Arxiv and similar services are mostly used in actual academic circles to publish pre-prints or just to get articles out there while they’re still being reviewed by actual journals, so it’s possible that this will be published in a journal at some point.
After reading some discussion on lemmygrad about veganism, I felt the need to share my thoughts in a separate thread, as comments weren’t appropriate for the wall of text I’m about to throw....
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.
"Research" by US university says lemmygrad is the 4th most popular "tankie" website (twitter.com)
The whole article is quite funny, especially the lists of most used tankie words, or the branding of foreignpolicy as a left-wing news source.
Veganism and materialism
After reading some discussion on lemmygrad about veganism, I felt the need to share my thoughts in a separate thread, as comments weren’t appropriate for the wall of text I’m about to throw....
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