Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights

Bob Torres
AK Press (2007)
Reviewed by Charles Boyes

 

 

 

What is immediately inspiring about a work such as Bob Torres’s Making a Killing is the evident amount of political terrain that has been traversed since the publication of Animals, Men and Morals, Animal Liberation and the other early examples of contemporary animal advocacy more than thirty-five years ago. Where these texts, certainly inhibited by an unwavering fidelity to moral philosophy, considered the welfare of animals an individual matter, Torres’s book, among others, are intent on steering attention and activism to the “institutional form[s] of violence towards animals” (71), particularly when these forms of violence also account for other primary modes of (human) domination: racism, sexism, classism, etc. Making a Killing is part of a crucial transition in animal studies: from high moralism to practical ethics and from a “centralized economy of activism” to non-hierarchical personal activism (141). 

It is unfortunate, then, that Torres’s work is epistemologically and methodologically uneven. This is not to disparage the admirable critical advances that he achieves. Of especial merit is his insistence that not all activisms are created equal. Torres argues that mainstream animal welfare/rights movements, typified by the HSUS and PETA, are part of a broader trend toward a form of lifestyle activism, where “your ‘activism’ is reduced to a mere financial transaction” (140). Simply put, these charitable monoliths compromise their stated commitment to combat animal exploitation by focusing (necessarily given their size and internal complexity) on “their own bureaucratic and business maintenance, gradually slipping into cooptation and profiteering on the backs of animals” (93). Further, Torres condemns these hierarchical “rackets” for promoting animal justice on the backs of other marginalized individuals. Singling out PETA , Torres makes a passionate case for extracting animal advocacy from the vacuum in which it tends to find itself (or which it happily occupies), and recognizing the intersectionalities of all modes of oppression under capitalism. Exploiting women to save animals is unimaginable if one admits of an identity of the function and logic that oppresses both. 

Torres is at his best when exploring these dynamics on the activist plane. In the transition to a theoretical plane however (which he haphazardly cites as either a parallel with or a logic of activism), Torres is much less convincing. Steven Best has already noted Torres’s uncritical reliance on the irreconcilable theoretical apparatuses of Gary Francione and Murray Bookchin[i]. While the latter’s name may recur more often throughout, Torres’s greatest debt is to Francione, as it is Francione’s principles of strict pacifism and “eliminating the property status of animals” that animate Torres’s work (98). Torres is to be commended for extending Francione’s otherwise limited thesis to include the “subsequent commodification” of animal bodies and products (98), and for locating this critique within a more general attack on what Hardt and Negri call the Republic of Property[ii]. However, Torres’s treatment of Marx, which predominately guides his contribution to Francione’s theory, is again largely uncritical, if not uninspired. What else might account for the peculiar fidelity to Marx’s texts, with little to no acknowledgement of the Marxist theorists who have managed to make Marx pertinent in a post-Fordist economy?  Torres is unwilling or unable to account for the insurmountable discrepancies between rote Communism, social anarchism, and a pacifistic theory of animal liberation. And it is ultimately these discrepancies that make for an occasionally frustrating read.Nonetheless, the appearance of Making a Killing, despite its own limitations, is itself an event. It demonstrates that a certain reflexivity and politicality are becoming commonplace within animal studies. That species oppression is slowly be acknowledged as existing among the matrix of other social oppressions, and that it must be combated alongside other modes of domination, will only help to bring animal advocacy to the fore in the global struggle for justice.

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[i]     See: Best, Steven. “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education.”  Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7.1 (2009): 12n5. 
[ii]    See: Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. esp. 3-21.