Propaganda, Property-Rights and Politics: Margaret Setter Interviewed

Interviewed by Claudette Vaughan

Margaret Setter is a veteran of the animal rights movement, the feminist movement and the peace movement. She joined Animal Liberation in 1989 and served as a Director from 1990-95. She has been a volunteer for 15 years and has been involved in direct action on behalf of battery hens and pigs exploited in factory farms. With Ken Setter, her second husband and love of her life, she lobbied Liverpool Council and campaigned locally against animal-based circuses. In 1998 Liverpool Council imposed stringent conditions for circuses performing in Liverpool. No circuses using exotic animals have since performed in Liverpool. Margaret Setter’s oratory skill has influenced many activists to take up the fight for animal rights. She is a regular guest writer for the Abolitionist-Online. Here she makes connections between Marxist theory and animal liberation.

Q.  Behind the golden farm images and the cheery faces of the television commercials for Kentucky Fried chicken, “beef” soup, pizzas, butter and Australian lamb and a million other products lie the image-makers.  Nazism knew the value of propaganda.  What role does the image makers play in further oppressing nonhumans by perpetuating the myth that everything is OK with the appearance of things and question not the reality?

A.  Yes, you are right.  The Nazis were certainly masters in the art of propaganda and used it in their sinister and irrational anti-Semitic campaigns with tragic results for European Jewry.  In so doing they drew on stereotypes of Jews transmitted from the past, and part of European culture, although it must be said that the Nazis did not invent the concentration camp.  According to author Robert Hughes, that honour must go to the British, who pioneered the concept with the setting up of a penal colony in New South Wales.

Every human being is born into and inherits a world of images and ideas not of our own making.  They are a part of the socially constructed, taken- for- granted world.  The image-makers are themselves product of this process.   Look around you on the train any working day of the week and you will notice earnest -looking young women engrossed in studying the principles of propaganda, under the heading of a University course in Marketing.

 Insights gained from the study of depth psychology applied to human motivation are embedded in the course material.  The student is already witnessing a plethora of images appearing in relentless profusion 24 hours a day disseminated from the various modalities of the mass media.

Without these messages to generate income and profits the media could not survive.

Not only that, the entire economic system, in the absence of countervailing strategies would deteriorate.  Workers would lose their jobs.  Social distress would intensify.

In such situations individual responsibility for one’s collaboration in the system plays second fiddle to the necessity to hold down the job to pay the mortgage, schooling the children, and a plethora of expenses that are part and parcel of every-day living.    Since every one of us is a constituent part of society we must each accept responsibility for bringing about change that will benefit the animals.  As former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam once remarked, “Only the impotent are pure”.

Q.   As a mode of thought Marxist theory aims at the abolition of classes and divisions in society.  Marx also spoke about freedom and abolition of being viewed as cash objects of production and consumption in the eyes of each other and to identify with each other’s subjectivity.  What connections, if any, do you see between Marx challenging private ownership and some animal rights activists challenging the property status of nonhuman animals in capitalism? 

A.   This is a difficult question to answer and I must, of necessity be rather ‘long-winded’ in doing so, since I know of no animal rights theorists who cite Marx as an intellectual mentor and indeed Marx himself was not even a (human) rights activist, let alone an advocate for animal rights!

 Most animal rights advocates work within the liberal tradition that takes the economic system as given, where the emphasis is placed on individual rights and the maximisation of individual opportunities. 

Second, Marx was born almost 200 years ago into a vastly different social and intellectual milieu than the one we know.  The word ‘class’ was part of the currency of everyday language and  “Class” is at the core of his social analysis.  In Marx’s schema it is social groups, not individuals as such, that drive social evolution forward in a purposive manner.

Classes are not defined by income, sources of revenue, or status.  That would be merely an exercise in social stratification. Marx was well aware that a hierarchy of almost infinite gradations constituted society in his day, with everyone knowing his or her place. I clearly remember being admonished by my English working class mother that I was a child and should therefore ‘keep a child’s place’.

In Marxian thought, Classes function as antagonistic groupings defined by their relationship to the means of production of material life. In his Paris Manuscripts Marx, under the influence of Hegelian metaphysics, considered the nature of Man as gattungswesen, a species being, innately productive and creative, who in the process of production of material conditions of life creates himself as a self-conscious, self-directing being.  Industrial capitalism, with its iron discipline and long hours of monotonous toil, dehumanises Man and is the negation of his essence as gattungswesen.  (For Marx the labourer was always the workingman)

Q.  How did Marx come by this notion?  Was it his conception alone?

A.  This was not a new idea.  Thirty-two years before Marx was born Adam Smith wrote that what distinguishes property, that is, legal property relations, is the power given to some men, (in his time the owners of capital) to appropriate the product of the labour of others. In other words, property relations were derived from antecedent relations of domination and subjection. 

Marx often referred to the propertyless working class as the “proletariat”, those who are counted only by their heads, who are held to produce nothing of value “to the Kingdom”.  This view held sway in England well into the 19^th century with lingering echoes remaining in the 20^th century.  It is a legal property relation that legitimises the imprisonment and torture of billions of nonhuman sentient beings each year, solely for supposed human benefit. We degrade innocent beings and in the process we degrade ourselves.  Most people remain unaware of this exploitation and abuse; it is simply part of their taken-for-

granted world, but as Christine Townend, founder of Animal Liberation NSW has written:

  ‘The world is changing,  because the consciousness of people is changing’.

Marx elevated the propertyless proletariat to be the centerpiece of a theory known as the “labour theory of value”. In Marxian theory humanity is inescapably part of nature.  (The earth is our home and the only one we will ever know).  Nature provides the raw materials used to create products for human use. The application of socially organised human labour adds ‘surplus value’ to the raw materials provided by Nature, part of which is appropriated by the capitalist as private profit after deducting the necessary costs of production. ‘Labour power’ is therefore ‘the source of all wealth’. 

Marx distinguishes between the “use value” and “market value” of a product, and between a class “in itself” and class acting “for itself”.  Under capitalist property relations everything; the natural world, even man himself; has become a commodity, to be bought and sold on the market, that  being the sole criterion of value.  This diminishes the nature of Man, who in Marx’s humanistic view should be the measure of all things.

Because Man is essentially a “species being” his essential nature forces him to rebel against everything that diminishes him as a man.  In its misery, the19th century industrial working class represents the supreme expression of this dehumanisation.   19^th century industrial capitalism created what Marx refers to as ‘The Gravediggers of Capitalism’.   The Proletariat by its nature is forced to free itself, and because there is no other class to oppress, carries through the abolition of class society with its antagonistic class relations.  A new period of historical development begins, which in time will lead to a free society based on the rational, and above all, co-operative association of free individuals.

For well over a century Marx’s writings inspired millions of people to sacrifice their private concerns to work for the goal of the good society. While to us all this may seem very far-fetched, it is not necessary for a story or myth to be true in the positivist sense of the term to have this effect.  We have only to consider of the power of theology, even in its current manifestations, to influence the way different social groups see themselves and work to change the world and themselves in various ways. Marxism as a system is now almost obsolete.  That doesn’t mean that reading Marx is a complete waste of time.  For some people his work remains a fruitful source consciousness raising insights.

Q.  So what connection does this 19^th century theory have with 21^st century campaigns to abolish the property status of animals?

A.  It seems to me that activists who use statutory and case law to work for the status of legal personhood for nonhuman animals do so with three main aims in mind.  One is to abolish the status of animals as items of personal property, and under this category we include all types of companion animals, whether privately exchanged or bought and sold in pet shops.   The goal is to transform this relationship from that of a human owner with absolute ownership rights of an animal, to that of guardianship and the acceptance of legal responsibility for the welfare of a sentient being with physical behavioural and emotional needs, in accordance with the requirements of its species life.

The second aim concerns the aim of abolishing the status of animals as raw materials in the production process, as objects of experimentation in laboratories, or as performers forced to participate in entertaining human beings.

The third aim concerns the status of free-living animals whether these are wild, feral, or just simply abandoned.  These animals have the right to be treated with respect and compassion and euthanased only when absolutely necessary.

Q.  Did Marx ever envisage these goals?

A.  Well no. 

In the 19^th century, Marx as a philosopher of history, was immersed in the political concerns of his time, most of which centred around the institution of the nation state and the objective of transforming human subjects into active citizens. Like George Washington the slave-owner, Marx proclaimed libertarian ideas while remaining in thrall to the many of the ruling ideas of his time, of which his patriarchal attitudes toward women, including his wife, was very much the norm.

Marx has been dead for well over a century.  As a society we have moved a long way from the illusions and prejudices of his age.  But the lessons of history remind us it is always possible to succumb to the influence of reactionary ideologies that seek to legitimise violence and oppression against those we consider outside our circle of compassion.

In our time we continue to experience war, injustice, cruelty and a chronic sense of insecurity.  It is also a period ‘pregnant’ with possibilities.  (Marx was fond of using organic metaphors).  We have the means to provide every living being on earth with the basic necessities of life, without enslaving anyone, human or otherwise. The reasons underlying our failure in this regard are complex, one reason being human greed and the grossly unequal distribution of wealth on a global scale; another reason lies in the incomplete nature of the ethical framework required to construct the institutions both necessary and sufficient to achieve both human and animal liberation.

Q.  Are you optimistic about the possibility of achieving such thorough going change?

 A.  We must continue to believe, beyond everything, that we have the ability, and the motivation to overcome our greed and other shortcomings, to achieve our goals of human and animal liberation.

I offer you this extract from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ 1844, in which Marx was asking himself where lay the possibility of German emancipation.  (I have omitted parts irrelevant to nonhuman animals.)  Could this be one of the texts inspiring some animal rights activists to seek to abolish the property status of non human animals?”  (Remember, Marx did not condemn capitalism because workers were treated unfairly but because the wage contract itself was a system of slavery that must be reformed but in the end should be abolished).

My perception is that some of the arguments used by animal rights activists bear some similarity to Marx’s reasoning in this regard. Animal welfarists, for example, do not consider the use of animals for food and other human requirements ethically unsound, so long as the animals are treated humanely and with respect.

Animal rights activists disagree with this line of reasoning.  They argue that reforms are not an end in themselves, confined to securing the animals a better place within the human-animal relationship.  The goal should be (using Marxian or Hegelian terminology) to ‘negate’ and ‘transcend’ an essentially exploitative and unequal relationship.  The relationship arising out of the negation and transition of the old would a new harmonious human/animal relationship based on the equality of each as a ‘subject of a life’.

I offer this quote from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

“A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general”………this dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat”.

Fanciful?  Nonsensical? That is for you to decide.   Over the years I have read it many times.  It continues to resonate strongly with me, maybe because my mother, who was born in 1905, came from a very poor family in London’s East End.  Although their living conditions were better than those of her class who were alive in 1843, she nevertheless spent part of her childhood in the workhouse, and in a home where there were more mealtimes than meals.

Even now, as I read Marx’s words I can scarcely refrain from weeping.  Our brutal and callous disregard of the rights and interests of sentient beings represents the negation of all the fairy stories we choose to tell ourselves about how peaceful, tolerant, and compassionate we are.  Like Marx, I look forward to new beginnings.  I believe in the evolution of human consciousness, and its power to finally bring to a close the long period of historical development, which has witnessed so much pain and suffering.

Richard Dawkins expresses a similar thought in different language.  He holds out the prospect of  ‘deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world’.  Although ‘we are built as gene machines,’ he says, ‘we have the power to turn against our creators’. (Quoted by Peter Singer in his book A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation) Yale University Press,  New Haven and London, 1999.)

To the extent we succeed, I believe we will have freed ourselves and in effect, achieved what Marx referred to as our “authentic human nature as gattungswesen”.

Q.  The Green Movement in Australia has developed a cohesive set of political policies, which emanate from a hub of clearly defined environmental issues.  Animal rights activists have a cohesive set of principles yet we still remain a silent voice in the halls of parliament.  Do you have any insight on why this is so Margaret?

A.  Part of the answer is that Animal/ Rights/ Liberation is but one small section of a wider, broader movement. Today animal issues are in the forefront of many people’s minds, especially young people. Many more are discovering the delights and health benefits of a vegetarian/vegan diet. Daily this section of the population is growing. Soon our interests and those of the animals will be represented in our parliaments. It might be timely to remind ourselves that no so long ago this was not the case. As such we should congratulate ourselves on the progress we have made.

Another reason is because the environment movement has been around in one form or another for the best part of a century, whereas the institutionalised exploitation of animals in factory farming only began in the United States in the 1930s.

World War 11 provided the stimulus for growth in the form of Government orders for cheap food for the armed services.  After the war, the U.S. government continued to provide subsidies and grants to intensive agriculture.  The United States Peace Corps disseminated the technology overseas, making a significant contribution to the profitability of the now burgeoning chemical and pharmaceutical industries. As with any other significant industrial innovation there were both winners and losers. 

The advent of mass consumerism masked evidence of appalling animal abuse in the intensive industries.

Like all nascent movements it had its teething problems.  Progress was slow, and uneven.  Meanwhile the environment movement was going from strength to strength. There were so many issues, involving many different interest groups.  Peace, nuclear disarmament and opposition to uranium mining provided a focus for dissent throughout the 1970s and Eighties. 

The built environment became another focus with Jack Mundey providing militant leadership of the then Builders’ Laborers Federation in the imposition of Green Bans on controversial re-development of The Rocks and other heritage buildings.  Jack’s  integrity and warm, expressive personality made him a popular figure, particularly with middle class voters like those who campaigned for the preservation of Kelly’s Bush in the 1980s.  Community groups concerned for their local environment began to spring up as a result.

All these groups, composed of many different kinds of people, with many causes to promote The Greens a political base. By contrast the animal rights movement seemed to be a single-issue movement.

The Greens act as an optimistic, articulate voice for people who otherwise would be ignored in the power struggles of the major parties.