Tag: Veganism

Élisée Reclus: Veganarchism, Violence, and Colonialism

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.

“Anarcho-Beef People”: Against All Domination at Anarchist Gatherings (1986-89)

A series of annual gatherings from 1986 to 1989 revitalized the anarchist movement and built the infrastructure for national and continental coordination. I will share more writing about this in the future, but I wanted to share a quick anecdote about the debates over food and animal liberation at these convergences. They offer a window into the evolving values and ethical norms of the anarchist movement at the time. Anarchists developed a commitment to fighting all forms of oppression, hierarchy, and domination—including of other species—rather than solely focusing on capitalism and the state.

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The first national convergence was held in Chicago in 1986 to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket Affair. Several hundred people from across the country attended a few days of workshops and a major demonstration. Tensions at the gathering reflected the political and ethical debates taking place within the anarchist movement around the question of animal liberation. Although there is a long history of vegetarian anarchism, this became a major concern in the late twentieth century.

The Chicago organizers served a non-vegetarian friendly (and certainly non-vegan) meal at the major Saturday banquet. This, some attendees felt, was no accidental oversight. Rather, it happened because (as one attendee later reflected) “they don’t like vegetarians.” Tensions rose, fueled by both ethical concerns and hunger. An impromptu demonstration ensued in which, a participant describes, “the street theater crowd from San Francisco began milling around the middle of the room on all fours, mooing and clucking and being herded by a vegan speechifier with an imaginary whip” who then proceeded to “slaughter” the “cows.”

Although the demonstration was largely received in good humor, an associated group handed out incendiary flyers attacking “anarcho-beef people.” The distribution of this flyer provoked strong negative reactions against “preachy vegans” and for a moment it appeared that a physical fight might actually break out. Tensions soon calmed, however—or at least, much of the anger was redirected towards an argument around anti-Semitic flyers distributed by another attendee. (The latter is a story for another time.)

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The next annual anarchist gathering, in Minneapolis in 1987, was a crucial step in the path towards a national anarchist network. It was organized with the intention of coordinating the de-centralized movement and laying the groundwork for a national organization. Unlike the previous convergence, which was organized mostly by older folks in a group called “Some Chicago Anarchists,” this one was put on by younger people who were more immersed in the growing anarchist milieu (including its ethical debates).

The Minneapolis crew framed the convergence around “Building the Movement.” While they hosted a wide range of workshops, including anarcho-punk DIY staples like how to dumpster food and brew your own beer, the focus was on facilitating strategic conversations and building the infrastructure for a coordinated national movement. Thus, throughout the gathering there was a “movement building track” of strategic discussions and meetings.

Part of this focus on building the movement entailed avoiding the unnecessary, distracting conflicts of the previous year’s gathering. For one, the organizers vowed to avoid the previous year’s arguments around food by simply serving all vegetarian meals. Of course, this was based in large part around an ethical commitment to animal liberation, but one key participant shared in a recent interview with me that it was also a conscious decision to avoid unnecessary drama and dissension.

The banquet was catered by a vegetarian workers’ cooperative called the New Riverside Cafe. This was specifically noted in a pre-convergence mass mailing to anarchists across the country. It seems that the organizers meant to be clear from the beginning that the meat-headed (sorry) mistakes of Chicago would not be repeated. There would be no protestors pretending to be mooing cows, no near fist fights over burgers.

In part because of its superior organization (including around the question of food), the Minneapolis gathering was a smashing success. It laid the groundwork for the next two annual meetings, in Toronto (‘88) and San Francisco (’89), which set the scene for the anarchist movement in the 1990s.

(Sources for the Chicago gathering come from the zine “Mob Action Against the State: Haymarket Remembered… An Anarchist Convention.”)