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?
I think a Marxist exploitation would be interesting!
I think a materialist analysis of why veganism became popular, and why it was recent, would be interesting. There are, of course, related precedents in diet with religious vegetarianism (Buddhist, veg Hindu, etc) and minimizing unnecessary harm (Jainism, Quakers, certain middle eastern philosophies, etc). But veganism as we think of it is a modern phenomenon that emerged in a highly industrialized society of the imperial core.
I think the elephants in the room are industrialized agriculture, the end of famine conditions, and the social aspect of acquiring food from markets. Eating a modern vegan diet was not practicable before B12 vitamins and cheap staples. People that tried would eventually become malnourished. Re: famine conditions, if you have not had to think about the prospect of dying from a lack of food, you may spend more time thinking about where it comes from and how you might be more picky about it. And with the social component of markets, food is a consumer choice, an abstraction away from its production (complete with Marxist alienation), and not as much of a core social activity as are hunter gatherer activities or working a farm. Not eating animal products means a substitution of items bought at a market with no need to substantially change a budget. And when it’s a consumer choice abstracted from production, when you learn about its production you will be more likely to be horrified.
So yeah things like that are interesting. They could also assist in understanding how one might understand the advancement of veganism dialectically, e.g. avoiding being chauvinist towards societies that haven’t had the necessary productive and social prerequisites to have this perspective, being too busy dealing with imperialism and their own development. And how pushing for certain kinds of economic and food security may be a better way to spend a portion of one’s advocacy budget. And why certain psychological barriers exist to adopting a vegan stance and how they might be addressed without a liberal approach.