The material incentive to raise meat for slaughter is that people buy it. You remove that incentive by not buying it, fewer people will raise meat for slaughter.
Joseph Stalin himself described boycotts as a viable means of political activism.
I'd prefer to firebomb meat processing plants but that's pretty hard to pull off
the issue is that veganism as a method of disincentivising meat production through boycott is ineffective not because boycotts are ineffective, but because it is not a boycott.
you are not withholding your purchase until they meet a set of conditions at which point you will resume purchase.
you are removing yourself from their list of customers entirely. your only demand to the meat production company is that they cease to exist, which obviously precludes them further selling you a product.
that is both fine and good, but it is not a disincentive to meat production.
A lot of food gets thrown away in different parts of the supply chain, but ultimately the amount of a food that is produced is largely determined by how much of it will be bought. If supermarkets are faced with significantly fewer customers buying meat, they'll reduce the amount they buy from suppliers, and ultimately the farms will be forced to downsize how much they produce (or some will go out of business). That's how it acts as a disincentive.
the amount of food [produced is] determined by [what] will be bought
they literally let whole fields of produce rot every year rather than ship it to starving people, because profit margins.
the idea that a couple of percentage points of purchase power will sway things the way youre talking about is nonsense. it would require a massive majority of people refusing to eat any meat product, which simply isnt going to happen [of its own volition], and even then under capitalism, meat production would just reduce to an elite luxury item that prices itself accordingly, not an actual end to the practice.
edit: bottom line is, personal responsibility is not a viable answer to systemic problems
the idea that a couple of percentage points of purchase power will sway things the way youre talking about is nonsense. it would require a massive majority of people refusing to eat any meat product, which simply isnt going to happen [of its own volition], and even then under capitalism, meat production would just reduce to an elite luxury item that prices itself accordingly, not an actual end to the practice.
Sure, if not enough people do it, it won't have any effect, but what kind of activism doesn't that apply to?
It's a good point that consumer choice alone wouldn't completely eliminate animal exploitation. But: firstly, massively reducing it is also a huge win. And secondly, it'd be far easier to take action (either direct action or conceivably even democratic action if it comes to that) to completely eliminate animal exploitation if a large proportion of the population didn't eat meat, because people usually don't support something that impacts them negatively, and taking away the meals they enjoy would do that.
edit: bottom line is, personal responsibility is not a viable answer to systemic problems
I agree, but the whole point that I'm trying to get across is that because veganism is a movement, it's not just personal responsibility or individual consumer choices, it's a cooperative effort across many people. It's the difference between being mad at my work conditions so I phone in sick vs being mad at my work conditions so I participate in a strike. It'd be disingenuous to pretend the latter is just a whole load of individuals doing the former at the same time. If your point is that your consumer choice has to be coupled with advocacy, then yes I agree, but I don't think anyone here is claiming otherwise. It's in the title of this thread.
i think my point boils down to that, as a movement, "we just have to not purchase" is weak as hell, so i want to drive home very clearly that that is not and will never even approach being enough to stop a profit motive in its tracks.
like, imagine if abolitionists had come out like "no you guys, all we have to do to end slavery is not purchase slaves! this will cause the invisible hand of the free market to destroy the slave state apparatus for us!" and the only advocacy they did to furthur abolition was in getting other people not to buy slaves.
clearly even with all the shit abolitionists did, slavery still hasnt ended, so obviously that wouldnt work
we just have to not purchase” is weak as hell
it's not the goal of veganism, it's the bare fucking minimum that even supposed leftists on this site can't seem to be bothered with
yeah great good, i fucking agree. wild to me that the person making this thread apparently thinks the point of veganism is "harm reduction"
like damn, im not even vegan, im a vegetarian, and i have fucking loftier goals than that
you might have lofty goals, but you can't even be bothered to do the bare minimum and still criticise others
You want a medal? You're vegetarian, you still pay people to CW
spoiler
kill and rape
animals for you.
"I don't eat meat, I just pay to have them used up and killed so OTHER people can eat their meat"
:CommiePOGGERS:
the only animal product i consume these days is honey.
so... nope.
:comrade-fly:
well then it shouldn't be too hard to stop, would it? You're an omni in the vegan comm, what did you expect?
you can't even be bothered to do the harm reduction you think is not enough and I'm supposed to take you and your opinion seriously?
"you consume iphone and im supposed to take your opinion about capitalism seriously?" :very-smart:
using an iphone is necessary in this day and age, contrary to honey, and you know that. Now you're just debasing yourself with omni-level takes
:very-intelligent: k whatever bruh
im disengaging from this, since you literally have said you disregard anything and everything i have to say out of hand
Can I ask why you don't just go vegan then? You're like basically there lol
because i dont see a reason not to consume honey
apiaries are good and pollinate loads of plants.
having bees is environmentally beneficial.its not vegan, but its not morally reprehensible. yall disagree and i find the argument uncompelling
Here's an article that talks about it. I think it's not the best written article, particularly in the beginning lol, but there are good points I'll list below:
Factory-farmed honey bees are victims of unnatural living conditions, genetic manipulation and stressful transportation. Beekeepers force their hives to live in boxes to make it easy to transport them as well as to harvest the honey.
When a new queen is born, the hive will instinctively split. Since this causes a decline in honey production, beekeepers will often clip the new queen’s wings to prevent her from leaving.
Queens are artificially inseminated, either instrumentally or through the use of drones (who are then killed afterwards).
Large commercial operations sometimes take all the honey instead of leaving enough for the bees to get through the winter. The honey is then replaced with a cheap sugar substitute.
If their colony becomes infected with deadly parasites, beekeepers opt to burn the entire hive with the bees still inside rather than go to the trouble of relocating them first.
When thinking about it like this, it's hard to say it's fine or even morally grey.
Thoughts?
Btw - I see you disengaged talking to u/Lord_ofThe_FLIES, but haven't said the same to me. If you'd rather not talk to me either, that's fine, but this is a good faith question.
yeah absolutely large commercial honey farming is problematic as fuck
but small local apiaries exist, and are better for you anyways because they include antihistamines for the localized pollen...
basically its the same kind of thing as the dreaded
stugglesessionohgod
backyard chicken
thing, where people can, do, and will, form symbiotic rather than parasitic relationships with them.
like, i have built a number of apiaries over the years, and have never done any of the things listed there [aside from the hive being a box, but like... if the bees move out im not stuffing them back in lol. hasnt ever happened anyways]
Animals (including invasive farmed honeybees) are not commodities for you to lust over their excretions, you vegetarian coward.
Right - someone can be a nice bee / chicken owner, but it doesn't change the fact that they're stealing something the animal needs for itself.
Is it as bad as factory farming?
No, but that's not really the point. Bees need their honey, chickens need their eggs. It also sets the precedent for others that it's okay to do and will just lead to large scale farming again.
I actually was a vegetarian until about 5 years ago and I used to have chickens. They are basically pets and they actually didn't need the eggs at all, like they would lay them on my porch and just leave them. We let them set on eggs when they wanted and it all seemed pretty reasonable, but here is the catch, you let them set on eggs as is their nature, fine good, and the the eggs hatch and you get roosters. If you have two or more roosters they will mutliate and kill each other because of the necessarily unnatural conditions they have to live in in a northern climate. So we got to the point where we needed to kill them. This was about 12 years ago and I actually ate meat at the time. I took them out to the field to kill them and it was a gloomy spring morning and as I killed them all I had this crazy spiritual moment where their lives literally flashed before my eyes. I sort of broke down. I ate those chickens, but I neve ate meat again after that. (Ok, full disclosure, I ate pork momos in Nepal that I had order by accident. I felt bad for my white privilege of throwing out food in such a poor country, but I didn't get through them and got sick to my stomach. Suffice to say I was more careful ordering food after that.)
Who is saying that a percentage of people not eating meat is going to stop the profit motive in its tracks? I have literally never heard one person argue that in my entire life. You are tilting at windmills.
The point is it is a reduction in suffering and it doesn't cost us anything. If you get to reduce suffering by any amount for free that's a win.
strikes are a withholding of labor that stalls or prevents the commodity from being made. its the commodified brand thats usually being boycotted when it comes to boycotts
with a strike management loses its labor and thus the products the labor produces vs with a boycott management just sells less product but the ability to make that product is still intact
i dont really have an opinion on whether boycotting is meaningful or not, i just think its different than a strike
:this:
which is what my main point was in my first post.
veganism is not a boycott. its a demand for abolishment.
yup! basically its when they decided to destroy the train itself in snowpiercer vs their old plan when they wanted someone from the tail section to control the engine instead of wilfred
if the point is to stop the raising of animals for slaughter, that is literally abolishment of the meat industry.
which would be good
not really sure what youre not getting here.
:yes-sicko:
either you want that switch flipped off or you dont. "harm reduction" doesnt flip switches
You know, you can want the switch flipped and try to reduce harm in the meantime. Unless you can come up with some very inventive way that not buying meat impedes your ability to do activism to abolish meat entirely.
my god, its almost like my whole point was that "not buying meat" is not enough in and of itself to make any headway on that second part, and thus conceptualizing it as a boycott is counterproductive because it instills the idea that one has done enough :shocked-pikachu:
The problem with your argument is that it literally just is a boycott.
"withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest." Oxford dictionary
It is very clearly a withdraw from commercial relations, and very clearly done in protest
"to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (a person, a store, an organization, etc.) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions" Merriam-Webster
You might take exception with "concerted," but as I have said this cultural phenomenon practised by millions of people over decades not to mention numerous organizations that advocate for a plant based diet.
"to refuse to buy a product or take part in an activity as a way of expressing strong disapproval" Cambridge dictionary
It clearly expresses strong disapproval.
The second half of your argument is that it apparently promotes an idea that I have never heard anyone express either directly or indirectly. On the contrary, animal rights activist are some of the most notoriously committed and militant activists there are.
Your concern is that by calling a boycott a boycott you might promote an idea that is the opposite of the idea that people actually have of people who carry out said boycott.
quoting the dictionary at me (lmao) does not change at all what a boycott actually is for, that is, to alter the way a business operates based off of their percieved loss of revenue, which they can regain by modulating behavior in accordance with a set of demands.
veganism is not a boycott, because it doesnt seek for the meat industry to take any action which would result in vegans resuming the purchase of meat.
im done responding to this.
Ok, well as I have said it does disincentivize them by reducing the size of their market, which does reduces the value of their product based on a reduction in demand, which in turn will reduce investment and less investment means less money to build factory farms and slaughter houses.
So if you want to continue calling the people using the commonly held definition of the word boycott anti materialist for believing that a reduction in demand for a product has an effect on the profit motive, which is about as materialist as you can get, because of a fear that it might create a perception of vegans that is completely contrary to the actual public perception of vegans, then I think you are going to be having a lot more of these discussions in the future.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep "being a radlib" and advocating for veganism.
Ah yes capitalists, famous for being both motivated entirely by profit margins, but also not responding to changes in profit margins.
Now it's 10 idiots who think meat companies operate like video game companies in regards to having "key demographics." No dumbasses, they just want sales. Someone going vegan is a lost sale to them which is why they fund anti-PETA propaganda and market their foods to everyone and try to counter every vegan truth they can through false studies, etc.
It's weird that you even see this critique, because vegans are notorious for their activism and direct action.
Around here, yes. Leftists stereotype vegans as being entirely focused on individual action, and, sorry to say it, but it's almost entirely to score points. I'm sure the owners of some of the farms around here that have been raided and photographed have a bit of a different idea of what a vegan is and does, lol.
It's kind of a shame, tbh. There's a lot that vegans can learn from leftists and vice versar, but that involves rooting out the bigotry and nasty assumptions on both sides.
It's not leftists and leftist vegans, it's leftists in general (of whom lots are not vegan) and vegans in general (of whom lots are not leftist).
I think people get confused by the "personal consumer choices" thing. Me deciding that I don't like a company and not buying their products for a while isn't any kind of meaningful activism. Me cooperating with a large group of people for a sustained boycott, coupled with advocacy, can be.
I've seen people point out subsidies to farmers and so on as counteracting the effect of people going vegan, and that's true to an extent, but this just means there's a bigger barrier to overcome. Eventually if a large enough proportion of people went vegan, the dam would break.
The fact that the government has to step in to subsidize the industry certainly suggest to me that its actually having a pretty significant material effect. So I would sort of draw the exact opposite conclusion.
omnis think being plant based is the goal of veganism when it's the bare minimum, the moral baseline they can't even meet. Because they aren't doing shit they hope vegans aren't either. Well, guess what, there's a lot of vegan activists that put most of you libs to shame
I think the only legit argument is consumer side activism works best on a small scale, where the impact is very clear and obvious. As it scales up the effect of your activism becomes obscured since the boycotters becomes a smaller % of the market.
Obviously veganism isn’t antimaterialist, but there has to be more than just consumer side activism when you are on the scale of nationwide/global distribution.
As a form of activism, sure, but if you have millions of people not eating meat, meat production is going to draw less investment and will have a material impact on producers, which will inevitably lower meat production. So just in terms of purely reducing animal suffering, it's going to have a big effect.
The number of people going vegan does not out number the growing markets in developing countries. Major production companies are still gaining customers on a global scale due to globalization.
Obviously go vegan, but expecting real change out of nothing but a dietary choice is unrealistic. Direct action through other means like legislation etc. will be more effective both in the short and long term
On the small scale though I think it is effective. If you get your entire friend group or community to boycott a family restaurant that supplies the meat from their farm you will be having a real effect on those animals.
Direct action through other means like legislation
Direct action like legislation?
The idea that millions of people in a sustained way over decades boycotting a product doesn't cause real change just doesn't make sense. That is the exact kind of anti materialist thinking I was talking about. It's like some kind of doomerist religious thinking.
“AN EFFECT” yes, a large effect on a growing market with billions of customers I don’t believe so. I’m not saying going vegan isn’t a good thing, I’m simply saying that it is not very impactful compared to other direct actions. The global markets are expanding to the billions in the global south, where veganism is not as prominent, therefore these global corporations will not really see an impact profits wise due to prominence of veganism in the global north. Therefore I think we need to focus on more drastic action than simply a diet change
Vegetarianism isn't a fad so it's not really applicable. It's been in a steady increase for decades. Obviously it's gojng to go through periods of relative popularity, but overall it is increasing, and the market is hugely responding with q huge number or overpruced designer plant based products.
For reference, you are arguing from the materialist perspective that supply and demand doesn't exist. That's a pretty lofty claim. The market for a commodity has no relavence to the value of that commodity or investment in it's production or ultimately the amount of that commodity that is produced.
Like I said, this isn't a temporary reduction, it's a sustained reduction for decades so that example is not applicable at all.
If a company that makes meat products invests in making meat alternatives, that means they are aren't investing in meat products.
There hasn't been a drop in animals in captivity because of globalization, but there would be even more animals in captivity if it were for the millions of vegetarians all over the world.
Of course they can. I don't know what that proves. Money that is invested in meat alternatives is literally, that exact dollar, is not invested in meat. The fact that it is companies that have traditionally made meat products doing this only further illustrates the point. A bunch of ghouls sat down in a board room and said ok, if we invest in veggie burgers there is a better return. Seeing that better return they did not invest that in new factory farm.
Like how does meat companies inveating I meat alternatives not prove my point?
I get your point generally, but any example is necessarily going to be a simplification.
I can't really post a 200 page dissertation on the effects vegetarianism has on the meat industry though.