more leftists should be vegan. veganism and leftism operate on the same beliefs. social justice, no exploitation of labor, autonomy, environmental concern, intersectionality, an equal and just living etc. leftist praxis should include veganism
Indigenously: no.
Animal welfare and animal rights are different things; it is good and normal for humans to be slightly anthropocentric while acknowledging our role within the greater ecosystem. Factory farming should indeed be dismantled- I want all animals harvested for food/leather/fur/bones/organs to have full and rich lives with as little suffering as possible before they're harvested. But it is not anti-leftist to live as a predator within the ecosystem. It is not more wrong for humans to eat salmon than it is for bears and eagles to do so.
i used to work in a vegan restaurant and it had basically all the same labor and management problems as the other restaurants i worked at that served meat. obviously. because it was a business in a capitalist system so obviously theres an economic incentive to pay workers the bare minimum and charge customers the maximum you can get away with.
in fact, the restaurant used the vegan identity and environmentalism as fuel for their marketing in quite cynical ways. at the same time they had a deal with Whole Foods (implicated in prison labor allegations btw) to source ingredients, meaning that there were transcontinentally shipped produce lol. for example we used frozen blueberries that were product of Chile. for a restaurant in the pacific northwest region in the united states of america. there are blueberry farms in oregon, washington, etc. But it’s cheaper to exploit south american farms than get local blueberries i guess. (which still by and large exploit the labor of migrant farmworkers from mexico and south and central america, but i digress)
i was vegetarian at the time and i had a lot of deep conversations with my coworkers and manager and the conclusion i came away with is that veganism is merely a cultural practice and is not inherently “leftist” in any way. if you consider human lives equal to animal lives i think that is not compatible with a clear-sighted materialist analysis of the world we live in. its practically a religious belief. which, like, okay, you can be religious, you can have irrational beliefs, but that’s not what “”””leftism”””” is about. that’s not really what any socialist or communist theory is about. it could be syncretized with socialist theory, but it would always merely be an ill-fitting addendum.
