I escaped the Reddit regime a little while ago. I consider myself a marxist-leninist-MZT. Vegetarian and vegan for a few years. I’ve a lot of thoughts on how marxism and veganism are connected. Never wrote them down. I’d like to start smth like a club for marxist vegans to develop our own proletarian theory. Most vegan theory I found is either openly bourgeois (Francione is a literal TERF) or revisionist (anti-China, anarchist, libertarian). How about fixing this?
I’m going to lock this thread because discussions are getting out of hand. The topic of veganism and animal exploitation has once again been proven to be a sore point for marxists lol.
Three day old account asking for the creation of what has the -potential- to be a highly divisive, highly inflammatory community. I wish people would have a different attitude, one of lurking a bit in their new home, understanding its nature and waiting before seeking power and influence and change over it. I doubt OP is ill intentioned I just think “lurk more” is a good mantra.
Let me lay out some thinking.
Whereas:
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Hexbear has an existing community around this already that is much larger than this one will ever be and as we are federated you can view and interact with that community and perhaps accomplish your goals?
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Whereas the creation of that community on that site led to some of their most enduring struggle sessions and division (curiously their application asks applicants not to be racist, not to be homo or trans-phobic, and about animal liberation stuff, not a whiff about women’s rights though even after their big post about misogyny problem, really kind of telling priorities in the western left but perhaps that’s for another time). And whereas we have a meager 550 monthly users on lemmygrad total and further division of that is bad.
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Whereas great Marxist theorists have written many more times as much on atheism, anti-theism, anti-religion, etc (compared to a few carefully mined quotes relating vaguely to this) and whereas despite this most Marxists and anti-imperialists almost certainly fall within the camp of not being offended by such content nor having a problem integrating it in their lives. But whereas such content was prohibited from becoming a community unto itself on lemmygrad to prevent strife, struggle sessions, disharmony, dis-unity, and division from the wider masses.
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Whereas this by contrast would be much more divisive, tends to bring in a lot of problematic people (as with the atheism community in places) who are very dogmatic, inflammatory, hurtful, antagonistic (I’m thinking federated instances here) towards those who don’t hold their view and tend to make such posts in great number which are unfriendly to those who don’t hold their persuasion and would result in strife, dis-unity, division, and struggle that distracts from primary interests such as anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. (And please let’s be honest here, if we’re going to say Muslims and Christians should feel welcome by not pushing the Dia-Mat hard in that direction and beating them over the head with it, it’s equally if not more important given the amount of people who eat meat even compared to the religious/irreligious (greater) that we not create an unnecessary point of tension here and a point of division from the masses).
Theory-crafting in a dedicated community? I don’t have an issue with that, I’m not freaking out about trying to connect veganism and Marxism. What I worry about is the memes, the casual posts, the rants, the venting about “carnists” and so on that stir up trouble and strife when things have been so relatively harmonious here compared to hexbear. Some of that is due to the vetting and requirements for membership, some credit is due to the admins and a lot of that I think is from discouraging anything too inflammatory that distracts from the uniting interest and goal here. I hope you can keep this in mind if you make such a community when setting rules.
I remember years ago Hexbear pulled an entire subreddit of Vegans into their site solely because they were vegan and nothing else. All they did was go from com to com and harass the ever loving fuck out of everyone. Most of them had to be banned and mods had to put in new rules in some subs. Idk if it was a psyop or just terminally online crazies. Probably a bit of both.
Now, seemingly out of nowhere a 3 day old account pops up using Veganism as an in to cause drama. This post alone already has some pretty rabbid comments popping up. Mainly by Hexbear and Lemmy.ml accounts that came in at warp speed when we RARELY see them this involved with a Lemmygrad post.
The funny thing is, there’s lots of Vegans in Lemmygrad, yet you never see them acting like this towards fellow comrades. Weird how the brand new accounts pops in, makes a post like this, and all of a sudden it’s filled with non-lemmygrad accounts starting drama. All seems suspect to me.
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/r/vegancirclejerk
My only interaction with that sub was joining for 3 days before seeing some rather disturbing posts advocating for anti-natalism (I don’t want to elaborate much but it was content warning worthy) and leaving.
It was barely even relevant to the topic of the sub. Really crazy the kinds of shit that flies in spaces that don’t take a hard line for moderation.
This is correct. That sub was a branch from other vegan subs because the more extreme and crazy of the users got banned from them. Vegancirclejerk was literally where all the “crazy vegan stereotypes” went when they normal people in the other vegan subs kicked them out.
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Tbh I don’t think this post is attracting all that much attention, it’s like, 3 or 4 people having a comically drawn out discussion where all parties are from seemingly completely different planets and can’t seem to figure out what the others are saying, pretty entertaining but not so productive.
Whereas the creation of that community on that site led to some of their most enduring struggle sessions and division (curiously their application asks applicants not to be racist, not to be homo or trans-phobic, and about animal liberation stuff, not a whiff about women’s rights though even after their big post about misogyny problem, really kind of telling priorities in the western left but perhaps that’s for another time). And whereas we have a meager 550 monthly users on lemmygrad total and further division of that is bad.
This whole paragraph is a bit suspect.
How so?
Well, first of all, Lemmygrad’s applications don’t ask about women’s rights, either. All Lemmygrad asks is “What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support LGBTQ+?” — no asking about racism or animal liberation, either. So bringing up not asking about women’s rights, as if this is unique to Hexbear, rather than applying to both Hexbear and Lemmygrad, is strange.
The bigger point however is that anyone with a non-superficial understanding of LGBT+ issues understands how the oppression of LGBT+ people stems from and reinforces the subjugation of women. The wording of the “western left’s priorities” — and the implication that misogyny on Hexbear is caused at least in part by not explicitly asking about women’s rights in user applications — together get uncomfortably close to accusing LGBT+ issues of being “western decadence” wholly separate from women’s issues, whose advancement is detrimental for women.
The final point is that calls for unity I observe often come from a place of the one calling for unity really just wanting people to shut up about something that that person does not want to confront. The final paragraph of darkcalling’s comment adds some more context to this end: “What I worry about is the memes, the casual posts, the rants, the venting about “carnists” and so on that stir up trouble and strife when things have been so relatively harmonious here compared to hexbear.” — This makes it sound to me like this person really just wants to avoid having to think about veganism, and wants to make that vegans’ problem rather than keeping it their own.
I think that if you say that vegans aren’t allowed to complain about carnists, that all this really does is make the space less welcoming for vegans, and make tensions rise between vegan and carnist users, for the sake of the carnist users’ conscience alone. And I frankly don’t think that anyone who doesn’t have thick enough skin to not flip out and get aggressively defensive when told that eating meat is wrong, belongs in a space where people should by all means regularly be putting in the effort to unlearn their own indoctrination.
I dunno, I guess that’s just how I feel about it, personally.
I am 3 day old but I lurked for a few weeks here. I’m not going to discuss veganism on this sub. I really didn’t use any “carnist” word here to avoid any tension. I wrote here to introduce myself (this is my second post) and to cover vegans who don’t read hexbear.
- Yes, I’ll go there
- No issue. I’m all for marxist cohesion. We want an effective community for our future revolution
Convincing points.
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Animal products are more usually the more expensive food items. A vegan diet is cheaper, uses less land and resources. If there was no animal agriculture, we would waste less food and could feed more people.
So quite the contrary.
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Animal products are more usually the more expensive food items. A vegan diet is cheaper, uses less land and resources. If there was no animal agriculture, we would waste less food and could feed more people.
Outside of the western world, this is false.
Beans and rice are more expensive outside the Western world?
I think we should think very carefully about tamping down on Marxist viewpoints for the sake of unity, on a case by case basis. Just because we do it for one thing doesn’t necessarily mean we should do it for another. In the case of brow-beating religious people with dia-mat, i think the case for unity over discourse is valid because atheists are not an oppressed minority that we should fight over or risk losing from the movement. This is also the case of vegans. Animals are an oppressed minority, yes, but they cannot join our movement, and so we can’t risk losing them from our movement if we don’t steadfastly defend them.
I mention this because if you’re not careful you could apply this logic where it actually matters, like racial or gender oppression. Should we handle racism with kid gloves because it might cause division and scare off white people? No! Because then we risk losing oppressed racial and gender minorities from the movement for not defending them.
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Veganism is the way forward and we cannot ignore the enslavement, rape, torture and killing of other species for our own pleasure. I think many marxists are flawed when it comes to this.
Also, to whom it may concern. You are not a bear. Nor a chimp. Nor a lion. You are not forced at gunpoint to eat meat or animal products. You are a human being. We can have a perfectly healthy diet without it. Eating animal products is a choice. Exploiting other species is a choice.
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I think there’s a connection between the commodification of animals and worker exploitation. The slaughter industry is one of the most brutal and inhumane work environments in the imperial core, almost nothing compares to the conditions that workers are under. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
This is based on vibes and not theory, though.
I think a Marxist exploitation would be interesting!
I think a materialist analysis of why veganism became popular, and why it was recent, would be interesting. There are, of course, related precedents in diet with religious vegetarianism (Buddhist, veg Hindu, etc) and minimizing unnecessary harm (Jainism, Quakers, certain middle eastern philosophies, etc). But veganism as we think of it is a modern phenomenon that emerged in a highly industrialized society of the imperial core.
I think the elephants in the room are industrialized agriculture, the end of famine conditions, and the social aspect of acquiring food from markets. Eating a modern vegan diet was not practicable before B12 vitamins and cheap staples. People that tried would eventually become malnourished. Re: famine conditions, if you have not had to think about the prospect of dying from a lack of food, you may spend more time thinking about where it comes from and how you might be more picky about it. And with the social component of markets, food is a consumer choice, an abstraction away from its production (complete with Marxist alienation), and not as much of a core social activity as are hunter gatherer activities or working a farm. Not eating animal products means a substitution of items bought at a market with no need to substantially change a budget. And when it’s a consumer choice abstracted from production, when you learn about its production you will be more likely to be horrified.
So yeah things like that are interesting. They could also assist in understanding how one might understand the advancement of veganism dialectically, e.g. avoiding being chauvinist towards societies that haven’t had the necessary productive and social prerequisites to have this perspective, being too busy dealing with imperialism and their own development. And how pushing for certain kinds of economic and food security may be a better way to spend a portion of one’s advocacy budget. And why certain psychological barriers exist to adopting a vegan stance and how they might be addressed without a liberal approach.
That’s a nice summary, although I don’t agree with all points you made (namely that being vegan increases the cost of food) but this will be highly dependent on where you live in the world and wont be materially feasible for everyone currently. I’ll dare say that legumes are probably cheaper than meat almost everywhere in the world though.
I think one obvious reason as you stated is that veganism and probably animal liberation theory could not become as widespread before the material condition for realizing it were widely available. I think B12 synthesis was achieved in the 1940’s so a fully vegan diet would have probably been complicated before that. Warm clothes would also be more complicated (disclaimer: I’m not that versed in clothing so there might have been other ways than fur that did not involve petroleum based materials)
On your point of food security there is actually a project named Food Empowerment Project that tries to advocate for food security through plant-based agriculture and also advocates for farm workers right, it’s based in the USA however.
Hi! I think I said the opposite about budget (it doesn’t make substantial changes to one), though it’s a common false trope that going vegan is expensive so I can understand why you’d be on the lookout for it.
Re: geographical variation, yes of course, which is one of the valuable parts of looking for material grounding. A bombed out place with food insecurity may both prevent a vegan from avoiding animal products to survive and will impact what people will focus on and prioritize. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the modern movement of veganism emerged and took off in the imperial core where food is subsidized without being undermined by imperialism and workers, on average, receive a greater level of purchasing power for their labor than those in imperialized countries (due to imperialism).
For warm clothes, the possibility of making that devoid of animal products preceded veganism by a long period of time. Waxed canvas clothing was popular among those with access to it (sailors, those who worked outdoors in cold and wet conditions) and thick cotton garments like flannels (which didn’t always have wool) were similarly popular. Both were only made popular through changes in production, of course, but they were fairly popular hundreds of years ago in parys of the world. But if you were in the far north and could not import cotton and oil, these were not options.
Re: food security, that looks like a nice project! My thinking on food security was that its increase promotes veganism itself, it is a material basis for veganism even if the security itself is not explicitly vegan. Most vegans are converts, they started out non-vegan with non-vegan parents and became exposed to and convinced by materials against consuming animal products. I think the propensity to be convinced would be positively impacted by the relative availability of food, and particularly vegan food, so that it can be thought of as a consumption choice among others.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood what you were trying to say about budget. Thanks for the info regarding the clothing!
Of course!
This is exactly the kind of discussion around veganism I’d love to see more. Too often it gets incorrectly reduced into an awfully restrictive diet.
In some ways my mostly vegan (sometimes vegetarian) diet is more varied than it was before. The flavour and prominence of meat was doing a lot of the heavy lifting in most meals. When you ‘lose’ that, you soon find better ways to flavour the plant side of things and that opens a lot of culinary doors.
It only feels restrictive because most restaurants cater to meat eaters first and foremost. That, and because e.g. ready meals are ‘for some reason’ filled with unnecessary meat products (some of the other comments touch on what those reasons might be).
I’m glad!
Here are my thoughts. Not polished but hope they make sense:
Point 1: Most socieities in a smartphone phase have a contradiction between the bourgeoisie that exploits animals and vegan activists. Farm workers take part in this exploitation but they’re not benefiting from it, they’re also exploited in this slaughter-hell. Animals don’t have a weight in this xontradiction because they can’t really fight back their oppressors. The people in general buy animal products but I think they don’t reall benefit from animal exploitation. Most people buy & use animal prod because they’re used to and attached to them culturally-emotionally.
Point 2: People actually care about animals, they just can’t change their habits. With each friend, I had at least a few convos on veganism. The most honest non-vegans tell me exactly that.
Point 3: People are speciesist because they exploit animals, not the other way around. Humans ate animals in the past because this helped them survive. Before veganism, I went “reducetarian” for health and environmental reasons. Only after that I went vegan.
Point 4: When capitalism started to dominate, animal industry appeared. This industry is interested in preserving speciesism. That’s why the bourgeoisie attacks animal rights activists so much. It even tries to ban anything that can push people towards veganism:
- Suddenly, they care about product “misbranding”. It’s now “wrong” to call soy meat “meat”. Shouldn’t we ban saying “peanut butter” then?
- Some Statesian States banned cell-cultured meat
- Vegans are almost never depicted positively in Western sitcoms, cartoons and mass media
- Bourgeois news websites spread anti-vegan misinformation. I’m bombarded by my relatives with bs articles saying “veganism either killed some baby of crazy raw vegan or science paper says veganism bad for health or actually not good for the environment”. Some of the articles come from “respectable” sources like BBC or CNN
- Right-wingers are almost universally anti-vegan
Point 5: All vegans must support socialism. Socialism will eliminate the bourgeoisie but speciesism will stay for much longer. Under socialism, it will be easier to eliminate speciesism because proletarians have no (or little) material interest in animal exploitation. You can convince a socialist .gov to make steps towards veganism for environmental and health reasons. China already does that: https://www.nycfoodpolicy.org/food-policy-snapshot-china-five-year-agricultural-plan-cultivated-meat/ With this, veganism will stop being seen as a fringe thing. People always ask me how am I capable of living without so many products. All the alternative foods will answer this question. People will slowly adopt these foods and eventually speciesism will crumble.
My veganism came from my socialism. I went vegan in 2020, when meat packing plant managers were gambling on the lives of their employees with a literal betting pool about who would catch COVID next. I was always sympathetic to the animal rights angle of veganism, but it was connecting it to the workers’ struggle that made it the only personal choice I could tolerate.
My thoughts are that:
Eating meat is not antithetical to communism. Animal farming will continue to exist under communism
I’m also a vegan tankie and would be glad to join.
Coincidentally I did have an IRL conversation with an older comrade about this topic (I’ve been a vegan for 5 1/2 years now) and she told me to read a passage from Engels that he wrote about vegetarians (the part played by labour in the transition from ape to man) in dialectics of nature.
Thinking that I couldn’t be the first to be a vegan communist to read this, I found this great blog: https://medium.com/@lilligroeneveld/challenging-friedrich-engels-about-veganism-2c17f303a269
Great read, basically sums up all the same thoughts I had and then some!
This is the 4th year I am a vegan. Before that for one year I was a vegetarian. Idk how to contribute to this, but I support you.
Although honestly I think there is nothing really we can do, when people are so numb emotionally, can’t really raise this bar for or in others. I agree with the person who said: live life according to your values and influence people that way.
It’s the same with homelessness or starvation, poverty. It’s cool you save one and it it everything for that specific one, but it’s all or nothing.
I’d maybe incentivise people who feel the weight of this to post things into the vegan community and share stuff that actually matters rather than just recipes.
Bottom line is that no change will come unless humanity realises that all of life on this planet, or maybe even in the universe is one organism (?) and we are (at least on earth) the responsible species to cater to all forms of life in this scenario, rather than just to our own selves or our species. Nonetheless this is just wishful thinking, or idealism or something so far in our evolution, that we can’t even comprehend it yet, some may can’t even see the point of it yet.
Honestly, I am not blaming other vegans, I understand the anger and shock, but wtf do you expect when we have not yet even came to the stage in our evolution as a whole that every one of us grows up to and is being educated to be a decent human being. Our concepts on life and what we do here in this lifetime are so primitive that I don’t think you can convince yourself that you can reasonably expect people to not kill an other life form for very fucking obvious reasons, especially when there is absolutely and without a doubt no need to do so. All of us here experiences that we can’t even fucking set a universal moral code yet, or unite humanity, or at least build socialism alrady globally, so expecting emotional and moral development that is not yet even present in human lifeform to extend to other lifeforms is I think just setting yourself up for failure.
This is the same primitive mindset that rules all other part of our life, that just wants to R word life in every way, no difference.
Whatever. Try to influence people by example, nothing else works anyways.
My thoughts are that is perfectly fine. About a year ago I started eating less meat myself and am transferring over to a more vegan diet. Grocery stores where I’m at are abysmal in terms of making decent dishes or the spices necessary so I end up growing a lot of my veggies and fruit when every season. cardboard shroomie farms had me switching a lot of my protein base with tofu and mushrooms like oysters and lions mane. I fucking love mushrooms.
I also think the whole “carnist” thing and any form of aggressive proselytization should be left at the door. What do I mean by aggressive? Well, I put “carnist” in quotes because I have first hand seen the bend that some people can have. To me, it is no different than purist leftcoms. Doctrine purity combined with a complete lack of knowledge of the conditions the person they’re talking to is going through. I’ve seen the massive struggle sessions on Hexbear and the points darkcalling made ring true.
What’s actually been the most helpful to me is an actual community that posts good recipes (once again, mushrooms), one that understands that people can and have struggled with transitioning diets and one that doesn’t beat you over the head with insults and a general demeaning nature. If someone doesn’t wish to switch to a vegan diet, that’s a shame, but it’s something that you should just accept in the sense of “Well, if they aren’t interested in actually changing, what is the point of causing a flame-war on a unrelated or even tangently related topic?”. Hexbear’s Vegan community front, smack-center is already two inciteful, divisive shit. “Carnists are deeply unserious people”. Once again, to me it’s no different than a leftcom being like “Ah, the poor simply haven’t actualized the potential of the intelligentsia for the revolution!”.
In the same manner, I am really not fond of Christianity. Will I bash and attack Christians on here? No. I’ll gladly talk about something I’m writing, or mention that it’s good that proselytization of the young is put down like in China but I wont attack anyone specifically. If you want to make a community here that talks about the ills of animal exploitation, new recipes, theory-crafting, etc that is great and should be encouraged.
edit: By the way, I’m not sure who is brigading the thread and actually marking down points that are actually rooting for discussion. Why not instead participate? It’s a shame that the thread was locked. Of course this is a sore point of discussion for Marxists, it is something that should be talked about and contained to this thread because I am afraid that after shutting this down, it could have heightened tensions and lasting “spite” for other users instead of letting them settle these things with the input and consideration of others.
That was a disappointing decision. The senseless brigading alone though illustrates mine and darkcalling’s point. A lot of vegans really do be acting like purist leftcoms. Outright disdain for those who do not share your perspective. Straight up could be utilized for wrecker shit, honestly.
Doctrine purity combined with a complete lack of knowledge of the conditions the person they’re talking to is going through.
So I wrote a thing and then realized after you had already mentioned religion also in your example (oops, reading comprehension fail lol). I will post what I was going to say anyway, but it may come across a bit of a repeat of what you have already said.
This is what I wrote:
Yeah, I would say it’s similar to what gets called “militant atheism” in this way. It’s one thing to be against exploitative, abusive, or controlling religious practices (especially cult-leaning stuff). It’s another thing to hate religion unquestioningly and in the process, be hating colonized peoples who just happen to also be religious while fighting for liberation. In a similar sense, it’s one thing to encourage someone who can realistically eat vegan to eat vegan. It’s another thing to throw everyone under the bus, including colonized peoples who hunt in ways that respect animals and do it to survive, and have a very different view and practice of eating meat than the factory farming capitalistic mode of consumption. When we try to universalize these things too flippantly, we more often end up on the side of imperialism, even if unintentionally. The imperialized, colonized peoples of the world may not have the “liberal individualism” “choices” that we have to “choose to be vegan” in the first place. Some of them are outright struggling to eat, period. So yeah, things need to be understood in the proper context.
How about fixing this?
Be the change you want to be
Hey, I’ve been vegan for a few years and would be interested in it as well. I’ve mostly read theory on speciesim related to racism (Ko sisters) and related to validism (Sunaura Taylor). I’ve discussed this subject in an informal manner many times in socialist/anarchists movements with other comrades.
I have a book in my to-read since a few months (https://cup.columbia.edu/book/animal-oppression-and-human-violence/9780231151894). I don’t know the author, but it looks like it’s explicitly trying to draw a link between capitalism and animal exploitation. I’ll probably get to it in 1-2 months.
Here is also a comment where I tried to explain informally why I think veganism is worth it and not just an individualist action but a political statement https://hexbear.net/comment/5751548
I whole heartedly support the idea of a such club. I, in fact, had recently a thought provoking conversation elsewhere about this topic and thought I’d have to expand it into a longer piece from proletarian perspective. So, yes, let’s fix this.
There are already several people who responded. Should we just juse use !vegan@hexbear.net or create a simplex chat?
I guess if Hexbear already offers a suitable place, then that might as well be used.
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