Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice

by Ted Benton

In this challenging book, Ted Benton takes recent debates about the moral status of animals as a basis for reviewing the discourse of “human rights.” Liberal-individualist views of human rights and advocates of animal rights tend to think of individuals, whether human or animals, in isolation from their social position. This makes them vulnerable to criticisms from the left which emphasize the importance of social relationships to individual well-being.

Benton’s argument supports the important assumption, underpinning the cause for human rights, that humans and other species of animal have much in common, both in the conditions for their well-being and their vulnerability to harm. Both liberal rights theory and its socialist critique fail adequately to theorize these aspects of human vulnerability. Nevertheless, it is argued that, enriched by feminist and ecological insights, a socialist view of rights has much to offer. Lucid and wide-ranging in its argument, Natural Relations  enables the outline of an ecological socialist view of rights and justice to begin to take shape.

246 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 1993

Reviews

[D]

I like Verso books as much as the next comrade. But one thing that I find frustrating is their almost complete neglect of animals. Pro-animal thinkers have contributed massively to leftist traditions. Pro-animal social movements have developed innovative activist tactics for transforming the relations between humans and animals. And as the climate collapses around us, it's nonhuman animals that are among the first to die. Over the past few years, Verso have published valuable books about climate change and environmental justice. But how is it possible for their authors to tell the story of fossil capitalism, of cheap nature, of the Green New Deal, or of geoengineering without also telling the story of the sixth mass extinction? And how is it possible for those who do analyse capitalism's role in biodiversity loss to not also reflect more widely on how animals are subjugated under the conditions of the profit motive?

It's quite fascinating, then, to pick up Ted Benton's Natural Relations. Published in 1993(!), this remains the only Verso book to date that deals substantively with the question of animal rights and ethics, and their relationship with the Marxist intellectual tradition. The book's opening page directly addresses the very problem I hinted at above: that despite the complimentarities, even outright convergences, of socialist and pro-animal thought, Marxists and animal liberationists tend to view one another with mutual suspicion, hostility, or indifference. Marxists, ever wary of "rights" and "ethics" as bourgeois pursuits that preserves the status quo, see no reason to converse with those interested in extending personhood to chimpanzees. Animal liberationists, ever wary of material and ideological anthropocentrism, see no reason to talk to those whose political philosophy of human flourishing is made possible by a ceaseless mastery of nature.

Yet Benton's main claim here is that "the prize of bringing together a broad spectrum of radical movements for common action wherever it can be achieved is too valuable to be simply written off. Perhaps a critical analysis of their intellectual heritage ––both what they share and what separates them–– might deepen political understanding and create intellectual possibilities for mutual cooperation not formerly recognised?" By offering a "sustained encounter" between socialism, ecology and animal rights, Benton hopes to show that "each position may function at different moment as a provisional standpoint from which to enrich critically or correct the others."

I started reading Natural Relations in October, in preparation for a paper on Marxism and animal liberation I was due to present at the annual Historical Materialism conference. Rushing to finish writing my paper in time, I only make it through the book's introduction. But as it's standard practice in academia to make big arguments about ideas that you've only superficially engaged with, I cite the book anyway. Later, annoyed at myself for having instrumentalised the book without reading it cover to cover, I return to it again in my first week back at work after Christmas.

On full reading, it turns out that this is a rigorous and in-depth scholarly exploration of how Marxism and pro-animal thought might yet come together. It's a challenging book, and one which takes each of its interlocutors incredibly seriously, subjecting them – whether Marx or Peter Singer or Tom Regan – to robust argumentation. What comes out the other side though is not so much a vision of a Marxist animal liberationism, as I'd have liked, but rather a pathbreaking critique of Marx's anthropocentrism and animal liberation's liberalism. I broadly agree with Benton on this conclusion, but there is much more to be said.

Seventeen years after Natural Relations' publication, it's time for a popular leftist publisher to make space for a new analysis of our relationship with animals, and a new communist vision of how humans and animals might live and flourish together. It was Marx, after all, who called not just for the resolution of the conflict between "man and man", but also the "genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature".