Animal liberation and overpopulation

I AM encouraged to see SocialistWorker.org take up a discussion of vegetarianism and animal liberation. While SocialistWorker.org may regard veganism and other forms of vegetarianism as individual choices, socialists should view animal liberation as a serious social movement.

Historically, Marxists have not taken a public position on animal issues, although Rosa Luxemburg described her personal concern about animal abuse in a prison letter. In the broader socialist movement, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, originally published in the socialist journal Appeal to Reason, is a model for undercover investigation of animal factories.

As Alan Peck pointed out ("For an end to animal exploitation"), a good place for socialists to begin to address the animal liberation movement is to campaign against the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). AETA has been used not only against activists following Sinclair's example, but also against activists whose only "crimes" have been taking videos and posting information on the web.

Democratic U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chief author of AETA, has recently been exposed as a key enabler U.S. government surveillance. As long-time opponents of both the Democrats and Republicans, socialists are now in a good position to oppose bipartisan cooperation on repressing dissent.

The biggest obstacle to socialist involvement in the animal liberation movement is the continued denial of the overpopulation problem. Overpopulation is the biggest threat to biodiversity and, many would argue, the biggest driver of climate change. Unfortunately, SocialistWorker.org used the occasion of the world population reaching 7 billion to reiterate the long-standing socialist denial of overpopulation.

Paul Ehrlich was instrumental in describing overpopulation not as a simple matter of numbers, but as the combined effect of overconsumption and population increase. Socialists could easily extend Ehrlich's focus on overpopulation as an issue for rich countries to focus on rich people within those countries, the so-called 1 percent.

Yet in the face of growing starvation around the world, socialists continue to attack Ehrlich for not exactly divining the time and extent of famine. Ehrlich is no more guilty than are Marx and Lenin for not divining the exact time and place of socialist revolution.

Historical materialists recognize that 19th and 20th century Marxists were products of their times. Marx and Engels accepted the Victorian view of progress as a triumph of humans over nature. Trotsky, who enjoyed hunting in the forests of Russia, did not see overpopulation as a problem. But it should be apparent today that overpopulation is a serious problem.
Marc Bedner, Santa Fe, N.M.