I escaped the Reddit regime a little while ago. I consider myself a marxist-leninist-MZT. Vegetarian and vegan for a few years. I've a lot of thoughts on how marxism and veganism are connected. Never wrote them down. I'd like to start smth like a club for marxist vegans to develop our own proletarian theory. Most vegan theory I found is either openly bourgeois (Francione is a literal TERF) or revisionist (anti-China, anarchist, libertarian). How about fixing this?
Three day old account asking for the creation of what has the -potential- to be a highly divisive, highly inflammatory community. I wish people would have a different attitude, one of lurking a bit in their new home, understanding its nature and waiting before seeking power and influence and change over it. I doubt OP is ill intentioned I just think "lurk more" is a good mantra.
Let me lay out some thinking.
Whereas:
Hexbear has an existing community around this already that is much larger than this one will ever be and as we are federated you can view and interact with that community and perhaps accomplish your goals?
Whereas the creation of that community on that site led to some of their most enduring struggle sessions and division (curiously their application asks applicants not to be racist, not to be homo or trans-phobic, and about animal liberation stuff, not a whiff about women's rights though even after their big post about misogyny problem, really kind of telling priorities in the western left but perhaps that's for another time). And whereas we have a meager 550 monthly users on lemmygrad total and further division of that is bad.
Whereas great Marxist theorists have written many more times as much on atheism, anti-theism, anti-religion, etc (compared to a few carefully mined quotes relating vaguely to this) and whereas despite this most Marxists and anti-imperialists almost certainly fall within the camp of not being offended by such content nor having a problem integrating it in their lives. But whereas such content was prohibited from becoming a community unto itself on lemmygrad to prevent strife, struggle sessions, disharmony, dis-unity, and division from the wider masses.
Whereas this by contrast would be much more divisive, tends to bring in a lot of problematic people (as with the atheism community in places) who are very dogmatic, inflammatory, hurtful, antagonistic (I'm thinking federated instances here) towards those who don't hold their view and tend to make such posts in great number which are unfriendly to those who don't hold their persuasion and would result in strife, dis-unity, division, and struggle that distracts from primary interests such as anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. (And please let's be honest here, if we're going to say Muslims and Christians should feel welcome by not pushing the Dia-Mat hard in that direction and beating them over the head with it, it's equally if not more important given the amount of people who eat meat even compared to the religious/irreligious (greater) that we not create an unnecessary point of tension here and a point of division from the masses).
Theory-crafting in a dedicated community? I don't have an issue with that, I'm not freaking out about trying to connect veganism and Marxism. What I worry about is the memes, the casual posts, the rants, the venting about "carnists" and so on that stir up trouble and strife when things have been so relatively harmonious here compared to hexbear. Some of that is due to the vetting and requirements for membership, some credit is due to the admins and a lot of that I think is from discouraging anything too inflammatory that distracts from the uniting interest and goal here. I hope you can keep this in mind if you make such a community when setting rules.
To add on to what you are saying. While i think its great if people want to be vegan vegetarian or anything in their own personal lives. I do not think its possible to really separate that issue from elitism. I mean its an individual making an active choice to NOT eat things that are perfectly edible. Just having to financial ability to do that is pretty rare in the wider world. So many people simply don't have the luxury to be picky about what they eat. They just eat what they can get and it usually still isn't enough.
So a community like this doesn't make sense to me. What would make more sense tho in my opinion is a general recipe sharing community where people can share recipes. Vegan users can share affordable easy to make vegan recipes to help expose others to things they might otherwise not be aware are an option. Without trying to push a specific strict diet on them they may not be able to maintain logistically.
Animal products are more usually the more expensive food items. A vegan diet is cheaper, uses less land and resources. If there was no animal agriculture, we would waste less food and could feed more people.
So quite the contrary.
Did i say that it wasnt cheaper? Not getting into how prices vary by region, and westerners have no concept of price since all their shit is subsidized. Price is irrelevant. If you are living in poverty you eat what is available. Sometimes that may be vegan food sometimes it will not be. You dont pick and choose the food you eat. Your just grateful to HAVE food in the first place. Have you ever had to feed yourself without access to a store at all? Thats the reality for many people.
Many people in the world still hunt, and forage, or farm their own foods. Many others are entirely reliant on the donations of others and do not control what they get. More still rely on quick, cheap, highly processed foods that usually have animal byproducts in them.
Like i said in my post. Wanna be vegan? Great do it. But if you actually think that its possible to change the way our societies produce food by individuals being picky about what they eat then you dont understand the issue at all. Food production is a complex global machine, and the average person has no control over it. Even if tons of people suddenly went vegan all it would accomplish is soaring prices for anything vegan forcing people to go back to animal products.
Also food isnt the only place animal products are used. Lots of non-food items use animal products too. Avoiding all these things is a monumentally time consuming and sometimes impossible task. If the only soap you have has animal products do you just not clean yourself?
This doesnt even get into how many people have health based dietary issues that further restrict their diets.
This is exactly the problem with individualism. Problems like this will never be fixed by it. Just like climate change isnt going to be fixed by the actions of individuals trying to watch their carbon footprint.
So yeah for some people in some places being vegan would be cheaper. For some it wouldnt be. For some it wouldnt even be possible. But none of that matters as its all individualistic. This is a systemic issue that requires systemic change to fix.
Outside of the western world, this is false.
Beans and rice are more expensive outside the Western world?
I remember years ago Hexbear pulled an entire subreddit of Vegans into their site solely because they were vegan and nothing else. All they did was go from com to com and harass the ever loving fuck out of everyone. Most of them had to be banned and mods had to put in new rules in some subs. Idk if it was a psyop or just terminally online crazies. Probably a bit of both.
Now, seemingly out of nowhere a 3 day old account pops up using Veganism as an in to cause drama. This post alone already has some pretty rabbid comments popping up. Mainly by Hexbear and Lemmy.ml accounts that came in at warp speed when we RARELY see them this involved with a Lemmygrad post.
The funny thing is, there's lots of Vegans in Lemmygrad, yet you never see them acting like this towards fellow comrades. Weird how the brand new accounts pops in, makes a post like this, and all of a sudden it's filled with non-lemmygrad accounts starting drama. All seems suspect to me.
The Hexbear vegan thing wasn't random. It was because Reddit started to crack down on /r/vegancirclejerk which, despite the name, was a place for vegans to discuss serious ethics amongst themselves (along with memes) instead of being constantly filled with "I'm not vegan but..." posting. Too many memes about those users made Reddit uncomfortable in the same way Chapo got banned for John Brown posting. They were also invited, because the circlejerk sub had a lot of crossover with other leftist subreddits and were looking for somewhere to migrate.
It wasn't some sort of invasion, just a result of Hexbear being exposed to a lot of serious vegan users making non-vegan users expand their definition of intersectionalism (admittedly with abrasive posting, in the same way HB is already abrasive) and those vegan users struggling to blend into a space that was now focused on more general interests. The most problematic users were dealt with.
I'm also a HB poster, but this was just on my front page. Just wanted to clarify because your post I think unintentionally plays into the "crazy vegan" stereotype that is all too prevalent all over the internet and makes it sound like they one day decided to take over a completely unrelated website.
My only interaction with that sub was joining for 3 days before seeing some rather disturbing posts advocating for anti-natalism (I don't want to elaborate much but it was content warning worthy) and leaving.
It was barely even relevant to the topic of the sub. Really crazy the kinds of shit that flies in spaces that don't take a hard line for moderation.
This is correct. That sub was a branch from other vegan subs because the more extreme and crazy of the users got banned from them. Vegancirclejerk was literally where all the "crazy vegan stereotypes" went when they normal people in the other vegan subs kicked them out.
I'm not going to say it was full of entirely good takes all the time, but it did aggressively combat the kind of "we're carnivores lol" logic that is even being presented in this thread. Animal liberation is a significant blind spot for a lot of communists that they refuse to even investigate. The 'normal' vegans you're talking about are just quiet about it, which is why everyone likes them because they don't prompt anyone to investigate. I don't think its appropriate to relitigate that entire event, but if someone is comfortable congratulating someone for settling for "less bigotry" instead of "no bigotry", you'll find the difference between the type of person that posts on /r/vegan vs. VCJ.
Tbh I don't think this post is attracting all that much attention, it's like, 3 or 4 people having a comically drawn out discussion where all parties are from seemingly completely different planets and can't seem to figure out what the others are saying, pretty entertaining but not so productive.
This whole paragraph is a bit suspect.
How so?
Well, first of all, Lemmygrad's applications don't ask about women's rights, either. All Lemmygrad asks is "What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support LGBTQ+?" — no asking about racism or animal liberation, either. So bringing up not asking about women's rights, as if this is unique to Hexbear, rather than applying to both Hexbear and Lemmygrad, is strange.
The bigger point however is that anyone with a non-superficial understanding of LGBT+ issues understands how the oppression of LGBT+ people stems from and reinforces the subjugation of women. The wording of the "western left's priorities" — and the implication that misogyny on Hexbear is caused at least in part by not explicitly asking about women's rights in user applications — together get uncomfortably close to accusing LGBT+ issues of being "western decadence" wholly separate from women's issues, whose advancement is detrimental for women.
The final point is that calls for unity I observe often come from a place of the one calling for unity really just wanting people to shut up about something that that person does not want to confront. The final paragraph of darkcalling's comment adds some more context to this end: "What I worry about is the memes, the casual posts, the rants, the venting about "carnists" and so on that stir up trouble and strife when things have been so relatively harmonious here compared to hexbear." — This makes it sound to me like this person really just wants to avoid having to think about veganism, and wants to make that vegans' problem rather than keeping it their own.
I think that if you say that vegans aren't allowed to complain about carnists, that all this really does is make the space less welcoming for vegans, and make tensions rise between vegan and carnist users, for the sake of the carnist users' conscience alone. And I frankly don't think that anyone who doesn't have thick enough skin to not flip out and get aggressively defensive when told that eating meat is wrong, belongs in a space where people should by all means regularly be putting in the effort to unlearn their own indoctrination.
I dunno, I guess that's just how I feel about it, personally.
I am 3 day old but I lurked for a few weeks here. I'm not going to discuss veganism on this sub. I really didn't use any "carnist" word here to avoid any tension. I wrote here to introduce myself (this is my second post) and to cover vegans who don't read hexbear.
I think we should think very carefully about tamping down on Marxist viewpoints for the sake of unity, on a case by case basis. Just because we do it for one thing doesn't necessarily mean we should do it for another. In the case of brow-beating religious people with dia-mat, i think the case for unity over discourse is valid because atheists are not an oppressed minority that we should fight over or risk losing from the movement. This is also the case of vegans. Animals are an oppressed minority, yes, but they cannot join our movement, and so we can't risk losing them from our movement if we don't steadfastly defend them.
I mention this because if you're not careful you could apply this logic where it actually matters, like racial or gender oppression. Should we handle racism with kid gloves because it might cause division and scare off white people? No! Because then we risk losing oppressed racial and gender minorities from the movement for not defending them.
Convincing points.