Mainstream vegan ideology is very much tied to moral philosophy, which limits its ultimate usefulness. It stung how accurate it was when Marco Maurizi said something along the lines of the vegan community being stuck in a cycle of endless debates with hostile non-vegans over whether it's okay to eat meat or euthanize people with mental disabilities.

Maurizi takes up the challenge of pulling away antispeciesism (say that three times fast) from the idealist, utilitarian roots of Peter Singer and formulating a new historical, materialist theory of antispeciesism. Succinctly put, Maurizi is saying "we do not exploit animals because we consider them inferior; rather we consider them inferior because we exploit them.

The book is broken up into three parts, but can be simplified to these two:

• Critiquing modern animal liberation ideology and critiquing Marxist takes on animal liberation
• Tying together Marxism and animal liberation ideology

It does the latter by finding a common root cause between human and animal liberation struggles: our animal self-hatred, which originates from the divide between human and animal consciousness created by the need to dominate nature in order to satisfy the high levels of production necessary to sustain class society.

Humans are animals, of course, so dominating nature means dominating both external nature and our own internal nature. Thus, "human beings internalize as individuals the oppressive praxis that they exert on nature as species. Silvia Federici highlights some of the more obvious historical examples of this in Caliban and the Witch, such as Descartes' quest to dominate the human body to increase its potential for production. Descartes vivisected many animals during his study, and ultimately concluded that human and animal bodies are mere automata.

The human and animal struggles are one in the same not based on some metaphysical concept of equality between all beings, but because they are literally one struggle originating from the same cause. Thus, we human animals have an established interest to pursue animal liberation.

The book has a strong start but begins tapering off toward the end. It's a worthwhile read for anyone interested in modern antispeciesist theory