this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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vegan
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Welcome to /c/vegan and congratulations on your first steps toward overcoming liberalism and ascending to true leftist moral superiority.
Rules
No plant-based diet bullshit or promotion of plant-based capitalism.Veganism isn't about you, it's about historical materialist anti-speciesism, anti-racist animalization, and animal liberation. Ethical vegans only.No omni apologists or carnists.Babystepping is for libs, and we're not here to pat you on the back. Good faith questions and debate about how to fight for animal liberation are allowed.No advocating violence to any species for any reason.If you think this is negotiable GTFO. This includes but is not limited to animal testing, slaughter, and mass euthanasia. Anything that promotes speciesism or the commodification of animals will be removed.Use Content Warnings and NSFW tags for triggering content.Especially if a comrade requests it.Questions about diet belong inc/food. It's also a great place to share recipes.In all sections of the site, you must follow theHexbear.net Code of Conduct.
Resources
Animal liberation and direct action
- Animal Liberation Press (ALF)
- Wiki on Ethical Veganism
- Wiki on the Animal Liberation Front
- Wiki on Total Liberation
- Different approaches to AL direct action
- Earth First! manual and tactics
- Support prisoners of conscience: Vegan Prisoners Support Group (UK)
- If someone tells you to put some paint on your hands, tag some buildings and then go turn yourself into the police - your "rebellion" is a fucking op
Read theory, libs
- 18 Theses on Marxism and Animal Liberation
- Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out
- Animal Liberation
- The Death of Nature
- The Case for Animal Rights
- Anarchism and Animal Liberation
- Total Liberation
- The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk
- Speciesism as a Precondition to Justice
- Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation
- Citations Needed on media portrayals of animal rights activists
- The Jungle
Vegan 101 & FAQs
- Black Vegans Rock resources page
- Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach FAQs
- 30 Non-Vegan Excuses & How to Respond to Them
- Guide to justifications for harming and exploiting animals
- Your Vegan Fallacy Is
- The Radical Left’s Top 10 Objections to Veganism (And Why They Suck)
- Animal Liberation Front FAQs
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Having a clear message and working towards the goals of the movement is not "being concerned with theoretic purity". Words have meanings for a practical purpose, and stripping those meanings away makes it more difficult to organise.
The issue here is that this is just untackled speciesistic thinking. It's not "respectful" to consume the flesh of someone who was killed, nor is it worse to "waste" the products of their exploitation.
Every human under capitalism is "created" to serve capital. It is not a "waste" if they were to die without getting completely exploited for all of their labour power to the day they die, except through the lens of a capitalist.
People like certain tastes and textures, especially things they are used to. There is no reason to give up something they like if they can have it without murdering someone. The same applies for clothing and entertainment. There are no supernatural urges or cravings, and practising a vegan lifestyle is not a stoic struggle towards noble virtues through suffering.
Changing any habit takes some time and adjustment, there is nothing special about it.
Actually, no, we don't "know most people ‘quit veganism’’. A lot of people go on plant-based diets for any number of reasons and call it "going vegan" because the word vegan has become synonymous with plant-based food in many countries (this has both positive and negative consequences, but it's out of the scope of this discussion) and is often used as a marketing term.
People quit all sorts of diets all the time. It's nothing out of the ordinary.
It does not take much investigation to find that the overwhelming majority of people who say they are "ex-vegan" have never had anything to do with the movement at all. There are some examples of activists going "ex-vegan" and it gets very publicised, but ultimately it's a very small number of people.
I'm not interested in any one person, nor am I trying to be the "label" police. My take regarding this has to do with organising and how having concrete terms with concrete meanings is crucial to that process; this is not exclusive to veganism.
There are practical reasons behind the labelling of certain organisations and individuals as "TERFs" rather than just "Feminists", for example.
Like I said, others in this thread have already tackled this, so there is no reason for me to rehash it here, but in short, I do not agree that the consequences of those actions are not negative.
Ultimately, I believe you focus too much on individuals and individual actions rather than the big picture and how the movement as a whole, not individual vegans, should conduct itself.
My perspective is shaped by my experience in organising locally and engaging with dozens of other organisations nationally and internationally. I have seen many strategies from across the spectrum, many mistakes (made many myself), and many successes. I started organising first, then arrived at theory later out of practical necessity.
"Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.",
"[...]practice gropes in the dark if its path is not illumined by revolutionary theory.", etc. etc.
It's not through a concern of "theoretic purity", rather a practical concern with driving the movement forward.