Hegemony, Animal Liberation, and Gramscian Praxis: An Interview with John Sanbonmatsu by Dinesh Wadiwel 
John Sanbonmatsu 
Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts,usa js@wpi.edu 

Dinesh Wadiwel 
University of Sydney, Australia dinesh.wadiwel@sydney.edu.au 
© 2023 John Sanbonmatsu and Dinesh Wadiwel 
Abstract. Political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel interviews philosopher John Sanbonmatsu about the relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s theories of capitalism and collective action for the contemporary animal ad­vocacy movement. Wadiwel and Sanbonmatsu discuss Gramsci’s key concepts, including hegemony, the distinction between ‘organic’ and traditionalintellectuals,thecapitalistcrisis,andthenecessityof‘moral and intellectual leadership’ in praxis. Sanbonmatsu acknowledges the historical tensions between the political Left and animal rights, but makes the case for a theoretical and practical merging of the two. In this context, he suggests, Gramsci’s phenomenological conception of praxis – i.e. as the engendering of a new political and social reality through the exercise of human will – offers important lessons for the animal movement. Sanbonmatsu suggests that as growing contradic­tions in the capitalist animal food economy open up fissures in the system of domination and consent, Gramscian analysis can help us to identify points of strategicweakness,ones wemight collectively lever­age to create radical social change. 
Key Words: Antonio Gramsci, Marxism, animal rights, animal ethics, critical theory 
Hegemonija, osvoboditevživali in Gramscijeva praksa: intervju Dinesha Wadiwela z Johnom Sanbonmatsujem 
Povzetek. Politicni teoretik Dinesh Wadiwel se s filozofom Johnom SanbonmatsujempogovarjaopomenuGramscijevihteorijkapitalizma 
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.55.237-268 
inkolektivnegadelovanjazasodobnogibanjezagovorništvaživali.Wa­diwelinSanbonmatsurazpravljataoGramscijevihkljucnihkonceptih, vkljucnoshegemonijo,zrazlikovanjemmed»organskimi«intradicio­nalnimiintelektualci, s kapitalisticno krizoter z nujnostjo»moralnega in intelektualnega vodstva« v praksi. Sanbonmatsu prepoznava zgo­dovinske napetosti med politicno levico in pravicami živali, vendar se zavzema za teoreticno in prakticno združitev obeh. V tem konte­kstu Gramscijevo fenomenološko pojmovanje prakse – tj. kot ustvar­janje nove politicne in družbene realnosti z uporabo clovekove volje 
– izpostavi kot pomembno lekcijo za gibanje za pravice živali. San-bonmatsu predstavi razmišljanje, da nam, medtem ko vse vecja pro-tislovja v kapitalisticni ekonomiji živalske hrane povzrocajo razpoke v sistemu nadvlade in privolitve, Gramscijeva analiza lahko pomaga prepoznati tocke strateške šibkosti, ki jih lahko skupaj izkoristimo za dosego radikalne družbene spremembe. 
Kljucne besede: Antonio Gramsci, marksizem, pravice živali, etika ži­vali, kriticna teorija 
Dinesh Wadiwel (dw) In 2011 you edited the collection, Critical Theory andAnimalLiberation(RowmanandLittlefield).Insomerespectsthebook was unprecedented and remains unique in exploring connections between left theory and pro-animal politics. Your introduction to the book lays out someofthechallengesbeforeus,includingahistoricantagonismfrommany leftists towards the animal liberation project; and simultaneously, an ur­gent needfor animalliberationanalysistoengagea ‘penetratingcritiqueof, among other things,patriarchy andmale violence, the links between racial-ization andanimalization,[and]thecapitalist state assuch’ (Sanbonmatsu 2011, 30). Could you explain a little about the impulses behind the collec­tion? 
John Sanbonmatsu (js) One of the few positive developments I see on the left regarding animals is Critical Animal Studies (cas), a small, emerging academic field that seeks to bring radical social critique to an­imal liberationism, while bringing an animal liberationist perspective to radical critique. The point of my anthology was to provide a space for someoftheemergingvoicesincastomapthetotalityofhumandomina­tion.TheoriginalimpetusforthevolumecamefromtheMarxistphiloso­pher Renzo Llorente, in Spain, whose idea was to co-edit a book about capitalismand animals. When Renzohadtobowoutoftheproject, how-ever,thecollectionbecamebroaderinscope,exploringnotonlythelink­agesbetweenspeciesismandcapitalism,butbringinginfeministcritique, the Frankfurt School, ideology critique, etc. 
Unfortunately,thoughtherearenowdozensifnothundredsofscholars 
working in this arena,casremains a very small domain. Meanwhile, the 
left as such remains indifferent to animal liberationist critique. In 1989, 
I wrote an article for ZMagazine (a leftist journal based in Boston) on 
why the left should take animal rights seriously, both as an idea and as 
an important social movement. When the article was published, I was a 
bit anxious, anticipating a backlash from the magazine’s readers. In the 
event, I needn’t have worried – because there was no reaction at all. Un­
fortunately, the left’s attitude towards animals and to animal rights has 
not changed much in the intervening 30 years. There have been some 
exceptions. In the 1990s, for example, William Kunstler, the celebrated 
leftist attorney, publicly spokeoutagainsthumanexploitationof animals 
in laboratories and farms, describing our treatment of other species as 
‘barbarism.’ More recently, the leftist journalist Chris Hedges has drawn 
someattentiontothesufferingofanimalsinagriculture.¹ However,these 
aretheexceptionsthatprovetherule,andanimalliberationistthoughtre­
mainsmarginaltoleftismasawhole.Jacobinmagazinehaspublishedone 
ortwoarticlesinananimalwelfaristvein,butthey’vealsopublishedatro­
cious pieces attacking animal rights – including one that even defended 
factory farming. 
Not only isn’t the left interested in animal rights, but countless left­
ist journalists and critics have enthusiastically thrown their support to 
small-scale animal farming and aquaculture as ‘forward-looking’ devel­
opments in environmental sustainability. For example, George Monbiot, 
one of the few leftist writers to have criticized animal agriculture, pub­
lished a repugnant article in The Guardian about how he hunted down 
and killed a deer, ostensibly as a way of demonstrating his commitment 
to a post-agricultural order.² 
dw In left discussions, one often finds the term ‘hegemony’ cropping up, a termmostoftenassociated withtheworkofAntonioGramsci.Canyoufirst explainwhatismeantbyhegemony,andperhapstootheoverallsignificance of Gramsci’s politics for praxis? 
js Hegemony is a complex term.³ The word derives from the ancient Greek word hegemon, foraleading ordominant citystate. Hegemony 
¹ See e. g. Hedges (2015). ² See Monbiot (2020). ³ See Perry Anderson’s book length treatment of the subject, The H-Word: The Peripeteia 
of Hegemony (2017). 
is often still used in this sense, as the power or influence of a ruling or 
dominant group or power. Leftists thus refer to the ‘hegemony’ of the 
World Bank, to the hegemony of capital, to racial hegemony, and so on. 
Whilethesearevalidusesoftheterm,whatGramscimeantbyhegemony 
was rather more specific.4 Broadly, hegemony encompasses the means 
through which a group or class establishes, and subsequently maintains, 
itsrule. By ‘rule,’ however,I don’tmean only oreven primarily itscon­
trol of the state or political institutions. Rather, I mean its authority and 
influence over society as such. It’s one thing to rule over others solely us­
ing force – the police or military, etc. But it’s another to gain the consent 
of the populace to a form of authority and a mode of life by redefining 
the common sense of society itself. The contest for power plays out in 
all spheres of society, not only at the ballot box, but in the workplace, 
in academia, in popular culture, and therefore too in language and the 
realm ofideas. A dominantgroupmaintains its power not only or chiefly 
through control of the state, but through the propagation of values and 
beliefs,normsofbehaviour,structuresofpractice. AsBenedettoFontana 
observes,forGramscia ‘grouporclasscanbesaidtoassumeahegemonic 
role to theextentthatit articulates andproliferates throughout society 
cultural and ideological belief systems whose teachings are accepted as 
universally valid by the general population’ (Fontana 1993, 140). If we 
thinkofsocietyasaconsensualrealitysharedbythosedwellingwithinit, 
then politics is the art of defining that reality. Those who exercise hege­
mony are thus able to define the meaning and purposes of human life. 
It wasoneofGramsci’smostimportantinsights,however,torecognize 
thathegemonyissimplybuiltintothenatureofpoliticallife.Itistherefore 
invaintosupposethatanoppressedclassorgrouphasonlytooverthrowa 
hegemonicgroup or system in ordertosucceed.Itmust instead institute 
its own form of rule, its own form of hegemony. A counter-hegemonic 
movement therefore seeks to crystallize a new form of popular consent. 
4 Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian political theorist and revolutionary who wrote most of his major works while languishing in a fascist prison, having been sent there under the direction of BenitoMussolini in 1926. Gramsci’s essays (smuggled out of prison and published longafterhis deathas The Prison Notebooks), rangedwidely over a greatmanycultural,literary,historical,andpoliticaltopics.ForanintroductiontoGram­sci’s life, see Giuseppe Fiori’s Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (1995). Among the best treatments of Gramsci’s conception of politics as dialectic between leaders and led, andasthecreativeshapingofhumansocialreality,isBenedettoFontana’s,Hegemonyand Power: On the Relation Between Gramsci and Machiavelli (1993). 
This,inturn, requires ‘moral and intellectualleadership.’Inthe specific 
case of the animal advocacy movement, an effective counter-hegemonic 
praxiswouldtransform theprevalent ‘commonsense’ viewofnonhuman 
animals as our natural inferiors and slaves. What animal advocates seek 
isn’t merely the ‘liberation’ of animals, but a new form of civilization, a 
civilizationbased onquitedifferent social,ecological,economicand eth­
icalprinciplesthantheonesthatconstitutethepresentbasisofsociety. In 
thisconnection,theproblemofspeciesismcannotbesolvedinthecourts. 
Only through gaining mastery over the terms of debate and thought can 
the animal rights movement thereby transform the total ensemble of ex-
istingsocialrelations. Legalreformswillfollowonlywhenthemovement 
has achieved a certain level of social consent. 
Counter-hegemonic praxis must therefore be differentiated from the 
liberal view of social change. The latter takes a static view of society, tak­
ing the existing social forces and social beliefs at face value, more or less 
as immutable ‘givens.’ The liberal view also believes that meaningful so­
cial change can be achieved through formal democratic processes, and 
hence through a compromise between different political blocs.5 By con­
trast, the oppositional movement sees the forces in society as dynamic 
and therefore contestable. Moreover, the counter-hegemonic movement 
seekstoimposeanewsystemofvaluesontheold,thuschangingtheepis­
temological ‘ground’ ofdailylife.Theworkoftheactivistintellectualisto 
prepare this ground. White Americans today no longer give any thought 
to how they stand on the ‘question’ of slavery, because that ‘choice’ was 
taken off the table by abolitionists (and civil war). Though de facto slav­
ery still persists throughout the world, it is no longer acceptable or legal 
to buy and sell human beings outright as commodities, based on their 
race. Similarly, though women are still treated as subordinates by men, 
no one inour societyasks whether womenshouldhave the right tovote. 
Suffrage – an idea onceconsidered radicaland controversial – is now ac­
cepted by nearly all (though women still face numerous obstacles to full 
politicalrepresentation). Feministsimposedthisideaonsocietythrough 
a panoply of tactics, including marches, civildisobedience, letter-writing 
campaigns, and arson attacks. 
5 Nonviolent direct action is one potent form – as potentially ‘coercive’ a mechanism as violence. See Barbara Deming’s instructive critique of Frantz Fanon’s defense of revo­lutionary violence in ‘On Revolution and Equilibrium,’ We Are All Part of One Another (1984). 
dw Gramsci had a particular view about the role of leaders within move­ments. Can you say more about this? 
js I would first emphasize again that social movements must conceive ofthemselves asleaders –theleadersofsocietyitself.Itisnotenoughsim-ply to oppose an existing order – one must convince at least a significant minorityofsocietythatonehasthebetter alternative.Inordertodothat, however,leadershipmustalsobeexercisedwithintheoppositionalmove­ment. Thoughmovementsandrevoltsoftenarise spontaneously,theyare unlikely to last or to achieve concrete objectives without leadership of some kind. 
Some on the left understandably bridle at any mention of ‘leadership,’ fearing that it implies hierarchy or even a self-appointed elite. Vladimir Lenin’s conception of the ‘vanguard party,’ said to embody the will of the proletariat and to provide ‘correct’ political direction for the work-ingclass,offerstheparadigmaticcase. ThoughGramsciissometimesde­scribedasaLeninist,however,hisconceptionofleadershipwasconsider-ably more democratic. Why, though, have leadership at all? Because not everyonestartsoutfromthebasisofknowledge.Itisnotintheinterestsof those who wield power for subordinated subjects to have a complex un­derstanding of the nature of the system that oppresses them. Elites main­tain their hegemony, thus, by mystifying the true origins, and machina­tions, of the dominant social authority. Critical consciousness therefore doesn’tarisespontaneously,butmustbeeducated.Ifworkers,say,already had asufficientunderstanding oftheir situation,and ofhowtochange it, then presumably they would have already liberated themselves by now. However,whilethelivedexperiencesofworkersistheproperbasisofany socialistpraxis,thoseexperiencesmighteasilybechannelledinsteadinto aright-wingpolitics.Hence Bebel’s famousremark that ‘anti-Semitismis the socialism of fools.’ And hence the groundswell of populist authori­tarian movements throughout the world today. The far right is proving more adept than the Left in turning alienation, class oppression, and on­tological insecurity into a potent political project. 
Forthisreason, Gramscifeltitimportanttodistinguishbetween ‘those who know’ (chi sa)and ‘those whodonot know’(chi non sa). Whereas thecapitalistclassseekstomaintainthisdistinction,however,bykeeping chinonsa inastateofignorance,thesocialistmovementseekstodissolve it. The goal of oppositional praxis is therefore to democratize knowledge by providingordinary people withthe epistemic toolsthey need to make 
sense of social reality – i.e. to grasp the true nature of the existing order. 
Once given an unobstructed view of the system, those in the movement 
can share this knowledge with others, and contribute their own insights 
to collectiveoppositionalunderstanding. Inthisway, the circle ofcritical 
understanding, of knowledge, propagates outwards, until it coincides at 
last with the whole of society itself. 
In grasping the totality of social relations, the working class achieves 
self-consciousness, becoming the ‘subject-object’ of history – that is, it 
becomes both the product of social forces and the new agents capable of 
leadingsocietybeyondthecapitalismanditsalienatingmodeoflife. This 
may all sound like a subtle paternalism – the all-knowing party leader­
shiptellingthemasses‘whatistobedone.’6 Onthecontrary,however,the 
whole point of Gramscian praxis is to diminish the ranks of those ‘who 
do not know,’ so that the leaders become the led, and those who are now 
beingledthemselvesbecometheleaders.Mediatingthisexchangearethe 
‘organic’ intellectuals,individualsfromthe subaltern classeswhoareable 
to unite theory with practice, drawing on their own understandings and 
social experiences. The oppositional movement grows ‘organically’ and 
dialectically out of, and in conversation with, the perspectives, experi­
ences, and needs of ordinary people. 
dw You mentioned Gramsci’s idea of the ‘organic intellectual.’ Gramsci is understanding‘intellectual’ hereinaspecificway –andheisnotnecessarily referring to university professors. Can you say more? 
js Clearly, if hegemony is engendered, and maintained, through ‘moral andintellectualleadership,’thenpresumablyintellectualsmustplaysome role in the matter. Everyone, in a sense, is a ‘philosopher’ or ‘intellectual,’ because we all have opinions about the world, and we all bring intelli­gence and creativity to our work, no matter how simple that work may be. At the same time, not everyone specializes in intellectual labour. As Gramscinotes,while ‘everyoneatsometimefriesacoupleofeggsorsews up atearinajacket,we donot necessarilysay that everyone is acookor 
6 As the Black narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man bitterly concludes after spend­ing months with ‘the Brotherhood’ (the Communist Party), organizing the African-American community in Harlem: ‘What did they know of us, except that we numbered so many, worked on certain jobs, offered so many votes, and provided so many marchers for some protest parade of theirs? [...] For all they were concerned, we were so many namesscribbled on fake ballots,to be used at their convenienceand when not need to be filed away.’ (Ellison 1972, 496–497). 
atailor’ (Gramsci1971, 9). In the sameway,everyone is a ‘philosopher’ in some sense, but not everyone has intellectual expertise. Properly speak-ing,then,wecanidentifyintellectualsbytheir socialfunctionasintellec­tual labourers. The latter are involved in the production and circulation of the ideas and beliefs of society. Thus defined, there are technical intel­lectuals (scientists or engineers, or state bureaucrats), artistic or literary intellectuals (novelists, poets, or journalists), legal intellectuals (law pro-fessorsandjurists),clericalintellectuals(priests,imams,rabbis),andaca­demicintellectuals(philosophers,theologians,andsoon).Allsuchintel­lectualsexertaculturalinfluenceovercivilsocietyatthelevelofideasand beliefs. In other words, Gramsci writes, their ‘function [...] is directive and organizational, i.e. educative [and therefore] intellectual’ (Gramsci 1971, 16). 
Gramsci draws a further distinction between so-called ‘traditional’ intellectuals and ‘organic’ ones. Broadly, ‘traditional’ intellectuals are aligned with the humanist tradition and with the existing social order. In the idealized version, the traditionalintellectual’s functionis to reflect on truth, ethical life, and the nature of society or the human condition. Ostensibly, the traditional intellectual is an independent mind, beholden to noparticular classidentityorformation.Inreality, however,the tradi­tionalintellectualiscloselyattachedtothedominantclass.Thediscourses of such intellectuals thus tend to correspond to, or reinforce, the world­view, forms of life, and interests of the dominant class. In Gramsci’s era, the most important ‘traditional’ intellectual in Italy was the philosopher Benedetto Croce, whose classical humanism had the function of orga­nizing society in defence of the status quo. An equivalent today would be someone like Steven Pinker, in theuscontext, or like the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, in France. In theory, Lévy is an independent and courageous ‘free thinker.’ In reality, he is wholly a creature of the French establishment and its elitist educational system, and his work serves to conserve a particular traditionalist, racist, and patriarchal conception of French national identity. 
‘Organic’ intellectuals, by contrast, are individuals connected to a spe­cific realm of economic activity – out of professions or work environ­mentswheretheyexerciseachieflyintellectualfunction.Theinfluenceof organic intellectuals, however, often transcends their specialized labour activity. Such individuals thus exert a ‘directing’ influence, either in civil society (the realm of consent: discourse, persuasion, and argument), or the state (the realm of coercion: the judiciary, diplomatic statecraft, war 
colleges,etc.).7 Journalists and editors in the mainstream corporate press 
might loosely be described as organic intellectuals, insofar as they are 
drawnpredominantlyfromtheupper-middleandupperclasses,andthus 
express the views of a sector of the capitalist class. Hence the open con­
spiracy in the press to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential cam­
paignin2016. 
However, Gramsci rejected the view that only an elite few, those from 
theupperclasses,are ‘naturally’suitedtoengageinintellectualactivityor 
theoreticalreflection,while ‘themany’ arebestequippedfor ‘thoughtless’ 
manual labour. On the contrary, Gramsci was intent to show the impor­
tanceofanewtypeoforganicintellectual.Thecapitalistdivisionoflabour 
had given rise to specialized intellectual labour not only at the erstwhile 
‘higher’ levels of production – white collar work, science, diplomacy,law, 
etc. – but, too, in the ‘lower’ sphere of production, on the factory floor. 
Justasthelandedgentryofearliercenturieshadgivenrisetothecountry 
priestorparsonwhoexertedmoral,spiritual,andpoliticalinfluenceover 
his parish, the emergence of the proletariat had engendered a new kind 
of intellectual – e.g., the shop steward, union leader, party representative 
– who exerted a ‘moral’ leadership and influence in the workplace and outside it. The organic intellectual is enmeshed in the communal needs, experiences, and perspectives of their class: such an individual doesn’t pretend to hover ‘above’ the fray, as the traditional intellectual does, as a mere ‘theorizer’ of revolution or societal change. Rather, the organic in­tellectual, arising out of the working class itself, participates actively ‘in practicallife,asconstructor,organizer, “permanentpersuader”’(Gramsci 1971,10). Theyassume responsibilitynotonlyforeducatingand organiz­ing others in their working class, but in exerting leadership over society, as such. That is, by virtue of theiractivity,they areengagednotmerelyin the ‘technical’ work of organizing union meetings, but also in the work of articulating a new philosophy of life, anew ethics,anew culture. The choice between philosophical ideas, on the one hand, and the practical activity of labour, on the other, is thus a false one – an artefact of the di­vision of labour and, hence, of class oppression. 
dw Is there some way that Gramsci’s conception of ‘organic’ intellectuals might be helpful to us in thinking through leadership and the role of intel­lectuals within the animal rights movement today? 
7 For a discussion of Gramsci’s distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals, see King (1978). 
js Theanimalrightsmovementcannotbesaidtohave ‘organic’intellec­
tuals in Gramsci’s specific sense, since activists necessarily operate at an 
‘ontological’ remove from the historical subjects/beings whose interests 
they defend (i.e. nonhuman animals). Nonetheless, Gramsci’s analysis of 
intellectuals has important implications for contemporary animal advo­
cacy. First, intellectuals continue to play a crucial role in reinforcing hu­
man supremacy and the ideological system that legitimates our exploita­
tion and killing of other beings. It is therefore vital that we do our best to 
place our own intellectuals, ones committed to an anti-speciesist politics 
and system of values, in positions where they/we can disrupt the circu­
lation of speciesist knowledges – in the media and culture industry, in 
journalism, in academia. We need to think of ourselves as producers of 
culture. It is a mistake to see animal rights as a ‘protest’ movement; as I 
have said, itrepresents anattempt to lead ourspecies in anew civiliza­
tional direction. 
Second, we need to grapple with the fact that the animal rights move­
ment right now seems more ‘organically’ tied to the middle class than 
to the working class. There are some advantages to this, insofar as the 
middle and upper classes are privileged with higher levels of education, 
and hence are better prepared to make inroads into the culture industry 
– into journalism, law, politics, and so on. However, the movement’s ‘or­ganic’connectiontomoreadvantagedclassesalsocomesatacost.Forone thing, wesee animal rights being blurredinto a voluntaristand oftenlib­eralpolitics(or anti-politics)ofwhite,middle-class,veganconsumerism. We can partly thank the corporate ‘welfarist’ wing of the movement, and its Effective Altruism backers, for that. The class, race, and gender of the welfarist wing – upper middle-class, male, and white – has stifled grass­roots animal advocacy, compromised the movement’s ethical vision, and silenced many women in the movement.8 We are therefore losing out on opportunitiestobuildcross-classalliancesorganizedaroundanintersec­tional politics. And that is an important deficit if we are truly to exert ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ over society as such. 
The continuing public perception of animal rights as a ‘bourgie’ and white,middle-classconcern(theWholeFoodssyndrome)limitsourabil­ityto connect theworkingclass majorityofourfellowhumans. Convinc­ing trade union leaders or shop stewards to introduce workers to animal rights issues would help advance animal interests; and an animal rights 
8 See Adams, Crary, and Gruen (2023). 
perspective would in turn deepen the meaning of the socialist project, ethically and ecologically. However, the labour movement is still very weak today. Furthermore, meat-eating, fishing, and hunting have long been associated with working class masculinity. It therefore remains un­clear whether there is any one social class or group around which we might organize an animal liberationist movement. What we need is a broad-based socialist project in the Gramscian sense, i.e. one that would draw uponnumerous socialstrata to form an effective oppositionalbloc. It is clear that animal liberationism is the only truly universal libera­tionism, hence the only true socialism. But it remains unclear how we aretoconvinceour fellow leftistsofthatfact. 
dw Gramsci’sworkisoftenfocusedon analysisandstrategy withinapar­ticular political terrain, with clear goals in mind about structural change. Would you describe Gramsci then as a ‘pragmatic’ political philosopher? 
js Gramsci was a practical philosopher, but I wouldn’t describe him as ‘pragmatic.’ On the contrary, Gramsci distinguished between a liberal or pragmatic conceptionofpoliticsand aradicalone. So-calledpragmatists conceiveofsocietyinstaticterms,as afixed systemof ‘facts.’Theyconse­quently think ofpoliticsas consistingofcalculated,instrumental manip­ulation of existing people and institutions in order to achieve ‘realistic’ objectives. The trouble is, if we set out believing that the world already is what it is, rather than believing that it can become other than it is, and ought to be, then we have in a sense ended the ‘game’ of social change before it’s properly begun. The pragmatist looks at the way things ‘really are,’ then adjusts his or her expectations and goals to suit the existing re­ality. He or she looks out upon a world whose underlying elements seem immutable. 
For example, seeing the enormous power of the animal industry, and realizing the low-level of public consciousness around animal rights, the pragmatist cautions more radical activists against ‘alienating’ the public by exposing them to disturbing videos or descriptions of animal slaugh­ter. The pragmatist may also sponsor legislation to end the use of gesta­tion crates, say, rather than seek an end to the reproduction of pigs for slaughter. But whatthe pragmatist fails to grasp is that what we can know depends upon the exertion of our will, and therefore too upon our dy­namic and creative actions. ‘Only the man who wills something strongly,’ Gramsci wrote, ‘can identify the elements which are necessary to the re­alization ofhis will’ (Gramsci1971, 171). Thedivisionofreality into ‘what is’ versus ‘what ought to be’ (a just world) is therefore false. What exists is certainly real; but reality is itself an open field of possibilities to the activist or politician or movement who wishes to change it. 
Imagine foramomentthat you’restandingattheendofacorridorthat you know leads to three rooms, each of which you’ve visited before. Your choices therefore appear to be limited to three. Suppose, however, that a fire breaks out in the building. The way you came in is blocked behind you, and you realize that none of the three rooms has a window or an exit. So, what do you do? Now that your safety is at stake, you look for another option. So you run to the far end of the corridor, past the three rooms,anddiscoverasecondcorridor–andastairwell.Gramsciissaying that the only way we can know what is possible, and what isn’t, is by ex­ercising our will. That is because what we call reality is merely ‘a product of the application of human will to the society of things’ (Gramsci 1971, 171). Knowledge of reality and of the ‘possible’ cannot be arrived at inde­pendently of actionand will,Gramsci wrote,because ‘strongpassionsare necessary to sharpen the intellect and make intuition more penetrating’ (p. 171). 
Human social reality contains hidden pathways, junctures, and pos­sibilities that we discover only when we have a kind of ‘faith’ that these things might really exist. In seeking an alternative, in a practical rather than merely ‘theoretical’ way, new historical possibilities are revealed to us.Thisisbynomeans to saythatall things arepossible, or at alltimes. Butitistosaythatrealityisnotsomething wepassively ‘receive.’Itis only through our passions and through our will that reality assumes form or shape. This point is not merely epistemological, but phenomenological and ontological. Justastheexactpositionofanelectronisfixedonlyatthe momentwhenanexternalsubjectactivelyobserves it,themyriadpossible worlds wemight liveinonlybecome ‘fixed’ into channels ofpossibilityat the moment we strive to realize them. The function of leadership is to investigate the conditions necessary for the realization of our collective will. Gramsci’sinsight,whichhe takes as muchfromMachiavellias from Marx, is that reality is not given to us in advance, but is something we mustinvent. Whatwecall ‘facts’ canbuckleand beovercome orbetrans-formed through the exertion of conscious will and collective action. 
One of the limitations faced by both the animal rights movement and the broader Left today, in this connection, is the absence of a properly strategic orientation to social change – the ability to analyse the totality of social relations through time – the terrain of culture, ideas, economic forces,and soon –inordertoidentifymomentsofstrategicadvantageto our movements. 
dw Sothisiswhy,atleasthistorically,momentsofsocialoreconomiccrisis can appear as opportunities for many leftists? 
js Yes. To return to my metaphor of the fire in the building, the revolu­tionarysubjectconjuresthestairwellorexitintheveryprocessofactively seeking to ‘find’ it. Moments of social crisis offer sudden glimpses of the precarious nature of the existing system, opening up new opportunities forpraxis. Whileeveryactofpoliticsisanactofcreation,onecannotcre-ate ex nihilo. – one must work within the objective framework that one hasbeengivenbyhistory,takingintocloseaccountthecomplexinterplay of institutions, cultural norms, values, political parties, economic forces, social classes, and so on. Reality emerges from the dialectic of the objec­tive and the subjective. Or as Marx famously put it, people ‘make their own history,but they donot make it justasthey please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.’ (Marx and Engels 1978, 595). 
dw In Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal, his Gramscian analysis of the rise of Thatcherism in Britain, Hall suggests that the political right at times seems to grasp this point better than the left does. Do you agree? 
js Alas, yes, the right often does seem to have a better grasp of this in­sight, that politics is ‘about’ the creation of a new social reality. As Stuart Hall showed in the British case, the right was able to displace the Labour Party by establishing a new form of social consent. Thatcher adroitly turned the working class against itself, through myths of national great-ness,foreignwar(theMalvinas/FalklandsconflictwithArgentina),racist demagoguery,culturalappeals toindividualself-reliance, etc. What’skey is that both she and President Ronald Reagan went well beyond defend­ing an existing status quo and accepting the citizenry ‘where they were.’ Instead, they transformed society and reshaped the human personality, rollingbackthesocialwelfarestate,destroyingunions,privatizingpublic goods, weakening civil rights and environmental protections, and so on, while interpolating a new kind of white subject, one that would corre­spond to the needs of neoliberal capital. 
. ‘Political man is a creator [...] but he does not create out of nothing’ (Gramsci 1975, in Fontana 1993, 78). 
The Thatcher-Reagan approach stands in stark contrast to the ap­proach of the liberal who sets out from the world of supposed ‘facts,’ which he or she reifies or treats as self-evident ‘givens.’ During the afore­mentioned 2016 presidential campaign in theus, liberals said that while Bernie Sanders had good ‘ideas,’ they were ‘unrealistic,’ because Sanders’ proposals,likeMedicaidforall,freecollegetuitionforall,andsoon,were at odds with political ‘realities.’ However, what liberals failed to grasp is thataskilfulpoliticianbackedbyadynamicsocialmovementpotentially has the power to change the nature of existing political realities. Estab­lishmentDemocratsandRepublicansalikefailedtograspthisfact,which is whythey failedtograsp thethreatDonaldTrump poseduntil it was too late. Even today, when we find the institutions of liberal representa­tive democracy unravelling everywhere, technocratic elites continue to treat politics as a cynical game of manipulating the electorate. For the corporate mandarins whorunthe DemocraticPartyintheus,politics is a form of Realpolitik in which only winning and maintaining the cor­porate status quo matters – never the creation of a new form of shared political life, anew societyoreconomy.But one cannottreat individ­uals in society merely as static elements, as pawns on a chess board to be pushed around. The Left must instead change the wider context, and hence the rules of the game themselves. And the only way to do that is to understand ordinary people’s experiences and beliefs and to address them in a language they understand. 
Anotherwaytoputthisistosaythathumanpurpose,humanwill,must beorganized.‘Human beings,forGramsci,arenot “givens” whose nature is immutable and fixed,’ observes Benedetto Fontana. Instead, ‘they are a “becoming,”’ i.e. they are agents ‘who posit themselves and create them­selves in and through historical action’ (Fontana 1993, 1). What the po­litical right does is give the people the illusion of political control, while in reality maintaining them in their ignorance – their bad faith and irra­tionality. The Left’s task is harder: it is to give ordinary people the tools they need to educate themselves and to lead society in a new direction. 
dw So, if the right can transform societies, the way they think and the way they operate (neoliberalism and Trumpism being examples), what is stoppingtheleftfromsimilarlytakingforwardavisionforatransformation of societies? 
js For the left, the work of organizing new forms of consent is more dif­ficult, I think, because it is always easier to defend an existing order than to engender a new one. The Right enjoys the advantages and preroga­tives of power (including vastly superior resources), and it also has no moral scruples whatsoever. The tools employed by the Right – the casual lie, propaganda,xenophobiaand racehatred, cynicalnationalmyths,ap­pealstopatriarchal authority, andsoon–arepowerful, butthey aren’t ones that we can use or want to use. 
dw In the ‘Introduction’ to Critical Theory and Animal Liberation you refer to speciesism as an ‘ideology.’ The concept ‘ideology’ has a long tradi­tion ofdebate andtheorizationwithintheleft project. However ‘ideology’ is rarelyspokenaboutwithinanimalliberationtheory.CouldIstartbyasking, what is ‘ideology’? 
js I have described speciesism or human domination as a mode of pro­duction, a way of producingthe material and cultural substrate of all hu­man life. And ideology is central to the legitimation and reproduction of this system. But what is ideology? Typically, we think of ideology as a more or less closed system of self-confirming beliefs, a kind of ortho­doxy. In this view, an ‘ideologue’ is someone immune to any proposition or counter-factual case that might contradict his or her system of beliefs or arguments. However, that is just one definition of ideology. Of the 16 usages of the term identified by Terry Eagleton (1991, 1–2), three are par­ticularly germane here: 
• 
the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life; 

• 
a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; 


• ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power. Thefirstdefinition importantly conveysasenseof ideology’s natureas a total systemofbeliefs,henceasformingthehorizonofeverydaylifeand experience. The second two definitions show that the ideology is bound upwith power (Eagleton 1991,5). Eagletonofcoursetakesthispointfrom Marx and Engels, who in TheGermanIdeology (1998, 67) write: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is the ruling material forceofsociety,isatthe same time its ruling intellectual force. Theclass which has themeans of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the 
means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The rul­ing ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the domi­nantmaterialrelations,thedominantmaterialrelationshipsgrasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. 
The ideas that people have largely converge with the material interests ofthosewhodominateeconomiclife–and,hence,withthosewhodomi­nate social,political,andculturallife. Ideologyboth reflects thestructure of domination and reinforces it. 
dw I note that the term ‘speciesism’ originated in liberal and analytic phi­losophy – e.g. Richard Ryder and Peter Singer – as referring to a prejudice or mode of discrimination. It’s clear that when you describe speciesism as an ideology youintendsomethingdifferent. Could you saymoreabout this? 
js Liberal theorists tend to reduce systems and structures of power or oppression to problems of individual belief – to individuals having ‘prej­udices,’andsoon.However,theliberalviewfundamentallymisconstrues human ontology and sociality. Utilitarianism suffers from this problem. In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer(1975)in factequivocates betweena liberal and a more radical conception of speciesism: he begins by com­paring speciesism to a form of ‘prejudice,’ a set of ideas, then in a later chapter identifies ‘man’s dominion’ as the core ofthe problem. ButI don’t think he adequately explains the relationship between the two. Nor does he acknowledge the structural relationship between speciesism and cap­italism, or between our domination of animals and male domination of women. 
Animalwelfarists haveaweakunderstanding ofideologybecausethey proceed from the liberal view of society as an ‘aggregate’ of isolated, monadic individuals. This mistaken social ontology in turn becomes the basis of campaigns geared toward changing the ideas and behaviour of ‘consumers,’ e.g. through prudential appeals to personal health and safety. The welfarist imagines that the worst excesses of the speciesist system canbeovercomebyreforming animal agricultureand by provid­ingconsumers with veganfood alternatives.Byreducingthe problemof speciesism to one of ‘unnecessary suffering’ (caused by ‘factory farms’), welfaristdiscourseendsuplegitimatingsmaller-scaleandorganicanimal production. In fact, however, the problem of animal suffering is merely a consequence of the prior decision to kill. That is, it’s because we treat other animalsasdisposable ‘things,’ratherthan as ‘someones’ orpersons, that they inevitably suffer in the animal gulag. 
dw Melanie Joy is perhaps one of the few animal advocates who discusses ideology through the concept of ‘Carnism.’ However, as far as I am aware, Joy does not explicitly situate the idea of carnism within the historical and theoreticaldevelopments of left theory. Withthis inmind,Iwould likeus to unpack ideology furtheras a concept, and get to the bottom of how it might function with respect to animal liberation. 
js Let me say first that I applaud Joy’s work for introducing animal rights issues to a broader public, though I sometimes disagree with her approach. In her book, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), Joy deconstructs meat-eating as an ideology, exposing the irra­tionality latent in the stories we tell ourselves about the validity of eating animals. A popular dodge used by the meat-eater is to describe him­self/herself/themself as a ‘carnivore’ – an ideological term that serves to naturalize what is really a normative, historical practice. So Joy intro­duces the neologism of ‘carnism’ – the inverse of veganism – to denote meat-eating as a cultural rather than natural practice (i.e. as a choice we make). Joy then goes ontomakethe case foranalternative way ofre­lating to other beings, through compassion and empathy. The rhetorical strategy sheusesistocompare farmed animalstocompanion animals, invitingher reader to imagine the horrorof eatinga dog,say, rather than acow or pig. 
Joy’s approach has the virtue of building on Americans’ affection for dogs and cats to challenge their perceptions of other kinds of animals. However, the approach she takes can only be described as liberal. In her description of feminism in Why We Love Dogs (2010), for example, she writes: ‘Feministshavebeensuccessfulintheir attempts tochallengesex­ismnotbyarguingthateverybodyshouldbecomeafeminist,butbyhigh-lighting the ideology of patriarchy – the ideology that enables sexism.’ While patriarchy is certainly ideological, however, it is not itself an ide­ology – patriarchy is a system or mode of domination – i.e. a set of con­crete social relations, including a sexual division of labour, institutions and norms bound up with capitalism and the state, and so on. Joy thus risks reducing patriarchy – and, I would argue, speciesism, as well – as asystemof power, of domination, of violent exploitation – to a problem of mistaken belief. But ideology is the expression of relations of power, rather than power itself. 
OnJoy’s telling, there isa ‘gap’ in our consciousnessthat constricts ‘our freedom of choice’ (Dr. McDougall Health and Medical Center 2012). 
The key to overcoming carnism, then, is to get more and more people to ‘choose’ veganism. The trouble with this conception, however, is that it reduces complex social systems and modes of economic production to problems of ‘belief’ and ‘relational dysfunction’ (VeganLinked 2023) – the latter to be overcome through the choices of many individuals. Joy’s conception of social change, however, is idealist –ascan be seen in her deterministic contention,in Hegelianfashion, that‘the numberofveg-ans is going to increase, the number of [and] availability of vegan prod­ucts is going to increase, and it’s going to be easier and easier for people everywhere to become vegan’ – until suddenly ‘those scales are going to tip [and] veganism becomes the dominant ideology’ (Plant Based News 2017). Like many others in animal advocacy, thus, Joy ignores capitalism as a social structure and as the very system destroying the conditions of animal life on earth. The word ‘consumer’ appears 51 times in Joy’s book, forexample,buttheword‘capitalism’doesn’tappearonce.Inreality,how­ever, the term ‘consumer’ is an ideological category. (Before there were ‘consumers,’ there were citizens. And ‘citizen’ is a far more politically ro­bust term, denoting a politicalsubject within a shared polity, rather than merelyanisolatedconsumingunit.)Whenweemphasizeanimalissuesas aproblem of consumption, rather than as one of class relations and com-modityfetishism,wethusobscurethefactthat production ispriortocon­sumptionundercapitalistrelations.Commoditiesarenotproducedinor­der to satisfy the needs of consumers; they are produced because capital requirescommoditiesandconsumers.Nonetheless,thereisawidespread perception that the ‘consumer’ is in control, and that their needs, prefer­ences, and ‘votes’ are what ‘cause’ goodsand services tomagicallyappear. Inreality,commoditiesaren’tcalledintobeingbyconsumers;capitalcre-ates ‘consumers’ aswellastheirdesires.Tosuggestthatconsumersarethe ones calling the shots, therefore, is to mystify what is really going on. 
We find a better treatment of ideology of meat, in this connection, in the work of Carol J. Adams. Adams situates human violence against ani­mals in the material context of patriarchy, showing how the meat system functionssemiotically,culturally,politically,andeconomicallywithinthe wider system of male domination. Though Adams does not write exten­sively about capitalism, her intersectionalist approach takes up capitalist production in its sweep – as in her analysis of the labour process of the ‘disassembly line’ of the modern slaughterhouse, which she places in the context of monopoly capital.¹° Stache and Bernhold also offer an excel­
¹° ‘Ford dismembered the meaning of work, introducing productivity without the sense of 
lent treatment of ideology – and from a Gramscian perspective, no less 
– in their article, ‘The Bourgeois Meat Hegemony’ (2021; see also Stache 2023). The authors show how the capitalist state colludes with monopoly capital to foster a ‘politico-ideological’ regime of meat consumption. By theway, hereI would like torecommend your own pathbreakingnew book, Animals and Capital (Wadiwel 2023), which provides a carefully drawnand comprehensiveanalysis of animalsand labourfrom a Marxist perspective. 
dw So we need a more complete perspective where we take into account production under capitalism as a driving force for the proliferation of com­modities, including animal-based foods. However, does this mean that veg-anism has no place within movements towards change for animals? 
js Just to be clear, Iam not saying that vegan consumerismdoesn’thave some role to play in antispeciesist praxis. Clearly, we do need palatable alternatives to meat, eggs, and dairy, to help wean people off of animal products. However, using phrases like ‘consumer choice’ inevitably rein­forces the logic of the commodity system. So, yes, we should promote veganism. But changing people’s diets isn’t enough. We need a more po­litical conception.¹¹ 
dw Okay,withthisbackgroundin place,can we try tounpackhow speciesism might operate as an ‘ideology,’ particularly in relation to cap­italism? 
js Consider Eagleton’s first definition of ideology, as a ‘process of pro­duction of meanings, signs and values in social life.’ That aptly captures the ideological nature of speciesism. Our culture – our institutions, sci­ences, modes of thought and experience, aesthetics, and so on – is so closely bound up with our domination of other beings that we might describe speciesism as the bedrock of our identity as human beings. Speciesism is an existential project, a way of defining ourselves as be-ings,ofgivingmeaningandpurposetoourexistence and identity,aswell as a form of ‘bad faith,’ in the Sartrean sense (Sorenson 2014, 29–44). In 
being productive. Fragmentation of the human body in late capitalism allows the dis­membered part torepresent the whole. Because theslaughterhouse model is not evident to assembly line workers, they do not realize that as whole beings they too have experi­enced the impact of the structure of the absent referent in a patriarchal culture’ (Adams 1990, 80–81). Adams draws here on Harry Braverman’s critique of monopoly capitalism. See also ‘The Sexual Politics of Meat with Carol Adams’ (Bloomsbury 2020). 
¹¹ See Jones (2016). 
the same way that men under patriarchy constitute their identity on the basis of the negation of women and the feminine – or the way the West hasconstituteditselfthroughitsnegationofthe ‘other’oftheEast,inOri­entalism – our self-understanding as ‘human’ is built on the negation of the concept of ‘the animal’ (Derrida 2004, 113–126). However, speciesism as ideology reflects speciesism as a mode of material production. Marx and Engels describe the relationship between base and superstructure – 
i.e. the realm of material economic production and the ‘superstructural’ realm of ideas, culture, politics, and so on – as dialectical. While the sub­structure orbase has primacyover the superstructure,the twocondition one another. Thus, while speciesism is a mode of producing human ma-teriallife(base),ithaserectedarounditselfanelaboratesystemofbeliefs, norms,andpractices(superstructure).Becausespeciesismisintertwined with capitalist production, its specific articulations are mediated by cap­ital; and, as capitalism is a dynamic historical process, rooted in contin­uous upheaval, we find that cultural norms and beliefs about animals are changing all the time, too, corresponding to changes in the forces and relation of production. 
While the reduction of animals to the status of property, hence for ac­cumulation and exchange, has been a fact of human life for many thou­sands of years, the advent of capitalist relations in early modern Europe further diminished the status of animals by enmeshing them within a system of production based on endless accumulation. In the sixteenth century, Thomas Müntzer wrote that itwas ‘intolerable’ that ‘allcreatures have been made into property, the fish in the water, the birds in the air, theplantsonthe earth–alllivingthingsmustalsobecomefree.’Inother words,allanimals – even ‘wild’ ones – werebeing turned into commodi­ties(Müntzer1524,inMarx1992,239).(Tobeclear,Müntzerwasnotsug­gestingthat animals shouldbe freeofhumandomination,but rather that their exploitation should be ‘organic,’ direct, and communal.) 
As the new relations of production took hold, new ideological justifi­cationssprang up to justifythem. European conceptions of nature and of nonhuman animals began to shift from an ‘organicist’ or holistic meta­physics that portrayed Nature as alive with meaning and purpose to a ‘mechanicist’ onethatreducednature tothe statusofmere‘stuff’tobe controlled (Merchant 1989). As Marx observes: ‘Descartes with his def­inition of animals as mere machines saw with the eyes of the manufac­turing period, while in the Middle Ages, animals were man’s assistants’ (Marx 1887, 333). Cartesianism to this day remains the dominant onto­logical paradigm of the modern sciences, with nonhuman animals still treated as machines. At the same time, changes in the composition of capital have led to the development of new forces of production or tech­nologies that have in turn changed the way animals are viewed. Owing to the importance of the biotechnology sector as a catchment for surplus capital,wenowthusfindscientistsandentrepreneursviewingnonhuman animalsas‘factories’forthebioengineeringofnewcommodities–asfun­giblesequencesofdnaorrnatobeedited atwillbycomputer(Weisberg 2015, 39–54). Animals now take on the abstract and protean appearance of finance capital. 
Human beings everywhere view animals today as private property 
– 
either as commodities in production – chickens and pigs raised for slaughter, mice bred and sold as laboratory subjects, companion ani­mals purchased atthestoreandviewedunder lawastheprivateproperty of the ‘owner,’ etc. – or as commodities in potentia or ‘in waiting’: raw ‘stock’ sittinginreserveforcapitalistappropriation–thefishesinthesea, macaques ‘awaiting’ capture for export from Asia to European research laboratories, etc. So pervasive is this way of viewing other natural beings that even the leading environmental protection organizations conceive of nature and animals in quantitative terms. According to the authors of the 2018 Living Planet Report, by the World Wildlife Fund and London Zoological Society, the reason the living earth is worth preserving is be­cause it provides ‘services’ to the world economy that are worth up to ‘$125 trillion a year.’ The deaths of billionsof honeybees fromBeeColony Collapse Syndrome matter, the authors write, because ‘pollination in­creases the global value of crop production by $235–577 billion per year’ 

– 
and that in turn ‘keeps prices down for consumers by ensuring stable supplies’ (World Wildlife Fund 2018, 47). And so on. What remains out­side the bounds of permissible environmentalist thought is the notion that other animals have value in themselves, rather than as backstops to the global economy or cogs in the machinery of ecosystems. 


Allofthissuggeststhatmappingtheideologyofspeciesism–itswaysof legitimating human dominion, aestheticizing human violence, etc. – re-quiresa ‘mapping’oftheterrainofthecapitalistsuperstructureandofthe myriad ways it mediates our relations with animals. Powerful economic interests drive the meat economy – corporations like Tyson Foods,wh Group,andMaruhaNichiro(theworld’slargestseafoodcompany).How­ever, becausecommodityfetishismobscures the social origins and condi­tions ofproduction,thepublicremainslargelyunawareofthetruenature of the animal economy as a system of extreme suffering, violence, and ecocide. Companies selling animal products manipulate language and imagery to obscure the violence endemic to their enterprises. Flesh, ova, milk, leather, and so on, are meanwhile depicted as ‘natural’ commodi­ties and associated with status and health. As Carol Adams, Josephine Donovan, and other ecofeminists have pointed out, the consumption of flesh is meanwhile associated with masculinity and the control of men over women – and ‘feminine’ nature. These cultural mediations are not incidental to the reproduction of ‘bourgeois meat hegemony,’ but a core component of that system. 
dw Here you seem to be explicitly treating speciesism, or perhaps anthro­pocentrism,asastructuralproblemthattosomedegreecanbedistinguished fromcapitalism.Thisdiffersfromatleastsomelefttheory,particularlysome variants of green Marxism, which have tended to suggest that addressing capitalism alone is enough to reform our relations with animals or mend the ‘rift’ between humans and nature that was created through capitalist agriculture. Are you suggesting that we need to take account of both capi­talism and speciesism as separate structuring relations? 
js Yes. There is no question that capitalism mediates all of our relations with other animals today. However, capitalism isn’t the only problem. Ecological Marxists who reduce the problems of animal agriculture and other forms of animal exploitation to capitalism alone are missing the bigger picture. Speciesism is a mode of production in its own right, and indeed the more ‘primordial’ and deeply rooted of the systems. Today, capitalism and speciesism are so deeply woven together that it’s virtu­allyimpossibletodisentangle them,evenintheory. However,thoughthe two overlap they do not coincide. If they did, then overthrowing cap­italism would of course also overthrow human supremacy. But human supremacy antedates capitalism by thousands of years. Like patriarchy (its ancient, co-constitutive system), speciesism is a universal and pro­tean featureofthe humancondition.Itishumans qua humans who have subordinated all life on earth to a planetary regime of cruelty and ex­termination. The ideologies of speciesism thus cannot be reduced to the mediations of capital alone: human supremacy is a system of signs and practices in its own right. 
dw Can you say more about this? Does this have implications for our un­derstanding both of ideology and of hegemony? 
js Giventheprimacyofspeciesismnotmerelyasawayofproducinghu­manexistence,but as a political relation, a relation of domination by one group of subjects over others, our ideas about other animals reflect the interests or perceivedinterests of our own species,the dominant ‘class’ of beings of the earth. Human supremacy is a fact; and so too is the idea of human supremacy – i.e. the notion that only human life has inestimable value, and correspondingly that nonhuman life is worthless in itself (i.e. apart fromits utility for humanbeings, as food,asfodderfor scientific experimentation, aesthetic appreciation, as necessary components of a thrivingecosystem,etc.). Weknow fromethnozoologythatdifferentcul­tures at different times and in different places have entertained quite dif­ferentconceptionsoftherolesand ‘being’ofnonhumananimals. Aborig­inalcosmogenesisstoriesofanimals,forexample,bearlittleifanyresem­blance to theviewof animals takenbycontemporarywildlife manage­ment authorities (as ‘resources’ to be ‘managed,’ etc.). Nonetheless, cer­tainly in the modern epoch, our ideas about animals have come to form acoherentideologicalsystem.Thissystemiscomplexlymediatedthrough other structures ofoppressionand domination – e.g. patriarchy and race hierarchy – and hence through a panoply of cultural/semiotic systems.¹² 
This is not to say that Homo sapiens is ‘ontologically’ prone to violence againstother beings.It istosay,though, that much of oursense of who we are as a species has gotten bound up with a universal contempt for other life forms. As Wilhelm Reich observed in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1993, 334): 
Man is fundamentally an animal. [...] [Yet] man developed the pe­culiar idea that he was not an animal; he was a ‘man,’ and he had longsincedivestedhimselfofthe‘vicious’andthe‘brutal.’Mantakes great pains to disassociate himself from the vicious animal and to provethathe‘is better’ bypointingtohis cultureand hisciviliza­tion, whichdistinguishhimfrom the animal. His entireattitude, his ‘theories of value,’ moral philosophies, his ‘monkey trials,’ all bear witness to the fact that he does not want to be reminded that he is fundamentally an animal, that he has incomparably more in com­mon with ‘the animal’ than he has with that which he thinks and dreamshimselftobe.[...]Hisviciousness,hisinabilitytolivepeace-fully with his own kind, his wars, bear witness to the fact that man 
¹² See, for example, Ko and Ko (2017), and Kim (2015). 
is distinguished from the other animals only by a boundless sadism and the mechanical trinity of an authoritarian view of life, mecha­nisticscience,andthemachine.Ifonelooksbackoverlongstretches of the results of human civilization, one finds that man’s claims are not only false, but are peculiarly contrived to make him forget that he is an animal. 
Having ‘developed the peculiar idea that he was not an animal,’ Reich wrote,the humanbeingtook ‘greatpainstodisassociatehimselffromthe vicious animal and to prove that he ‘is better’ by pointing to his culture and his civilization, which distinguish him from the animal’ (Reich 1993, 334).The irony ofthis, Reichcontinued,isthatincontrastto Homo sapi-ens, ‘animals are not mechanical or sadistic; and their societies [...] are incomparably more peaceful than man’s societies’ (p. 334).¹³ 
As Reich suggests, speciesism is not reducible to class relations, and it isn’t merely a system of economic exchange. It is a mode of existence characterized by irrationality, death fetishism, and paranoia. Even now, with the planet’s ecology in free-fall and the worse zoonotic pandemic upon us in a century, at a time when we therefore have every possible incentive to cease killing other beings, the vast majority of people view the prospectofaplant-based dietasobjectionable and even outrageous –asliterally unthinkable. Reich’s account is also spot on in noting an ‘in­verse’relationbetweenanimalityandtechnology.Itisnocoincidencethat at the very moment when our species, through capitalist development and explosivepopulationgrowth,isengagedinthetotal biologicalexter­mination of other life forms (the so-called ‘extinction crisis’ is in reality acrisisof extermination), we find people in advanced capitalist culture in thrall to virtual reality and the internet, and developing relations of cathexiswiththeirdigitaldevices.High-technologyispolitical,rootedin masculine paranoia and aggression, in imperialism and the military in-dustrialcomplex.The maniainpopularculturefor ‘intelligent’ machines 
– a ‘superstructural,’ isomorphic expression of corporate and military in-
¹³ Reich wasalmostcertainlymovedtothisinsightby a similarobservationmadeby Freud in ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’ (1917): ‘In the course of his development towardsculturemanacquiredadominatingpositionoverhisfellow-creaturesintheani­malkingdom.Notcontentwiththissupremacy,however,hebegantoplaceagulfbetween his nature and theirs. He denied the possession of reason to them, and to himself he at­tributed an immortal soul, and made claims to a divine descent which permitted him to annihilatethebondofcommunitybetweenhimandtheanimalkingdom’ (Freud1955,in Patterson 2002, 2). 
vestments in robotization and artificial intelligence – is but the logical, ‘psychic’ complement to shrinking biodiversity. Wherever we now turn, we see onlyever ourselves.Loveof the machineis the flipsideofour ha­tred of ‘the animal.’ 
I’m suggesting, along with Reich, that there is a deep irrationality built into human dominion, and that this cannot be reduced to the machina­tions of capital alone. This irrationality is closely tied to the gender sys­tem. As the radical feminist Nancy Hartsock observes, death fetishism is simply built in to the dynamics of patriarchy. The myth is that relations betweenmenandwomenarebasedon‘sexualreciprocity.’Inreality,how­ever, we find ‘not only relations of domination and submission, but also dynamics of hostility, revenge, and fascination with death.’ What the cult of masculinity seeks is ‘the death of the other as a separate being, the de­nial of one’s own body in order to deny one’s mortality, and the recasting ofevenreproductionasdeath’ (Hartsock1983,176–177).Sincespeciesism is in part an expression of the gendered division of labour, we find these same dynamics (a pathological and violent relation to ‘the other’) oper­ating inthe way we relatetoother animals. Wehave infactorganized the totalityofhumanmaterialandpsychiclife,aroundviolenceagainstother species. 
dw Sofrom thisstandpoint, we needto develop notonly a critique of cap-italism,butsomethingofanideological critiqueofthehegemonyassociated with the human domination of animals? 
js Yes, our praxis seeks to disocclude the structures of human domina­tion. As a movement of counter-hegemony, animal liberationism exer­cises an ‘educative’ function, providing the people with insight into the nature of power. I see one of our main responsibilities as engaged in­tellectuals, thus, to be ideology critique. We need to explode the myth that we can exploit and kill other sensitive beings in an ‘ethical’ way. The challenge, of course, is that speciesism, like capitalism, is a ‘total’ way of life, one that implicates all of us. As Marco Maurizi shows in his recent book, Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism and Critical Theory (2021), capitalist domination and human domination are intertwined in ways that can only be solved through a new kind of socialist praxis, one that includes critique of animal exploitation at its core. Drawing on the insightsoftheearlyFrankfurtSchool,Mauriziprovidesausefulroadmap tothestructuralandideologicalcomplexitiesofthisnew system.AsMax Horkheimer wrote in 1934, in a passage cited by Maurizi (2021, 132): 
Below the spaces where the coolies of the earth perish by the mil­lions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in society, would have to be depicted, the sweat, blood, despair of the animals. [...] The basement of that house is a slaugh­terhouse, its roof is a cathedral, but from the windows of the upper floors, it affords a really beautiful view of the starry heavens. 
dw What,finally, can the animal liberation movement learn from Gram­sci’s philosophy ofpraxis? Andhow could animalliberationism fit inwith a wider left-socialist project? 
js First, we need to understand just what it is we as a movement are trying to do, and to make that objective known to the rest of society. Speciesism is a hegemonic cultural, semiotic, economic and ‘spiritual’ system that undergirds and conditions all aspects of human existence. Contra the claim of animal welfarists, the true goal of animal liberation isn’tto‘reduceanimalsuffering’buttoestablishanewformofhumanciv­ilization. Capitalist civilization is based on the brutal exploitation of bil­lions of humans and the brutal exploitation and killing of other animals. So,weare seeking the negation not onlyofspeciesism, butofcapitalism, of patriarchy, of racism, and so on. And this negation is at the same time abid foranew formofsociety. 
In my experience, however, the public really has no understanding of either the extent or the brutality of the speciesist system, nor of the re­lationship between our quotidian extermination of animals for food and the destructionoffree (‘wild’)animals acrossthe earth – the ‘war’ onan­imals you describe in your own important book.¹4 The public does not see animal liberationism as a political movement, and consequently they haven’t been exposed to the breadth of our critique. As with other struc­tures of power and inequality, the public has only a fragmented and rei­fiedviewofsociety. Thattooisafunctionofcapitalism–occlusionofthe whole. Our job, as I see it, is to illuminate this totality and to make the case for a post-speciesist world. 
Gramsci described politics as a struggle over meaning, and hence, effectively, over what Hannah Arendt called ‘the space of appearances’ (Arendt 1990, 33). Social movements, therefore, must assume a deter­minate phenomenal form if they are to be ‘seen’ within this space. Un­fortunately, most people today associate animal rights either withpeta 
¹4 See Wadiwel (2015). 
– 
the most visible ‘shape’ of animal advocacy in the public sphere – or with ‘lifestyle’ veganism.¹5 What we need are visible organizations and institutions committed to building coalitions with other movements and campaigns. Animal liberationism must come to be viewed as a coherent philosophy of life – not merely as a set of single-issue campaigns. We have to universalize our conception of the world. At the moment, how­ever, we are more positioned as a disorganized ‘sect’ than as a ‘church’ 

– 
i.e. as an inward-oriented community of like-minded believers, rather than as an outward-oriented movement seeking to broaden the scope of its ambitions. Gramscicomparedsocialismto asecond Reformation. We likewise should see ourselves as the nucleus of a new society – the germ of a future civilizational order, a new way of being human. 


Unfortunately, however, animal advocates are forced to contend with thenear-universalacceptanceofspeciesistbeliefsandpracticesinhuman culture.Thedifficultyforananimalliberationistpraxisisthat,incontrast to past social movements, we need to appeal to members of the oppres­sor class themselves to relinquish their dominion. And that’s a challenge without precedent in the history of social struggle. A related challenge is that existing models of praxis, including Marx’s, rest on conceptions of agency and collective action that don’t necessarily apply to our relations withnonhuman beings.Socialism,feminism, thelgbtqmovement, and others, conformto aHegelian politicsofrecognition –i.e. they affirm the ability of an oppressed subject to achieve self-consciousness, and hence freedom, through collective struggle. Gramsci’s conception of counter-hegemony, too, derives from Hegel, requiring class solidarity and the co­alescence of diverse groups in society around a shared moral and so­cial vision. Nonhuman animals, however, cannot achieve revolutionary transformation of human society on their own, and they cannot even be the main agents of their own liberation. Though individual animals, and even, attimes,smallgroupsofanimals,doresisthuman oppression,they areunabletostrategizeortocoordinatetheiractionsthroughtime. Draft horses can’t call a general strike across New England, hammerheads and Bluefin Tuna can’t take the fishing industry to the International Criminal Court. Nor can chickens call upon free species of birds to attack human citiesandtownsinsolidaritywiththeircause–asoccursinAlfredHitch­cock’s film, The Birds (1963). 
¹5 For adiscussion ofwhyestablishinga phenomenalorapprehensible form issoimportant for counter-hegemonic movements, see Sanbonmatsu(2004, 160–179). 
As important as itis to overturn class hierarchy and dismantle the sys­tem of commodityfetishism, itis not true, as many Marxists believe, that overturning capitalism will end our estrangement fromNature and from other animals. The trouble is that human beings as such constitute an oppressive class, with the mass killing of animals treated throughout the world as a normal, immutable, and benignant feature of the human con­dition. Animal liberation therefore cuts against the interests (or at least the perceived interests) of the very historical subjects who are supposed to effect change. The daunting challenge we face is to somehow convince the majority of our fellow humans to eliminate their own prerogatives and privileges – sport fishing and eating chicken wings, taking children to the zoo, animal experimentation, and so on. 
Unfortunately, it is hard to think of a case in which an oppressive class decidedonitsowninitiativetooverturnitsownmodeoflife. Itisimpos­sible to imagine a feministmovement led by men, oran anti-raciststrug­gle initiated by and directed by whites, or capitalists leading the charge for socialism. Nonetheless, we need to envision modes of praxis to bring humanity to a consensus on the need to dismantle the speciesist system. 
dw So,wherethendoes all of thisleave ourmovement,particularly inthe context of Gramsci’s conception of moral and intellectual leadership? 
js Marx held thatthe working class contained withinitself the kernel of anew society. As it is humanlabour thatproduces society,and therefore social reality as such, the working class is in the unique position of being abletousher inauniversalformofcivilizationaldevelopment, one based ongenuinelyfreeactivity.Couldwesaysomethingsimilaraboutanimals? That their oppression too contains the ‘germ’ of a new civilization? The oppressionofnonhumansbyhumansisthemostfundamentalcondition of our existence; to challenge that condition, therefore, is to assert the possibilityof a new form of life.However, the analogy is inexact. If work­ers tomorrow woke up and decided to declare a general strike, refusing to labour, the capitalist system could be overthrown in an hour, because the reproduction of capital depends entirely upon the value added to the commodity by the labourer. Furthermore, workers constitute 99 percent of the human population. So, for the working class to accept the legit­imacy of socialism would be but one short step away from overthrow­ing capitalistrelations and initiatinganew modeofexistence. In contrast to the situation of the working class, however, other species lack the ca­pacity of self-realization in the political and universal sense. Nonhuman animalsforma ‘strategic’collectivesubjectinthesensethathumanecon­omy, culture,identity,psychology, etc., are dependent uponanimals – on animal bodies,animallabour, animal habitats,etc. Inthe same waythat capitalism cannot function without the exploitation of workers, human society in its current form cannot function without the exploitation of nonhumans. But while animals represent a ‘universal’ class of subjects whose liberation could also liberate humanity, we lack a ‘material’ ba­sis for building a social movement powerful enough to impose its own values on the rest of society. Unlike the working class, the animal rights movement has no social base to speak of. Animal advocates represent a very small minority of the human population, and, unlike workers, they don’t collectively play a strategic role in the reproduction of daily life. It appears, then, that we lack a plausible account of how animal liberation is to be achieved. 
However,thesituationisnothopeless.Thecontradictionsofspeciesism are producing new avenues for strategic praxis by undermining the bioe­cological conditions of life, including human life. And here Gramsci’s thought is useful in helping us to identify more or less promising lines of action within the present ‘organic’ and conjunctural crises of soci­ety. Both thecovid-19 pandemic and the wider ecological crisis offer us favourableterrain foraction. Sinceanimal agricultureandfishingarethe driving forces of our planet’s ecological collapse, we can use that to ar­gue for the abolition of the animal economy. At the same time, however, ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ is more than egoism or prudentialism. We therefore mustn’t shy away from the ethical and existential dimen­sionsofthecrisis.Specifically,weneedtodevelopamovementorganized around defence of (1) the principle of life itself, and (2) of the collective and individualrighttolife,notonlyforhumanbeingsbutforallanimals. We need to conceive of animal liberation as a philosophy of existence. Furthermore, ourpoliticsneedstobegroundedinanexplicitphilosophy of love and compassion. One of the problems with utilitarian framing of the problem of dominion is that it slights empathy and can offer no defence of the ‘spiritual’ goods we gain in relating to other species out of friendship and respect. 
Theproblemwithanimalwelfarism,inthisconnection, isthat it’sfun­damentally incompatible with the long-term goal of animal liberation. We cannot advance the cause of animal rights through incremental im­provements inanimals’ conditionsofenslavementorextermination. The notion that we can exploit and enact violence against other beings ‘ethi­cally,’inawaythat‘respects’them, has been one of the chief ideological conceits of human dominion for thousands of years. Insofar, then, as an­imal welfarists advocateonly reforms of the existing system, they remain withinitsideologicalterms.Thenotionthatitismore ‘pragmatic’ toseek reforms rather than to seek the overthrow of speciesism as such rests on a profoundmisapprehensionofthe nature ofpoliticallife. Ifweallowour horizons to be bound to the existing reality, the world ‘as it is,’ then we embrace our own defeat. Gramsci, Benedetto Fontana reminds us, held that while the liberal reformer seeks ‘the preservation within certain ju­ridical boundaries of the existing structure of power,’ the true political agent ‘acts upon the existing reality in order to transcend it and establish a new structure’ (Fontana 1993, 88).Challenging specificinjusticestoan­imals isn’t enough; our goal must be to constitute a new social order, one based in socioeconomic equality and compassion for all sentient beings 
– human and nonhuman alike. 
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