Veganism and materialism

While I don't agree fully with the original post, and especially with how it's worded around what is "natural" I don't agree with your line of argument here.

Not every human is equal

When we say everyone is equal, we mean that everyone should enjoy equal rights and responsibilities, not that everyone is identical. Marxism definitely recognizes and takes into account that every individual person is different.

intrinsic value of animal lives

What is the intrinsic value of any life? All of these concepts are socially and historically constructed and not absolute.

Your syllogism is focused on the physical form of the individuals, but that’s not what we think about.

The ability to feel or think is directly connected to and stems from the physical form. Consciousness is a part of our material reality and our physical bodies, our thoughts and feelings are not separate from it. We know, and are still learning, what and how different other species feel or think, but our human societies, while we are a product of nature, have reached a more complex level of social and historical relations in which we must operate in order to address these issues. We do place humans above other species, for better or worse, and that is not a relation that can change easily, if at all.

Our moral perspective posits that inflicting intentional harm on sentient beings purely for our pleasure is ethically wrong.

It is immoral to cause unnecessary suffering to sentient beings

The point is to move away from a moral argument, just how our critique of capitalism and similar systems is not primarily a moral one. Morality is, again, socially and historically constructed. People laughed and cheered at public executions in Europe in the 19th century. I do agree that the reduction of meat consumption in the west would be a good thing, and it's good for any individual that is able to make that choice and does so, but a moral argument fails where a Marxist one is much stronger. We should strive to drastically change the west's meat industry but that will not happen by individual choices made by consumers. Suggesting that people eating meat is a moral failing of the individual will not lead to anything. Systemic change is necessary which we will probably not see under capitalism, but the argument to be made for radical changes to our meat industry is much stronger when it comes from an environmental position, or a more general position of worker exploitation in the meat industry - an argument which can be applied universally without condemning any specific cultures or societies which consume and use animal products sustainably, and not a moral one which cannot be universalized. The only way widespread changes in human diet occur, and subsequently changes in our relations to these animals, is through changes to the mode of production in our meat industry. We know that any such radical changes do not come about from individual consumer action, but from organized class struggle and ultimately changes on the side of production.

I think that as leftists, we should strive to abolish any kind of ideology that preaches the unjust discrimination and exploitation of others based on their physical attributes, whether it be speciesism, carnism, racism, sexism, ableism, and so on…

Equating racism, sexism, ableism, etc. with human treatment of animals is quite chauvinistic and fails to take into account the material basis for any of these phenomena. Just preaching that these things are wrong doesn't do anything. What can help is proper education which includes an analysis of the material conditions that brought about these phenomena and ultimately no real change can happen in these areas until the material conditions which cause them are changed.

I was gonna jump in to correct the syllogism, but you already said it better than i would've so thank you!

I understand your point, but I don’t think an appeal to nature is a very productive type of argument.

Yes actually you're right it was very poorly worded. Appeals to nature are more often than not reactionary.

What I meant wasn't that "nature good we should do like nature" type of appeal we see all across the rightwing spectrum. The core argument is that humans aren't alienated from "nature" for exploiting and killing other species, there is no break, we are animals that build, craft and organise in a complex way thanks to language. Our nests have become big and we've become conscious that we're destroying ourselves by destroying the environment, but we're still animals. In that sense, if we're to say that speciesm is wrong for thinking humans are above all else, then I say okay, so humans are just a species like any other that uses all of its available power to do whatever it wants with other species.

And I know it has some nihilism to it, but in the end I find meaning in trying to connect to other species and building a better society for the human species, it's just that we need to be realistic in the morality we're trying to defend.

And basically, it just serves a basis to say that it's unmarxist to scream "murderer" at someone who eats meat

Some images outlining the materialist case against carnism:

True, as I said, I was arguing against moral veganism not environmental veganism

Especially red meats, those are by far the worst ones for your health

many of these animals produce extra products as a result of the genetic manipulation.

I would argue that breeding these animals to produce more than they need is a form of exploitation. Sure, on an individual level you can look at a modern cow and say she doesn't need all the milk she produces. But zooming out, you see a millennia old process of exploiting animals to produce more than they need. Breeding of defects is a thing that exists on a spectrum. Sure, we can't let these animals into the wilderness, but we can stopp breeding them.

You're leaving out that chickens are so pumped full of bullshit hormones that they lay so many eggs and so much more often that it is damaging to their health, and that they become prone to health programs and mature faster than is natural and healthy for them, only to be discarded.

Do you know what happens to male calves in the dairy industry? Hint: they are unnecessary for dairy farmers. The cows spend their whole lifes artificially inseminated, another word for that is "rape". Get pregnant over and over, get your calves taken away to be either killed or raised the way their mothers will. All to be sent off to slaughter once milk production slows down. Usually at about 3-5 years old if my memory serves me correctly.

Not to be too judgemental, and i understand this is how my post comes off anyway, but you are still directly responsible for this. Cows were never meant to produce 10L of milk a day for their calves, so much that they're in pain if not constantly milked.

Far from anything close to ethical. Same goes for chickens and their eggs.

It's considered as more of a priority in western spaces from what I've seen. The overwhelming majority of users here and in most English speaking spaces are westerners. That's not to say it isn't important to discuss, it just doesn't rank high in the discourse of developing/non-western politics.

Why is the presence of some inter-species violence a justification for harming someone from that group?

The problem is in "justification"

Who or what do you want me to justify to when I eat animal products? God? A metaphysical presence of the whole of nature? I was talking about materialism so this is out of reach.

We only ever justify our actions to other humans, therefore the human species is free to define how it should relate to other species.

Also small children, feral humans and some severely disabled people cannot properly uphold our moral standards. Can we eat them?

What a shallow attempt to dunk on an argument. You just made a fool of yourself by hinting that you don't consider small children and other fellow humans to not be part of the human species.

We don't eat disabled people because the collective of humans decided that this is wrong, and it did by being informed by its material conditions. A society where we eat people is a shit society to live in so we're all very happy that whoever tries to eat someone else is being jailed.

Completely right, those are points I did not mention in order to remain focused on the core argument, but those are reasons that pushed me to investigate the basis of moral veganism.

For all the reasons you mentioned, if using animal products, typically raised from grazing, like wool, leather, goat milk etc... makes one a murderous complicit of animal slavery, then the sacrifice to remain in the right path is absolutely huge. Not only in terms of societal changes but in terms of how much potential allies we would alienate if we took a radical moralistic approach to veganism.

In your understanding of “equal”, both you and the infant are considered equal in this scenario

What should be said instead is: humans and non humans have an equal right to live.

Thank you for bringing this up, it's true that "equal right to live" is a better way of expressing the vegan position. Although the definition of inter-species equality that you attribute to my original post is not the one I intend at all. If I edit my post and replace the "equal" by "have an equal right to live" then my take would be the same.

Again, humans and non-humans alike don't have a right to live if you look at the ecosystem as it is. When the first homo sapiens developed the first tools and proto language, there were no right for anything to live. Now the homo sapiens have accumulated a great deal of learning through language. What changed? In order to organise our lives as bigger and bigger collectives we developed tacit rules. The very first rule is, don't go and kill someone because you like to, only kill the people who harm the community.

So that's why...

But, as far as we know we’re the only creatures with morals, ethics and empathy

(Actually non-humans have empathy that's a common argument for veganism)

Humans have developed morality. Because that's useful. For us, the collective craft-based language-based species. That's part of the collective life of humans. Other species though, as you put it, cannot take part of it, they don't share the language or the crafting ability.

So, when you say equal right to live, my question is, in front of whom? Humans have a right to live when other humans recognise their right to live. Humans aren't slaves when other humans recognise that they have a right to be free. So other species have a right to exist and be free in front of the humans who think they do.

So basically, we could adopt moralistic veganism as a basis for society, the question is why would we? And again, I'm not talking about climate change. Imo to tackle climate change we need to use the grass area for grazing because that's better than mono crop agriculture. We need "slaves animals" in practice, even if we only consume them very rarely.

You cannot just compare as 1:1 the societal relations during a revolution and the human consumption of meat. We do not kill and eat animals because we think they pose a danger to us. As the original post says, our relations to other species are defined socially and largely determined by our material reality - consider the difference of pets, working animals or food animals, or even non-animal species. Again, these relations are different in different human societies.

For millions of years humans have eaten other animals and plants. For most of history humans didn't moralize about this, they just did what they had to to survive and ate what they could get their hands on. As our societies developed, and we started practicing agriculture, our diets changed and most people ate a largely more uniform plant-based diet. In modern times the meat industry developed to a massive extent under capitalism. Most people today eat meat simply because it is there and accessible, and importantly, good alternatives are not present everywhere. Diets are also not uniform in today's world and we shouldn't take a western-centric view and abstract it onto every society on the planet.

Any such individual choices, as we know, don't have impact on the system and communists certainly don't preach about individual morality. If our material conditions change and we develop in a way that reduces the meat industry (which can probably only happen in a socialist society) our diets will change along with it and because of it - even our societal moral relations to these animals might change with this. However, we cannot force these changes in reverse order due to moral considerations. Not to mention that more humane and sustainable farming practices would be much easier to implement under socialism with the priority of the food industry being to feed people and not to make a profit.

We as Marxists can certainly be vegetarian or vegan, but preaching veganism as a moral good is not compatible with Marxism, and the idealistic, liberal ideology and political movements of veganism - which just presuppose any use of animal products in the abstract as moral wrongs and are thus quite chauvinistic in their expression - are not compatible with Marxism. We don't want to impose these concepts onto people from above and plenty of human societies consume and have consumed meat in environmentally sustainable ways. The problems here are those of agricultural and industrial practices which are problems due to capitalism, and not due to eating meat or using animal products as such.

Thank you for this point, it invites more useful precisions.

Communists do act morally in struggle by only resorting to killing when necessary. But why? Do communists all belive in afterlife, or do they obey to idealistic imperatives? Not at all, firstly communists understand that vicious and cruel actions, immoral killings, will alienate them from the masses and undermine the struggle. Secondly, they understand that a society where cruelty isn't considered immoral isn't a society worth fighting for. Again : morality is socially useful, it serves a purpose. Parts of it are in the interest of all and other parts solely in the interests of the ruling class, so we keep adhering to the parts that are in the interests of all, obviously.

Now, if morality is socially useful, we should ask ourselves, is animal cruelty a useful thing to forbid? The answer is yes because humans have a sense of empathy that causes dread at the sight of animal suffering. But how about the exploitation of other species?

If you would consider animals to be part of the human society, I can only say that this is widely unrealistic for the reason that we don't function in the same way as other species. We can't eat grass, cattle can't build tools to farm land, we can't sleep outside, cattle can't build houses. At every points of human life, there is teaching through language and production by the hands. Other species cannot contribute to human society in a free way, either we use them as means of production, either we stop interacting with them.

So given the material fact that non-human species cannot be included in the framework of human societies because of their wide physical differences, then the problem morality of using them is upon us.

So finally, your point was that we don't have to kill them, it's not obligatory. It's true, but I'm not saying we have to kill them, I'm saying we just can, there is no god or rule of existence to tell us that we shouldn't. Contrary to killing random people for pleasure, exploitation of other species doesn't collapse human society. There is no use in depriving ourselves of it if we stop the capitalist death machine demanding always more meat for the burgers. We can be empathetic towards other living beings but we have no imperative to stop using them.

Vegan moral absolutism implying that animal violence is equal to human violence flies directly in the face of trying to exist in a world with animals beyond the control of laws or language.

Yes that's a good way to put it!

I knew you were a psycho when you made a post about the MBTI test.. this confirms it.

Classes describe concrete socio-economic relations in human society. We can't just add or remove them as we please or apply them to any concept or relation in general.

I checked your profile, I understand your situation, I don't take your insults personally, but I wonder if it's a good idea for you to be on a community of people discussing highly controversial topics in the most down to earth way possible. Maybe spare yourself the burden of random online encounters and focus on your own health