We know what "corporate veganism" is - greenwash for the same old brutal food giants. But what if they faced a socialist veganism?

“Socialist veganism” prompt to GPT-4

A conjunction of abstractions devoutly to be wished/feared: socialist veganism. The case for such is being made in the pages of the veteran US left journal Monthly Review, by Benjamin Selwyn and Charis Davis. The opening paragraphs are succinct and effective:

A paradox exists in the United States, United Kingdom, and other rich countries. Increasing numbers of people realize that the current food system is environmentally damaging.

They are attempting to transform it by changing their diets, which they hope will influence corporate investment strategies. They are encouraged to do so by claims that shifting to plant-based diets represents the “single biggest way” to reduce our environmental impact.

The paradox is that many of the corporations that are expanding the plant-based food market have an enormous, immensely damaging environmental impact.

Expansion into these markets does not portend a shift away from their environmentally damaging mass production of meat, dairy, and other environmentally ruinous activities. Rather, it represents a market expansion strategy combined with, and based upon, attempts at corporate brand greenwashing.

Such strategies reflect and reinforce market dominance by a few corporations. In the United States, for example, less than four companies control more than 75 percent of the market across a range of popular groceries. We call this strategy corporate veganism.

We argue that corporate veganism deepens animal suffering, human exploitation, and environmental destruction in and beyond the food system. Corporate veganism promotes the ideology of consumer sovereignty, where consumer choice is the key factor influencing producer output.

There is an alternative way of conceiving of and attempting to transform the food system, which we label socialist veganism.

Consumer sovereignty entails changing consumption patterns (or “end point regulation”). Instead, socialist veganism attempts to control the “start point” of production (deciding what is to be produced and how) and how products are distributed.

In Half-Earth Socialism, Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue for universal veganism, which they conceive as part of a utopian future in which socialism has been fully established.

Max Ajl and Rob Wallace subject Vettese and Pendergrass to a strong critique—highlighting their neocolonial and anti-small producer bias.However, neither Vettese and Pendergrass, nor Ajl and Wallace, ground their visions of alternative food systems in the reality of:

(a) contemporary dynamics of working-class food poverty in rich countries, or:

(b) the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent (with much more to come) on so-called green transitions by the United States and European Union states.

We conceive of socialist veganism as one element of shifting the balance of class power away from capital to labour, and of beginning to mend the metabolic rift between human (capitalist) society and nature.

Billions of dollars are either subsidizing fossil fuel industries, and/or being directed into a corporate-dominated green transition. So we believe the time is ripe for socialist movements to argue that these funds be redirected—towards an ecosocially transformative political-economic agenda.

While global agricultural production contributes to around 25 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, the meat sector is responsible for approximately 14.5 percent of total emissions [sources here and here].

Rich country populations are by far the greatest consumers of meat-based protein. In 2009, for example, the richest fifteen countries had 750 percent greater demand for meat protein than the poorest twenty-four nations.

Such internationally unequal levels of meat-based protein consumption do not mean, however, that rich country populations are healthy or well-fed. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and other rich countries, large sections of the working class, their families, and particularly their children find it too expensive to afford to eat enough (good) food.

In 2022, almost a quarter of children in the European Union were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, while one third of primary school age children were either overweight or obese.

In the United States in 2021, thirty-four million people lived in food insecure households and fifty-three million people turned to community programs and food banks to put food on the table.

As Jane Dixon puts it, working classes in the Global North “may now be portrayed as…over-consumers, but their overweight bodies are the result of insufficient incomes to consume fewer, less energy dense foods.”8

It is noteworthy that the recent victory by the United Auto Workers forces General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis to accept that electric vehicle battery production will occur in relatively well-paid, unionized plants, rather than low-paid, non-unionized plants.

It signifies the ability of organized labor to shape the beginnings of what is currently a pro big-capital green transition into a more socially just transition.

To be sure, such movements from below will have to proliferate and achieve much more, in terms of state resource allocation under transformed social relations.

In this spirit, we see socialist veganism as potentially contributing to movements for greater autonomy and equality for agricultural and non-agricultural workers. It would do so through an ending of working-class food poverty, and building new social relations on the land and beyond.

We focus on transforming food systems in rich countries for three reasons.

• First, by virtue of their far greater consumption of meat-based protein alone, the consumption habits of these countries have a much greater impact upon climate breakdown than those of poorer countries.

• Second, it is in these countries that interest in, and the beginnings of, a shift away from meat to plant-based consumption is happening most quickly.

• Third, many poorer countries have radically different agrarian systems compared to richer countries. For example, around 1.3 billion people (mostly in poorer countries) depend upon livestock for their livelihoods.

In terms of transforming food systems in poorer countries, we advocate, at the very least, debt write-off and mass reparations from richer countries. This would be partial recognition for the world-historic damage caused by colonialism and continued unequal and exploitative international relations.

… We propose a marriage between ethical veganism and socialism. We suggest that new food systems could be built upon novel social relations of greatly enhanced equality. This would entail deploying both high and low technologies.

Put differently, we propose a novel constellation of relations and forces of production. This will simultaneously provide good food for all—while contributing to repairing our collective relationship to the environment.

More (much more) here. For veganism at the Daily Alternative, see this archive.