Quotes from Bob Torres

Inevitably, people tell me that poor folks are lazy or unintelligent, that they are somehow deserving of their poverty. However, if you begin to look at the sociological literature on poverty, a more complex picture emerges. Poverty and unemployment are part and parcel of our economic order. Without them, capitalism would cease to function effectively, and in order to continue to function, the system itself must produce poverty and an army of underemployed or unemployed people.

We can argue about their intelligence (which we would likely define in human-centric terms anyway), their ability to understand human language, or even the extent to which they really understand and know the world around them, but there's no argument that can convincingly show that animals don't feel pain, and that they have no interest in avoiding that pain. If anything, animals are more sensitive to the world around them than we are, given their heightened sensory abilities.

If we're to be successful fighting oppression—whether based on race, class, species, or gender identity—we're going to need to fight the heart of the economic order that drives these oppressions.We're going to have to fight capitalism.

Much as we live in an economic and social order that is structured to exploit people, we live in one that is structured to exploit animals. We're encouraged to understand both are natural and inevitable, but neither are. Both exploitations have long and contentious histories as part of the development of our modern economic order.

Given that animals are nothing more than mere tools for the production of capital, the only way to abolish their exploitation is to challenge their status as properties and commodities.

If we're all led to believe that poverty is just a matter of laziness or stupidity or whatever other justifications we come up with, then we're not likely to be in a real position to do much about it when it comes to attacking the root causes of the problem. Instead of demanding a more equitable system for the distribution of social and economic goods, we blame the victim.

We need to challenge the hierarchy in our own lives, and begin living in a way that promotes mutuality. If we take this point seriously, it only makes sense that we begin systematically examining and extirpating hierarchical thinking and actions from our lives. Only in this way, will we begin to reconceptualize our relations with each other and with the natural world as complementary rather than dominant and conquering.

though a significant number of us wish to cling to our comfortable little myths about how good things are, we sometimes cannot deal with the cognitive dissonance before us, and we're forced to acknowledge the exploitative dynamics behind our economic order.

Hierarchy is a toxic inheritance from previous eras that we keep reproducing as a matter of our social reproduction, but that does not mean it is an essential, necessary, or unavoidable aspect of our humanity.

What we see in stark relief is that the production of goods is about social relationships.

Apple necessarily must pay the workers producing the iPods less money than they gain from the labor of that particular worker. In this, we see the basic profit motive of capital.