this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Veganism is good, necessary even, but more than voting we need to actually overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Profit will destroy the planet unless we take control of the reigns from capital.
Socialism so far has an absolutely terrible track record with environmental protection. Unless you're just talking about being able to directly force societal change in general, in which case you're arguing for eco-flavoured despotism.
Socialism doesn't even promise environmental protection, rather being focused on worker rights and minimizing inequality.
Socialism has a better track record than capitalism, but either way, my point is that necessary systemic changes need socialism for them to happen. Socialism isn't a promise, it's a mode of production. Further, countries like the PRC are rapdily electrifying, at the top of solar panel production and infrastructure initiatives, and combatting desertification, that's the power of a publicly driven economy.
On a planet where 95-99% of people consume animal products, and still heavily participate in the systems of animal captivity, brutality, and exploitation; can you explain how overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism is going to make a vegan world happen?
Socialism will not automatically create vegan world, it hasn't done so anywhere socialism exists. However, it does swap from profits as the end-all, be-all of how society is organized, to one where humanity can better plan production and meet people's needs. If capital is in the driver's seat, then the meat industry will continue to perpetuate said brutality and environmental destruction unimpeded. If humanity is in the driver's seat, then we can actually work against what would be assured in a profit driven model.
The swap to veganism will never be instant, but it will be largely impossible without human supremacy over capital.
That's a pretty fair assessment, though it's hard to imagine that being much less of an uphill battle. People still place a significant amount of their identity in what they eat. In the US at least, a culture of perceived personal freedoms still heavily prevails. Even though vegans are already relegated to trying to appeal to people to change their individual choices voluntarily, people still frequently accuse us of militancy and being tyrannical - even though we've virtually never even had real representation in government, aside from very small hard-won anti animal abuse laws that have resulted from extremely risky investigative operations.
Any governmental system that makes any attempts to shift us all in a more vegan direction would quite easily provoke significant backlash and possibly even the threat of overthrow.
Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but it's nearly impossible under capitalism. What would realistically happen is the state would heavily subsidize plant based food and develop economies of scale, and increase requirements on animal products for more "humane" treatment, until gradually animal products are phased out culturally. A top-down command for animal liberation would be commandist if the masses don't want it, so raising political consiousness would be a key part of that struggle.
Under capitalism, it would be difficult, but well regulated markets should be able to manage limited resources. The problem is that the negative externalities of meat are not being adequately captured, and meat producers are abusing the general Commons without recompense. That needs to be fixed with taxes or regulations. Then the market can balance around the true cost of providing meat, which would be much higher.
edit: grammatical typo, finished a sentence
Well-regulated markets, under capitalism, just means comfortable monopoly. You can't work against the system of voracious demand for profit within said system. You can't just pray for taxes abd regulations, the only ones that get passed are ones in the interests of the largest capitalists.
I agree that capitalism (as distinguished from straight markets) is the problem, yeah. Especially the part where the accumulation of capital influences the future accumulation of capital via the political process and externalizes cost to the commons.
Markets only work to the extent that they capture all costs in some form. If something is cheaper than the actual cost to society, you end up with problems.
So if (for an impractical example) oil producers had to pay to capture and sequester all the CO2 and methane implied by their oil and gas extraction, as well as repair all the direct damage their wells do, etc, the market might sort itself out. The "true" cost of oil might be $1000/barrel, and society would adjust accordingly. Of course, the time between point A and point B would involve a lot of misery with our current society.
Sure, I can see that hypothetical, but we can't get to that hypothetical in capitalism. Profit drives and steers the system, not humans.
Yeah, it's a problem. Our society is only sustainable to the extent to which we capture externalities through regulation and taxes, and efforts to undermine that entire concept is infuriating.
It's more that under capitalism, regulations and taxes only serve the bourgeoisie. It isn't that the concept is being undermined, it's that those are sold to the working class as a viable solution to avoid actually solving the problem.
You keep focusing on capitalism, but I'm working a little more generally than that. Any system that has markets would have the same issue, even anarchist ones. There has to be some feedback mechanism to reduce negative externalities on the commons. A centrally planned economy would struggle with it, as well as a fully distributed one.
We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. We can do a lot of good with well thought-through taxes and regulations, and while it may not be ideal, it gets us toward a better world, a more sustainable world. We live in a highly dynamic system, and perfection is likely impossible and must take into account human irrationality.
I'm focusing on capitalism because we can't let the progress we can imagine be the enemy of the progress we can actually achieve in the real world. Just like going up to Elon Musk and asking him nicely to not be a Nazi isn't a viable solution to systemic issues, so too is trying to use regulations against the system they are meant to solidify and protect. Socialism is necessary because without it, we can't get these well thought-through taxes and regulations to begin with, we are utterly at the mercy of profits.
Well, we're having different discussions then. Good luck.
I really don't think we are. You propose we push for change within the system, as it's better to have a tweaked current system than a non-tweaked current system. My point is that the reason the current system lacks those popular and necessary tweaks is because its built to resist anything that risks lowering profits, so our strategy should focus on changing to a system that allows us to make those tweaks in the first place.
You may not agree with me, but I don't think we are having different discussions.
That is not what I'm saying. And I'm done trying. Good luck.
That's a good general direction. But all the more reason to push for those things now, and then.
Also, saying it's impossible under capitalism somewhat doesn't give the animal liberation movements the credit they deserve. It's worth looking into the history of veganism. While there have been plenty of people and groups in virtually every culture who were either vegan-adjacent or somewhere in the same direction, the vegan movement is quite recent in the grand scheme of things. Any snapshot of where we're at might make it seem like we're small and insignificant, but the growth of the movement has been quite rapid when looking at the big picture.
We're just still in the early stages. But even 10 years ago was way different. Far fewer plant-based options. Far less awareness of the horror of factory farms. A lot less visibility in general. Now it's getting harder for people to ignore us.
We should do both.
Yep, but for systemic changes socialism is necessary. We should do what we can right now, but we can't cause systemic change without socialism.
I agree, really I should have written "We have to do both."
Yeah plants, the only thing that creates Oxygen
Actually the majority of atmospheric oxygen is produced by phytoplankton, which are mostly bacteria and protists. Plants do get us over the finish line though.