Vegetarianism and concern for animal rights has a long history in the anarchist movement. The great geographer and theorist of anarcho-communism Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) was one of the most prominent radical vegetarians in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Reclus was part of a milieu of Fin de siècle radicalism that was often anarchistic and concerned with a wide range of social issues, including vivisection and other forms of animal exploitation. Reclus wrote a stirring defense of his ethical position in a classic essay called “On Vegetarianism” (1901) in which he argues that vegetarianism is both an ethical and aesthetic necessity.
Reclus called for a beautiful, joyous life that only the total transformation of anarchism could provide. He extended this criteria of maximizing beauty and joy to the realm of food and the related concern of animal exploitation. Reclus decried slaughterhouses and the display of dead animal bodies for food as ugly, violent, and disquieting. These ugly displays were interwoven into everyday life under capitalism (and, to be sure, before it as well). This cannot help but affect our own lived experience and deaden our senses, decrease the beauty of our lives. Like the ugly scar of a concrete dam blocking a river, the slaughter and vivisection of animals dammed the beautiful potential of a life well lived.
The violence of animal exploitation and consumption at home was intimately connected, in Reclus’s mind, to the violence of colonialism and war abroad. Colonized peoples were dehumanized and reduced to the level of animals, which justified their slaughter. Of course, Reclus decried this dehumanization. At the same time, he believed that it was enabled by the treatment of animals themselves as disposable and beneath ethical concern. If, he argued, we could learn to approach animals ethically at home, it would destabilize the justification of colonial violence abroad. It would transform our relationship with the world in a way that precludes violence and exploitation directed at any human or non-human animals.
While the argument is compelling, it rings slightly hollow to our ears today. One concrete example suffices to expose the faulty reasoning: today, the Israeli Defense Force uses the relatively widespread prevalence of veganism in its armed forces as an example of its supposed dedication to peace. The IDF uses it as both a shield to deflect attention from its violence against Palestinians as well as a weapon to justify this violence against the supposedly “brutal” and “backwards” colonized subjects. This fits alongside the Israeli “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing,” (environmental and queer justifications for colonial violence).
Thus, it seems clear from our vantage point in the twenty-first century that Reclus was naïve in his belief that ending animal exploitation would end colonial violence. Capitalism and colonialism are able to co-opt and mobilize liberatory calls into their “humanitarian” defenses of the status quo and of the forms of violence that they practice.
Yet there is still an appeal to Reclus’s call for an ethical, beautiful life free of exploitation of human and non-human animals alike. In the late twentieth century, a new generation of anarchists and punks would develop this position and further interrogate the relationship between the violence of animal exploitation and the violence of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.