Dictatorship of the Vegetarian

Craig has his excellent post up on animal rights and anthropocentrism at The Inhumanities, in which he makes a distinction between State societies which believe that 1) they are the model of the human and that 2) they should exterminate nonhumanity, in contrast to non-state societies which share 1) but not 2). The conclusion is that anthropocentrism is not the problem per se, but how that fairly common attribute of culture reacts with State organization.

I like how Craig has linked veganism to historical phenomena, ie, the State, providing a target for opposition larger than the boycott but smaller than Christian ontology. This historicization also makes available a number of resources developed for resisting the State.

What comes to my mind, in particular, is the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I'd put this in parallel with the ethical meat position that aims to regenerate something like the relation to killing animals we find in non-State societies--which, at the least, simply cannot kill animals at the same level of scale as the factory farming of State societies. (Cleaning dead bodies in an artisanal rather than Fordist set-up is neither easy nor quick and constitutes a form of skilled rather than unskilled labor). If such a re-ritualized valorization of meat eating is what ethical meat holds as its normative social goal, the road to this as other than an exception or fetish (ie, as a social mode rather than a commodity) requires a theory of how one gets from State to non-State relations to animals and meat. If the State is directly attached to the social forms of mass meat eating (the factory farm, the normalization of plentiful, cheap meat) then ethical meat maintains a fantasy of the dictatorship of the vegetarian that would provide the link between the present and a society in which ethical meat recaptures its ritual meaning.


Discourse on ethical consumption recapitulates the Marxist argument that in a communist society labor wouldn't be alienated, or we wouldn't have a totalizing instrumental view of nature, or objects wouldn't confront us as commodities--that in whatever way, something we occasionally access today as an exception invested with fetish value would be normalized and de-fetishized. Following Craig's astute diagnosis of the entanglements of State and meat, we can see that half-way measures like ethical meat don't really believe in themselves except insomuch as they believe that vegetarianism is the condition of their reason.