Hey Everyone!
Welcome to this video.
If you make it until the end you are going to be with me for a little while because it's
going to be long as f— It's been a little while since I filmed
my last video.
As you can probably tell my hair has gotten light, and probably longer since then.
This video is going to be pretty much word for word the talk that I gave at Brighton
Vegfest around 2 weeks ago.
It wasn't filmed which is sort of a bumper because there were so many great talks, but
for me it wasn't really a bummer because it made me a little less nervous at the time
and I was very nervous so anything was good for me, and it also gives me the opportunity
to film it in a way that is hopefully even more easy to consume for you guys, the viewers.
So yeah, what can I say about Vegfest?
It was so incredible, and it was a pro-intersectional vegan summit that was organized by Christopher
Sebastian, I want to give him a huge huge thank you for inviting me he's one of my
favorite animal rights activist, I was so honored that he chose me and also so honored
to speak with the other amazing people at the conference.
I recommend checking out Eshe's talk.
Their talk was titled "How Whiteness became the norm in Veganism and why this is harmful"
and someone filmed their talk with a smartphone, so that will be linked in the description
box I really encourage you to check it out it was amazing.
So all of the talks were around a common theme and we were given the challenge to give a
talk that addressed how times are changing and what this means for the vegan movement.
My talk was called "Confronting capitalism: the new politics of animals liberation".
I really tried to give people a basic explanation of what capitalism is and try to provide a
framework that was helpful for thinking about veganism, and animal liberation within that
understanding.
Hopefully it will be enjoyable and insightful to watch if you've thought a lot about this
subject, or if you haven't thought about it at all and you need a basic understanding
of how capitalism works and what that means.
I'm going to be reading my speech today, I usually make an effort not to, but today
is going to be a little bit different so do bear with me and let's get started!
I think that it's pretty obvious to everyone that we are in the midst of a very deep political,
social, and economic crisis.
So let's look at the situation we are faced with today… the first statistic I want to
start out with is from an Oxfam report came out in January which estimates that 8 men
have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world.
Meanwhile, 1 in 10 people are living with under $2 a day and hundreds of millions of
people are trapped into hunger and poverty.
Our climate also is also collapsing.
Temperatures are breaking record around the world, and experts are now saying the earth
could warm up to 6 degrees by the end of the century.
Glaciers all around the world are retreating and global flooding could triple by 2030.
Climate change will displace 250 million people by 2050.
This means it will be the largest migration in history.
So yeah, if Europe thinks its refugee crisis is bad now, they have no idea what they are
in for.
And sadly, things aren't looking good for animals either.
Due to human-created climate change, species are going extinct at a rate at least 10,000
species each year.
Globally, we are killing more animals today than ever before, and this number is expected
to keep growing.
Meat production is expected to nearly double from 70 billion land animals slaughtered a
year in 2010 to 120 billion in 2050, and this number has already tripled in the past 40
years.
Understandably, these various crises have led to deep political unrest.
In the last year, you guys gave us Brexit, the united states gave us Donald Trump, and
we saw the rise of far-right populism all over Europe, like the Alternative for Germany
Party, the National Front Party in France, the Sweden Democrats, the Party for Freedom
in the Netherlands and the Freedom party for Austria.
Although these movements surely have their distinct particularities, they all have in
common that they blame Islam and the refugee crisis for people's loss of status, and
offer ethnocentric nationalism as a solution.
Furthermore, these movements are united by a common vision of the future, which advocates
for freedom from government interference, freedom from the establishment, and freedom
from the invasion of non-whites.
When Brexit passed for example, Marine Le Pen from the National Front party in France,
declared it an act of freedom and Donald Trump praised the outcome as a brave and brilliant
vote, even declaring that people will soon call him "Mr. Brexit".
As many people have observed, this is first and foremost a crisis of capitalism.
At the root there is nothing particularly new or particularly different about this crisis,
although to be sure, that does not undermine its severity.
However, capitalism has always produced crises of various lengths and intensities and it
will continue to do so as long as it exists.
This is because at the structurally, capitalism contradicts itself, and eventually it will
always catch up to it and cause it to collapse.
This is because capitalism is never able to fix its inherent contradiction, it only creates
the illusion of recovery.
The problem lies in the contentious relationship between production and wealth accumulation.
Simply put, the system is designed to respond to one thing, and one thing only, and that
is profit.
Since profit can only be achieved through growth, a capitalist must always push production
farther and farther.
However, production requires the use of goods that are not infinite, like labor and natural
resources.
Since capitalism cannot administer a limit, it will always eventually crash.
In other words, capitalism always ends up destroying the hand that feeds it.
Alright let's take the example of labor.
On the one hand, you have a majority of people who work aka the laborers, and on the other,
you have small group people making the profits aka the capitalists.
To remain competitive, capitalists are always trying to increase profits by producing more
goods, and producing them faster and cheaper.
At the same time however, they are trying to keep the wages of their workers as low
as possible to make the highest profit margin when they sell their goods on the market.
Keep in mind that every other capitalist is trying to do the same thing, which inevitably
creates a downward pressure on labor.
Eventually, you will run into a situation whereby the capitalists produce too many goods,
which the masses of people, now in poverty cannot afford to buy back.
And as you know, when there is no purchasing power left, there is a recession aka a crisis
of capitalism.
The second major problem that results from overproduction is environmental crisis, meaning
a corporation will run out of resources to use or that pollution will start to be so
great that it will impact the cost and the feasibility of production.
This is the natural outcome of a system that seeks to produce the most amount of goods
for the least amount of money possible.
Capitalism is a system that needs to perpetually grow, and perpetual growth on a finite planet
with finite resources, is impossible.
Capitalism creates the market and destroys it at the same time.
And because of this feature, crisis is an inevitable part of capitalism, and it is ongoing.
That's why we are always in one: the environmental crisis, the unemployment crisis, the debt
crisis, the refugee crisis, the financial crisis, the housing crisis…The fact that
these crises have different names make them appear as though they are disconnected, they
are all just crises of capitalism.
Capitalism is remarkably adaptive though, and always finds new ways to accumulate wealth.
In order to survive, it will choose to do this no matter how bad the trail of destruction
is that it needs to leave behind.
When the system hit a new limit in the late 1970s, it responded by introducing neoliberal
doctrine which deregulated banks and integrated the economies of the world.
This was the start of "market fundamentalism" which was said to stimulate healthy competition
in the system.
It did just the opposite, by essentially giving capitalists free reign to take wealth in economically
depressed parts of the globe that didn't stand a chance at resisting its takeover.
It weakened unions at home and globalized labor such that labor could no longer demand
its share of productivity, because well corporations could just move your job oversees.
It also allowed capitalists to circumvent animal and environmental protection laws in
the western world by relocating to poorer, less regulated countries.
And for the next 30 years, neoliberalism worked, at least in worked in terms of increasing
profit.
This period was characterized by an almost unprecedented level of growth.
The problem is that barely anyone benefited, and the wealth all went to
the top.
Today, a CEO makes on average 475 times the amount of money as one of his workers.
This is not an unusual statistic, it is an average.
And in all the ways I outlined at the beginning of this talk, the ship of neoliberal capitalism
is breaking down, and the cracks can't be fixed fast enough to keep it from sinking.
This is hurting a lot of people, and generally people are very angry and desperate.
And, whenever crisis hits, the system's justifications for existing need to become
more and more radical.
As economist Richard Wolf said, "when capitalism is in crisis, it needs to come up with an
explanation to its problems that can lead to actions to be taken that will leave the
system out of the conversation."
And this is when toxic ideologies like right-wing populism are able to spread.
They are able to tap into people's pain and fear of lost status, whether racial, gendered,
or economic, and blame refugees and immigrants for the system's failure.
That's how ideologies that seem unacceptable when times are good, suddenly become acceptable
and even compelling when times are bad.
That's what happened in Germany when hitler rose to power in 1929.
Hitler didn't start by killing 6 million Jews.
It took him over 13 years.
He started in Munich, leading a tiny fringe movement of dissatisfied war veterans after
WWI.
His ideas were seen as absurd by most people until he began to gain power in 1929-1930
after the great depression hit and left tens of millions of people unemployed.
Hitler was able to tap into people's fear and anger, and turn it into ethnocentric nationalist
pride.
We are seeing a similar version of this play out before our eyes today.
Fascism and racism are the underbelly of capitalism, as these forces play a key function in preserving
the material conditions of capitalism.
Rather than blaming the system itself, it responds to capitalism's invariable crises
by redirect people's revolutionary anger towards victims of the machine, who have absolutely
nothing to do with it's technical inaptitude.
So now I'll spend the rest of talk focussing on what I think the vegan movement can learn
from this crisis of capitalism, and how we can leverage this knowledge to design a new
politics of animal liberation.
So first of all, full disclosure, I think that ending capitalism, especially in its
present deregulated form, would be the single most important thing for animal liberation.
I talk about a good amount on my Youtube channel, and I get so much pushback on it from other
vegans, that veganism has nothing to do with capitalism.
A big channel even said a few days ago that my anti-capitalist views are conspiracy theories,
which honestly, I have a hard time understanding.
How anyone could look at the current state of affairs and think capitalism is working
for animals is sort of mind-boggling to me.
To be effective animals rights activists, we need to be aware of the fact that this
economic system has been incredibly harmful to animals.
They do not stand to win anything from the salvation of the system, regardless of how
many nut milks and tempeh burgers are becoming sold on the market as compared with what was
available 30 years ago.
Actually 30 years go, there were around 75% less animals slaughtered for food than there
are today, so I worry they would not see vegan consumerism as a sign of progress at all.
Truth is, it is literally impossible to separate the history of animal agriculture from the
history of capitalism and from the history of capital accumulation.
I mean if you think about it in a sick and twisted way, something that the economic system
requires us to do, animal agriculture is the perfect tool for capitalists to colonize and
control the globe.
By definition, animal agriculture is hierarchical, centralized, and expansive.
It takes up a huge amount of land, and mandates the privatization of land, water, and the
displacement of entire communities.
For example, the history of euro settler colonialism in North America, would not have been possible
without animal agriculture.
500 years ago, there were no domesticated species of pigs, cows, and chickens on the
continent.
Breeding animals and setting up a centralized agriculture system was a way to displace native
americans and destroy the food sovereignty of anyone who tried to live outside of the
colonial state.
Centralizing and controlling food production is still a domination tactic for profit accumulation
today, and animal agriculture plays a vital role in that.
One-third of the earth's land today is devoted to animal agriculture.
Since virtually all the earth's resources are privatized, it makes sense that anyone
who wants to survive needs to good purchase food with money at the supermarket.
Hands down, animal agriculture could have never reached the levels of production that
it has today if our system wasn't governed by profit, which is distributed amounts a
handful of corporate monopolies.
And this endless quest for profit has, as it always does, led to overproduction.
Today, we kill so many animals that over one forth, 26.2% of all the meat that enters the
US retail market ends up in landfills.
Based on the data provided by the USDA, this corresponds to over 25 billion fish, 15 billion
shellfish, one billion chickens and one hundred million other land animals.
These are all animals who are bred and slaughtered, not even because they respond to people's
appetite for meat, but because their existence in the "production" chain responds profit.
The fact that they end up in land fills is irrelevant.
It's irrelevant because it makes profit, which by the way, are numbers on a screen
somewhere that literally correspond to nothing.
I think that, henceforth, the vegan movement could gain a tremendous amount by working
more closely with other social justice movements who resist capitalism because their own liberation
is tied to the same economic system.
This shouldn't be hard to find today, as most movements for social justice are anti-capitalist,
especially with everything that's happened this past year.
However, in order to do that, we need to be ready to shift away from the vegan consumer
culture that dominates the mainstream vegan movement.
As long as vegans believe that animal rights can be achieved by buying vegan products,
they won't be taken very seriously by other activists engaging in a systematic and intersectional
critique of how capitalism works.
To be clear, by "vegan consumer culture" I am not talking about boycotting animal products
and buying vegan goods in their place As a vegan, I of course do that too.
By "vegan consumer culture" I am referring to a particular type of ideology that embraces
consumerism as a form of pseudo-market activism.
It advocates that equality would come about if we each just created the right kind demand.
However, consumerism runs counter to activism, because of the exploitation that is inherent
to capitalist production which I discussed earlier in my talk.
I'm not talking about a fringe ideology in the vegan movement.
I'm talking about beliefs that are very prevalent, like that we can all vote with
our dollars, even though plenty of people don't have dollars to vote with or can't
choose what to eat.
I am also talking about the idea that everything we buy that is vegan is automatically cruelty
free even though so much food is produced by exploited workers.
I am also talking about the mass exodus of vegans moving to poor countries and claiming
to promote veganism by stimulating the fruit economy, while not understanding the colonial
politics of the fact that their wealth dwarfs the income of the local black or brown population.
I am really not trying to shame anyone who has engaged in these practices.
I totally understand the logic behind them and I was there not that long ago.
However, we need to understand that these beliefs come from an incredibly privileged
place.
Vegan consumer culture is dangerous, because it obscures how industrial production requires
the exploitation of workers and nonhuman animals, as well as the displacement their communities,
and the destruction of natural resources.
Let's face it, vegan consumer culture makes us lazy, and for people who don't have money,
painting veganism as a consumer lifestyle rather than an ethical stance makes it inaccessible.
The other way that vegans essentially become mass propagandists for capitalism, is by furthering
the idea that we can solve climate change by replacing meat products with plant-based
alternatives on our shopping list.
Again, I'm not trying to shame anyone because god only knows how many times that very argument
came out of my mouth when I first went vegan.
Even though it is absolutely true that the animal agriculture is one of the most polluting
industries on the planet, we need to get away from the idea that this industry can be considered
on its own, and taken down while we leave the other ones unchallenged.
It will never happen– too many powerful industries are in bed with animal agriculture
to ever let that occur.
Most often, vegans bring attention to animal agriculture by pitting it against other oil-dependent
economies like fracking, tar sands, and transportation.
Interestingly, the military, which is by far the biggest threat to climate change never
gets mentioned.
I don't have a problem with comparing the relative impact of these industries, but if
they are to be compared, they should also be connected put into context.
For example, when we dismiss pipelines as relatively unimportant compared to in the
struggle for climate justice, we fail Native Americans and animals by making it seem like
climate change is primarily due to unstrategic activism rather than the fossil fuel economy.
As Vandana Shiva explains in Soil Not Oil, our entire industrialized agriculture, is
a "recipe for eating oil".
Vegan or not, fossil fuels are at the heart of our industrial food system.
Oil is used for the fertilizers that pollute the soil and water, it's used to replace
small farmers with giant robotized harvesters, it's used to industrially process and package
food, and it's used to transport it farther and rather away.
We can't talk about the unsustainability of our food system without first talking about
capitalism, which has eroded soil fertility worldwide and colonized nature by allowing
the privatization of its resources by a handful of huge corporations.
Unfortunately, substituting our diet from one that is reliant on capitalist animals
to one reliant on capitalist plants, will not suffice to end the destruction of our
planet.
All this to say, that reversing climate change and achieving animal liberation is going to
take a heck of a lot more than changing our grocery lists.
In order to to maximize our impact, it is quite urgent for vegans to understand that
consumerist veganism will not yield the outcomes that many people claim it will.
So, now that I've gotten made the point that one) the crisis we find ourselves in
is a crisis of capitalism and 2) that capitalism is bad for animals and therefore so is vegan
consumer culture, I want to finish my talk on an optimistic note, which is that I truly
believe that the vegan movement, right now, has an unprecedented chance at politicizing
animal rights and becoming highly relevant in social justice circles.
Now more than ever, we need to show that animals are the natural allies of other anti-capitalist
movements.
The rise in Right wing populism only tells one side of the story.
Leftist movements are also rising up and demanding an end to capitalism.
I recently saw a pole that says that 51% of millennials don't believe in capitalism
and want another economic system.
That number is huge.
In the US, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the native-led movement at Standing Rock, the
fight for Immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement are all
clear indicators that demands for economic, environmental, gender and racial justice are
getting louder and louder, which is also due to the fact that they are linking arms.
Sure Donald Trump won the presidency, but the largest crowd in US history showed up
to protest his inauguration.
In Europe, there are also similar movements at work.
Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, or the Labor party in england are examples of movements
who have gained a great amount of traction in recent years, and beyond any analysis of
these movements in and of themselves, what they show is that a lot of people want an
end to capitalism, and they are looking for other solutions.
I want veganism to be seen as a part of that solution, and for animals to be on that agenda.
As their allies, we need to realize that this is the smartest move.
That if animals could talk, they wouldn't be asking us to cheer on capitalism by voting
with our dollars and sitting back hoping the rest will take care of itself.
We need to realize that animals also have a stake in the fight for native rights to
land and water, they have a stake in dismantling the prison industrial complex, they have a
stake in opposing militarism, oil extraction, environmental racism, and LGBT discrimination.
Animals stand to benefit from all movements that challenge and weaken White-hetero-capitalist
patriarchy, because this is the same system that they themselves are oppressed by.
As vegans, we need to show our solidarity with these movements.
This isn't just about feigning interest in other oppressions to get everyone to "go
vegan".
It's about starting from an understanding that human liberation and animal liberation
are intimately tied, and that only by building alyship on this basis can we really hope to
see movements for social justice succeed.
Of course, other social justice movements must realize that rejective animal exploitation
is crucial and urgent, and yeah, the information is out there and a lot of that is on them.
However, there are definitely a few things we can do to make that connection a more obvious.
For starters, we need to understand that connection ourselves, and as a result stop promoting
consumerism as a method of activism.
We also need to stop using tactics that are sexist, racist, classist or ableist that make
marginalized voices feel that "veganism is not for them".
There is also an increasing presence of anti-SJWs in the movement that harass people who fight
for social justice, and an alarming rise in neo-nazis who advocate pro-white supremacist,
anti-semitic views.
We need to be clear that these people don't have their place in the vegan movement, and
not hold back from doing so for fear of "being divisive".
Being divisive isn't challenging bigoted behavior, it's making it unsafe for anyone
who isn't privileged, thin, white, cis, etc.
We cannot expect other people to make the connection between their oppression and animals,
if we don't understand oppression ourselves.
We need to highlight how capitalism and white supremacy use the mass exploitation of animals
and people in their quest for profit.
There are countless examples of this, starting with corporations funneling disease inducing
foods into communities of color, exploiting vulnerable people to work in slaughterhouses,
or placing CAFO's (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) in PoC neighborhoods.
I'm at Vegfest, let's pretend, so I presume most of us are intimately convinced that veganism
is crucial for helping animals, the environment, and our health.
That's why this talk isn't devoted to that.
This talk was more aimed at giving people a framework for some of the many reasons why
capitalism, and other systems that require an exploited underclass, like White supremacy,
patriarchy, and speciesism, are inherently contradictory to veganism.
The future of animal liberation depends on the end of these oppressive hierarchies, and
the future of our movement depends on us understanding that fact if we hope to deliver all the promises
we have made.
It will make the difference between animal liberation being commodified as another fringe
consumerist trend, and animal liberation being seen as an inextricable part of anti-oppression
struggles.
I'm not here to sell you pro-intersectional, anti-capitalist veganism as something new
or a solution that will only be attained in the distant future.
There are a lot of people already doing this.
If you'd like to find those people, I'd like to shout out a page that Collectively
Free just made on their website.
If you don't know them, they are an amazing organization that you should check out.
They just put together a list of all the people doing this sort of pro-intersectional vegan
work.
It's amazing to have us all in one place so that we can all find each other more easily.
There are endless things to learn and people to be inspired by.
And I really hope that this talk was a good introduction in you wanting to learn more.
Check out the links I put in the description box and what your comments are.
Speaking at Vegfest was so much fun and I was
really nervous, for those of
you who were there let me know!
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