MOVEing Beyond Anti-State to Anti-Civ: Black Lives Matter and the MOVE Organization Through the Critical Environmental Justice Lens

Rejecting the human–animal binary and embracing socioecological indispensability

Where EJ studies have traditionally focused on race and class in analyzing the causes and impacts of environmental racism, BLM extends its analysis of state-sanctioned violence to other categories of difference, including gender, sexual orientation, and citizenship status. ^{20 , 21} The omission of species as a category of difference, however, is an important and common oversight. It is certainly the case that distinct marginalized groups experience oppression in unique ways, but as Patricia Hill Collins ²² has noted and other scholars have applied to speciesism, the same logics of domination undergird distinct forms of oppression. ^{23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29}

Speciesism, the unconscious or conscious belief that some species are superior to others, and racism are two such forms of oppression. The symbolic boundary ³⁰ between the terms human and animal allows those in power to mete out human status in a way that has great material and psychosocial consequences for racialized minorities.

A recent illustration of the racist discourse of animality occurred when Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, referred to BLM protesters as “animals literally taking over our cities.” ³¹ Although it happens less often and carries fewer consequences for the targets, marginalized racial groups also employ the animality discourse typically to highlight the iniquitous behavior of powerful actors. A proverbial example is the pejorative “pigs” used to refer to law enforcement officials. This was grotesquely depicted when an activist carried the severed head of a pig during a BLM protest ³² following the racially motivated brutal murder of George Floyd Jr. by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. ³³

What occurs more frequently than the incident described above, however, is the reification and implicit acceptance of the human–animal binary when racialized minorities attempt to assert their own humanity by highlighting how they are treated similar to or worse than animals by law enforcement officials, for instance. In a recent tweet addressing the problem of police violence in black communities, BLM cofounder Alicia Garza stated, “This country allows black people to be hunted and killed like animals.” ³⁴ The problem with this sort of analogizing, as Carol Adams argues, ³⁵ is that it references the exploitation of nonhuman animals without also condemning it. Instead, what is communicated is that for nonhuman animals, being hunted, killed, and exploited is legitimate.

Since racialized minorities, especially descendants of Africans, have historically been subject to pernicious forms of dehumanization, the desire to distance oneself from the animal makes sense, ³⁶ but such an approach maintains the socially constructed hierarchy that subjugates nonhuman animals and racialized minorities alike.

As is demonstrated by the first pillar of CEJ, an intersectional approach would view the plight of racialized humans and nonhuman animals as inherently interwoven and similarly needing to be overturned to combat systemic oppression. ^{37 , 38} Capturing this idea as it relates to BLM, Lindgren Johnson writes, “In failing to recognize the most fundamental operating procedure of white supremacy—that speciesism is a discourse that historically has been and continues to be weaponized against black lives as well as animal lives—Black Lives Matter misunderstands the workings of both racial injustice and justice.” ³⁹

This is an instance where close study of the MOVE philosophy—core tenets of which are rejection of the human–animal binary and repudiation of all forms of hierarchy—could aid BLM in developing a theoretical frame more in alignment with the goal of black liberation.

For MOVE, all other life forms deserve the same moral consideration as do humans. Some of the organization's earliest activities in the 1970s included protesting zoos and circuses in major cities. What many people tend to regard as benign, MOVE saw as patently exploitative. To highlight this, MOVE would often draw connections between captive animals and oppressed groups of human beings both domestically and abroad: “You cannot solve the problems of Cambodia and leave the concentration camp of Ringling Brothers Barnum & Baily [sic] to go unopposed, deal with the situation of watergate and leave the punishing stagnation of aquariums to exist, oppose the deceptive imposition of politics and leave the lying, cheating, three-ring circusing [sic] of life unopposed.” ⁴⁰

MOVE also links the domestication of nonhuman animals with that of humans: “Attempting to walk a dog that has been a prisoner every day of its life can be a very trying, uncomfortable situation, both for you and the dog, as the animal is usually straining uncontrollably at the leash in a futile effort to break free. In a very real way, the animal is trying to free itself of the same things that are constantly pressing on everyone, the house, the apartment, the chains of your lifestyle (emphasis in the original).” ⁴¹

The following further illustrates the emphasis MOVE places on the interdependence between the human and nonhuman worlds: “Each individual life is dependent on every other life, and all life has a purpose, so all living beings, things that move, are equally important, whether they are human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind or rain. To stay healthy and strong, life must have clean air, clear water and pure food. If deprived of these things, life will cycle to the next level, or as the system says, ‘die’.” ⁴²

For MOVE, the well-being of all humans is inextricably tied to the well-being of nonhuman animals. In other words, as long as other animals continue to suffer abuse at the hands of humans, the latter will be forced to contend with the reverberations of violence reflected in such social turmoil as war and political unrest. This connects well to the fourth pillar of CEJ, which highlights the concept of sociological indispensability: humans cannot survive (let alone reach their full potential) if the exploitation of the nonhuman world endures. ^{43 , 44} The current devastating realities of climate change and pandemics resulting from zoonotic disease transmission are a reflection of this. ^{45 , 46}

MOVEing Beyond Anti-State to Anti-Civ—an issue of scale

A core question grappled with in the third pillar of CEJ and in related scholarship is whether or not the victims of state-sanctioned violence should appeal to the state in attempts to generate change. ^{47 , 48} While BLM has been more critical of the state than more mainstream social justice organizations, it also legitimates the state with its demand for legislative reform such as the BREATHE Act. ⁴⁹ Essentially, BLM is “not asking how we might build safe communities beyond the state, but rather how we might do so with greater state intervention.” ⁵⁰

This question about the role of the state can be analyzed in conjunction with the second pillar of the CEJ frame, which focuses on scale. Pellow calls for taking a multiscalar approach to analyzing issues around race and inequality and uses BLM as a case for demonstrating how this can be done. In what follows, I add to this analysis and make the case that where groups tend to locate the source of the problem is also a matter of scale.

I argue that MOVE would agree with Pellow's claim that “social inequalities—from racism to speciesism—are not aberrations, but rather are deeply embedded in society and reinforced by state power and market systems” and that “the current social order stands as a fundamental obstacle to social and environmental justice.” ⁵¹ MOVE, however, would bump this up to a more encompassing scale of analysis—Western industrial civilization itself.

Parallels can be drawn between MOVE philosophy and contemporary anarcho-primitivist thought. “In place of a narrow criticism of capitalism and the modern state,” as el-Ojeili and Taylor assert, “anarcho-primitivism offers a wide-ranging critique of civilization.” ⁵² In other words, the anarcho-primitivist perspective does not identify the unequal distribution of material goods and social and economic opportunities as the ultimate problem needing to be resolved. Rather, it views civilization—a term denoting the shift from nomadic hunter–gatherer lifestyles to more sedentary modes of living resulting from the advent of agriculture and industrialism—as the source of societal malaise. The same can be said for MOVE belief: modern civilization is the cause of all systems of oppression such as hierarchy, poverty, and patriarchy—it distorts the natural order. ⁵³

MOVE members often describe people who are outside of the organization as being in the lifestyle, which is synonymous with being civilized or domesticated, a term used in modern society to describe formerly wild animals, who, as a consequence of deliberate human intervention, have become docile enough to manage and control in order to serve human ends. MOVE applies this term to lifestyle people owing to the belief that under the conditions of modern society, human beings have become just as tame as their nonhuman counterparts.

The following comments from John Africa provide a good illustration of this position: “This is a domesticated system that was born of domestication and everybody in it is domestic workers, despite the labels they put on themselves, the professionalism they try to air about themselves … But what has domestication given you? Just what has it given you? It's given you industry and industry has poisoned the air.” ⁵⁴ Discussing the violence inherent to domestication, John Africa states, “We know that people are taught to take milk, and they're told to do it, but milk is as recent as domestication, that is cow's milk … It's easier to rape a mother, a mother cow of her milk and deny the mother and the calf, but you notice you don't see no bulls raping women of their breast milk and denying their babies.” ⁵⁵

MOVE's analysis of the practice of domestication accords well with sociologist David Nibert's conceptualization of a term he calls domesecration (a portmanteau comprising domestication and desecration). As per Nibert, when humans domesticate other animals, they are violating the sanctity of life. Defining domesecration as a “systematic practice of violence in which social animals are enslaved and biologically manipulated, resulting in their objectification, subordination, and oppression,” Nibert makes the argument that violence against devalued humans is contingent upon the violence inherent in the practice of domestication. ⁵⁶

This sort of gratuitous violence is often thought to be associated with uncivilized societies. For MOVE, however, civilization is itself a crime. In other words, violence and other social problems are endemic to civilization. The following provides a concrete example of this perspective: “Crime ain't apart from civilization. It just didn't happen. It's in civilization. I don't understand the schizophrenia in locking up one person in this system for crime when that person could not have been criminal without the system.” ⁵⁷

Contra BLM, which works within the parameters of acceptable redress, MOVE members' condemnation of civilization leads them to disavow its legal institutions. Instead, they uphold what they identify as natural or Mom's law. According to MOVE, natural law is signified by the kinds of ecological relationships between human beings and the nonhuman world that are not mediated by technology and social institutions, unlike man-made law, which refers to those social practices that are conceptualized and reified by humans.

For MOVE, a major distinction between natural and human-made law lies in the former's immutability and unbiased application, whereas the latter is typically enforced in a stratified manner based on social hierarchies. “Mom's Law is unwavering and unbending. It doesn't make separations or just apply to people who are rich or have status. It applies to everyone. For example, if you have a politician, a lawyer, a cop, white people, Puerto Rican people, poor people and rich people all standing in the rain, everybody's gonna get wet. Natural law doesn't make allowances or separations for life. But man's law is always compromising, bending, wavering. The laws are set up for certain people.” ⁵⁸

In the period between the organization's founding and the 1985 bombing, MOVE behaved in strict accordance with this fundamental aspect of their philosophy—the belief in natural law and rejection of human-made laws. Such application of their beliefs served as a catalyst for the friction that developed between MOVE members and their neighbors as well as with city officials. MOVE chose not to abide by what many perceive as basic social and legal contracts. As a result, the organization was often cited for a number of violations related to “the regulation of individual conduct and activity.” ⁵⁹ For social contracts to hold, all involved parties must acknowledge and uphold the basic premises that buttress such contracts—MOVE did not.

Rather than pay their water bills, for instance, MOVE instead declared “Water is free and MOVE is not going to pay for it. The politicians can't make MOVE pay. Water is free.” ⁶⁰ They rejected the notion that something as essential and naturally occurring as water could be subject to market forces, so they opted out of the social practice of exchanging legal tender for water. In another example, MOVE members periodically ran a car wash to earn extra income, but they operated without a permit. For MOVE, “[their] hands were [their] permit to work.” ⁶¹

MOVE's relationship with the local court system also demonstrates the organization's denunciation of legal institutions. Due to the high rate of arrests among members, they were often compelled to appear in court. However, even when their own freedom was at stake, MOVE still mocked official protocol: “If we had a court case and didn't want to go, we'd just let them send a summons. If we got hungry in court, we'd eat. We did whatever our bodies told us. We didn't have no special respect for the judge. When they'd say ‘All people rise,’ we'd sit down. The judge isn't God. He's a human like we are, a man who makes mistakes.” ⁶²

MOVE's decision to eschew all manner of social convention and locate the source of most social problems in modern civilization certainly did not gain them much legitimacy in the eyes of average citizens, nor from state officials. The organization did, however, gain some sympathy when the full force of the state came down on them first in a starvation blockade, which culminated in the 1978 standoff, and then in the 1985 bombing.

As is discussed in the second pillar of CEJ, this excessive response to the MOVE organization demonstrates how the magnitude of state violence is often contingent upon the race of the perceived aggressors. Furthermore, whether one agrees or not with the tactics employed by MOVE, it is clear that part of the perceived threat stemmed from their refusal to see the system as legitimate and insistence that the problem of social disorder is a result of the fundamental societal values many hold sacred. ⁶³

A review of MOVE philosophy forces us to question where social problems such as inequality and state-sanctioned violence begin. If racialized minorities had greater decision-making power within state institutions, would social inequality and repression cease to exist? What of other societal and socioecological problems?