Abstract
In order to properly illustrate the importance of this book by the Italian philosopher Marco Maurizi for the development of animalist Marxism and convey it to Marxists, a comparison seems appropriate. Parts of this publication mean to animalist Marxism what the Theses on Feuerbach or the German Ideology meant for the evolution of historical materialism as a whole. By the definite negation of what Maurizi calls the ‘Animal Liberation Ideology’ (p. 55), early versions, particularly of Part 1 of the book, helped scattered activists and scholars in Western Europe in the 2000s to turn their analyses of animal domination and exploitation and their understanding of animal liberation from head to feet. Maurizi lays the foundation for a historical materialist analysis of human–animal relations in two steps. First, he scathingly criticises the theoretical strands of utilitarian and deontological Kantian moral philosophy, and the ‘juridical illusion’ (p. 58), that is, animal rights theory. These three approaches, together with some forms of poststructuralism, have been the theoretical cornerstones of human–animal studies avant la lettre and are still highly influential in academised human–animal scholarship and in the pro-animal movements. Maurizi contrasts these approaches as forms of a ‘metaphysical antispeciesism’ with what he calls ‘historical antispeciesism’ (p. 32). In other words, he proposes to replace idealist, liberal and methodological individualist animal ethics with a theory and critique of animal exploitation and domination which is based on their historical and social understanding. In fact, the socialising and historicisation of thinking human–animal relations to demonstrate that the animal questions is a political, not a moral one is Maurizi’s second contribution, which cannot be overestimated, to the development of a still relatively young field. To have worked out the juxtaposition of the old and the new paradigm is his merit, introducing to maybe the smallest of the so-called new social movements the Marxist key insight that an ideology like ‘speciesism – our belief that the human being is something other than and superior to every other animal – is the cause of nothing; it is rather the effect of something’ (p. 34). On this basis, Maurizi made room for a serious dialogue between Marxism and animal liberation.
Maurizi’s own explanation of animal domination, which makes up the second part of the book, is aligned to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, an approach he understands as a further development and complement of Marx’s theory. In his reading of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, the history of Western civilisation is a history of the mastery of nature and its dialectic. This keeps human society within a self-produced state of (second) nature as long as it tries to leave nature behind by dominating it even further through instrumental reason and technique. In other words, civilisation resembles ‘a history of domination’ (p. 140). According to Maurizi, the ‘general scheme of domination’ (p. 141) at work since the beginning of class societies is structured as follows; human society subjugates external and internal nature while at the same time one class of humans subjugates another and the ‘hierarchical distinction between spiritual/intellectual labour and physical labour’ (p. 139) is put into place. By subsuming nature and especially animals in the transition from hunter-gather societies to sedentary societies, which implemented agriculture and domesticated animals for the first time, humans constituted themselves and split off that they are animals which get objectified. Thus, Maurizi argues in his ‘Philosophy of History’ (p. 23) that ‘the first historical “victim” of speciesism’ is ‘the human animal’ (p. 40). This is the pivotal point which links human oppression and liberation to animal oppression and liberation. What is done to animals is not only done to them. It is also done to ourselves. Therefore, ‘our destructive attitude towards (human and non-human) animality becomes the shibboleth that eventually denounces our illusions, unmasking the “bestiality” of our society’ (p. 147). Not to be misunderstood, Maurizi is far from downplaying or levelling the difference between humans and animals which he considers to be the precondition of liberation of both humans and animals. He rather views human history and potentiality unfulfilled as long as humans act like animals within a newly produced state of nature, reproducing domination of nature and animals on higher stages through socially highly developed divisions of labour and instrumental reason, while negating their animality. Capitalism, in this line of argumentation, is therefore ‘the last incarnation of hierarchical, classist, patriarchal and dominating societies’ (p. 189). The way out is to remember that humans themselves are animals and part of nature, and to enforce this recognition by means of class struggle to realize the ‘universal human being’ (p. 170) and a reconciliation with nature in an ‘enlarged animal society’ (p. 172).
While Maurizi’s historical analysis of early class societies needs to be continuously discussed considering what historiography brings to light, I have reservations against the theoretical and historical model which inherits several classical Frankfurt problems. I will mention three of them briefly. First, it is primarily a political and not a political–economic approach, at least it is not conclusively clarified by Maurizi. Domination seems to be the explaining determinant for human and animal exploitation and oppression. The problem here is that there are competing approaches to its origin. Is power a purpose in itself, is it, as Maurizi indicates in the introduction, the result of ‘fear’ (p. 18) or, as he writes later in the book, an instrument to appropriate the social surplus product? Second, there is an anthropological rest in the conceptualisation of the relation between humans and nature or animals which needs to be retooled along class lines. It is not human society as a totality that exploits and oppresses nature in class societies, at least not in the first instance. Finally, retrospectively, we can say that exploitation and domination of classes and nature or animals have always taken place in pre-history so far. However, I think, the differentia specifica in history which we need to take into account are the revolutionary ruptures in organising social labour. In other words, the exploitation and domination of humans, nature and animals have been arranged in historically and socially specific ways according to the mode of productions Marx described. These form the starting points for the concrete analysis of the concrete role which nature and animals have played in social history so far, not a scheme of domination in Western civilisation.