This is the book I've been waiting for. Making a Killing is a rare and powerful example of first-rate scholarship, a searing critique, and lively declaration of the rights of animals and humans. You will walk away from this book with a clear understanding as to why social justice movements for people must take animal rights seriously, and vice versa. Bob Torres has forever deepened my thinking about these relationships."--David Naguib Pellow, vegetarian, animal rights and anti-racist activist, and Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego; and author of "Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago" and "Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice"
Challenging Conventional Anti-Capitalist Thinking
Suggest to the average leftist that animals should be part of broader liberation struggles and—once they stop laughing—you'll find yourself casually dismissed. With a focus on labor, property, and the life of commodities, Making a Killing contains key insights into the broad nature of domination, power, and hierarchy. It explores the intersections between human and animal oppressions and their relation to the exploitative dynamics of capitalism. Combining nuts and bolts Marxist political economy, a pluralistic anarchist critique, as well as a searing assessment of the animal rights movement, Bob Torres challenges conventional anti-capitalist thinking and convincingly advocates for the abolition of animals in industry—and on the dinner plate.
Why I Wrote Making A Killing
The Left needs animal liberation, and animal liberation needs the Left. The struggle for social justice cannot be a complete project if we ignore the suffering of the least and most voiceless among us. Similarly, the animal rights movement cannot truly argue for justice for animals if it doesn't care about justice for humans. My hope is that this book will generate a discussion on the nature of hierarchy and domination within capitalism, and encourage us all to think beyond the confines that have defined our activism so far.
Exploring Overlapping Oppressions
Making A Killing queries the linkages between the exploitation of humans and animals under capitalism, using a framework rooted in—but not constrained by—Marxist political economy. Working from key social anarchist insights on domination, oppresion, and hierarchy, Making A Killing calls for a new kind of activism, a holistic approach to social justice, and a realistic consideration of the flaws of both the Left and the animal rights movement.
Table of Contents
- 1: Taking Equality Seriously
- 2: Chained Commodities
- 3: Property, Violence, and the Roots of Oppression
- 4: Animal Rights and Wrongs
- 5: You Cannot Buy the Revolution
Fully footnoted and indexed, Making A Killing can serve as a jumping-off point for more reading in political economy, social anarchist theory, the animal rights movement, and the commodification of animals as property.