Can Vegan Goals Ever Be Blended In With Capitalist Imperatives?
Scutinizing the inconsistencies between veganism and capitalism
A few years ago, I was riding the metro back home from an animal rights outreach program in the CBD area of the city with a fellow animal rights activist. He was youthful personality bursting with passion for the AR movement and was still in college at the time. He was busy juggling college duties and AR activism along with the obligations of his side business, a vegan startup aimed at providing low cost alternatives to expensive plant-based dairy.
“I aim to take home a 6 figure monthly income in the next 5 years”, or something along those lines was what he yelled into my ears, to be audible above the din of the rattling metro coaches and the noisy crowd in the coach. He would be graduating college in a couple of months and would then be able to devote full time, attention, and energy to his business. So all the eagerness and enthusiasm of a college entrepreneur naturally came through.
I don’t know if he makes a six figure income on a monthly basis. But today, his startup is one of the prominent players in the plant-based space and his products are on par with conventional dairy producers who have forayed into plant-based milk as a vertical. His products are competitively priced and he has managed to achieve price parity with conventional dairy, a stupendous feat of achievement in light of how expensive plant-based products generally are. Even though this price parity came at the cost of having to rebrand and trim a few products from their portfolio, he still manages to remain in business by drawing in a set of repeat customers every year.
On that unremarkable day on the train, I was as much a fresher in the corporate world as him, although I had a job that left me with little more than a bag of peanuts by the end of the month.
After I bid him goodbye and as I was making my way home, I pondered about his ambitious goals. Why couldn’t I have such aspirations like him? All I wanted to do at the time was live vegan and that was it. But he was a visionary who wanted to make the world go vegan. At the same time I had conflicting information flooding my mind. It made me wonder how someone could want to be vegan and simultaneously make such an obscene amount of wealth at the same time.
I was also a huge fan of AOC at the time and one of her hottest takes on billionaires and income inequality instantly popped into my head:
“You made that money off of the backs of undocumented people, you made that money off of the backs of black and brown people being paid under a living wage, you made that money off of the backs of single mothers,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.”
As many of you are aware, once analyzed, the philosophical goals of veganism clash with the imperatives of capitalism at many critical junctures.
After being vegan for more than a dozen years, I perfectly understand why people consume meat and indulge in activities that are cruel to animals. It’s because at the very heart of it, selfishness and narcissism forms the foundation our capitalist system whose sole objective is to exploit humans, animals, and the planet for profit. The economy doesn’t have a cardiovascular system. You do! The animals do.
Because at the very root, my vegan entrepreneur friend was just as selfish and narcissistic as the non-vegan capitalists he was looking to compete with.
That’s what got us here in the first place. In a state of crisis. Why on earth would you want to not just perpetuate by participation, but also encourage such a brutal and exploitative system that seeks to plunder and annihilate everything in its path? If my non-vegan friends were apathetic and insensitive to the rights of animals, wasn’t my entrepreneurial vegan businessman friend, with his lofty goals to amass fortunes from the plant-based industry, insensitive to the needs of other humans and the environment too?
How can one ever claim they run a vegan company when their own employees and everyone else in the production and supply chain is being exploited for monetary gain?
May be we’ll one day reach a point where all products and services are vegan. However by the very virtue of dominance and personal enrichment to be driving cultures of entrepreneurship, there can never be vegan companies or vegan economies. Because you either have a business that’s growing, or a business that’s failing. Within the capitalist ethos, there’s no middle ground right?
Even if you aren’t necessarily exploiting animals, whether as a company or an individual, you’re always exploiting humans to hoard assets and amass fortunes. Within capitalism there’s always going to be the “unlucky ones” and “the less fortunate”. There will always be haves and have nots.
Veganism
The philosophy of veganism seeks to emancipate all living beings from exploitation and commodification. That includes humans and non-human animals too. With this philosophy in mind, many passionate vegans have left their old jobs to drive the world towards achieving the objectives laid down in the veganism philosophy manifesto. They start their own companies, restaurants, cafes, hotels, clothing lines, and even entire product lines without as much as pulling the stinger out of a bee.
They aim to veganize entire product lines with the introduction of sustainable alternatives such as faux leather, mock meat, plant-based dairy and poultry, plant-based cosmetics and skincare, and so on and so forth.
Capitalism
Capitalism seeks to drive infinite growth on a planet with a finite amount of resources. Capitalism brutalises and tortures every sentient being in the production pipeline, even those whose lives it supposedly intends to benefit. It seeks to enhance and improve the lives of human beings through whatever inventions and innovations possible, no matter the cost. And that’s the troubling bit: At any cost whatsoever, even at the cost of the wellbeing of the very lives it seeks to improve.
Ask any company founder about how their products benefit customers and you are bound to receive a lengthy explanation on how their products and services uplift and elevate the human condition. This is when you, me, and most other people know that the world would be perfectly fine without their products like it did for many generations before. Like hey, we don’t really need microwave ovens or dishwashers, but they sure do help.
But helps whom and for what? Those who are pressed for time. Why are they pressed for time? Because they are too busy doing their jobs. What jobs are they doing? Jobs that seek to improve and elevate the human condition. But wait a second…..
If you are laughing now at the circular logic merry-go-round explanation of what capitalism is about that you just went on, congratulations! You are a sane and rational thinker.
Where’s the discrepancy?
Now that I’ve laid out the goals of veganism and imperatives of capitalism separately, let’s discuss why they can never be wedded together in a perfect union that is the dream of every capitalist vegan on the planet.
From a distance, both of them seem be harbouring pretty much the same objectives. But on closer inspection, the glaring inconsistencies between the two become painfully evident. Veganism seeks to eradicate all kinds of suffering on the planet, whether that be human or non-human animal based. Capitalism seeks to enrich and uplift humans through the creation products and services at the cost of the lives of those very same living beings.
Want to provide nutrition to starving children? Imprison and brutalize billions of factory farm hens and dairy cows for meat, cheese, milk, and eggs.
Want to home deliver consumer goods to people in just a days time? Brutalize workers with cruel and soul-crushing working conditions.
Want to create sustainable sources of energy by harvesting the energy of the wind and sun? Bulldoze football fields of virgin forest to install wind turbines and solar panels.
Capitalist vegans rationalize the legitimacy of their movement by claiming that veganism can easily ride the consumerism-capitalist money train to success. They envision a world where everyone drives electric vehicles, eats plant-based meat, and derives the power for all their lifestyle needs solely from renewables. Some of them might not be aware of it, but much of the renewable energy sector is propped up and kept alive by none other than the fossil fuel industry itself. Organizations like Deep Green Resistance go to great lengths to spread awareness about the “Bright Green Lies” which exposes the fabrications and duplicitousness of the so-called “green energy movement”.
The sentiments and feelings of capitalist vegans usually stop where animals are slaughtered for food, clothing, shelter, and technology. They seem to be totally fine with the earth being plundered for the gargantuan amount of resources required to prop up the alternative energy industry.
Alternative veganism
Proponents of alternative lifestyles claim that the only way for the world to be truly vegan is by doing away with the industrial way of life — the way of life that eventually leads to cultural, social, and economic inequality eventually — altogether. They proffer that as long as someone seeks to enrich themselves by selling a product or service, we can never live truly vegan lives, i.e. in harmony with the planet. Only once the industrial way of life is done away with for good can we truly live vegan on this planet. Everything else is just a stop gap measure.
“the future of food systems should be held by the people, not multinational corporations. Businesses aren’t inherently evil, small or locally-owned vegan businesses are hardly the problem. The truth is that agribusiness and plant-based industries are still for-profit business. They aren’t unions or co-ops. At a multinational level, their impact is unsustainable, even if it’s more sustainable than animal-based alternatives.”
It also certainly doesn’t help that dozens of vegan alternatives to daily essentials of animal origin are produced by none other than non-vegan companies themselves, with vegan products constituting just a tiny spec amongst a dozen of their other portfolios.
Derrick Jensen bluntly elucidates on this particular point in his book, “Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It”:
“industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable. It will always require violence to biotic and human communities. And it will create a culture where trauma is normalized, where living beings become objects, and where the only relationship left is one of domination.”
Like Jensen, proponents of alternative lifestyles believe that as long as we mine the living world for our lifestyle needs and wants, we will continue indiscriminately killing animals for resources. They assert that even so-called renewable sources of energy are dependent on non-renewable methods of extraction and still contribute to the plunder and desecration of the living world. Agriculture itself, which is propped up by none other than fossil fuel derived fertilizers like Nitrogen and Ammonia, is also at war with the natural world for these very reasons.
“We must remember veganism isn’t about having thousands of plant-based products while non-humans and humans still suffer within supply chains. It’s about recognizing that we can still make certain options and nutrients accessible AND dismantle the harmful, oppressive industrialized systems still slaughtering non-human animals.”
Lierre Keith, who co-authored ‘Bright Green Lies’ with Jensen, meticulously breaks down this particular myth of being vegan in an industrial world in another book of hers, “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability”:
“The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won’t save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil — the basis of life itself. Keith argues that if we are to save this planet, our food must be an act of profound and abiding repair: it must come from inside living communities, not be imposed across them”
We’re currently living through the 6th mass extinction on the planet, the Anthropocene. We can definitely do better than telling people that switching to fake meat, driving electric vehicles, and sourcing our lifestyle energy requirements from renewables will somehow save the planet and prevent the worst of the climate impacts from hitting us.
At the end of the day, vegan goals being blended in with capitalist imperatives is a smoothie that is never going to taste good. We’ll always require a manual labour workforce that does all the menial jobs of industrial civilization; the electricians installing the solar panels on your rooftop, the lithium miners for the battery in your electric car, or the factory workers packing all your mock meat into cartons so that you can blissfully enjoy a “cruelty-free” meal at home, just to name a few.
We can never live vegan on a planet that seeks to extract resources at every turn and juncture. There’s no way to peacefully co-exist with our fellow earthlings following a system that depends on its destruction. As long as capitalist philosophy forms the driving ideals of the movers and shakers of this world, we will as Jensen says, continue to be at war with the natural world.
The issue isn’t about choosing between meat or plant-based food while sitting down to dine three times a day. It’s about choosing whether to live with the planet or against it. The entire system needs a rehaul. Vegans look at just a teeny tiny portion of the puzzle and attempt to solve those parts in isolation. Proponents of alternative lifestyles are looking to solve the entire puzzle itself.
Fun fact: There are so many people out there following alternative lifestyles and living completely off grid. They harvest their own energy through sustainable sources, grow their own food, and practice eco-friendly living in all other aspects of life.
Who do you think lives a more vegan life?
The vegan who lives a resource-intensive industrial city life, commuting to work every day using electric vehicles, taking transatlantic flights for holidays, subsisting on mock meat and a dizzying array of industrially produced plant-based products while living a consumption-oriented life……or……the suburbanite who isn’t necessarily vegan, but lives in an eco-friendly home, grows their own food through organic farming/permaculture, are self-sufficient for the majority of their lifestyle needs, and lives a slow, minimalist, and austere life?
