You cannot just compare as 1:1 the societal relations during a revolution and the human consumption of meat. We do not kill and eat animals because we think they pose a danger to us. As the original post says, our relations to other species are defined socially and largely determined by our material reality - consider the difference of pets, working animals or food animals, or even non-animal species. Again, these relations are different in different human societies.
For millions of years humans have eaten other animals and plants. For most of history humans didn’t moralize about this, they just did what they had to to survive and ate what they could get their hands on. As our societies developed, and we started practicing agriculture, our diets changed and most people ate a largely more uniform plant-based diet. In modern times the meat industry developed to a massive extent under capitalism. Most people today eat meat simply because it is there and accessible, and importantly, good alternatives are not present everywhere. Diets are also not uniform in today’s world and we shouldn’t take a western-centric view and abstract it onto every society on the planet.
Any such individual choices, as we know, don’t have impact on the system and communists certainly don’t preach about individual morality. If our material conditions change and we develop in a way that reduces the meat industry (which can probably only happen in a socialist society) our diets will change along with it and because of it - even our societal moral relations to these animals might change with this. However, we cannot force these changes in reverse order due to moral considerations. Not to mention that more humane and sustainable farming practices would be much easier to implement under socialism with the priority of the food industry being to feed people and not to make a profit.
We as Marxists can certainly be vegetarian or vegan, but preaching veganism as a moral good is not compatible with Marxism, and the idealistic, liberal ideology and political movements of veganism - which just presuppose any use of animal products in the abstract as moral wrongs and are thus quite chauvinistic in their expression - are not compatible with Marxism. We don’t want to impose these concepts onto people from above and plenty of human societies consume and have consumed meat in environmentally sustainable ways. The problems here are those of agricultural and industrial practices which are problems due to capitalism, and not due to eating meat or using animal products as such.
You cannot just compare as 1:1 the societal relations during a revolution and the human consumption of meat. We do not kill and eat animals because we think they pose a danger to us. As the original post says, our relations to other species are defined socially and largely determined by our material reality - consider the difference of pets, working animals or food animals, or even non-animal species. Again, these relations are different in different human societies.
For millions of years humans have eaten other animals and plants. For most of history humans didn’t moralize about this, they just did what they had to to survive and ate what they could get their hands on. As our societies developed, and we started practicing agriculture, our diets changed and most people ate a largely more uniform plant-based diet. In modern times the meat industry developed to a massive extent under capitalism. Most people today eat meat simply because it is there and accessible, and importantly, good alternatives are not present everywhere. Diets are also not uniform in today’s world and we shouldn’t take a western-centric view and abstract it onto every society on the planet.
Any such individual choices, as we know, don’t have impact on the system and communists certainly don’t preach about individual morality. If our material conditions change and we develop in a way that reduces the meat industry (which can probably only happen in a socialist society) our diets will change along with it and because of it - even our societal moral relations to these animals might change with this. However, we cannot force these changes in reverse order due to moral considerations. Not to mention that more humane and sustainable farming practices would be much easier to implement under socialism with the priority of the food industry being to feed people and not to make a profit.
We as Marxists can certainly be vegetarian or vegan, but preaching veganism as a moral good is not compatible with Marxism, and the idealistic, liberal ideology and political movements of veganism - which just presuppose any use of animal products in the abstract as moral wrongs and are thus quite chauvinistic in their expression - are not compatible with Marxism. We don’t want to impose these concepts onto people from above and plenty of human societies consume and have consumed meat in environmentally sustainable ways. The problems here are those of agricultural and industrial practices which are problems due to capitalism, and not due to eating meat or using animal products as such.