{"id":774480,"date":"2023-12-27T07:43:51","date_gmt":"2023-12-27T12:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=774480"},"modified":"2024-01-14T11:01:51","modified_gmt":"2024-01-14T16:01:51","slug":"veganism-as-left-praxis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=774480","title":{"rendered":"‘BODY’ POLITICS: Veganism as Left praxis"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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The political Left\u2019s goals are served by a broad-based opposition to industries and production processes rooted in the commodi\ufb01cation of and violence against animals. Veganism should be enacted broadly on the Left as a praxis not as an overarching moral position, but as a broader politics of anti-capitalism and liberation. Veganism, as a boycott of products derived from animals, can be an effective tactic for eroding capitalism.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

JONATHAN DICKSTEIN:<\/strong> When bacon appears on the shelves of a supermarket refrigerator \u2013 pre-sliced, cling-wrapped, and bloodless \u2013 it does its best to seem a commodity like any other. American consumers, who eat around 50 pounds of pork each year, in thrall richard mille cheapest watches<\/span><\/a> to the cultural and marketing phenomenon of \u201cbacon mania\u201d, live in a society where their relationship to animals is almost entirely mediated by complex value chains and where they can therefore \u201ceat meat without the killers or the killing\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the supermarket, there is no sign of the artificial insemination to which sows were subjected, or the one-hundred-plus days they spent locked in a gestation crate, of the work at breeding farms undertaken by an often-migrant workforce, of the environmental degradation caused by hog manure lagoons or industrial farming\u2019s contribution to anthropogenic climate change, of its roots in settler colonial ethnic extermination and expropriation of land, of the ongoing dislocating impact on rural communities of large-scale corporate farming, of mass-scale animal suffering and death at industrialized slaughterhouses at the hands of marginalized and racialized laborers, or of corporate lobbying for anti-whistleblower \u201cag-gag\u201d legislation and union-busting \u201cright to work\u201d laws. The entire social, political, and ecological biography of bacon is e\ufb00aced behind its commodity form.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once we \u201cget behind the veil\u201d and learn about these conditions of production and their impacts, how should we confront a commodity so entangled in myriad forms of exclusion and exploitation? If our political commitments lead us to oppose any or all the processes which produced the bacon \u2013 including but not limited to animal rights-related concerns \u2013 should we not simply abstain from eating it? Is it not time to start talking seriously and explicitly about the need for veganism as Left praxis?…<\/em><\/p>\n

Veganism should be enacted broadly on the Left as a praxis not only of anti-speciesist or animal-rights-motivated politics, but also broader politics of anti-capitalism and liberation…We understand praxis as a pattern of intentional action by individuals and groups enacted in the service of moving toward a desirable collective ethical-political horizon. This entails acting in all the ways possible, given what we know theoretically and given a particular political-historical context, to achieve material and ideological social change. We argue that the Left\u2019s goals are served by a broad-based opposition to industries and production processes rooted in the commodi\ufb01cation of and violence against animals.<\/em><\/p>\n

We define veganism not as an overarching moral position or political end-goal, but more modestly as a tactic: a type of boycott almost exclusively focused on individual and collective \u201cconsumer behaviors, i.e. behaviors that engage markets\u201d of the sort that has historically been supported by the Left in the context of a wide range of social justice struggles. Veganism, for us, is a type of \u201cpractice movement,\u201d or a form of explicitly political \u201cunorganized and unrepresented but nonetheless collective action\u201d… So, while veganism predominantly addresses and attempts to end speciesist violence, we argue that it can and should be strategically adopted by those engaged in other, anthropocentric fronts of resistance, as one tactic among many others.<\/em><\/p>\n

Veganism, as a boycott of products derived from animals, is one such tactic. In this article, we elaborate our specific definition of veganism as a boycott, situate it within the broader horizon of total liberation and its targeted sites of oppression, and explain why it constitutes an effective tactic for eroding capitalism… Veganism as tactic does not merely concern animals, but works toward liberation for all oppressed persons. Our goal, in the space provided by this article, is not to o\ufb00er a determinative blue-print for interspecies liberation. We purposely want to keep this framework mobile and open to revision, in conversation with a variety of political and cosmological systems. Moreover, we acknowledge that while \u201cthe Left\u201d is loosely uni\ufb01ed through a collection of social and political commitments to social and environmental justice, the global Left is immensely diverse in terms of material needs, means, and access to food and other commodities. Veganism-as-praxis thus involves considerable malleability in interpreting and implementing what is \u201cpossible and practicable.\u201d However, for most leftists living in industrialized countries, the complete if not near-complete abstention from animal products is surely realizable.<\/em><\/p>\n

We believe that veganism plays a fundamental role in total liberation because the meat-centric diet and food infrastructure that increasingly structures worldwide consumption \u2013 the political-economic-ecological process of \u201cmeati\ufb01cation\u201d \u2013 fundamentally intertwines with white supremacist capitalism and its intersecting systems of oppression. Early-modern European countries depended on domesticated animals at world-historical levels, including for the power needed for colonizing missions. Non-European cultures\u2019\u201cfailure\u201d to domesticate animals to the same extent was read as a mark of their developmental backwardness. Settler colonialism brought fundamental ecological reorganizations as commodified animals displaced cultures \u2013 and often the very possibility \u2013 of humans and animals intermeshed in a shared world. Livestock centrally figured in European colonization of the land that would be called the United States and fundamentally structured the rise of an American capitalism that still tries to shape the world in its image. SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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