[Marxism] Delicatessan

["Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

As a vegetarian I am subjected to crude and stupid arguments regarding the
justice of meat-eating all the time. Rarely do I encounter a meat-eater who
is willing to critically engage with arguments about meat-eating, and
prefers not to talk about how nice eating meat is, or how unhealthy
vegetarianism is. Neither taste nor health per se have anything to do with
being a vegetarian in my book.

I read in a book on the psychology of nazism once that vegetarianism was
merely sublimated rage. Adorno wrote that all metaphysics is articulated
with rage. Except vegetarianism is not deontological; it is an ethical
decision taken with regard to one's social relations with nature. As such,
like Mao, I would be prepared to eat rats if it came to it, but refuse to
eat a pig in the midst of affluence. When I point out that there is no
difference between killing and eating a dog and killing and eating a pig,
sentimental carnivores recoil in horror. Usually, they parrot that dogs
taste vile, but pigs don't (despite the fact that they can't know this).
Well, I reply, human flesh might taste heavenly, but cannibalism is frowned
upon (kids are great; but I couldn't eat a whole one).

Furthermore, since I can be quite healthy chewing on cow now and again,
health is not a factor intrinsic to vegetarianism. In fact, the vegetarian
health-bores/victims-of-eating-disorders function as a kind of loyal
vegetarian opposition to human carnivores. Some others of this types imagine
that eating meat makes people aggressive. When it is pointed out that such
sociobiological claptrap fails to account for the sadistic madman Hitler's
being a vegetarian, they are flummoxed.

I believe that the spurious arguments put forth by rich human carnivores are
similar in kind to ignorance of Third World slavery. I believe that if
people can rest content with stupid arguments justifying one unnecessary
kind of violence and oppression *in the name of their own pleasure* then
they can more readily do so more generally. I yearn for the day when alien
beings of vastly superior power and intelligence, perhaps from Andromeda,
come to earth (as in John Carpenter's *They Live*) to breed humans like
cattle for slaughter.

'Don't they taste nice', they will say. 'But they're only humans', they will
laugh together.


<http://www.pww.org/article/view/7170/1/272/>

Marxism Without Meat?

When at long last war and capitalism, terrorism and religious fanaticism
have had their final day, when a communist society breaks out like the
glorious sun after the most savage storms, what will our new world look
like? Only the science fiction writer knows, and the utopian novelist. But
surely we all feel in our bones that its basic tenets must be peace and
plenty, love and kindness. Certainly there can be no cruelty. And yet I
wonder whether a most monstrous cruelty ? rampant in this ugly age ? will
hang on to mar our future. I mean the incarceration, torture and slaughter
of billions upon billions of animals.

Each year 10 billion chickens ? their beaks cut off with a hot knife ? are
jammed into cages with less room per bird than a piece of paper. Hanging by
their feet the birds are conveyed to assembly line slaughter. They are
stunned electrically, then by mechanical blade their throats are slashed.

A cow is given a severe blow to the head then hung up by her hind legs. The
animal ? who often remains conscious ? is ?stuck? in the throat and then a
knife is plunged into her heart. Kicking, blood gushing from her body, the
animal moves down the line to the tail cutter, the belly ripper, and the
hide puller.

Paul and Linda McCartney wrote, ?If slaughterhouses had glass walls,
everyone would be vegetarian.? Author Charles Patterson agrees because
through those walls, he says, we would gaze horrified into a place that
looks much like a Nazi death chamber. In his shattering book ?Eternal
Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,? Patterson draws an
astonishing analogy between a slaughterhouse for Jews and a slaughterhouse
for animals. In both we find the annihilation of ?life unworthy of life,?
the wholesale depersonalized day-after-day butchery and the lying prattle of
?humane killing.?

But we cannot look through the walls of the slaughterhouse; the owners of
?our? TV airwaves will not permit it, reports Gail A. Eisnitz, who
interviewed workers with 2 million hours on the kill floor and photographed
the carnage there. In her book ?Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed,
Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment inside the U.S. Meat Industry,? Eisnitz
writes of the monopoly control of the meat industry. Their gluttony for
profits leads to a speedup of production lines and arrant contempt not only
for worker safety but even dignity. ?Workers,? writes one reviewer, ?are
having to urinate in their pants rather than being accorded the simple
dignity of being able to leave the line to take care of their affairs.?

Health reasons for vegetarianism are just as compelling as ethical ones. Dr.
Michael Klaper reports, ?Every 30 seconds on this continent somebody grabs
their chest and falls over with a heart attack. This is animal fat clogging
up the arteries.?

As for ecology: to produce a one-pound steak requires 16 pounds of grain and
2,500 gallons of water. More than 70 percent of the grain grown in the
United States is fed to slaughterhouse animals. The waste is criminal.

But returning to moral reasons: ?The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon
the innocent, faithful animal race form the blackest chapter in the whole
world?s history.? This statement by Edward Augustus Freeman would be called
?sentimental? by August Bebel. In his book ?Woman and Socialism? (50
editions in many languages), Bebel writes, ?A purely vegetable diet is
neither likely nor necessary in the future.? Let us hope Bebel?s is not the
last word of Marxism on vegetarianism.

Rather let us heed the socialist Albert Einstein: ?Nothing will benefit
human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as
the evolution to a vegetarian diet.?

World socialism/communism, apparently, is as far off as the highest mountain
on the horizon. Certainly as we climb higher and higher up that mountain we
will with each step advance morally. It is inconceivable that a communist
society can be attained without ethical, compassionate people leading the
way.

Come, let us be soybean socialists. Must we have slaughterhouses under
communism? No, let us have a cruelty-free communism ? Marxism without meat!
Let us climb that mountain with ?vegetarianism? on our banners and say, with
H.G. Wells, ?In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But
now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. I can still remember as
a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.?



Gene Gordon (wochica@xxxxxxx) is a California writer who, with June Levine,
wrote ?Tales of Wo-Chi-Ca: Blacks, Whites and Reds at Camp.?

_________________________________________________________________
Be the first to hear what's new at MSN - sign up to our free newsletters!
http://www.msn.co.uk/newsletters


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism