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My thoughts on veganism (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I escaped the Reddit regime a little while ago. I consider myself a marxist-leninist-MZT. Vegetarian and vegan for a few years. I've a lot of thoughts on how marxism and veganism are connected. Never wrote them down. I'd like to start smth like a club for marxist vegans to develop our own proletarian theory. Most vegan theory I found is either openly bourgeois (Francione is a literal TERF) or revisionist (anti-China, anarchist, libertarian). How about fixing this?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Whereas the creation of that community on that site led to some of their most enduring struggle sessions and division (curiously their application asks applicants not to be racist, not to be homo or trans-phobic, and about animal liberation stuff, not a whiff about women's rights though even after their big post about misogyny problem, really kind of telling priorities in the western left but perhaps that's for another time). And whereas we have a meager 550 monthly users on lemmygrad total and further division of that is bad.

This whole paragraph is a bit suspect.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How so?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago

Well, first of all, Lemmygrad's applications don't ask about women's rights, either. All Lemmygrad asks is "What is your understanding of gender? Should Marxists support LGBTQ+?" — no asking about racism or animal liberation, either. So bringing up not asking about women's rights, as if this is unique to Hexbear, rather than applying to both Hexbear and Lemmygrad, is strange.

The bigger point however is that anyone with a non-superficial understanding of LGBT+ issues understands how the oppression of LGBT+ people stems from and reinforces the subjugation of women. The wording of the "western left's priorities" — and the implication that misogyny on Hexbear is caused at least in part by not explicitly asking about women's rights in user applications — together get uncomfortably close to accusing LGBT+ issues of being "western decadence" wholly separate from women's issues, whose advancement is detrimental for women.

The final point is that calls for unity I observe often come from a place of the one calling for unity really just wanting people to shut up about something that that person does not want to confront. The final paragraph of darkcalling's comment adds some more context to this end: "What I worry about is the memes, the casual posts, the rants, the venting about "carnists" and so on that stir up trouble and strife when things have been so relatively harmonious here compared to hexbear." — This makes it sound to me like this person really just wants to avoid having to think about veganism, and wants to make that vegans' problem rather than keeping it their own.

I think that if you say that vegans aren't allowed to complain about carnists, that all this really does is make the space less welcoming for vegans, and make tensions rise between vegan and carnist users, for the sake of the carnist users' conscience alone. And I frankly don't think that anyone who doesn't have thick enough skin to not flip out and get aggressively defensive when told that eating meat is wrong, belongs in a space where people should by all means regularly be putting in the effort to unlearn their own indoctrination.

I dunno, I guess that's just how I feel about it, personally.