Burak Sezer ABSTRACT

“Veganism and Solidarity”

Burak Sezer, Technical University Dortmund, Germany

 

This essay argues that solidarity takes centerstage in vegan modes of being in the world. Taking the cue from Timothy Morton’s notion of solidarity in Humankind (2017), I argue that veganism operates against what Morton calls “agrilogistics,” an exploitative form of modern-industrial agriculture whose logic bleeds into well-known ontological binaries, such as human/animal or nature/culture. Whereas agrilogistics is prone to foster parasitism – the “one” side living at the expense of the “other” – solidarity translates these relations of domination into those of symbiotic coexistence. Furthermore, this notion of solidarity will be extended into one that encompasses relations of hierarchy among humans as well, especially across class divisions in urban areas. This is necessary insofar as many discussions revolve around making animal products more expensive (via pricing) or more difficult to obtain (via faraway free-range farmers, fishers, or hunters with high standards of “animal welfare”) in order to curb consumption. However, that would allow affluent or otherwise privileged classes to maintain their diet while others are compelled to change theirs.

 

Against this background, vegan solidarity argues that it is an ethical obligation, especially for the upper-middle class, to outright refuse to eat non-vegan food, regardless of pricing, accessibility or “animal welfare.” Adding to Benjamin Westwood’s considerations of vegan refusal (2018), these theoretical considerations are then used to critique Donna Haraway and Martha Nussbaum’s recent contributions to human-animal studies. Haraway argues that it is ethically defensible to eat the meat obtained by trained hunters who “practice [ ] love for the animals they kill” (299), while Nussbaum claims that “[v]egans, like abolitionists, deny the possibility of mutually beneficial symbiosis” (221), instead aiming for merely a “mostly vegetarian diet” (169). I argue that both apologies for non-veganism falter in the face of the notion of vegan solidarity. Being in a privileged position to know a well-trained hunter, or being able to afford to buy ecologically sustainable fish, cannot constitute the ethical basis for a behavior that ought to translate into broader societal imperatives.

 

Keywords: veganism, solidarity, intersectionality, agrilogistics, classism