“What, Who, and How?” Session Three. Edited Transcript – 8 November 2026

Also available in: Français

More information about this series of discussions here.

Table of Contents

Prehistory of the Project

DM: Okay. As an introduction — we’ll get to the structure of this session afterwards — I want to say a few words about the prehistory of these sessions.

As everybody probably knows, in the autumn of 2023 Ben Gidley, Daniel Randall and I wrote For a consistently democratic and internationalist left – A contribution to left renewal and transformation — and that’s how this project (the blog, the webinars and interviews, etc) got called Left Renewal. The text made the case for a more thorough and consistent internationalism and a renewal of the left, based on what we saw as core left values: values we thought had been breached in some responses to the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks and the war that followed.

The three of us came from different backgrounds. Daniel Randall is a member of a heterodox Trotskyist group in the UK. BG and I come from anti-authoritarian left backgrounds and we’re actually quite anti-Leninist. The original text had some seams and perhaps slight contradictions, which came to light in online discussions afterwards. Quite a few people who welcomed its critique of left antisemitism did not really agree with its radical anti-capitalist politics. And there were other disagreements among the signatories. Some were with a group of secular feminists. We found their position on the headscarf simplistic: for Muslim women of different generations, communities and political situations it doesn’t mean the same thing, and it cannot be reduced to a universal symbol of patriarchal or religious oppression. And I at least consider the 2004 French law on conspicuous religious symbols in school an expression of racist, and specifically anti-Muslim, tendencies in France. This disagreement overlapped with another disagreement with a group of mostly older feminists who are more or less anti-trans, a position we find abhorrent and completely unacceptable, and have “abolitionist” positions on sex work – positions we oppose, and which we see as hostile to sex workers and sex worker organising. These are just some examples; there were other disagreements as well.

Later we wrote Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting, published in late 2025, to clarify ambiguities in our original text, as we saw them, but also to deepen and broaden the analysis. After it had been out for a while we tried to use the text as a starting point for some political discussions and networking. It turned out that some of the “anti-campist” people we were in dialogue with carry what we would consider Stalinist — or at least traditional-left — baggage, and espouse what I have called (to their great displeasure, but I stand by it) anti-campism light. They oppose Russian imperialism in Ukraine, but won’t take a clear position against the pseudo-socialist dictatorship in Cuba; they want to avoid stepping on the toes of Pan-Africanists who idealise the pro-Russian military regimes in the Sahel; and they do not see China as a major threat to human emancipation today. We disagreed about the meaning and priorities of a struggle against the global far right and global authoritarianism. I, for one, see China as an essentially far-right regime, and I oppose an “antifascist” strategy that focuses only or primarily on the far right and fascists in Europe and the Americas.

We also found that some people we thought were on board with our text’s rejection of class fundamentalism were in fact not. Their idea of a radical left programme seemed much more traditional, holding on to class fundamentalism and what looked to us like trad left, somewhat uncritical, ideas of progress and rationality, as opposed to what we have in mind. So we thought: there are a lot of disagreements and misunderstandings; let’s go back and talk about the text, with the intention of linking it to more practical political and strategic questions. That was the genesis of this series of discussions.

Recap of Sessions One and Two

In the first session, on 13 September, we focused on class, interlocking systems of oppression and revolutionary subjects. Basically we argued for class analysis without reductionism: we advocate recovering class analysis but reject class reductionism and class fundamentalism, while arguing for a broader idea of the working class. We distinguished class reductionism from class fundamentalism — a distinction Daniel Randall came up with. Very roughly, what we mean by class reductionism is the dismissal of anything that’s not class-first politics, including what some people call identity politics. Class fundamentalism is much more open in what it considers class and class struggle, but it still sees the working class, whatever that means, as the universal agent of emancipation, and we question that.

Then we talked about “left” and what it means. We separated descriptive from prescriptive definitions. We said we do need a prescriptive definition. We proposed equal worth, freedom understood as freedom-to, and all these community, cooperation and cohesion words, with a common thread of questioning the supposed naturalness of hierarchies. Even then we made some connections to what this means for species and civilisation, which we’re going to get into today. We also talked about why radical left politics (as opposed to centre-left “tinkering” with the system) at all.

In the second session we moved to micropolitics and macropolitics — macropolitics meaning society-wide structures, micropolitics meaning the power relations of families, workplaces or our own organisations. Then we discussed left, or emancipatory, organisation: how much structure, etc. I argued vehemently that the family or household should be a central political question. One participant spoke a lot about technology: basically, that technological developments are going to lead to a society of abundance, which will radically transform the relationship between labour and capital. We talked about “race”, nation and the left, and about “racial” capitalism theory and how patriarchy and capitalism fit together.

The people who were there and spoke expressed appreciation for a lot of Marxist-feminist (specifically, social-reproduction) and “racial” capitalism approaches, but had this doubt: isn’t it too neat? Isn’t there too much functionalism? Aren’t there things that can’t be captured by a political-economy lens, or by extending the concept of labour?

That was on a theoretical level, and on a more strategic-political level I guess we came to the point of saying that the left should stop seeking unity around one key question. There was also some talk about the centrality of gender, and the salience of questions of masculinity for the far right today, and a bunch of other details that are in the transcripts (Session One – Session Two).

Coloniality, Colonialism, Imperialism

DM: We didn’t get to coloniality and imperiality last time. So our idea for today was to take that up, and to move from coloniality, colonialism, imperialism and imperiality to issues of civilisation: what is a proper human — and what do “race”, adulthood, ability, not being an animal and all that have to do with these hierarchically arranged ideas of identity, and with civilisation? We want to talk about reason and progress and the role these ideas have played, and then about the domination of nature, the rights of non-human animals, and the whole animal and anti-speciesism question from there.

On coloniality and imperiality: in our collection of videos there are two French-language interviews, one with Michel Cahen and one with Pierre Gaussens, on the critique of the theoretical approach of “decolonial studies” (of Latin American origin), or the “decolonial option”. Until now they were pretty unusable for anglophones, but there are now decent English subtitles, and I was just looking at them.

The definition of coloniality that I would use is close to the one Michel Cahen defends. To make it even shorter, I use it as a shorthand for the cultural and ideological phenomena that continue, colonialism-like, after formal decolonisation. So you could use the word neocolonialism for economic dependency — for example, in France, “Françafrique” — and I would use the word coloniality for many different things: people in Japan wanting to have operations to make their eyes look more round, even though Japan was never colonised by any European power; internalised racism; or, if you look at Latin American countries, who the ruling class is, and what the dominant aesthetic is — a very white aesthetic in Mexican media, for example.

I don’t see the point of really distinguishing between imperialism and colonialism. One could say that for colonialism to be there, there should be some colons, some settlers; but that’s not how the word has really been used. Of course there have to be at least a few people who occupy a territory, overseas or contiguous. What makes more sense to me, then, is the distinction that colonialism involves territorial occupation, whereas imperialism does not necessarily need it. But I don’t think that’s a very good distinction, at least not as a transhistorical distinction.

One of our interviewees, Joe Grim Feinberg, made another distinction. He proposed that pre-modern empires could have a degree of ranked inclusion — of course there was ethnic domination and ethnic ranking — but that colonialism, or coloniality in his version, means a clearer segregation of colonial populations as racialised and absolutely different: non-citizen “natives”, “barbarians”, with a completely different status from the metropolitan population. In my mind this is all linked with late modernity and ideas of equality. In Europe, from the eighteenth century on at least, there were demands for equality, and nationalism was in a sense a way of giving this equality, in principle, to everyone who belonged to the core nation. Empires with a state at the centre that was transforming into a nation-state — like the French Empire, and to some degree even the Russian Empire — had to find a way to give some rights and some humanity to the metropolitan population, while finding good reasons for denying this equality to colonial populations. So for him, if I understand him correctly, colonialism is more segregationist and more racist than “empireness” in a longer historical view — especially if you look at, for example, the Mughal Empire in India or the Ottoman Empire, which look quite different from European colonial empires in their degree of segregation.

But it’s all still not absolutely crisp and clear in my mind, and I think not in the minds of most people. What I appreciate about this project — the blog, the interviews, the webinars — is that there’s been a lot of collective learning going on over the past three years. At least I feel I’ve learned a lot and am now confused at a much higher level of understanding.

State, Economy, Imperialism

SRM: The most interesting thing I brought up last time was the argument — I’m sorry, I’m forgetting the writer — that to understand imperialism, imperiality, we need to take more seriously the role of the State as a contested terrain on the left, instead of collapsing the state simply into capital and class. We need to look at it as a complex set of contested institutions and terrain that interact with class struggle. Seeing it as something contested between different social forces begins to give a clearer idea of why states seek imperial acquisitions, or imperial glory — imperial activities that don’t seem to be strictly useful for capital accumulation, per se.

DM: It’s good that you remind us, because I had automatically dropped that. For many Marxist-inspired leftists today, when they say imperialism they basically focus on the economy and on Lenin’s classical ideas about imperialism. I decided many years ago that that’s ridiculous, so I don’t even think about it anymore. But yes, we should mention it: in our discussions we came to a more state-oriented definition of imperialism. That doesn’t mean economic interests play no role; it’s just that the definition of imperialism as a stage or form of capitalism doesn’t work at all, I think.

Briefly, there’s really interesting historical research in Chinese history that brings out ideas of a civilising mission. Obviously it’s not called that in Chinese, but there are very homologous things. There’s a whole debate about to what degree you can talk about “race”, or racism, in a very broad sense in earlier stages of Chinese history. I don’t want to get into that, but there is some nineteenth-century ethnography, and a discourse about the civilised and the barbarian, and civilising ideas that pop up a lot in East Asia. I bring this up to make the link to civilisation as an idea which, in a wider sense, is not limited to Western or Enlightenment discourse. I’m far from being able to formulate anything like a global history of civilisation-like ideas across different areas and periods, but it’s not only a Western issue.

I wanted to open the floor to some free association: what do you think the link is between histories of empire and imperialism, or maybe statism, today — and these questions of civilisation and nature?

Anti-Imperialism, Planetary Perspective

BG: Stepping back a second: I thought that was really interesting, what SRM and DM just said, in terms of clarifying. From the very beginning of our project, we saw a certain version of anti-imperialism as a really dominant ideology on the contemporary left. It’s an element of what we might call the traditional left, which I think has been one of the most corrosive ideologies, seeing the world in a binary, Manichaean way. I think SRM made a good point about the state; relating that to class reductionism: it’s a class-reductionist way of thinking that sees the economy as central and doesn’t understand that states have their own logic that sometimes overwhelms the economic. So these ideologies around “race” and human hierarchies are sometimes more powerful than economic interests.

Secondly, the planetary perspective: what Lenin saw from Europe in 1916 is not the right starting point; if your starting point is China or India or somewhere else, you end up somewhere very different. In a way the decolonial critique shares something of our critique, but it brings other problems. Within the decolonial perspective, people like Sylvia Wynter start with questions like: what is the human, and how have colonialism and coloniality framed the idea of who counts as human? We have something in common with that, even though we have political problems with the decolonial perspective. Taking seriously the question of who counts as human is one of the ways in which we would really differ from the traditional left.

Appropriation and Nature

YB: I make a lot of use of the analyses of a materialist feminist sociologist, Colette Guillaumin, who theorised relations of appropriation: the relations of domination through which one group appropriates another group. Relations of slavery, of serfdom, and what she called sexage: the appropriation of the group of women by the group of men, through the appropriation of individual women by individual men in marriage, etc. It is also the appropriation of children — first by peers, then by the family. And it is also the appropriation of animals by humans.

Guillaumin shows that to the concrete appropriation of one group by another there corresponds an ideology in terms of nature. The dominated are apprehended as having a specific nature, which gives them a specific function and justifies their place in the social order. The dominant see themselves as escaping nature, emerging from nature, as beings of freedom: beings who master themselves, who master their bodies, who therefore belong to themselves and can be owners. They cannot be slaves — and by the same token they can be owners of the rest of the world, in particular of the appropriated groups. They see themselves as beings of freedom, that is, beings of contract. This is the whole ideology that is born with John Locke, for example. It is the beginning of capitalism.

I think this corresponds, broadly, on the one hand to the development of wage labour, of capitalism as a capital–labour relation, and on the other hand to what Marx called the primitive accumulation of capital — which I don’t see as a moment at the origin of capitalism, but as a constant movement within it. So, schematically, the naturalist humanist ideology corresponds to these two moments of capitalism. I think that makes sense in the context of reflections on colonialism and imperialism, not only on patriarchy concerning women and children, and on speciesism, the system of animal exploitation. That went very fast, didn’t it.

BG: That was a really great explanation. I’ve read her work on “race”, but I’ve not read anything else of hers. I really liked what you just said.

Primitive Accumulation, Property, Liberty

DM: So many points. One is about primitive accumulation — in English also “original accumulation” or “primary accumulation”; in German ursprüngliche Akkumulation. There’s a lot of confusion about it, but I think all Marxists worth anything today don’t see it as something that happened in the past to kick off capitalism, after which it stopped. It’s very à la mode to talk about ongoing primitive accumulation these days. And I think there’s a lot in there.

But in trying to grasp phenomena like imperialism or racism on a very large scale with concepts like — we talked about this last time — Nancy Fraser’s, which proposes, very simplistically, that regular workers and regular people are exploited, while expropriation creates “race”, or “race” corresponds to the expropriation of land or of your whole body — great as far as it goes, but I have the same hesitation I expressed last time: it’s sometimes too neat. I have a similar feeling here. Think about appropriation in the sense of ownership. I think ownership is really interesting, and we should know much more about how it exists in different cultures and historical periods. There used to be the myth that in indigenous American societies there was no private property in land. That’s very simplistic; it was more complicated. There were, it seems, all kinds of complicated notions of what you can and can’t do in certain areas, and what you have and don’t have. So ownership and appropriation is an important point on which to get more world-historically and ethnographically informed. In other words, I’m totally on board with everything you’ve said.

The last thing I’ll say is about liberty, because we talked last time about the definition of the left. The left globally faces this problem that the right and the far right are very good at taking liberty and freedom from us. The freedom they mean is the freedom to be an asshole, the freedom to exploit, the freedom to rape, the freedom to take things from other people. That’s the freedom they want, and it’s appealing, because being an asshole, and not having to work hard and letting other people do it, is kind of appealing — if you’re messed up enough. I wanted to mark that as another big point of discussion: how can we, as leftists, or unorthodox leftists, speak for liberty or freedom of the egalitarian kind, to be free in the sense that nobody else has the freedom to make me a slave?

Reason, Technology, Science

Since we have limited time, can we also talk about reason, progress, technology and rationality for a moment, before we come to the domination of nature and the nature and animal question? Last time, a friend of ours, the person who translated our text into Spanish, remarked while translating it that this whole degrowth stuff is not really where he’s coming from, though he finds it an interesting perspective. He seems very into this whole fully automated luxury communism tendency, left accelerationism, abundance. We also had some disagreements with another participant — at least I did — about how to talk about science and rationality in a radical left programme.

I think we have some not very useful binarisms in the left tradition here too: the romantic left current and the rationalist current, often not usefully in dialogue with each other. I also think of the feminist and other critiques of the links between various forms of “racial” domination and rationality: it’s always the subaltern “races” or ethnicities that are like children, who need to be led, who are stupid. There are always links there, and obviously a link between rationality and gender. And in the Marxist tradition as a whole there’s not enough self-criticism about the fascination with technological and scientific progress. That started with Marx. Which doesn’t mean that we should all become primitivists or anti-industrialists, or think the Enlightenment was only a terrible catastrophe. Maybe somebody has something to say about this.

BG: I oscillate between more sympathy and less sympathy with that kind of technological fix. Is there a way to be critical of the idea of rationality and logic as a property of the civilised — a kind of ideology of domination — without completely giving up reasonableness and falling into an irrationalist perspective? It’s about the dichotomy, the binary: how can we get rid of the reason/unreason binary? I oscillate between wanting to critique rationality and wanting to defend something about it, and I think that probably indicates the strength the binary has over our thinking.

SRM: I think I agree. I tend to be in the camp of disagreeing: when everyone wants to be rational, I want to attack rationality, and when everyone wants to throw out rationality, I want to defend it. Rationality is, like imperialism, a tough thing to pin down, but it feels a little disingenuous to show up to a meeting like this with the intent of really trying to hash out how we think about so many intractable issues of theoretical definition on the left, and not see that as an attempt at what we would call reasonableness, or rationality, or logicking-out — even if rationality with a capital R is probably out, as a justification for hierarchy.

On the technological question, I’m another middle-ground person, agnostic. Maybe I haven’t read enough, but I think we have to work from where we’re at; at the same time I understand the perspective that technology changes, society changes, and then the question changes. I don’t necessarily think that once there’s enough abundance, social relations will change of themselves. But technological change can create certain possibilities or open up opportunities. My view is similar to BG’s: it’s good to hold both things in hand. I’d call it a realist view: not romanticising science, nor getting away from science. Science as ideology, you might say, is weird — science as an attempt to structure the social world.

When we talk about science, I do think there’s something to be said for methodological knowledge production. If we can accept that as a definition of science, that’s good enough for me.

DM: I think one important point we should hold on to is that there is an understanding of the scientific method that is fundamentally non-authoritarian. It’s not because somebody important says something, or it’s in a holy book that you have to accept it as truth. The attitude — you have to make sense, you have to prove your point, an experiment has to be reproducible — is a basic attitude that shows up in multiple historical periods and cultural areas, whenever there are people with enough material independence to think independently, and not so much repression that they can’t. That’s when science or proto-science pops up: when there are people rich enough that they don’t have to repeat what the priests say or what pleases the king. There is an argument that science comes out of the independent, non-authoritarian thinking of all kinds of people when they get enough space and good enough material circumstances.

SRM: I think there’s a bad version of science, Science with a capital S, a reified science that is access to truth by certain truth-knowers, like scientists. There is something about science that is democratic and egalitarian, or has that potential: people working together to agree on a solution or solve a problem, debating it, going back and forth. I think that’s something the left could do better at surfacing — the democratic and popular aspect of science.

Rationality, Sentience

YB: Rationality was invoked from the time of Aristotle and Plato — but above all Aristotle — to combat what I call sentientism, which means considering that sentience is the foundation of ethics. It is because we feel sensations and emotions that we have interests to defend; our lives can go well or badly, and others must take our interests into account, for example in a conflict or an arbitration. In Aristotle, rationality immediately intervenes against the dominated classes: first the animals, then the women, then the slaves, and to some degree the barbarians. And it serves to invalidate their sentience. They resemble things: they give no meaning to what they feel, they are slaves to their sensations instead of being masters – through rationality – of their sensations, their bodies, their desires. That is how appropriation is justified: if they are slaves of their bodies because they have no reason, they can be appropriated, whereas the others, who have reason, master their bodies and therefore have the nature of an owner — and likewise of the world.

This is the whole war that has been waged against sentientism for 2,500 years, since Aristotle. It is founded on the notion of rationality — but a notion that has nothing to do with what neurobiology says, or with philosophical reflections on what sentience and reason are. From a scientific point of view, it is erroneous to separate reason from sensations and emotions; what we call reason as something isolated does not exist. I think there is a real critique to be made from that standpoint.

DM: I want to echo that. A certain definition of rationality, one that has to do with self-control and ownership of oneself, is pretty central to various forms of domination. I think we can agree on that.

Expansion and Population Growth

I’ll add one more thing: expansion — territorial expansion — and propagation, in the sense of population increase. You can have that in state versions, like the territorial expansion of a State, which has a lot to do with the colonialism and imperialism we talked about earlier. But you can also have expansion simply in the sense that one area is getting a bit full, and people leave for another place, and maybe have to fell trees and adapt to a new environment to make a new life in a new place. I think there’s a spectrum between a nonviolent human expansion, where you don’t enslave or dominate other people, and what we might call colonisation or imperial expansion. SRM made this point last time. It’s valuable to look even at what we tend to see as harmless: human expansion into areas previously uninhabited by humans. Is that really completely politically innocent, when it’s just humans expanding and dominating their surroundings?

Second, population increase. You can see other people as useful labour, and having a bunch of children who can help out can be good. Long before empire or kingship, there may have evolved ways of thinking and being where we see other people in terms of their utility for us or our group, and want more of them so that we can do things as a group and expand. So I think the roots of some of today’s problematic social tendencies may go quite deep, historically. And in many left utopias there is, for my taste, too much expansion and multiplication. Maybe we should explicitly have counter-utopias: wouldn’t it be great if we humans became fewer in number, by our own choice, over the long term? And wouldn’t it be great if there were areas of the earth where we say, no, we’re leaving that to other beings; this is not for humans? That would be an ethics and an aesthetics very different from today’s, and I really like this idea…

Anti-Speciesism and the Zoosocial Order

From here we should go on to talk specifically about species and animals. I’d like to ask, YB, in strategic or practical political terms — and it’s not just a question for you but for all of us — if we want to take anthropocentrism seriously as a problem, what should we do? I noticed that you use “humanism” in the negative, as what you’re against. I understand that, but there are other uses of the term humanism. How should we deal with anthropocentrism and the anti-speciesism question in practical political terms? How can it be articulated with anti-racism and anti-capitalism, theoretically, but also in terms of who to talk to, and how, on the left and beyond it?

YB: There is a lot of work to do. But fundamentally — right now I’m working on the notion of “zoosocial order”. It’s a notion from a sociologist, Kaoutar Harchi, who is anti-racist and anti-speciesist. Roughly speaking, she says what anti-speciesists have been repeating for a long time: that the different forms of intra-human domination, within humanity, are structured by the human/animal difference — the oppressive, false difference, the divide we put between animals and humans. Dominated groups are animalised, and dominant groups are humanised. The whole social order is traversed by the zoosocial order. Anti-racists have been able to speak of a “racial” social order; the term zoosocial order was coined on that basis, but she speaks of the order of orders — the order that organises the other orders of domination. It is not a question of anteriority or centrality; it is simply that speciesism plays an extremely structuring role for all relations of domination. That doesn’t mean it is central, because there are enormous links between the different orders of domination. But it’s a message I’d like to get across to the left.

We now have very many studies in social psychology showing a very strong correlation between speciesism, racism, sexism, ageism, xenophobia, etc. — and that if we manage to reduce speciesism in people’s cultural imaginary, prejudice toward dominated groups also falls. This is not known, and yet these studies have existed for twenty years.

On another level, capitalism developed on the basis of considering everything that is not of the human order — nature, which is somehow the way of expressing it — as the appropriable world. For me this follows from Guillaumin’s analyses. Humanity, as I use the word here, is only the dominant humans, those perceived as owners; nature is what is perceived as appropriable. I want to put ethics at the heart of politics, and sentientism at the heart of ethics. Sentientism means taking into consideration the sentience of individuals, and therefore their interests as individuals. What capitalism did was to deny that many individuals had interests to defend, and so it was able to appropriate not only those individuals but also their resources and territories. This is recognised when we talk about racism: a territory was considered terra nullius, belonging to no one. Of course the same was done with animals — without even asking the question, so obvious was it — and animals themselves were res nullius, things belonging to no one.

Putting sentientism at the heart of ethics and politics amounts to undermining the foundations of capitalist property. What we very often make ourselves owners of are things useful to sentient beings: when we appropriate nature — a territory, trees, anything — we are appropriating territories and resources of beings who already use them. I am not in favour of respect for nature — I think it doesn’t exist — but I am in favour of taking sentient beings and their interests into account, and indirectly that implies a critique of the idea of property. Property is supposed to be total: the owner has all power over his property. That is the property of Roman law: usus, abusus, fructus. But other types of property have existed, for example in medieval Europe, or in other civilisations — more like multiple forms of possession, recognising that the same territory can be used in extremely different ways by many different parties. The well-known example is forests: there were rights to wood, to acorns (for the rearing of pigs) — differentiated rights that different social groups had. Perhaps I’m straying from your question.

DM: No, you answered; it was a huge question. The part that’s missing for me is: once we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s a central critique, how do we convince other people? How do we make it legible to people living in other activist worlds, or just other worlds? I’m not expecting an answer; I want to raise it as a central question. I’ve noticed, for example, that a lot of radical-left anti-speciesists spend a lot of time trying to disprove the notion that anti-speciesism is a white, middle-class ideology for privileged people. There is lots of anti-racist anti-speciesism by non-white people in various places — Brazil, the USA and elsewhere. But some anti-speciesist milieus I was familiar with were in fact very white and ignorant of other struggles, and nobody denies this. And to give one last example: in South Asia there is this whole culture of vegetarianism, associated with caste, which makes it very difficult to be an anti-caste vegan. There are some, but the social situation sets up binaries that are very hard to question.

YB: In India it is difficult to be an anti-caste vegetarian, because vegetarianism is used to assert caste. But the anti-speciesist activists there insist precisely on veganism, which goes against the caste system, because it is the use of milk and butter that is defended by the caste system. So there is a bit of a difference at that level.

DM: Absolutely true. But you will find a lot of people on the left, or in countercultural circles in India, reacting very strongly, not distinguishing between veganism and vegetarianism, and arguing that veganism is a privileged, urban thing — which, objectively, it often is. I’m not arguing against you; it’s good to get into the details of the various cultural particularities. BG, were you about to say something?

Humanism and Anti-Speciesism

BG: I was going to ask YB a question: whether anthropocentrism and speciesism are synonymous with humanism for you. I really liked what you said about the dominant being humanised and the dominated being animalised. Is the correct response to say that we need to reject the concept of the human, or to say that we need to expand the concept of the human and demand humanisation for those who have been denied it? The second might be a kind of humanism. What would you say?

YB: There are debates in France and in the Francophone world around these questions. Should we reject humanism in general, or distinguish an inclusive humanism from an exclusive humanism — which is human supremacism? And at the strategic level: should we continue to attack speciesism, or should we attack humanism? I’ve put a link in the chat to a site with English translations of Francophone anti-speciesist texts. For example, there’s a text of mine on precisely this question. These debates are, I think, much more common in France than in Anglophone countries, so it may interest you. They haven’t been settled, and they are debated mostly among the movement’s intellectuals, more than by the movement itself.

I am in favour of fighting humanism — but that is a movement of much greater scope than the wish to use humanism by broadening it. I think that in reality both movements will exist, and that is certainly a good thing from a strategic point of view.

Custodianship, Property

BG: I was wondering, on this question of property that we started with: in some versions of indigenous politics there is a lot of discourse around custodianship of the land versus property. Is that a productive line of thought?

YB: I think it’s important to think about property — to rethink property, or even, above all, to think of something other than property, in light of the multiple uses of the world. I’m also thinking of animals there, but even without animals the question arises in the same terms.

Nature, the Living and Sentience

DM: I think there’s an unresolved conflict between an approach that talks about nature, accepts that there is such a thing as nature, and holds that it needs to be protected and respected — with varieties, one of which is animist-inspired: sacred mountains, trees and rivers, where the river or the mountain could have rights — and, on the other side, a philosophy centred on sentience. I absolutely see the point of the sentience focus, and I agree with it, and I wonder whether it’s possible to bring the two together. I like the ethos of: we live in this big world, and we don’t know everything about it. I always say that having a scientific worldview is not very scientific, because scientific thought means recognising that we lack a lot of information about a lot of things. What was fringe science and pseudoscience at some point may become mainstream science fifty years on — most often not, it remains fringe or is forgotten, but sometimes it does. So we should keep an open mind and not dismiss the idea that the mountain is alive, or ideas about life energy and so on, as obvious nonsense. On the other hand, when the idea of life or the living is used as an argument to minimise the idea that we should care about the suffering of sentient beings, that is not good.

YB: Yes. The idea of nature, and also the idea of the living, are used as steamrollers against sentientism. In France it’s very strong; there is a big offensive — the “sentience of plants”, the “sentience of the living” — to invalidate animal sentience, and the specificity of sentience.

History of the Concept of Nature

SRM: I have a general question: I’d be interested if people have resources for reading about the history of the concept of nature, of the human, the idea of a natural world that we relate to. It occurs to me that there’s something interesting about the moment at which something goes from being nature to being part of the human world. There’s a tree far away in a forest, and it is nature; at some point we chop it down and it turns into my desk, and it’s definitely not nature anymore — now it’s my desk. I’d be interested in anything about this transformation of nature into something we appropriate: not just into property, but also into our social understanding of it, and of ourselves. Maybe that just is property. If anyone has anything on nature and nature’s property, I’d be quite interested to read it.

DM: I’m also really interested in this question. It reminds me of something I studied long ago in feminist anthropology. One current was trying to explain the widespread male domination in many societies by associating gender binarism with the nature-culture binary. Then some other feminist anthropologists argued: we have cases where people don’t have this concept of nature at all, but they do have male domination, in a way that is recognisable to us. So how does that work? I don’t remember all the details; it fascinated me thirty years ago, and I should look it up again.

YB: I’m talking about how it was structured in what we call Western civilisation — already the term is very open to criticism. In any case, today it is a civilisation that has become globalised precisely through colonialism and imperialism, and you find this pretty much everywhere. But it’s clear that there are other systems of domination, in other types of civilisations, that do not rest on the idea of nature, and where it works in a totally different way.

Next Session

DM: There is one last session in four weeks, on 6 December, at a much more reasonable time for people in the Americas. We said we would talk about the state and violence.