A professor at the University of Texas at El Paso believes animal rights activists should more often resort to “economic sabotage” and “illegal tactics” to free animals.
That professor, Steven Best, encouraged such illegal acts in a post on the website of the Animal Liberation Front — a group the FBI calls a “serious domestic terror threat.”
In the 2009 piece, titled “Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: By Any Means“, Best argues against people he calls “Franciombes” – those who follow the work of an animal rights professor named Gary Francione.
In short, Best is upset that these mainstream animal rights activists — like many liberal vegans and the Humane Society (HSUS) — settle for anything less than total liberation:
“In the last decade, for instance, PETA pressured McDonalds, Burger King, and KFC to increase cage size and adopt ‘less cruel and more profitable’ slaughter methods, while HSUS aggressively campaigned for ‘humane meat’ and ‘cage-free eggs.’ These groups ultimately serve corporate exploiters’ interests and champion capitalist principles generally. […] HSUS has been a bureaucratic welfare group since its inception in 1954, it consistently denounces the ALF, and has always capitulated to carnivorous culture as it barely gives support even for vegetarianism.”
The professor insists “pacifist” animal rights activists are wrong when they claim “militant” tactics aren’t appropriate:
“According to the pacifist party line, militant direct action (MDA) tactics such as economic sabotage are ALWAYS wrong and NEVER effective […] For over three decades, in dozens of countries throughout the world, in countless thousands of actions, liberators and saboteurs have freed hundreds of thousands of captive nonhuman animals; permanently shut down numerous breeders, ‘fur farmers,’ and vivisectors; and convinced countless numbers of individuals to find gainful employment in careers other than nonhuman animal exploitation, while inspiring people worldwide to join the animal liberation movement…
By vilifying sabotage tactics as ‘violent,’ and by conflating attacks on property with assaults on people, Franciombes adopt the reactionary discourse and position of the FBI and the corporate-state-media complex. They needlessly and divisively pit education in opposition to illegal tactics (even open rescues), as if the two tactics were irreconcilably opposed rather than complimentary aspects of a revolutionary process….
Thus, we need education and agitation, mainstream and militant tactics, peaceful resistance and confrontation and sabotage, and aboveground/legal and underground/illegal means of weakening speciesist capitalism”
Best brings up capitalism a total of nine times in his manifesto, and makes defeating it a key aspect of the overall animal liberation agenda.
The academic is no stranger to controversy.
In 2005, the United Kingdom employed a “hate law” to ban Best from entering the country. Earlier that year in England, he was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as having said: “We are not terrorists, but we are a threat. We are a threat both economically and philosophically. Our power is not in the right to vote but the power to stop production. We will break the law and destroy property until we win.”
Best sums up his “form of abolition” towards the end of his ALF piece with the following paragraph:
“We endorse a form of abolition that (1) defends the use of high-pressure direct action tactics, along with illegal raids, rescues, and sabotage attacks; (2) views capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda; (3) has a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, (4) promotes an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralization and democratization processes.”
The professor has not responded to a request for comment.