Consider bacon.
When bacon appears on the shelves of a supermarket refrigerator – pre-sliced, cling-wrapped, and bloodless – it does its best to seem a commodity like any other. American consumers, who eat around 50 pounds of pork each year, in thrall to the cultural and marketing phenomenon of “bacon mania”, live in a society where their relationship to animals is almost entirely mediated by complex value chains and where they can therefore “eat meat without the killers or the killing”.
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’s 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 “ag-gag” legislation and union-busting “right to work” laws. The entire social, political, and ecological biography of bacon is effaced behind its commodity form.
Once we “get behind the veil” 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 pro-duced the bacon – including but not limited to animal rights-related concerns – 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?
This article argues that 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 follow Steven Lukes’ description of the Left as “a tradition and a project … which puts in question sacred principles of social order, contests unjustifiable but remediable inequalities of status, rights, powers and condition and seeks to eliminate them through political action”, and include its increasing integration of a strong commitment to environmental justice. 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 theor-etically and given a particular political-historical context, to achieve material and ideological social change. We argue that the Left’s goals are served by a broad-based opposition to industries and pro-duction processes rooted in the commodification of and violence against animals.
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 “consumer behaviors, i.e. behaviors that engage markets” 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 “practice movement,” or a form of explicitly political “unorganized and unrepresented but nonetheless collective action”. As we will illustrate below, this definition of veganism is flexible enough to adapt to many material and cultural circum-stances, including indigenous contexts and cosmologies.
Conceptually, we situate veganism within a three-tier model for animal-inclusive political action, which can be schematized as follows:
- The top tier establishes total liberationism as the overarching ethical-political horizon, one that demands the liberation of all sentient beings from oppression perpetrated by other sentient beings.
- The middle tier identifies specific sites of oppression, namely systems of power rooted in race, sex, gender, class, ability, age, religion, and species, among others. Differential consideration and treatment based on species categorization alone, or speciesism, is the particular locus of oppression for animals.
- The bottom tier identifies patterns of action, or tactics, deployable in the service of corresponding fronts of resistance, some crossing between different sites of oppression and others focused on individual goals or issues, some collective and others individual. These tactics include both “negative” and “positive” duties, such as boycotts and sit-ins, voting and legislative pressure, changing one’s use of language, or engaging in direct action, among myriad others.
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 (Part 1), situate it within the broader horizon of total liberation and its targeted sites of oppression (Part 2), and explain why it constitutes an effective tactic for eroding capitalism (Part 3).
Part One – Veganism as Political Boycott
In 1944, Donald Watson, co-founder of the Vegan Society, coined the term “veganism,” to distinguish abstention from eating any animal-derived pro-ducts from lacto-ovo vegetarianism. Five years later his co-founder Leslie Cross formally defined the term as “the doctrine that man should live without exploiting animals”. By 1979 the definition solidified with “veganism” denoting
a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment.
The first definition centers on, and the second includes, a particular, individual pattern of action: an ethically- and politically-motivated abstention from participating in the exploitation of animals, which includes not consuming them as food and commodities and otherwise refusing to participate in their use. In short, a boycott. Whatever else it might also be, such as a phil-osophy or lifestyle, veganism is intrinsically a form of praxis: a refusal to par-ticipate in exploitation as part of a political conviction and strategy of political change. It is a tactic available to both individuals and collectives and, like other boycotts, to a broad cross-section of society, including those who have considerable capacity to effect change through additional means and also disenfranchized or otherwise oppressed populations who lack such means. It is an embodied practice that forms part of one’s commitment to imagining a world that could be otherwise, where relations between humans and animals – and, by extension, between humans and the natural environment – are not inherently predicated on violence. As such, it functions in the service of an “all-encompassing anti-exploitation ethic”.
We explicitly distinguish this position from some popular understandings of veganism: namely, the range of liberal and deontological approaches that conflate identity, political commitments, ethical behavior, and consumerism. This latter conception of veganism resembles a religious asceticism where ethics starts and ends with the body and the individual self, often serving as a “litmus test” for others’ commitment to animals and lending itself to a consumerist “neoliberal ethic of care”.
For us, however, veganism exclusively refers to a pattern of action practiced by individuals and groups, directed not at perfecting the self, but rather outward at challenging and refusing to participate in systems of exploitation. It is a material and symbolic act that addresses oppressive econ-omic and political conditions, strengthens the resolve to dismantle them, and acts as a form of propaganda by deed. It sees the quotidian consumption of food as a site for the subversion of hegemonic structures and norms, where the refusal to consume animal products works opportunistically, employed when and where possible “in isolated actions, blow by blow”. It publicly expresses solidarity with the exploited – includ-ing animals, farm and slaughterhouse laborers, and those humans and animals whose ecosystems are ravaged by the spread of animal agriculture – as part of any number of political projects that resist capitalist depredation. Crucially, veganism as we conceive of it can co-articulate with, but does not require political or ideological adherence to, the agenda of any particular animal rights organization.
While veganism shares many characteristics with other political absten-tions, such as anti-sweatshop boycotts and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement, it distinguishes itself by enacting an alternative sense of who registers in our ethical calculus. Or, stated differently, it seeks to alter the terms that determine which beings are a who and which are a what. In this sense, it dissents from what Jacques Rancière, Panagia, and Bowlby calls a partition of the sensible: it disrupts the map that frames whose interests are legible as interests in a given collectivity. To adopt veganism as praxis does not just attempt to directly reduce the amount of animal products consumed (though that, too, is crucial), but pre-sents a commitment to live a life that relates to animals in a new way – and to be open to the new relationships and practices that subsequently emerge.
To be sure, this distinction between veganism and other political absten-tions is not absolute – boycotts against labor exploitation draw attention to how workers are treated more like things than persons. But in these situations, the problem occurs on the register of hypocrisy: workers have not been treated according to the standard that humans ought to be treated; they are whos treated as whats. In the hegemonic terms of ethical value, no such hypocrisy exists with animal objectification, only a cruel consistency. Veganism recognizes that animals have a distinct relationship with the process of fabricating commodities as not simply exploited labor, but captive flesh to be literally consumed; there is a “death-value” in the bodies of animals that no labor reform or “humane” farming practice can erase.
This approach challenges a persistent argument in some corners of leftist thought that animals fall outside progressive politics because they are objects, rather than subjects, of history, incapable of political agency. This line of thought stretches from Karl Marx to British socialist and animal experimenter Stephen Rose (author of the essay “Proud to be a Speciesist”)who rejected the notion of animal rights and defended a hierarchy of species in socialist publications, to writers in contemporary Left publications who reject any explicit overlap between Left politics and animals’ interests.
Despite a long history of individual leftists concerned with animal issues calling on other leftists to join them, or to at least consider vegan-ism as desirable from an ecological standpoint, and also despite overwhelming ethical arguments justifying animals’ moral standing and right to superior treatment; Regan, those who champion animals’ interests still remain “‘orphans of the Left,’ championing a progressive cause that is shunned by other progressive movements”. One would think that those on the Left concerned with the reifying effects of capitalism and the violence it enacts on humans and the natural environment would welcome an animal-inclusive revolutionary critique and act upon it. Any critique that recognizes a “demystification of our social relations,” argue Johnson and Johnson, “contains both accusations and an imperative: We ought to do what we can to achieve a new and better set of relations that is less mystified, less exploitative”. Yet the Left has proven hesitant to embrace not only veganism, but the question of animals altogether.
Angela Davis said that
I usually don’t mention the fact that I’m vegan but I think it’s the right time to talk about it because it’s part of a revolutionary perspective … People don’t think about the horrendous suffering that those animals endure simply to become food products to be consumed by human beings. And I think that the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world … And so I think that would really be revolutionary: to develop a kind of repertoire, a habit, of imagining the relations, the human relations and the nonhuman relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment.
This article does not attempt to prove that (or how) individual animals or species command moral worth; given the extant and growing scientific and philosophical literature dismantling the edifice of human exceptional-ism, this seems unnecessary. But the Left’s reticence to engage animal issues represents a refusal to deal seriously with the speciesism foundational to current institutions, relations, and, per Davis, repertoires. Differential consideration and treatment of individuals and groups based on species cat-egorization alone is a central tenet of contemporary society, undergirding numerous projects of exploitation, and the Left performs it as much as any other political group. Though the concept is often presented as an arbitrary form of discrimination with simple analogies to racism and sexism, we instead follow Cary Wolfe in understanding specie-sism as an institution defined by “the ethical acceptability of the systematic ‘noncriminal putting to death’ of animals based solely on their species.” Speciesism is rooted in a “material, institutional base”. Not simply ideational discrimination, it systematically privileges humans’ interests – conceived both socially and biologically – over those of any others. It does not run parallel to racism, sexism, and so on, but co-operates (and cooperates) with them; speciesism is not to racism as animals are to non-white people, but rather the two systems are intersecting social arrangements that unevenly distribute precarity and proximity to death among marginalized populations. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the industrial slaughterhouses where laborers are meant to sacrifice their own health and bodies in the service of enacting violence at a mass scale against animals.
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.
Part Two – Toward Liberation
As outlined in the first tier of our model, 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 offer 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 “the Left” is loosely unified 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 “possible and practicable.” However, for most lef-tists living in industrialized countries, the complete if not near-complete abstention from animal products is surely realizable.
We believe that veganism plays a fundamental role in total liberation because the meat-centric diet and food infrastructure that increasingly struc-tures worldwide consumption – the political-economic-ecological process of “meatification” – 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’“failure” 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 – and often the very possibility – 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.
This model continually colonizes new arenas. We began with bacon.Now consider chicken. The current annual number of fifty billion chickens raised for slaughter globally continues to rise as chicken flesh production has become the fastest-growing animal slaughter sector in the world: a “global poultry agri-food complex” dominated by a handful of corporations mostly from the United States and Europe. U.S. chicken slaughterhouses brutalize their workers with low-pay, dangerous conditions, intimidation, and psychological damage. This model directly emerges from the racialized political economy of the post-war American South. Southern farm tenancy and share-cropping provided the model for its sub-contracting system and ensured cheap labor from women and black people. This broad pattern has not changed. The chicken industry now uses threats of deportation to force migrant labor into similarly abject working conditions and, when more convenient, it uses the forced labor of incarcerated people.
This process exemplifies the “cheap food” regime, or the mass-production of food that is both literally cheap and rooted in “a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work – human and animal, botanical and geological – with as little compensation as possible”. It causes widespread harm to not only animals and laborers, but also public and environmental health, including environmental despoliation, diet-related diseases, and contribution to climate change. Moreover, many animal-extracted products like dairy milk have been pushed on children through school lunch programs, including on popu-lations of color, many of whose members are not lactose persistent, leading to state-subsidized negative health outcomes and “food oppression”.
Going vegan will not overturn this system, but it does respond to two rea-lities: first, capitalism will not be “dismantled” without some alterations to markets and consumption patterns; second, while broader anti-capitalist projects are underway, ongoing mass-scale violence and suffering urgently require immediate mitigation. As Erik Olin Wright notes, anti-capitalism consists not only of a moral stance, but of practical actions that improve the condition of humans (and, we would add, animals). Many on the Left, however, continue to dismiss veganism as part of anti-capitalist praxis – or as being political at all – for a variety of reasons that stem from, on the one hand, its ostensible embrace of consumerist, neoliberal ontology (a charge we address in the next section) and on the other, its alleged whiteness stemming from a separation of dietary practice and cul-tural context.
According to the second criticism, veganism presents yet another coloniz-ing force that runs roughshod over marginalized and non-Western cultural practices. Breeze Harper notes that the whiteness of some social-justice initiatives blunts the effectiveness of their outreach and analysis, leading them to take on an evangelizing, condescending tone when addressing com-munities of color. We agree that certain forms of animal rights and vegan advocacy, especially those conceptualizing it as a single issue auton-omous from the structure of society, downplay the importance of racism, sexism, and ableism. Veganism must and can remain attentive to the complexities of these intersecting systems. Such navigation requires careful, nuanced analy-sis, as has always been the case when negotiating the intersections – or perhaps better yet, the ecologies – of systemic oppression.
But there is an irony in considering veganism as a “white thing,” given, as we have argued, the whiteness of the universalizing, imperial drive behind the “meatification” of food systems all over the world. Moreover, the ongoing exploitation of animals is fundamentally bound up with that of exploited humans all over the world, whether via overfishing, the consump-tion of endangered species, the exploitation of laborers in factory farms increasingly situated in the Global South, and so on. The irony is redoubled given the many non-Western diets that abstain from meat, including various strands of Hinduism, Buddhism, Rastafarianism, Taoism, and Jainism. Western vegetarianism, as historian Tristram Stuart notes, rose in popularity in part because the British encounter with Indian vegetarianism landed such “a powerful blow on European religious and social orthodoxies”.
As praxis, veganism does not require establishing abstract metaphysical principles or a fixed playbook for animal liberation that ignores local con-texts. Veganism evolves and issues from local knowledges produced by struggles for animal liberation that occur in the context of struggles against colonization and other forms of domination. Conversely, food tra-ditions that do center meat did not develop in the current context in which mass slaughter exists at such a large scale, shifting the stakes of the question. Negotiating these changes, the Mi’kmaq scholar Margaret Robinson has shown how veganism comports with cosmological pluralism and her national identity despite the fact that traditional Mi’kmaq diets rely on hunting and fishing. As she argues, though, the choice need not be between living exactly as her ancestors did before colonization did or assimilating into settler society, because Mi’kmaq culture is alive and dynamic. Similarly, Kristy Dunn highlights a growing conversation around veganism in New Zealand’s Maori communities, pointing to a plurality of “indigenous veganisms” as fonts of decolonialism, collective power, and community-building. Though the word veganism itself comes from a twentieth-century Englishman, the term is less important than the praxis that both precedes and will follows it. The task of a Left veganism is to draw inspiration from such diverse traditions. This will inevitably lead to variation in how veganism is practiced, no doubt spurring productive debate and discussion, as is the case for every theory of liberation. Rather than treating subaltern groups as unchanging sets of traditions, we envision veganism being adopted internally and manifesting without imposing a pol-itical project rooted in opposition to animal exploitation under capitalism onto locally-particular, extra-market interspecies relations.
The growing literature on black veganism presents a perfect example of this approach. Writers like Christopher Sebastian McJetters, Breeze Harper, Aph and Syl Ko, and many others have demonstrated the symbiosis between a race-conscious, food justice-oriented veganism and struggles against anti-black racism. These writers see black liberation and animal lib-eration as endogenous. Ko, for instance, writes that black veganism is internal to the project of black liberation because the latter’s rejection of a white supremacist system of value should include rejecting its negative valua-tion of animality. Black veganism, further, does not merely supplement veganism with anti-racism but suggests ways of transforming the project of animal liberation itself, including developing alternative philo-sophical canons and shifting political strategy and messaging.
What ultimately survives this cross-cultural dialogue is the importance of the practice of veganism to the broader project of total liberation. While it involves consumption – and specifically the refusal of certain forms of con-sumption – that is not its totality; it also founds new, noncapitalistic relation-ships amongst humans and between human and animals.
Part Three – Veganism As Tactic
Wright (2015) identifies four “logics of resistance” to contemporary capital-ism: smashing, taming, eroding, and escaping. Calls to smash capitalism are both legitimate and inspiring, but Wright soberly reminds us that “to actually transform capitalism, visions that resonate with anger are not enough; instead, a strategic logic that has some chance of actually accomplishing its goals is needed.” We agree and further emphasize that the erosion and refor-mation of exploitative relationships must occur right now, under capitalism. If another world is possible, it can only be birthed in this one. To erode capitalism, we must “introduc[e] the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches, and figuring out ways of expanding their habitat”. Veganism assists this goal through market impact with a view to destroying demand for animal pro-ducts and making its forms of production obsolete, and by reimagining multi-species relations to ones not rooted in a violent cycle of domination primarily mediated through consumption.
Quite simply, veganism as a boycott matters because boycotts influence supply chains (Friedman 1999), and therefore have tangible effects. Many successful boycotts are organized and targeted at particular companies or states, while veganism is a disaggregated and mostly uncoordinated set of countless consumer decisions undertaken multiple times each day that refuses a particular type of product. Its target is a massive, global industry whose effects are myriad. This presents a classic example of a collective action problem: there would be many beneficiaries of universal veganism, but there are few immediate benefits or effects of anyone acting alone. Mean-while, even if it is politically motivated and to some extent organized by animal rights groups or other institutions, veganism appears for the most part as a scattered and almost entirely individual consumer practice. Here, veganism encounters its stiffest opposition: critics decrying, on the one hand, its ineffectiveness (or the lack of incentive for individuals to enact it given its ostensible ineffectiveness) and, on the other, its ostensible focus on individual, apolitical, and consumerist solutions to complex structural problems.
The latter, ideological objection – reflexively rejecting veganism as individualistic consumerism – only reinscribes the fictive geography of capitalism that fences off the “personal” from the “social,” the “political,” and even the “moral.” Contemporary capitalism filters identity formation and freedom through the construction of a consumer self. Wadiwel writes that the wage not only physiologically but psychologically sustains human laborers through promising freedom via consumption. Life “off the clock” consequently emerges as the only possibility for “free” and “meaningful choices”. Moreover, food anthropologists have long demonstrated that food is a key site of both collective and individual identity formation. Personal eating practices are integral to identity (under capital-ism and elsewhere), and Wadiwel astutely informs us that in this context “giving up animal-based products becomes akin to a loss of world.” Leftist opposition to veganism and other alterations to individual consumption practices, we argue, stems from the internalization of this liberal economic set of premises which protect consumption as a site of amoral and apolitical individuality.
One may counter that neoliberalism rather advances a politics of shopping, touting “conscientious consumption” as resistance par excellence. But this argument betrays a shallow understanding of markets and the history of social change. Capitalism only defensively incorporates conscientious con-sumption to shield against criticism, and in doing so often reveals the need to sustain repressive logics that cast all non-consumer activism as social deviancy. Under ideal conditions of capitalism, any politics of consumption are downplayed in order to safeguard the illusion of consumerism as a fairyland of free play for exploited laborers.
The former, more practical objection to veganism challenges the actual effectiveness of boycotts in affecting supply chains. The commonplace causal inefficacy objection assumes something like the following: whether or not a single consumer purchases a steak today, there will be no appreciable impact on the number of steaks demanded by the retailer, and therefore on the number of cows bred, killed, and finally supplied by the producer. In other words, while well-intentioned, veganism fails as a tactic because it does not affect aggregate demand or even mitigate harm committed against animals in any appreciable way.
Most philosophical responses to this objection deny the moral relevance of expectation. They argue that while one cannot expect their own individual abstention to trigger a change in the supply chain, they can be confident that a fail-to-sell threshold does exist for the retailer. Each consumer has a probabilistic impact, no matter how small, even if their expected impact is indeterminate. Hooley and Nobis argue that, at the very least, the probability of negatively impacting animal industries through boycotting is greater than the probability of negatively impacting them by consuming their products. And once we acknowledge the gravity of the animals’ interests in play, such as avoiding harm and death, the probability of being the pivotal individual consumer becomes immaterial since the benefits of triggering that threshold far outweigh the costs of not enjoying a steak. Moreover, McMullen and Halteman argue, contra Budolfson, that the consumer’s proximity to a triggering threshold is likely greater within “long and complicated supply chains” because narrow profit margins make food markets very sensitive to consumer patterns, which are now more monitorable than ever.
An extension of this critique attacks not what veganism fails to accomplish, but rather what it remains complicit in. This is an economic version of the “purity” argument noted earlier: namely, that veganism fails to extricate one from participation in capitalistic exploitation. Warfield argues that since we cannot predict where our money ends up within circuits of capitalist circulation, no one has clean hands. Peter Gelderloos similarly concludes that “there is no meat industry and vegetable industry, there is only Capital, expanding at the expense of everything else.” However, these critiques – that there is no ethical consumption under capit-alism – implicate any and all market activity of any kind, and so do not condemn veganism in particular. Short of removing oneself completely from capitalist markets, one must inevitably choose between competing con-sumption patterns, with some demonstrably more harmful than others. Hence, for anyone participating in markets, the prima facie vegan imperative survives.
The final argument against the effectiveness of individual action holds that regardless of whether disaggregated individual action in markets is effective to some extent or not, it is de facto meaningless if it cannot achieve structural change. Critics of “political consumption” and the “individualization” of responsibility for addressing ecological ills through lifestyle changes charge that these actions embrace a neoliberal “vote with your dollars” approach to politics, which not only imparts a false sense of individual accomplishment, but also breeds complacency and reluctance to engage in direct action for systemic change. A number of left-leaning essayists have recently argued that whether or not someone eats meat or not is irrelevant to their broader politics vis-à-vis climate change – mass mobilization and structural change not only trump, but for all intents and purposes do not overlap with, individual actions.
This argument, however, is both theoretically flawed and empirically unproven. First, it again reifies the fictitious set of binaries that accompany consideration of individual action – citizen-consumer, consumption-politi-cal action, individual-collective – thereby falling into the trap of internalizing neoliberal categories even as it claims to critique them. In doing so, it also reifies the realm of the political in formalist terms and hews to a narrow spectrum of what constitutes collective action. Vegan-ism, as a “practice movement,” constitutes an “unorganized form of collec-tive action” rooted in it the “direct expression of [its] goals” in quotidian consumption, but is no less political. Moreover, this cri-tique misses the basic fact that “consumer,”“individual,” and “private” actions are profoundly influenced by political and social pressures, motivations, and influences. Second, this line of critique assumes the mutual exclusivity, in practice, of individual and collective action. However, boycotts, including veganism, involve vir-tually zero opportunity cost to political actors. One can engage in structure-focused, collective action(s) while individually abstaining from animal products; one can organize, march, research, work in electoral politics, or engage in direct action all while vegan. Even more damaging to this critique are studies of “conscious consumption”–that is both boycotts and alternative purchasing choices – from Europe and the United States that show that more purposeful consumption choices positively correlate with strong political commitments and active participation in other forms of political action. In other words, “conscious consumption ‘crowds in,’ rather than ‘crowds out,’ political activism”.
If anything, it is tempting to ask those who support strictly collective over individual action why they would expect people to, first, support policies or organize around issues when they are unwilling to change their own behavior on those same issues and, second, to accept the effects of structural change on individual actions they are unwilling to change proactively. Why would someone who actively consumes factory-farmed meat engage in collective action to shut down factory farms? And what is to suggest they would accept, rather than resist, the necessity of consuming less meat if factory farming were to be decreased or abolished?
This, in turn, leads to a question of the nature of large-scale behavioral change. Individual consumer action can not only coexist with other forms of political engagement; it also stimulates norm change. The logics and meanings behind consumption do not remain static; as numerous scholars have shown, “existing social conditions are often more fragile than might be supposed” because their underlying social norms, and therefore their influence on individual behavior, can shift dramatically and often rapidly. Such norm-changes are ubiquitous and have specifically led to changes in harmful consumer behaviors like smoking. Often, they start with individuals and small groups who make individual choices that otherwise seem ineffective or irrational, which then cause “norm cascades” that have broad social or impacts. As social beings, humans tend to match their behavior with “expectations of others’ behaviors and attitudes”, making observable action that models desired behavior as well as social approval and disapproval key to driving both other people’s actions. Acts aimed at norm change and the development of alternative practices can inspire and inform change in meaningful but non-linear and non-collective ways, becoming “more than the aggregate of individual action”.
Put simply, if other people are not going vegan or engaging in a boycott, you are less likely to do so. And the more people go vegan, the more likely it is that others will see veganism as normal and desirable. If no one goes vegan, the odds of structural change to meat production and all its associated forms of exploitation are slim; if everyone were to go vegan, these forms of exploi-tation would disappear.
Moreover, a shift toward veganism would help address the environmental and public health problems caused by the ubiquity of “cheap” meat production. A growing body of recent scientific research suggests that a shift toward plant-based diets is necessary to keep agriculture within planetary limits (in terms of land and water use and GHG emissions). Moreover, it has been suggested that a shift toward plant-based diets would have significant positive public health outcomes including decreased mortality, and undoing the forms of animal-product-driven “food oppression” mentioned earlier. In other words, this shift has the potential for broad collective benefits.
While we share the concern that “it is neither obvious nor straightforward that a society can consume its way into social justice or environmental sustainability”, we have demonstrated that veganism is an effective tactic that groups and individuals alike should embrace for exerting pressure on value chains and for shifting norms as part of a concerted effort to erode at least one systemic manifestation of capitalist exploitation.
Conclusion
We live in a world of nearly ubiquitous exploitation, in which the number of animals killed every year worldwide to feed a neo-colonial diet is nearly eight times the entire human population. In the face of this system, our project is centrally motivated by critical race scholar Joel Olson’s question: “What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”. We don’t have the full answer to his question and veganism is certainly not the overarching answer, but, as we’ve argued, vegan praxis enacts one of its fundamental components. In this article we have defined veganism as a tactic to be employed in the service of broader political goals – what we have termed “tiers”–of political struggle, explained where it fits within different projects of liberation and struggles for justice, and showed that it is effective as a tool for eroding capitalism. For the billions of animals killed every year, the eco-systems destroyed to make room for farms and feed crops, and the people displaced or made to labor in the animal-industrial complex, this active political refusal is the least we can do to show our solidarity.
Editors’ Note
The full version of this article appears in Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 33, Issue 3 (2022). To engage with its references and for purposes of citation, please visit the published version of this article on the Taylor & Francis website.