Issue 34 | July 2025

Movements for socialism and animal welfare developed side by side throughout the 19th century, connected by their critiques of capitalist exploitation in an increasingly urbanized and industrialized world.

The potential for interspecies solidarity was lost, however, when the socialist movement aligned itself with the humanist tradition and viewed nonhuman animals merely as means of production and objects of the class struggle, rather than as subjects of it. The animal welfare movement, on the other hand, became associated with the bourgeois class and its pet animals, while industrial-scale animal exploitation was pushed out of sight, to the outskirts of rapidly growing cities.

Today, the consequences of the exploitation of nature and nonhuman animals are impossible to ignore. Yet a void still exists between mainstream Left politics and posthumanist thought—the former typically focusing on human class struggle, the latter critiquing anthropocentric ideology.

Labor Movement for All Animals re-writes the history of the labor movement from the perspective of multispecies politics.

The author and film-maker Kwesi Owusu, who has died aged 70, wrote several notable books on Black culture in Britain, and was a founder member of the influential performance group African Dawn, which emerged from the vibrant creative scene of the Africa Centre in Covent Garden, London, in the 1980s. During that time, he also co-produced and directed the groundbreaking film Ama: An African Journey of Discovery for Channel 4, which was recently restored and included in the BFI’s 2023 African Odyssey season.

After returning to his native Ghana, Owusu became an advocate for the Ghanaian and African people, both through his leadership of the African branch of Jubilee 2000, a global initiative calling for debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries, and his media production agency Creative Storm, whose documentaries on subjects such as maternal health and access to water have sparked real change.