On not mistaking social service for social change

Ida’s recent post at The Vegan Ideal, “The Absurdity of ‘Triage’ and the Need for Social Change” recalled for me Paul Kivel’s excellent essay “Social service or social change?” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. A version of the essay is available online. In this excerpt (this portion is not in the online version), Kivel describes the difference between social service and social change, and the limitations of social service in the context of his work to end domestic violence:

Social service work addresses the needs of individuals reeling from the personal and devastating impact of institutional systems of exploitation and violence. Social change work challenges the root causes of the exploitation and violence. In my travels throughout the United States, I talk with many service providers, more and more of whom are saying to me, “We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change.” I meet more and more people who are running programs for batterers who say, “We are only dealing with a minute number of the men who are violent and are having little impact on the systems which perpetuate male violence.”

In a similar way, from an anti-oppression perspective, animal welfare, which has exploitation as a precondition, is a form of social service and veganism, which recognizes and challenges the structure of oppression, offers the possibility of social change. Ida writes:

[I]f we don’t address the exploitation that is underlying the structure of human supremacy and is justified by speciesism, then there will always be nonhuman animals who are casualties of that exploitation.
…
Prevention means radically transforming our perspective on the exploitation of other animals. Instead of taking the exploitation of other animals for granted and working to do “triage” on the so-called “worst” cases – while leaving others to linger in their exploitation – we view the exploitation of any animals as obsolete. No longer is exploitation seen as a given, but as something that needs to be radically replaced with nonexploitation.

This is not to say that social service work is not valuable: far from it! It is of course important to attend to the immediate needs of individuals.* This is simply being honest: social service, by itself, does not lead to social change.** In fact, Kivel’s essay explains why “many social service agencies may be intentionally or inadvertently working to maintain the status quo,” and this is where social service can hinder social change.

If our goal is liberation for all, I think it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of social service so we don’t mistakenly believe that our work in animal welfare (social service) will somehow lead to animal liberation (social change). And I think it’s important to not confuse social service for social change, so that if our hearts ask us to work for social change, we are able to fulfill that request.

* Though, note: many animal welfare campaigns don’t serve the needs of actual individuals.

** Sanctuaries for non-human animals, though often problematic in practice, are a form of social service that in theory attend to the needs of individuals. But since sanctuaries address the effects rather than the causes of exploitation, they are assured a constant stream of individuals in need of their services. The service violence provider who said, “We could continue doing what we are doing for another hundred years and the levels of violence would not change,” could equally have been speaking about sanctuaries and speciesist oppression.