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The Dr. Steve Best Narratives: 

Part 8: Total liberation: revolution in the Anthropocene epoch 

When one considers the evolution of moral discourse over the last two centuries, there is a clear progression in the concepts of rights and justice. The concept and application of human rights has expanded from white elites to workers, women, people of color, the LGBTQ movement, the disabled, and other oppressed or marginalized human groups. Over the past few decades, one also finds extensions of the notion of justice, evolving from within states (national) to among all states and world peoples (global), to all who suffer from environmental and climate impacts (environmental rights and climate justice), and from present to future generations (intergenerational). Moral and legal applications of justice have covered the entire scope of human existence but recently evolved a quantum leap further to apply to animals (animal or multispecies justice) and the physical world of earth systems (the rights of nature and planetary justice).

The Holocene epoch is over, but the mentalities and institutions that stemmed from it still prevail. There is a dire need for new theoretical outlooks, moral compasses, and a truly inclusive politics appropriate for the 21st century. We need comprehensive visions that can guide us through the existential, social, and ecological crises of the Anthropocene. With the environmental, climate, animal, and planetary justice movements, philosophers, scientists, social theorists, anarchists, ecosocialists, and activists have formulated increasingly inclusive and expansive moral and legal concepts in search of their full meaning and scope, as reason, coherence, logic, compassion, and solidarity dictate. The new visions for justice discussed above are a promising start for a viable post-Holocene worldview, and they all contribute significantly to creating a more equal, just, and sustainable world. Needless to say, the application and practice lag far behind the theories and there are daunting political challenges in building a multifaceted global resistance movement that can ground these visions in material and institutional form.

Despite mountains of evidence, increasingly urgent warnings from world scientists, and three decades of international climate conferences—from Kyoto to Paris to COP29—facts, logic, and evidence mean nothing to fossil fuel industries, world nations, and capitalist elites. The climate is changing faster than we are, fossil fuel industries are escalating extraction and production, nations are missing all climate goals, the world has breached most planetary boundaries and pushed major earth systems to their tipping points, while speeding without guardrails toward 3C degrees or more warming by 2,100 and still showing no signs of slowing down (see Carrington and Taylor, 2022; Fischer, 2022, and Kühne et al., 2022).

This is a pivotal moment in Earth and human evolution. The actions that humanity now collectively takes—or fails to take—will determine whether our future, and that of biodiversity itself, is redeemable or tragically bleak. Catastrophic climate change is already inevitable. Difficult crises are already—quite literally—baked into the future. Extreme weather events of recent years underscore that this dystopian future is already here, in incubo. The only question now is just how truly terrible the decades and centuries ahead will be.

As even the UN and IPCC concede, “transformative change”—a polite word for revolution—is necessary. The crises threatening the future of all life will not be overcome with moderation, tepid reforms, and techno-fixes, but rather demand urgent and radical change at every level—from the rotting neo-liberal economic and political institutions of capitalist society to the ideologies of anthropocentrism and speciesism that underpin our dysfunctional and destructive relations to other species and the natural world. If social and environmental problems are interrelated, so too must be the solutions and political responses. The project of human liberation and environmental sustainability will fail without giving equal importance to anti-speciesism and animal liberation and connecting human, animal, and earth liberation struggles. Only radical system change guided by a surging and more inclusive and expansive climate justice movement has a chance to avert biological meltdown, catastrophic social collapse, and remake Holocene worldviews and social systems along post-anthropocentric, post-speciesist, radically democratic, and ecological lines.

The root causes of global social and ecological crises involve both institutional and psychological-cultural factors. We need new comprehensive and systemic theories that grasp how anthropocentrism, speciesism, as well as racism, patriarchy, class, and other forms of human-over-human domination, are intertwined in dominator societies evolving over 10,000 years from the earliest agricultural societies to contemporary global capitalism. A truly revolutionary social theory and movement will not just emancipate members of one species, but rather all species and the earth itself. A future revolutionary movement worthy of its name will overcome instrumentalism and hierarchical thinking in every pernicious form, including that of humans over animals and the earth. We cannot leave intact the predatory and violent mentalities that inform our exploitative relations with animals, other humans, and a gravely wounded planet. We cannot create sustainable societies so long as they are premised on the industrial slaughter of trillions of animals to feed a burgeoning population of ten billion people. As clear in the arguments of the degrowth movement, systems of human growth must now contract, and abandon once and for all the dreams of infinite economic growth through the oxymorons of “green capitalism” and “sustainable development.” 

A viable revolutionary movement for the 21st century and the epoch of the Anthropocene will grasp the incompatibility of capitalism with the most profound values and goals of humanity. Will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human liberation in a total liberation struggle against global capitalism and domination of all kinds (see Best, 2014). It must eliminate every vicious form of prejudice and discrimination—not only racism, sexism, and homophobia, but also the scientifically false and morally repugnant lies of speciesism and humanism. It must reverse the growing power of the state, mass media, and global corporations to promote decentralization and democratization at all levels of society, and only then can society possibly be reconstituted in harmony with the natural world and other species.

We thereby exchange partial struggles for a broader, deeper, more complex, and more inclusive concept and politics. We must replace the critique of any one system of domination with a critique of hierarchy as a systemic phenomenon, as we recognize that capitalism is a metastasizing cancer eating away at the planet. This systemic approach analyzes entanglements between the exploitation of humans and other animals as well as how various logics of domination—racism, patriarchy, classism, speciesism, and so on—overlap and reinforce one another. And we must not only see the entanglement of human/animal oppression, but also those of liberation. Amidst the crises of the 21st century, social justice, animal justice, and environmental/planetary justice groups must come together to form the most diverse, inclusive, comprehensive, and formidable alliances barely yet imagined, let alone created. As increasingly obvious in the Age of the Anthropocene, human, animal, and earth liberation movements are unthinkable apart from one another. A struggle for one is impossible without a struggle for all.

But let us not be naïve. Such alliances will not come easily; typically, there are fractious differences within any one political movement, let alone a broad alliance of groups with different theoretical, ethical, and political perspectives. Social justice movements are easily divided by issues of race, gender, and class, each with its own priorities, and adding animal liberation and ethical veganism to the mix creates greater challenges and complications. The ideas spelled out in the “Principles of Working Together” (People of Color Leadership Summit (Second National), [1991]) by the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit provide at least a rough working framework for unity. Differences and conflicts among social justice proponents, environmentalists, and animal liberationists require open dialogue and mutual learning, but will never be fully resolved. Nonetheless, universal consent is not necessary, perhaps not desirable, and certainly not a process or goal for which we can patiently wait. Far more important than consensus on an intellectual level is a pragmatic approach that identifies common interests and overlapping concerns on a political level, such as discussed above regarding the array of problems caused by agribusiness, factory farms, and ever-climbing levels of meat consumption.

Humanity has reached an evolutionary impasse and now stands at a decisive historical crossroads where we confront the greatest challenge in human history: we can dramatically reconstruct our societies along democratic and ecological lines, or succumb to authoritarianism, chaos, and terror. We can also remake ourselves ethically and ecologically, or perpetuate the alienated, arrogant, and predatory mindsets that brought us to this evolutionary impasse in the first place.

The challenge before us is nearly as unimaginable as the consequences of not meeting it. It is sobering to compare the magnitude of the threat posed to life; the little time left to effect decisive change; the feebleness of world response; the pervasive denial of the existential threat climate change poses to humanity; and the power of fossil fuel industries to misinform, block change, and tighten its death grip on the living world. We confront not the death of the planet—which will continue to evolve into new forms—but accelerating mass extinction, ecological collapse, and the end of “civilization” as we know it.

Although the Anthropocene is an epoch of great calamity and upheaval, it also bears tremendous opportunities. With the sharpened consciousness of the doomed walking toward the guillotine, we have a chance to clearly recognize the flawed mentalities and growth-addicted systems that brought us to this precipice, to rebuild both our alienated psychologies and suicidal societies, and thereby to redefine and remake our place in the vast biocommunity to which we all belong.

Selected references

Carrington, D. and Taylor, M. (2022) “Revealed: the ‘carbon bombs’ set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown” (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2022/may/11/fossil-fuel-carbon-bombs-climate-breakdown-oil-gas)

Fischer, J. (2022) “Climate change: Ukraine war prompts fossil fuel ‘gold rush’ – report” (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61723252)

Kühne, K. et al., (2022) “Carbon bombs” – mapping key fossil fuel projects” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522001756?via%3Dihub) 

Best, S. (2014) The Politics of Total Liberation: Rethinking Revolution in the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan)

People of Color Leadership Summit (Second National) (1991) “Principles of Working Together” (https://www.ejnet.org/ej/workingtogether.pdf)