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Famous Steven Best Quotes

“We now face the grim choice posed by revolutionaries over the last two centuries, which involved "revolution or barbarism."”

Steven Best

Our situation has deteriorated so dramatically that we must choose between revolution or ecological collapse, mass extinction, and possibly our own demise. The twenty-first century is a time of reckoning.
Conclusion: "Reflections on Activism and Hope in a Dying World and Suicidal Culture" (p. 162)
The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014)

“There can be no full or even adequate understanding of the systemic problems of capitalist society, of the origins and dynamics of hierarchy, and of a future rational, autonomous, ethical, and ecological society until we address the 10,000-year legacy of speciesism and the barbaric exploitation of other animals.”

Steven Best

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 5 "Minding the Animals: Cognitive Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism" (p. 135)

“Attacking the new slave economy as it does, the animal liberation movement is a significant threat to global capital. Animal liberation challenges large sectors of the capitalist economy by assailing corporate agriculture and pharmaceutical giants and their suppliers. Far from being irrelevant to social movements, animal rights can form the basis for a broad coalition of progressive social groups and drive changes that strike at the heart of capitalist exploitation of animals, people, and the earth.”

Steven Best

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 4 "Rethinking Revolution: Veganism, Animal Liberation, Ecology, and the Left" (p. 103)

“Unless the intensity of our defense of life matches the ferocity of the assault against it, we allow a greater violence to grow exponentially until an earth once teeming with life becomes a mass graveyard, a battered wasteland, and a toxic cesspool. Then, when it is finally too late, the unfortunates who remain will grasp what the radicals tried to convey: what the logic of growth and capitalism finally wrought, the colossal failure of human vision and will, and the complicity of pacifism with the greatest violence of all.”

Steven Best

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 3 "The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of Militant Direct Action" (p. 78)