One of the things that gets me whenever Iâm talking to other leftists about veganism is how quickly they become pro-capitalist.
The land is âunusableâ for anything else? The most common take is to put a farm, and always a factory farm by their own descriptions of what the farm would be like, on it instead of figuring out why an area is so unusable, attempting to see if it could be rewilded, and then returning it to the native community that once lived there or turn it into a protected space if the area hasnât been colonised.
You want to boycott the meat, dairy, egg, honey, wool, leather, etc industries? But what about the people who own farms and the people who work on them? Thatâs their livelihood, how will they make ends meet? Your boycotting will ruin lives!
And yet, boycotting Starbucks, Chick-fil-a, Burger King, Target, Walmart, Amazon, etc is completely fine, thatâs encouraged.
Not to say no one in the history of boycotts has ever brought it up, but I have never seen people in the leftist spaces Iâm in talk about how the owners and workers will be affected by boycotts.
So itâs really just an excuse to keep consuming because going vegan means you actually have to give up the things you like to align with your morals, meanwhile brand specific boycotts are just minor inconveniences.
You can just go get coffee at another coffee stop, you canât get dairy milk ethically anywhere else, but itâs something people really like, so naturally they look for the harm in not consuming it and latch onto that, but the thing is that they take a pro-capitalist stance to do it.
The vast majority of farmed animals are from factory farms, they are megacorporations. The owners youâre defending are millionaires and the farmers youâre âsupportingâ are paid in scraps to do dangerous and traumatising labor while being regularly abused and exploited outside of that.
And even though buying from smaller farms is generally more ethical, itâs still unethical from both a non-human and human rights and welfare perspective, and it just isnât feasible long-term.
If half the people who ate meat began getting it from smaller farms, those farms would develop into larger, more factory farm-like, farms to meet demands sooner or later, because farming is always going to be business first.
