life, in housing, in control of the land, in stewardship of remaining wilderness, and in cultivation of new green spaces through rewilding; that the dismantling of the commons and indeed the functioning of the capitalist machine itself may be combated and the commons reconstructed, piece by piece, acre by acre, community by community[8]. In the context of settler colonial entities like the United States and Australia, the centuries-long histories of indigenous resistance and resurgence particularly illuminate the path towards how this may be accomplished. For centuries indigenous peoples have struggled simultaneously to resist colonial dispossession and elimination and to reestablish traditional lifeways based on relationships to the land and to non-human life, relationships that take as their foundational principles reciprocity, generosity, mutuality, and autonomy. The struggle for indigenous resurgence is a process of reimagining and remaking on a fundamental level our relationships with one another as human beings and with non-human life, and it is through this process of reimagining and remaking our relationships across the ecological plane that the reconstitution of the global commons will be accomplished. To have an ecological worldview means to have a relational worldview of this kind, to honour the interdependence of all that exists on this planet. Though anarchism as a formalized political and philosophical tradition dates broadly speaking from nineteenth-century Europe, one can easily see the resonances between indigenous conceptions of relationality and lifeways based on reciprocity on the one hand and anarchist conceptions of federation on the other hand[9].
To be radically ecological consists in building relationships of struggle along these lines, with workers, peasants, and the dispossessed building non-exploitative reciprocal relationships with one another locally and then linking together these relationships through federation, constructing thereby liberated space, common space, until the devouring machine of dispossession and enclosure finally is halted in its tracks and the global commons entirely reconstituted. It is only through this process, gargantuan though it may be, that liberation may be achieved for human and non-human life. Because of the multi-sectoral[10] nature of ecological social revolution and the existential scale of what needs to be done, we advocate for a strategy of organizational dualism[11] and the simultaneous social insertion of anarchist militants into social movements, social strata and mass organizations of the working classes to build an ecological revolution from below. This is in harmony with insertion into other struggles of the oppressed and alongside ongoing insurrectionary resistance to ecocide so as to build a culture of refusal, direct action and democracy, class struggle, anti-colonialism and anti-racism, feminism and radical ecology at all layers of society.
Footnotes:
[1] – https://apnews.com/article/bird-avian-flu-chickens-eggs-03793b5b1cb7429ce293e8577aef0358
[2] – https://apnews.com/article/bird-flu-texas-cows-355f1e288e72df8b81b0e2efd8b3ae2f
[3] – https://www.michigan.gov/mdard/animals/diseases/avian/avian-influenza
[5] – For foundational (marxist) works on enclosing commons as capitalist development, we recommend the following:
- Ellen Meiksins Wood – The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002) https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=497D56F4BB24D1D6EE5E7791EACA54C9
- Silvia Federici – The Debt Crisis, Africa and the New Enclosures (1990) https://libcom.org/article/debt-crisis-africa-and-new-enclosures-silvia-federici
- Peter Linebaugh – Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (2014) https://libcom.org/article/stop-thief-commons-enclosures-and-resistance-peter-linebaugh
[6] – “Logistically, “free nature” is unattainable without the decentralization of cities into confederally united communities sensitively tailored to the natural areas in which they are located. It means the use of ecotechnologies, and of solar [CotP: passive solar, not extractive solar panels], wind [CotP: There are forms of wind power that do not harm birds and require heavy extractivism like most modern wind turbines], methane [CotP: from biowaste, not natural gas deposits], and other sources of energy, the use of organic forms of agriculture [CotP: i.e permaculture and the use of pre-colonial indigenous farming techniques], the design of humanly scaled, versatile industrial installations to meet regional needs of confederated municipalities. It means, too, an emphasis not only on recycling, but on the production of high-quality goods that can last for generations. It means the substitution of creative work for insensate labor and an emphasis on artful craftspersonship in preference to mechanized production. It means the leisure to be artful and engage in public affairs. One would hope that the sheer availability of goods and the freedom to choose one’s material lifestyle would sooner or later influence people to adopt moderation in all aspects of life as a response to the “consumerism” that is promoted by the capitalist market.” – From “What is Social Ecology?” by Murray Bookchin https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-what-is-social-ecology#fn_back6
“In a good society, communal assemblies become forms of horizontal political economic governance. Means of production, fields, factories, and workshops would be communalized, all would have guaranteed rights to common means of production, the means of existence, and the means of direct horizontalist politics. Persons and collectives would have access to the means to develop their various social, philosophical, and artistic activities, aspirations, and hobbies. Necessities and luxuries would be free for all and made abundant. When there is scarcity of luxury goods, there would be new plans to meet needs with scarce luxury goods rationed as needed. Communities would get together to make decentralized and co-federated communal and intercommunal decisions and plans to meet people’s needs within and between communities and to develop common projects, activities, and infrastructure as expressions of participatory communal and inter-communal life. Communal self governance would become a realm of common freedom: participatory activity of each and all within horizontalist bounds and the means thereof.” – From “Communalism & Especifismo” by the Usfuruct Collective https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/usufruct-collective-communalism-and-especifismo
[7] – RedAndBlackNotes on the Green Ban movement https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/when-construction-workers-put-their-foot-down-the-story-of-the-new-south-wales-blf
[8] – The largest strike in history (250 million people!) was from peasants and lower caste workers in India in 2022 [https://www.anarchistfederation.net/11-months-later-indian-farmers-still-resist-laws-that-help-big-business/]. Despite mass urbanization, humanity still relies on massive exploitation of peasants and rural workers for food production while enclosing the few commons left that subsistence farmers rely on to survive. Resistance to this is global and ongoing, alongside anti-colonial resistance and the “developed” world’s farmer’s movement. Building this idealized federation of subsistence must bring together all of these sectors along with ecological scientists and communalist assemblies to find local-level and ecological solutions to food production
[9] – For more on North American indigenous resistance and it’s relation to Anarchism & Marxism, we recommend:
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/twinrabbit-stolen-anarchy
- https://files.libcom.org/files/Franklin_Rosemont_Karl_Marx_and_the_Iroquois.pdf
- https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D12433BCD42A37146D9B5183F2318DA1
[11] – For a primer on organizational dualism, check out “Organizational Issues Within Anarchism” By Filipe Correa https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/felipe-correa-organizational-issues-within-anarchism#toc4. For more detail into the theory and practice of org dualism, there’s Tommy Lawson’s “Foundational Concepts of the SAO” https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tommy-lawson-foundational-concepts-of-the-specific-anarchist-organisation