For us, going and staying vegan and (re-)asserting our stance of veganism, is an act of liberation, it’s a process of cutting through the cognitive dissonance that is inherent in the unnecessary exploitation and killing of animals. It is an* assertion of our deepest held values: That all life is valuable and that any harm should be minimised as much as possible. That instead, we should improve and enrich each other’s lives as much as we can!
We live in a world that, by its very structure, makes it impossible to fully live these values. This is why practising veganism is sometimes difficult (and can not be done “perfectly” by anyone!), often more difficult the less privileges someone has. Every fight against structural and societal injustice and violence is hard for the same reason. The powers-that-be don’t want to give up their power. Life today is built on foundations of exploitation and violence so that the path of least resistance is to just participate in the violence. Trying to even just extract oneself from that violence to the best of one’s abilities (to say nothing of actively fighting it!) is not only difficult, but already seen as an attack on the status quo, and met with some amount of social stigma. A society built on structures of violence and exploitation can not allow better alternatives to exist alongside it, it wouldn’t survive the competition! So the alternatives are gobbled up, faught, slandered, forbidden, invisibilised or co-opted. Veganism especially suffers from cooptation – it’s now mostly presented as a wellness diet (something really harmful! Diets kill.) instead of a political struggle for liberation, one that attacks the very foundations of capitalism and hierarchichal and extractive societies. We oppose the commodification of living beings.
The fact that it’s not exactly easy doesn’t mean fighting and advocating for justice is somehow an expression of privilege! On the contrary, the fight to revolutionize society so that it is less violent and exploitative is a fight against unfair privileges. This is what the societal liberation of animals is about, just like other social liberation struggles. Yes, we are against cages. But more importantly, we are against structural violence and systems of “morality” and law and “common sense” that make those cages possible in the first place.
We especially oppose the myth that it it somehow necessary to structurally exploit and violate (breed, cage, slaughter - for profit! not to meet anyone’s needs! It’s capitalism after all!) anyone! It’s not necessary to exploit animals this way. It’s not necessary to find the one group of beings that’s even lower than us (exploited and marginalised humans) on the social ladder and to kick down to hold ourselves up. On the contrary – we can never have a truly free and liveable society if the idea and practice of exploitation and subjugation survives. Even if it were “only” animals.
We have to rip all exploitation out by the roots! All of it!
And no we’re not shaming anyone for not being able to live 100% animal-products free this very second. I’m also not making any statements about indigenous peoples (or any culture but my own western industrialised one).
We’re just stating how important and necessary veganism as movements and as a liberation struggle is for this western industrialised society!
*not the only one!
