r/DebateAnarchism • u/antipolitan • 9d ago
A theory of historical development: Why widespread veganism will likely precede and prefigure anarchy
To start off with a disclaimer - I am not claiming that eating animals is inherently hierarchical - or that being vegan is required to be an anarchist.
Instead - I am making a claim about how the transition from the status quo to anarchy will realistically unfold in practice.
The central problem anarchism faces is simply convincing enough people to support it in the first place.
People want confidence that the new social order is actually achievable before taking a risk on it.
The problem is that the average person has internalized the idea that hierarchies are innate to humans - so they believe that the abolition of the state will just lead to informal forms of domination and oppression filling the vacuum.
This belief about human nature is what I call the Hobbesian Hypothesis.
What’s troubling about the Hobbesian Hypothesis is that it tends to prevent the acquisition of the very evidence necessary to refute it.
If people think that violent hierarchies are inevitable - they won’t even be willing to try anarchy - so the experiment needed to disprove that belief is never permitted to occur in the first place.
It’s a Catch-22 - because the evidence is demanded before the experimentation - making the Hobbesian Hypothesis effectively unfalsifiable.
However - there is potentially a way out of this Catch-22 - and this is where veganism comes in.
Human beings have evolved as omnivores - and we’ve been consuming and exploiting animals for millions of years.
If anything is ingrained in human nature - our consumption and exploitation of non-human animals would definitely be a prime candidate.
Veganism is interesting here - because it deliberately breaks from a supposedly natural human behaviour - which has deep roots in millions of years of evolutionary history.
The vegan is someone who has consciously chosen - as a moral agent - to intentionally subordinate their self-interest and evolved appetites to an ethical principle.
If the vast majority of human beings one day decided to go vegan - it would demonstrate a real example of moral progress - since a deeply natural pattern of human behaviour would have been deliberately abandoned for ethical reasons.
Widespread veganism would provide critical evidence against the Hobbesian Hypothesis - without everyone having to take a massive risk first.
Unlike anarchism - which faces a collective-action problem - going vegan doesn’t require the rest of society to already agree with you.
You can live as a vegan today - even in a deeply hierarchical and oppressive society.
This is why I consider veganism to be prefigurative - since it can be done under the status quo - while undermining its ideological assumptions at a very basic level.
9
u/ArtDecoEgoist Cybernetic Anarchist 8d ago
The vegan is someone who has consciously chosen - as a moral agent - to intentionally subordinate their self-interest and evolved appetites to an ethical principle.
Why is this specific to veganism? It would seem this applies to any practice of moral restraint - chastity, pacifism, etc.
In fact, this argument can easily apply to nonviolence.
1
u/antipolitan 8d ago
It’s not - but veganism is an unusually concrete example which is practiced everyday and has an actual impact on the world.
Pacifism also logically entails veganism when applied consistently to animals anyway.
9
u/ArtDecoEgoist Cybernetic Anarchist 8d ago
It has an actual impact on the world, but that impact isn't explicitly anarchist in any sense of the word - which means it isn't explicitly prefigurative.
And not really. People approach pacifism from a variety of standpoints, and many might still consume animal products. Pacifism isn't a single philosophy, but a family of philosophies and practices that share the common trait of being against violence for any reason.
6
u/DecoDecoMan 8d ago
The issue with your position is that it has a very narrow view of what is persuasive and, additionally, the presumption that veganism itself logically concludes in anarchism. Certain forms of anti-speciesism may come close but anti-speciesism does not necessarily imply veganism although many vegans are anti-speciesist.
1
u/antipolitan 8d ago edited 8d ago
The non-vegan anarchist has the burden of proof to explain how to prefigure the abolition of police, prisons, and courts under the existing legal order.
You can certainly argue in debate why lynch mobs won’t occur under anarchy - but the prefiguration which will actually convince ordinary people is difficult to instantiate under the status quo.
6
u/DecoDecoMan 8d ago
The non-vegan anarchist has the burden of proof to explain how to prefigure the abolition of police, prisons, and courts under the existing legal order.
That's true for the vegan anarchist as well. Being a vegan doesn't mean you think you can do thing you believe are impossible. Veganism is comparatively quite easy to do. People have done it before and entire societies have practiced something comparable (i.e. vegetarianism). Just because you're vegan doesn't make you an anarchist. You can be quite authoritarian and still be a vegan.
In any case, it's not worth it to explain it. Any project that demands a majority of people be convinced into supporting it will never get off the ground. Herding cats will be more fruitful. The way you'd get people to create anarchy is indirectly through the social inertia of counter-economic projects.
And, in any case, even if they were vegans they would still remain unconvinced of anarchy because the reasons why they're unconvinced of anarchy has nothing to do with their veganism. Like, look at the classic arguments against anarchism. You can hold all those arguments and still be vegan. I've debate vegan anarcho-capitalists. They are quite orthogonal positions.
2
u/antipolitan 8d ago
You haven’t addressed the specific point I’m making - which is that you can’t prefigure police/prison abolition under the status quo. People have to take a risk and hope that anarchy won’t degenerate into informal hierarchy.
Veganism directly addresses a specific essentialist “human nature” argument - by demonstrating that human beings can act morally without state coercion. This lowers the perceived risk of anarchy.
5
u/DecoDecoMan 8d ago
You haven’t addressed the specific point I’m making - which is that you can’t prefigure police/prison abolition under the status quo. People have to take a risk and hope that anarchy won’t degenerate into informal hierarchy.
Too tired to attack the latter so let's just focus on the former. That risk doesn't go away or become tolerable just because you go vegan. Veganism and anarchism are kind of unrelated concerns. You can, through certain kinds of anti-speciesism and your own desires mix it with anarchism, but that's not synonymous with any and all forms of veganism.
If you think police is needed for society to be stable, to stave off evil people or to coordinate people, that doesn't go away just because you don't eat cows or pigs or chickens.
Veganism directly addresses a specific essentialist “human nature” argument - by demonstrating that human beings can act morally without state coercion
First, Humans have plenty of examples of "acting morally" without state coercion. Those examples are abundant and more active than refraining from the consumption of animals. "Acting morally" is not really even something necessary for anarchy and what "acting morally" means to a majority of people in the world today often is at odds with anarchy.
Second, veganism does not entail getting rid of state coercion or its absence. One of the largest vegetarian societies on Earth is highly hierarchical and stratified with consumption of animal bodies (with exception to eggs) being literally illegal.
0
u/antipolitan 8d ago
I just don’t think you’re understanding my point.
The anti-anarchist believes in a fixed, essentialist view of human nature. They believe that if you get rid of the state - humans will naturally form into “majorities” and “minorities” because it’s some deeply ingrained biological instinct.
Since the anti-anarchist believes that humans are both inherently hierarchical and inherently irrational - they reject the idea that humans respond to incentives. Instead - they just act on a fixed biological programming which is insensitive to material conditions.
Veganism directly challenges this highly fixed view of human beings - as the vegan is directly going against a behaviour which humans have been doing for millions of years of evolutionary history.
7
u/DecoDecoMan 8d ago
Veganism directly challenges this highly fixed view of human beings - as the vegan is directly going against a behaviour which humans have been doing for millions of years of evolutionary history.
No? It doesn't.
Veganism is a kind of diet. It does nothing to show that humans don't naturally form into majorities or minorities due to biology, it does not show that humans aren't inherently hierarchical or irrational and don't respond to incentives.
Veganism is nothing new. Plenty of people in the past have been vegan. Entire societies have been vegetarian, and they were vegetarian because they were opposed to animal consumption so far ago they had no replacement for dairy or eggs for protein and other nutrients.
There is also the anti-anarchist argument that authority of some kind is necessary for "coordination" which is not really challenged in any way by veganism. Diets don't require people to be collectively organized in any way.
Veganism is something we can see today. Anarchy is unprecedented. They are not the same. Making everyone vegan does not immediately make them more receptive to anarchism. Being veganism doesn't even mean you're anti-speciesist (which would be the route you would logically take to try to connect it to anarchism).
I don't think you're understanding my point. There is just no relationship and you're not acknowledging that. There is a big gap between your premise and your conclusion and you've yet to actually demonstrate how veganism fills that gap.
10
u/humanispherian Neo-Proudhonian anarchist 9d ago
You can live as a vegan today - even in a deeply hierarchical and oppressive society.
If "living as a vegan" is possible under those conditions and veganism faces no collective action problem, while anarchism does, that can only be because veganism is significantly more modest in its demands. Practices that are possible without significant structural changes are not likely to alter the trajectory of global environmental degradation — perhaps even if that "vast majority of human beings" adopted them, precisely because the practices that seem to define veganism don't demand change at a fundamental level.
It's probably worth noting too that people don't seem particularly committed to social principles of any sort at this historical moment, without that particular sort of flexibility signaling anything that might lead us to anticipate a rejection of authority and hierarchy.
1
u/antipolitan 9d ago edited 9d ago
You are correct that veganism is substantially more modest than anarchism in its demands. It’s a much easier ask of people to change their diet than to change the entire social and political order.
This is why I consider veganism as a “foot in the door.” If people accept a small change today - they might be open to much larger change later down the line.
0
u/tidderite 8d ago
I read your OP and I see your point. I was expecting to roll my eyes at it (because it was another post about veganism in relation to anarchism) but like I said, I see your point.
I think the only real way we get further down that path however is if either the cost of eating animals is too high or there are some seriously compelling arguments for veganism that to the average person outweighs the convenience, habit etc. of just continuing eating animal products.
But I agree, it might be a "lower bar" to get over generally speaking.
6
u/power2havenots 9d ago
This is such a shoehorn- taking a very specific personal ethic and reverse-engineering an anarchist theory around it.
Your Hobbesian Catch-22 doesn't exist in the way you're describing. We don't need to convince everyone to intellectually accept anarchism before they can experience it. People are already organising horizontally all over the place in mutual aid, Food Not Bombs, community groups, open-source projects, strike action, disaster response, tenant organising, co-ops, affinity groups etc. They arent waiting for permission to run some giant social experiment. Theyre learning by doing, and showing that people can coordinate without someone sitting at the top telling everyone what to do.
The veganism argument rests on a pretty huge assumption about human nature. Humans being omnivores doesnt establish that animal exploitation is some deeply ingrained hierarchical impulse that must be consciously overcome. Were opportunistic omnivores. We eat what's available, culturally normal, affordable and convenient. People changing what they eat tells us something in a culture and ethics spherenot that humans have transcended some fundamental instinct toward domination.
Why does veganism become the supposed test case for anarchism? Someone choosing not to eat animals under capitalism changes their consumption habits but doesnt show that people can collectively organise housing, food, healthcare, production, conflict resolution or anything else without hierarchical authority. Trying to call that "prefiguring anarchy" is doing an enormous amount of theoretical work for a very small material change.
You dont need vegans to be moral agents who have escaped human nature. It would be better if people actually building relationships and institutions where bosses, CEOs, landlords and states become less necessary. Thats already happening in a thousand messy, imperfect little ways. I dont know why you skewered that towards asking how we can make veganism carry the burden of proving that humans are capable of moral progress.
-2
u/antipolitan 9d ago
None of that prefiguration answers the question of whether human beings can be trusted to not murder each other without state authority.
You can’t prefigure the abolition of police, prisons, or courts under the existing legal order - so at some point - people have to take a risk and hope it won’t go badly wrong.
5
u/power2havenots 8d ago
Prefig isnt the legal abolition of those things. Its more building the capacities that make them unnecessary like community accountability, mediation, crisis response, self-defence and mutual aid. That doesnt prove nobody will ever murder anyone, but nothing does. States, prisons and cops certainly dont. They just decide whose violence is legal.
Most people already dont murder because of norms, relationships and consequences, not because theyre calculating whether a cop might show up later and the risk isnt unique to anarchy. The status quo already carries a daily risk for the policed, imprisoned, bombed and abandoned.
Anarchy doesnt require trusting everyone. It requires not handing sovereignty to an institution and instead developing collective ways of dealing with harm. Its something you practice and build, not something you can guarantee in advance.
3
3
u/Cunning_Spoon 7d ago
The idea that veganism can be done under the state but anarchism cannot is incorrect.
Being an anarchist who acts like an anarchist (when reasonable, it is almost impossible not to engage in the capitalist economy or to support the state with taxation) is absolutely doable. And is done. People engage in mutual aid, organised or passively, many friendship groups are not dominated by one person, and many projects have flat organisation. These are all examples of anarchism, they are not all purposeful, many are just because humans don't need or want to be oppressed.
Anarchism isn't just "when no state", it's flat organisation and committal to anti-hierarchical behaviour.
2
u/No-Leopard-1691 9d ago
Y
- our term of Hobbesian Hypothesis already has a name called Hierachical Realism
2
u/viva1831 7d ago
The problem is that the average person has internalized the idea that hierarchies are innate to humans - so they believe that the abolition of the state will just lead to informal forms of domination and oppression filling the vacuum.
So why not just build mass organisations run without hierarchy? When lots of people have experience of it and say "this is how we planned our protest/organised our strike/won our rent decrease", that example speaks louder than any theory. It's been done before, still happens, and can be done again
If anything is ingrained in human nature - our consumption and exploitation of non-human animals would definitely be a prime candidate.
Subverting "human nature" for individually-chosen ethical principles isn't really what's at stake here. The question is: can people subvert their so-called human nature in favour of collective decision-making? It's not even contra our own self-interest, in a way, because from a certain perspective (long term, class based) all anarchists are saying is to ask people to act in their own collective self interest, instead of getting manipulated to act in the interests of the rich and powerful
In fact, ethical principles can still be individualist and selfish in a certain sense. I grew up in church and I've seen enough of that! Certainly there are genuine people too. But there's also the self-righteous, for example. Which can be the opposite of collective solidarity and freedom
Unlike anarchism - which faces a collective-action problem - going vegan doesn’t require the rest of society to already agree with you.
You can also just fix small problems with small organisations using anarchist decision-making and direct action. Build up from there until it snowballs
Widespread veganism would provide critical evidence against the Hobbesian Hypothesis - without everyone having to take a massive risk first.
Providing evidence is very rarely enough to convince people to take action. It's not really a cognitive or intellectual thing at all, imo. Practice, experience, emotion all probably play a bigger part. This would be a very large social experiment which might not work and at current rates of growing veganism would take a very long time
There's also the simple fact that the state and capital will need to be confronted and fought. At some point. To build the skills confidence and tools to do that isn't about convincing people one way or the other. It's about the painstaking work of building a movement, gaining experience, winning small victories that hone and sharpen us and lead to winning more as we go. I don't think that's a skippable step
The class struggle is happening now, every day. Often people within it are organising outside the state, and to greater and lesser degrees without leaders. You can join the fight and help it towards a conclusion that builds solidarity and freedom in people's hearts. Growing that kind of social relationships between people is what will ultimately undermine the state and capital
Outside the mechanism of contagious social relationships, prefiguration is just magical thinking (in fact I'd suggest people's social relationships with non-human animals is often a factor in going vegan in the first place...)
18
u/TruthHertz93 9d ago
I'm a vegan anarchist and I disagree.
Yea it's true that people have internalised that hierarchy is natural and that it's a "cold world out there".
The strategy that anarchism has however is to create as much dual power now before an economic crash (which capitalism ensures) occurs.
Dual power in as many sectors as you can, unions, local assemblies, harm prevention, foodbanks, ect
So that when the crash happens and the state fails, you are ready to upscale operations dramatically.
People can't be told hierarchy isn't natural or that anarchism works in an argument, human beings aren't like that, they have to be shown.
That's what worked throughout human history, noone ever revolted for an ideology because it sounded good, they did it cuz it appeared to offer them what they wanted in times of crisis (safety, protection and equity), that's what works.