Re: Quote of the day

["Juan R. Fajardo" <fajardos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Brown wrote:
>
> On animal rights, I'm not one of those who favor such a provision in
> our constitution, but the most effective argument I've heard against
> animal testing was that fully half of all animal testing was done by
> the military. I don't know if that is true, but it seems to me to be
> humane to oppose animal testing for military purposes. [...]


As a grad student in California in 1990-1993 I came into frequent
contact with animal activists, indeed I was friends with several and in
an iteresting twist had an anarchist friend, Ron, who got a work-study
job at the science labs' reception desk after-hours, and his job
consisted solely of notifying someone if animal rights activists (i.e.
Ted, a mutual friend and occasioanl political collaborator, and his
group) broke in.

In any case, to the point.  At the time I happened to read "The Death
Agony of Capitalism and The Transitional Program" by Leon Trotsky and
came accross the point at which he proposed the abolition of
proprietorship on research results on the grounds that it caused wastage
of precious resources by making companies endlessly and needlessly
repoduce research already done by others in order to produce and market
similar goods.

At the time it had also breen breought to my attention --although I
don't know why it had never ocurred to me-- that since pharmaceutical,
chemical, and cosmetics companies "own" their research, each company
must conduct tests of its own to prove to the FDA that its products are
safe for human use, even though another company, perhaps several others,
have already shown the safety of their lines of similar or identical
chemical mixtures.  That requires companies to needlessly expose,
infect, inject, irritate, burn, vivisect, dissect, and mutilate
countless animals that would be spared if it were not for research
secrecy.

Even tired as I was of animal rightists (hm, good term!) denouncing me
and my fellow YSAers as "speciest" because we cared "only about people",
it occured to me that in the abolion of research secrecy there lay a
possible germ for cooperation by both sets of activists: Marxists and
animal rightists.

At the time such ruminations came to nothing concrete, but they came as
a revelation to me and suggested that programs could intersect in
unexpected ways, even so seemingly disparate ones.


- Juan