In an oft-quoted essay on fascism, Umberto Eco writes that "freedom and liberation are an undending task." We cannot sit back and assume that the work of freedom and liberation will be done for us by more experienced people. Instead, it is up to each of us to do what we can to work toward the kind of world we want to see - not only in terms of activism for animals, but for freedom for everyone. The longer we fail to recognize that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of even the least among us, the longer we will damn ourselves to a world of oppression and domination. Social problems are failures of social relations; to be successful, we must change the social relations that underlie our world, including those of capital and other forms of needless domination and hierarchy. As I have shown throughout this book, capital is amoral. It values neither human lives nor animal lives, except insofar as they might provide value. In our movements, we must confront the amorality of capital head-on by asserting the inherent value of ourselves and of the least among us. We must challenge capital on ethical grounds and articulate a vision of a world which is free of hierarchy, domination, oppression, and abject suffering. To do this, we must reach across the boundaries that seemingly divide us, look for commonality, and cultivate a systemic understanding of oppression. Only then, can we begin to move forward. We know another world is possible. All we have to do is reach for it.
It will be a long and complex process to educate people, to change our social relations, and to produce a better world, but we have few other options. Gramsci talked of a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will; the world often looks quite bleak, and the chances for changing things look overwhelmingly against us. However, we have to start somewhere, and we cannot merely give up because the goal is too big and too ambicious. The truth of the matter is that if we want to change the world, we have to begin doing it in our lives and in our activism. If we want to live in a world that is not burdened by hierarchy and domination, we have to begin to create that world today, in the present, or we will forever be stuck in the same dynamics of oppression that make up the world as we know it. We cannot trade off our values and principles in the long run in the hopes that by trading them, we will produce some kind of magical "tomorrow" where all is well. No - our principles and our values are what must guide us now, and everything we do that runs contrary to them in the name of expediency, pragmatism, or "politics", is a step away from a better world. People will often argue that a positions such as this is idealistic; as both humans and non-humans suffer, we cannot afford our principles, that the cost of idealism is too expensive when we should just be doing what we can to stop the suffering. Though I am sympathetic to this idea, it is also dangerous. When we give up what matters to us in the hopes of producing something better, we get into a dangerous game where our ideals are divorced from our practice. Instead, as Bookchin urges, we must do the patient work of making connections, educating, and drawing out the common roots at the heart of domination. As LeGuin's character Shevek says, "you can only be the revolution".
There is no other alternative.
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