A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #364 - Antifascism - Victor Duran-Le Peuch: "When we talk about speciesism, we're talking about a social relationship" (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Victor Duran-Le Peuch, who came to lead a workshop on speciesism during 
the UCL Summer Conference 2025, agreed to answer our questions. UCL 
doesn't have a firm position on antispeciesism, but this interview may 
open up some initial avenues for reflection. So, could you explain why 
you're on the antifascist pages and not on the environmental ones? It's 
important not to reduce the animal question to an appendix of the 
environmentalist project, for one simple reason: when we talk about 
speciesism, we're talking about a social relationship, a system of 
domination that affects a whole group of individuals.

And this has its place within anti-fascist thinking: speciesist ideology 
is truly embedded in the DNA of the far right and fascism, which rely on 
a total naturalization of systems of domination. There are superiors and 
there are others who can be crushed; it is the order of the world, 
immutable and implacable. It cuts across many different forms of 
domination: racism, ableism, LGBTI-phobia, and of course patriarchy. It 
is a supremacist ideology, the idea of nature, which has been analyzed 
in particular by materialist feminists and in fact by most social 
movements for emancipation, because it is the same arguments: it would 
be in their nature, in their essence, to be inferior, to be dominated. 
The consumption of animals fits perfectly into this and into a discourse 
of returning to traditions, of defending national identity. In France, 
there's this narrative built around eating animals, barbecue culture, 
and so on. This is also being co-opted by the masculinist ideology 
present on the far right. We're seeing the emergence of influencers who 
are all too proud to show off their fridges full of offal: it's the 
ultimate symbol of their virility and superiority. An anti-fascism that 
doesn't pinpoint the extent to which speciesism is embedded in this 
entire far-right ideological conglomeration is missing part of the 
analysis and perhaps also the means to combat fascist ideology.

What are the key concepts for discussing speciesism?

The most interesting definition of speciesism, in my opinion, is to 
describe it as a system of domination where the human class appropriates 
the class of animals, just as the class of men appropriates the class of 
women and sexist people, and this applies to all other forms of domination.

One concept is fundamental: sentience. Subjective consciousness: it 
means something to us to live our lives. We feel pleasures and pains, 
and our lives matter; we don't want our freedom to be deprived. Humans 
are sentient, like the vast majority of other animals. As such, they 
have interests, and it is completely illegitimate, unjust, and 
disgusting to deprive them of their lives, to impose suffering on them, 
to imprison them.

Victor Duran-Le Peuch is an anti-speciesist activist and the creator of 
the podcast "Comme un poisson dans l'eau" (Like a Fish in Water).
Plants, on the other hand, are sentient without being sentient. They 
react in very rich, complex, and surprising ways, but that doesn't mean 
they possess subjective consciousness: they don't have a brain, a 
nervous system, they don't have the minimal conditions we know are 
necessary to create that extra something we have in common with other 
animals, which is consciousness. A photovoltaic panel is sensitive to 
light. Our cell phones are sensitive to the touch we apply to the 
screen. However, that doesn't mean at all that these objects can sense 
things associated with these reactions to stimuli or information.

Why become anti-speciesist when you're on the left?

I really like Kaoutar Harchi's saying that "being on the left means not 
losing anyone." And normally, if you're on the left, you're not supposed 
to ignore an entire category of oppressed individuals. The left also has 
this moral and political ambition to represent the interests of the most 
vulnerable people in our societies. There are systems of domination that 
specifically target, and even actively make vulnerable, certain 
categories of inferior individuals. Yet there is an argument that we 
sometimes hear, specifically on the left, and its consequences are 
horrific: it is to say that animals cannot make a revolution and that 
therefore we don't care, that this struggle is not legitimate. When, on 
the contrary, we have an additional responsibility to come to their aid, 
to position ourselves as allies! Imagine if we drew the same conclusions 
about children: "they don't lead their political struggle, so we can 
continue to legitimize the system that establishes adults as superiors."
We also hinder our own efforts to pursue a left-wing project if we focus 
only on certain systems of domination. They are robust and have 
co-occurred to such an extent that they rely on a common ideology, on 
the same type of argument. The construction of animality as an inferior 
category legitimizes the oppression of all the categories of humans we 
animalize, particularly women and people of color. As Axelle 
Playoust-Braure writes, "to animalize is to make them killable," 
exploitable, and dominable. If we don't also fight against speciesism, 
we leave ourselves open to the worst forms of violence and domination, 
including against humans; it makes perfect sense to destroy speciesism 
for these reasons as well.

What do you recommend to someone who wants to become anti-speciesist?

First, we need to educate ourselves a little, to understand and have 
arguments to oppose those who legitimize human supremacy, and to connect 
anti-speciesism to other social struggles in the most interesting and 
politicized way possible. And also to prevent the animal rights movement 
from being hijacked, as most struggles can be: we take a very 
superficial and depoliticized version of it to serve other systems of 
domination. For example, the far right always brings up issues of ritual 
slaughter to re-legitimize the worst racist prejudices. But when it 
comes to bullfighting, they say nothing. There are plenty of racist 
tropes like that. We have enough to deal with with speciesism where we 
are, especially in Western countries, without having to look in other 
countries where there are anti-speciesists already doing the work.

Once we feel sufficiently informed, take action. I recommend joining or 
creating collectives, and not acting alone. Often, we only talk about 
veganism and have a very individual conception of it as a simple matter 
of consumption. However, we need to be able to think about the material 
conditions that is, collective, social, and political of access to a 
world with means of action that enable the end of speciesism and the 
advent of an anti-speciesist society.

Anti-speciesism goes far beyond the sole issue of veganism. We are for a 
project of equality with other animals, so the least we can do is aim to 
stop appropriating, individually and collectively, their bodies for our 
own completely unnecessary secondary interests. And then simply continue 
doing everything we are already doing to fight for a project of global 
emancipation.

Victor Duran-Le Peuch, En finir avec les idées fausses sur 
l'antispécisme (Ending the False Ideas about Antispeciesism), éditions 
de l'atelier, October 2025, 13.50 euros.
Finally: don't be timid... We spend our time hearing euphemisms like 
"animal cruelty," or conversely, "respect," "compassion," "animal 
protection": never power, domination, and in response, equality. We must 
be able to fight back with the right diagnoses and the right words.

It's also important to talk about the intertwining of capitalism and 
speciesism, because obviously the forms of appropriation of animal 
bodies are industrialized: they have been so transformed and intertwined 
with the development of capitalist industrial systems that it's our 
activist priority to also bring down capitalism for these reasons. 
Animals human and non-human are literally crushed inside... We need to 
be able to think about these issues without simplifying or reducing the 
place of animals in this system. In fact, that's part of the problem: 
they are reduced, objectified, swallowed up in production systems as 
commodities, and transformed into consumer products.

We must also not give free rein to discourses that re-legitimize other 
forms of speciesism under the guise of anti-capitalism by saying, "Yes, 
but small-scale livestock farming is the first line of defense against 
capitalism!" It would therefore be virtuous to fight for small-scale 
livestock farming where there would be "respect" for animals, when no, 
it's still violence, even on a small scale.

An argument I often get is, "Eating vegan is expensive."

We can do very well without processed products: we can eat pasta, 
cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruits... There are a lot of very healthy, 
very good and inexpensive products. And one of the reasons for the very 
high cost of meat or dairy substitutes is that they are not subsidized, 
while there are huge subsidies that go to livestock farming and fishing 
and make the prices of products derived from animal exploitation 
artificially low. Intrinsically, it's cheaper to simply grow plants, 
rather than growing them and then feeding them to animals, only to get 
slightly less protein! Livestock farming is fundamentally wasteful. The 
Common Agricultural Policy (implemented across the European Union) keeps 
certain industries alive that would otherwise fail. We could redirect 
all of this toward an ambitious and collective plant-based transition, 
organize a fairer economic system that supports industries that don't 
rely on the appropriation of other people's bodies.

Interview by Nasham (UCL Montreuil)

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Victor-Duran-Le-Peuch-Quand-on-parle-du-specisme-on-parle-d-un-rapport-social
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