u/explorerofbells - originally from r/GenZhou
Hey comrades,
I’m a part of a discord server called Vegan Theory Club that’s run by mix of leftist tendencies. It’s a theory club that’s explicitly leftist and vegan, but we talk about more than just the book of the month.
We just started reading Eternal Treblinka - Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson, which we voted for. (Our last book was Kapital.) Right now is the perfect time to join!
We’d love to have you!
u/A-V-A-Weyland - originally from r/GenZhouIt isn’t that difficult to replace “worker” with “animal” and have it make sense by association. They’re still aiming for an ideal. As long as humans live on this planet they will always occupy land that used to be pristine nature. We can’t all go live underground or in space and make our planet a natural habitat. They take the ideals to the extreme and are unwilling to make incremental steps towards improvement.
Sustainability is a spectrum. But if you’re taking the theory you talked about to its logical conclusion then the end goal is to have people be completely separated from nature. Even putting down a solar panel would take precious light away from whatever wanted to grow beneath it. You changing your mind on the lab-grown meat just means you’re moving from reality to the ideal. Ideals will always win out over reality. Ideals don’t provide us with the tools required to achieve them though. We will have to work within the limits of our reality and develop in such a way that we leave our species and the world that we call home better behind than we found it.
u/warender99 - originally from r/GenZhouQuite the contrary. Lab grown meat is the ideal, you are the one living in the idealist framework of solutions. The very planet we live on is dying, quite rapidly, in no small part because of large scale animal production. Lab grown meat has no feasible way to replace that before it is far too late. The amount of material required for that to ever go large scale is far beyond our capabilities in the time limit we have, especially when it wouldn’t even supplant the meat industry if we started today. What we have in front of us is something actively destroying the planet, and your proposed solution doesn’t solve that problem. If we were to overthrown the capitalists tomorrow, we would immediately need to demolish the meat/animal product industry for the sake of the planet we live on.
The natural consequence of this is that people, especially those in the imperial core, would need to stop consuming the byproducts of animals. There is nothing about history or even our biology as some have tried to state that necessitates the consumption of animal products. We have long since figured out how to do vegan diets and maintain our health. You do not have to take supplements to be vegan, it just requires a bit of planning to avoid. This isn’t in and of itself a rejection of the future possibility of lab grown meat nor an argument against it. I’m not currently a vegan, nor do I share their morals, but I have to admit that they have a point here. There is little argument, aside from ideological ones, to continue the exploitation of animals in a socialist society. Proposing science fiction alternatives is quite like the earlier made elon musk analogy. Certainly lab grown meat could be something explored in the future, but it is currently in infancy and we don’t have that kind of time.