Over the centuries humans have folded themselves into power structures that benefit the few at the expense of the many. In the same way that the imperialist subjugates and exploits the third world and the capitalist exploits the worker, the human has positioned itself at the top of an explotative and murderous relationship to nonhuman animals. The beneficiaries of the status quo will emphasise their personal benefits, while refusing to acknowledge even so much as the existence, let alone the moral value, of their victims. When forced to engage with them, the justifications are often times the same - considering the outgroup to be deserving of oppression due to a perceived lack of valuable traits, be it intelligence, the ability to “contribute” to society or emotional “depth”. If we let our morality only apply to our chosen ingroup rather than extending it to all sentient life, we will inadvertantly leave intact the same unjust power structures we readily criticise in the rest of society. Working towards a life that doesn’t contribute to animal exploitation is not just possible but necessary. Go vegan.
Tell this to millions among millions of Bangladesh vegetarians and farmers, pushed off the fertile land by police/army serving western multinational grain/fruit corporations, and chased to coastal swamps to survive on fish and roots of amphibious plants.
If we were to agree that between power and wealth there is little difference, for the past few centuries it is clear that both oppression and exploitation happens with an economic motive. In earlier human development it was a mixture but mainly very concentrated power accumulation that formed such relationships. So it is not “human” but “capitalist human” that is responsible, and capitalist human stops at no moral, ethical, or ecological barrier to accumulate profit.
Going further back the centralization of power (and therefore wealth) became a characteristic of societies that started agriculture, due to the stability of communities (geographically) and the activities of accumulating, processing, storing food. Hunting gathering and therefore seasonal nomadic communities as far as we have discovered didn’t create centralization of either power or wealth. They all did the best they could daily and shared what the could bring back to camp.
Ecologically it is wild forest that can sustain the most life of all forms, not clearing and growing food (vegetable or meat), it is actually the definition of sustainable forest, the maximization of quantity of variety and quantity of life. Monoculture results to eventual death of the object and its ecosystem, and this should include a monoculture of human (urban areas).
But today, the only thing that can really change anything is the elimination of capitalism, not to alter consuming habits within capitalism.
We shouldn’t even struggle for people who don’t struggle themselves, let alone struggle for animals, or fungi, lichens, or other forms of life.
We struggle among those who struggle against power, wealth, oppression, exploitation. I am not going to turn against a hunting and gathering forest community because some metaphysical ideal of separation of dna forms. Between the rich vegan and the poor hunter/fisherman, I’m on the side of the hunter/fisherman. Between the pent-house tofu eating bastards and the earth’s near half of the population living in coastal and river areas of the entire “developing” world and barely surviving, I choose the later.
Vegans and vegetarians are on average poorer than people who eat meat, so the penthouse thing is mostly fiction.
Also, veganism is defined as not consuming animal products where it’s possible and practicable. If it’s not practical for someone to not consume animal products, then that’s just how it is. A vegan would not argue for one to eliminate animal products to the detriment their own health, well being, or livelihood. Instead, a vegan should only advocate eliminating animal products when you’re in a position that it’s safe and reasonable to do so.
Vegans are just as much concerned with people who have been forced into shitty living situations by colonizers and multinational corporations as you are. Just because they care about animals, doesn’t mean they think animals are more important than people.
First of all, in my long and wide experience, and I was a vegetarian for a while probably longer ago than you have been alive, not vegan, were never poor but “chose” to live a poor lifestyle. It was the lifestyle they were after not the moral/nutritional choice that was part of it. Was my experience biased, I’d let here people think of it and judge for themselves.
Your statements are full of what “x SHOULD do” … and this stems from a “moral choice” about consumption, robed of all political content, as if a conservative pro-capitalist can do all other things but not use animal products (leather shoes and triple stack hamburgers included). This is problematic alone, politically, to separate this agenda from all else being wrong in the world, society, community (politic-,soci-,economic-, ally). Having said this, about 30-40% of anarchists I know are vegetarian/vegan, but usually quite about it till meal time (like when a grocery was raided to bring food back to an occupied university campus, 30-40% of them went straight to the produce and cereals part of the store, no salamis and ham blocks) … … I was told, it is good to keep an eye on them and what they do :) It is the a-political vegan who can be a clerk at a bank authorizing or rejecting student loan applications, unsure of who to vote for all the time, attending church/temple ceremonies, … but wouldn’t dare eat sushi, unless it is sea-weed and organic rice.
For being a critic of veganism as a lifestyle this makes me a “colonizer corporatist”?
Wow, what an “either you are with us or against us” polarization. I thought most of us here were the ones banned or moded in reddit for having a “non main-stream” attitude and being critical of it. Maybe I am wrong, but a colonialist and multinationalist-corporatist … ?moi? … most of people around me would crack up to hear such a characterization of me.
There is political content in vegetarianism/veganism that is often overseen by mainstream lifestyler veganists. The fact that it takes 4-8 times more land and soil nutrients to produce x amount of animal proteing and general nutrients than vegetables, THAT is political. Land use in general. Having an industrial monoculture of modified soy to mass produce soy products for NW European and N.Am. vegans, is detrimental to land and peoples’ nutrition world wide. You tell this to most vegans and they DON’T care, it is better than eating deer meat caught by sharpened wooden sticks in the hills near you. Your “organic” soy smoothie may still be a GMO industrially produced product, boar’s steak is not.
Argentina has gone bankrupt more times than any country in the world, with all the social and economic anxiety this has caused, for being the largest beef monoculture in the world, supplying NW EUrope and N.Am. with beef. Poor people in Argentina can’t afford good beef, but their vegetables are pretty expensive because of this land use. Meanwhile kids can be staving in India with cows walking all around them.
The problem with veganism is it is just another -ism, derailed and integrated into the socio-political system as a lifestyle, robbed of political content and sterilized for mass consumption. Highly decorated Marxists teach at the same universities some of the world’s most prominent economists and corporate consultants come from. It is amazing what amount of enemies this system can digest and incorporate into its toolset.
I apologize for my wording, the intent of my statement was not to refer to you as a “colonizer corporatist”, I was referring to your comment about multinational corporations in bangladesh. I meant to say that many vegans care about situations like that, in the same way that you care about them. Deepest apologies for my poor wording there.
No problem, it seemed kind of odd to be characterizing me this way out of the blue. Here is my elaboration to my position
https://lemmy.ml/comment/3153547
In a world without exploitation and oppression of humans by humans, animals too will be less exploited and abused.
I find it difficult to accept your description of a vegan lifestyle, being subsumed and made digestible by mainstream vegans who don’t care much for the politics aspect. I don’t believe that accounts for the majority of vegans, at least based on the surveys I’ve looked at. Perhaps I am wrong and many vegans just don’t really care, but based on my experiences, I just find that a little hard to accept.
Also, on the topic of hunting locally sourced meat, I think it’s sort of irrelevant to the discussion of veganism. Regardless of my, or another vegan’s opinion of how ethical it is, hunting doesn’t provide enough quantity of meat to ever fulfill every human being’s current demand for meat. To be able to provide good, healthy and ethical food for everyone, the majority of it would have to be plants. The end of monoculture crops and factory farming cannot possibly happen without a significant reduction of demand for animal meat in developed countries, regardless of how the meat is sourced.
It’s not that I aim to villify hunting, it’s just that hunting is neither here nor there, in my opinion. It is what it is, and I’m not primarily concerned with it.
Our difference in perception and empirical experience may be political in itself. Let’s assume the vast majority politically belong on the left side of the spectrum but a significant portion may be morally on the general left but don’t care much about specifics. In my mind those that really count as being political are anti-capitalists, reformers are just as procapitalist as any. Specifically, there are those that think that without ending capitalism, this aspect of consumption can change, and people can stop consuming animal products as a moral choice. Others think there is nothing you can change within capitalism that can make a significant change, markets and governments adjust to consumer habits, but in general markets shape consumer habits and not the other way around.
It takes 8 times more land to produce beef than it takes to produce vegetables with nearly all the nutrients on would get from beed. There was an estimate in late 20th century that there were 300 more cows on the planet than they were in late 19th century. Both those numbers if nearing truth are political (economo-political as per land use) and this makes the proposal (veganism) very political, but it never walks far enough as a moral choice.
If it wasn’t for the exploitation part (of workers that produce animal products) which is ultimately producing wealth (profit), would beef be promoted? Dairy products? Poultry? It is the system of exploitation of humans that is the motive for this overproduction. In Marx’s time agriculture wasn’t yet intensified and tuned for maximum profit, so it was perceived as not industrial. 20th century development made agriculture a real industry with specific stages and specialties of the process and labor organization just if it was a Ford plant.
In any case, I think consumer-based movements are a-political and lead to nothing other than fashion that capitalism can further exploit and digest into profitable businesses. In the case of individual electric substitution of oil/gas consuming machines, the “green” alternative to power production, not only is a fad it is developing as a disaster of an ecological problem. It has promoted energy industry to take over public lands in alarming rates, even coastal and deep sea areas in international waters, and minining and recycling of toxic metals has gone up 7 fold in just a few decades, yet oil consumption and carbon oxide production is going up and up. This land use pressures the food production and reliance to industrial agriculture even more, leaving populations absolutely dependent on markets for survival.
Eat up on Cavendish bananas, they are about to become extinct. Take a picture while you do so, as proof to the next generation that there was such a thing as a banana. Unrelated to the subject? I don’t think so, an industrial product challenging the ecosystem and losing.