by Dr. Steven Best
Many people have been asking what they can do to promote Radical Abolitionism and begin to break out of the confines of pseudo-abolition single-issue veganism. Following are ten practical strategies to address total liberation through alliance politics. We encourage everyone to read and expand your frame of reference, engage and get active, and share your experiences and ideas.
1) Read and start thinking outside of single-issue veganism:
- Read the Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary
- Read these pages on Total Liberation
- Read these article by Dr. Steven Best on Alliance Politics and Total Liberation
2) Read books with a total liberation focus:
- Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Edited by Steven Best PhD and Anthony J. Nocella II)
- Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of The Earth (Edited by Steven Best PhD and Anthony J. Nocella II)
- An Unnatural Order: Why We are Destroying The Planet and Each Other (by Jim Mason)
- The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (by Marjorie Spiegel)
- Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (by Charles Patterson)
- A Tale of Two Holocausts (by Karen Davis PhD)
- Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (by David Nibert)
3) Write to Vegan Outreach about diversifying their message. Offer to help create new literature targeted toward poor people, the working classes, and people of color.
4) Get active and start educating people outside of the white middle class. Start doing outreach in urban areas that have been entirely neglected by the vegan community. Engage poor people and people of color and start building bridges into the other 99% of the population.
5) Extend yourself: contact groups such as Vegans of Color who “don’t have the luxury of being single-issue” and ask how you can help them.
6) Form alliances within your own community. Network with organizations fighting social oppression (e.g, LGBT groups, racial equality movements, feminists). Try to form alliances around common issues such as violence or discrimination. Introduce veganism as a social movement that seeks to eradicate violence and discrimination for all animals — human and nonhuman. Work with people and show them that we have a totally valid cause and that we all have important things in common.
7) In response to the aggressive pro-vivisection movement, the Alliance for Progressive Science (APS) addresses the move to commodify research which victimizes animals in labs and harms people with fraudulent science. Help us research and write about these issues.
8) Pick a group on Facebook or MySpace and initiate a discussion about alliances. Educate them about veganism. Learn about their struggle. Find common ground to work form.
9) Do some real vegan outreach and make a difference is the lives of the impoverished. Do a vegan food drive and support your local homeless shelter. Volunteer and prepare vegan food to feed the hungry.
10) Write a total liberation page based on your research and experience. Share your thoughts, ideas, and the new directions in which you are building alliances.
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Dr. Steven Best is NIO’s Senior Editor of Total Liberation. Associate professor of philosophy at UTEP, award-winning writer, noted speaker, public intellectual, and seasoned activist, Dr. Best engages the issues of the day such as animal rights, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media, globalization, and capitalist domination. Best has published 10 books, over 100 articles and reviews, spoken in over a dozen countries, interviewed with media throughout the world, appeared in numerous documentaries, and was voted by VegNews as one of the nations “25 Most Fascinating Vegetarians.” He has come under fire for his uncompromising advocacy of “total liberation” (humans, animals, and the earth) and has been banned from the UK for the power of his thoughts. From the US to Norway, from Sweden to France, from Germany to South Africa, Best shows what philosophy means in a world in crisis.
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LOVE THIS!
Keep in mind that these are passive, nondirect actions. It is important to get more aggressive as well if you want to see change. Educating oneself and others is important but it’s only a tiny fraction of what will make change.
There are also many direct actions people can do- boycotting animal tested products or companies that promote/support/engage in animal testing; perform direct actions to shut down these facilities (this can often be done with legal protest if done the right way if you’re not keen on lockdowns or anything); infiltrate places and get pictures, footage, etc; and so on. There are ways to do direct action legally and nonlegally and that is up to each individual or group. But please don’t be turned off from it if you only feel comfortable with legal/nonviolent stuff bc it exists!
The sky is the limit! Be creative!
Also, Vegan Outreach is anti-protest, anti-non-normative white people, etc. To work with them you have to look “like everyone else” and they have bashed protest and direct action on many occasions.
So, if you are against Francione, you should definitely have issue with vegan outreach.
IMPORTANT: when telling people to “reach out” to working class communities- this can be dangerous. Make sure if you are doing this you know what the hell is going on. Many white privileged folk like to run into neighborhoods, showing how much more they know than the “stupid poor folk” who just don’t get it. It’s a huge problem in many movements. Veganism is cheap and healthy. Many people don’t know that. Start there, but toss out the privileged white-know-it-all garbage bc working class people are just as smart as anyone else- just not as rich.
There is a group called “food Not Bombs” that has chapters all over the world, cooking free vegan food for people a couple times a week. Look them up in your neighborhood if you are interested.
Corvus, where has Vegan Outreach “bashed protest and direct action”?
Matt Ball, in “Activism and Veganism Reconsidered”
(http://www.veganoutreach.org/advocacy/path.html ), argues:
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Tactics
Given the wide range of animal abuses and the various situations in which activists find themselves, I believe it is not possible to make a blanket statement that a specific tactic is unquestionably positive or always harmful. For example, a certain type of demonstration, when run in a relevant situation and with a respectful, clear message, can possibly raise the public’s awareness, receive fair media coverage, and encourage some activists. The same type of demonstration, run under different circumstances and with an outrageous message made through chants, shouts, and/or stunts, can serve to harm the progression of animal liberation by alienating the public and frustrating thoughtful activists.
Like deciding where to focus our limited resources, decisions about tactics must be made in the larger context of our goals. Why are we doing this (e.g., is it because of anger and guilt, or because it is a strategic step that serves our larger goal)? What is the most probable outcome? What effect will it have on the public? On other activists? What other activities could we do with the same time and resources, and would one of those options have a greater effect overall? Again, I believe that we have an obligation to ask these questions.
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In the previous version of this essay, titled “Veganism: The Path to Animal Liberation”, authors Matt Ball, Jack Norris, and Anne Green were more critical of unconventional tactics (see: http://web.archive.org/web/20000408160100/http://www.veganoutreach.org/advocacy/path.html ). However, it seems that when Ball revised the essay, he adopted the more contextualist position shown above.
One of the guys who runs vegan outreach has gotten into actual arguments with locals about their tactics, completely disagreeing with protest.
How is bashing chants not bashing protest? How do chants and stunts “serve to harm the progression of animal liberation by alienating the public and frustrating thoughtful activists.”
I know a guy who joined them who went from piercings and camo to wearing polo shirts because they said he had to be mainstream in order to “reach the public”. How is being fake good for the cause?
I like VO’s pamphlets and information a lot, but I don’t see how saying anything other than being a white, polo-shirt wearing person in the middle of a middle class neighborhood or college campus is the only thing that can help the cause.
Like it or not, we are judged on appearance by society. If Vegan Outreach is employing activists to go leaflet, they have a right to dictate the clothes their employees wear when leafleting. I’ve done lots of volunteer leafleting with their “Why Vegan?” pamphlets and they’ve never questioned they way I look or dress.