A note on strategy, hope, and power:

I read the recent Project Phoenix piece on animal advocacy with a familiar feeling. It's that flutter of hope I used to get whenever I saw animal advocacy grappling seriously with its own limits and promising to institutionalise compassion.

It’s a thoughtful and well-researched article. It recognises that “go vegan” as a universal demand has plateaued, that moral pressure aimed at individuals can backfire, and that offsetting risks normalising harm rather than ending it. It tries, earnestly, to think in terms of strategy rather than purity. That alone puts it ahead of much animal advocacy.

And yet, reading it, I felt the deeper problem reappear.

What’s being presented is not so much a strategy as a portfolio: a menu of approaches, asks, and behavioural pathways that individuals might take depending on capacity, psychology, or preference. Veganism here, offsetting there, donations elsewhere. Pluralism framed as flexibility.

This form mirrors something very familiar.

Like “offsetting”, it mimics the logic of ownership under capitalism — diversified investments, risk management, ethical accounting — but that's not so much the problem, pitching at capitalism, so much as it does not confront the social relations that make animal exploitation inevitable in the first place. The question becomes which tactic circulates better, not which struggles shift power.

What’s missing is labour.

There is almost no discussion of the labour conditions that structure animal suffering, or the labour strategies that might meaningfully disrupt it. No sustained engagement with slaughterhouses as workplaces. No analysis of migrant and racialised labour, line speeds, injury, trauma, or unionisation. No sense of how animal advocacy might align with — or help build — organised struggle where killing is made cheap and routine. No discussion even if animal advocacy as a labour issue, so zero strategy or solidarity in this area.

In forming these strategies, animals in this piece are still primarily treated as a moral problem to be managed in circulation rather than as beings caught downstream of production relations and embedded in collective power systems that dominate them.

From a Marxist perspective, this is decisive. Without a theory of labour and power, pluralism becomes selection. Capital already tolerates — and often funds — a diversity of lifestyle, market, and philanthropic responses to animal suffering. What it does not tolerate are movements that threaten ownership, disrupt production, or organise workers across supply chains.

That is why I argue, in my own recent essay, that much animal advocacy today becomes free-floating: intense, sincere, and morally charged, yet structurally unanchored. Compassion circulates. Outrage circulates. But power remains untouched.

You can read that argument in full here:

👉 lifeagainstcapital.subs…

This isn’t a dismissal of Project Phoenix’s work. It’s an invitation to push further. To ask not only what works in terms of messaging or uptake, but where struggle actually happens. To think less in terms of behavioural portfolios and more in terms of collective organisation. To reconnect animal politics to labour and liberation politics: not as an add-on, but as a condition of effectiveness.

The hope I felt reading the article is real. But hope, without a confrontation with power, has a way of floating free of the conditions that make it real.

The question now is whether animal advocacy is willing to get real and confront the struggle of life against capital.