Hello friends! So, in BIG NEWS (please note capital letters), we've now reached 70% of our funding target! So, first things first: thank you, thank you, thank you. Your support is so incredible. As we enter the final stages of the campaign, this is where we need your help more than ever, to help share the book with friends and family and encourage people you know to support it. If everyone who has supported the book can persuade one other person to do the same, we'll smash our target!
To say thank you for all your amazing support so far, we wanted to share with you an EXCLUSIVE, FOR-YOUR-EYES-ONLY glimpse inside the book.
You may have heard of the (so-called) human philosopher, Karl Marx; but you almost certainly haven't heard of the real philosophical genius behind his most well-known ideas...without further ado, therefore, we'd like to correct that, by bringing you a brief 'Philosophy 101' introduction to the canine philosopher, Karl Barks:
Intellectual copyright infringer's name: Karl Marx
Dog’s name: Karl Barks
Breed: German Schnauzer
Born, 1818 AD
Died, 1883 AD
Age in dog years: 313
Key quote: “Canines of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your leashes.”
Principles:
- The history of all canine culture is the struggle for an equal share of treats
- Dogs control the means of walkies
- Cats are a bourgeois construct
Likes/Favourite past-times:
- Seizing the means of production of dog food
- The emancipation of all canines - especially working dogs - from capitalist power structures, like veterinary clinics
- Arranging butt-sniffing politburos with other dogs while out in the park
Special interests: urinating on private property
Philosophical law/impact on philosophy:
Perhaps one of the most influential figures in human history, Karl Marx – like all bourgeois humans – achieved notoriety by palming off the best ideas of his dog (Karl Barks) as his own.
Having been born a young, bushily bearded pup in Trier, Germany, Barks held that societies develop through the continued struggle between different classes of both humans and dogs. In this, he was inspired by his neighbor’s dog, Friedrich Beagles, and his daily struggle with the postman for the letters and parcels that Beagles rightfully saw as his own. After one particularly violent struggle for a parcel containing some of the finest capitalist chocolate, Barks noted that the only way to establish equal parity between the rule of the postman and the suppression of the canine, would be through the violent overthrow of existing power structures.
Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Barks predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems and relationships, the delivery and control of the post by humans naturally created internal tensions that would eventually lead to its self-destruction and ultimate devouring of said post by the dogs who had hitherto been unfairly left out of this paradigm.
For Barks, the existing antagonism between post and delivery men and dog were inherently unstable and prone to crisis. Using the example of the ‘Dutch Tulip Crisis’, he pointed out that while humans may have believed this financial crash was the result of over-inflated financial speculation – it was in fact the result of one rather mischievous Clumber Spaniel getting into a delivery warehouse and eating all of the tulip bulbs in Amsterdam. As these types of events grew in frequency, Barks posited that class and canine consciousness would also increase, leading to their conquest of political power and eventually the establishment of a classless, species-agnostic society in which dogs were able to eat as many tulip bulbs as they liked – and able to chew as many postal letters or parcels as they pleased. In this system, Barks noted, there would be no need for postal or delivery services at all – as no-one would have a fixed address; with everybody instead living in their favourite place: the park.
Barks actively pressed for the implementation of such a society, arguing that canines around the world were bound not by their differences – but rather their similarities; specifically, the fact that they were all suppressed by the human bourgeois class. In a number of key addresses to dogs he met on various walks, he argued that dogs should carry out organized revolutionary action to topple human power structures and bring about emancipation from their otherwise human-controlled and dominated lives.
Central to Barks’s thesis was his re-evaluation of canine nature. He argued that canines recognise that they possess both actual and potential selves – but that they could only derive meaning from these selves when they are able to exert influence upon their own lives. Under current conditions as he saw them, Barks perceived this to be impossible so long as dogs were not given control of their own lives and destinies. “In a day when you must wait for the human master to pour the food into your bowl, and then be told to sit, to wait, to stay, before being allowed to eat the food, the canine is only ever told to obey. He is not told to live,” Barks observed. “Though he eats the food, he does not control the food. It is the same with every aspect of a dog’s life. For the dog must wait inside the home, until granted permission to go outdoors for walkies by – once again – the human owner. And even then, the dog is kept in line, sometimes even physically through the use of the leash. In this way, the dog has no autonomy – without which the result can only ever be alienation from one’s self and from one’s destiny.”
Unfortunately for Barks, he was never to live to see his ideas put into practice in the way he envisioned. After one too many letters in his neighbourhood were eaten, Barks and Beagles were forced to flee their homes along with their owners, finding themselves in perhaps the most staid and impossible places for any energetic, progressive revolution: England.
Yet even following his death – at the hands of a stray cricket ball he may or may not have been chasing – Barks’s legacy continued. Indeed, his central ideas would become the governing principles of the dogs taking part in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, who proclaimed “from each according to his ability to eat the food, to each according to his need to eat the food.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Related topics:
Dog chains / revolution / walkies