Seventeen years ago this evening (on May 5, 2008), I drove up to a vegan sandwich shop in Oakland, California, had a sandwich, enjoyed it, and decided that, yes, I could be vegan and therefore that I would become vegan.
There were, of course, the health- and environmental-related reasons for going vegan, but I would say my primary motivation was as an extension of my then-anarchism. My thinking paralleled that of the animal rights movement (or, in an earlier incarnation, vegetarian ecofeminism) in that I could not justify a relationship of domination toward nonhuman animals.
A lot has changed since then. That sandwich shop is long gone, though Oakland remains a relatively vegan-friendly place.
More significantly, I am no longer an anarchist. Yes, humans have certainly been anarchist in the past.[1] But I am dissatisfied with the evidence that a vast majority remain capable of anarchism today. Indeed, too many celebrate their domination of nonhuman animals—Arby’s, for example, has stickers on its restaurant doors hoping “you enjoyed your stay at the top of the food chain” placed so visitors will see them on their way out. Entire regions of the country remain hostile to veganism. The entire phenomena of capitalism, of war in general, of the genocide in Gaza, of the Russian aggression toward Ukraine, of white Christian nationalism, of white supremacist gangsters (the so-called “police”), and indeed of Donald Trump and an aconstitutional broligarchy belies that legacy with cruelty for the sake of cruelty, domination for the sake of domination, and toxic masculinity for the sake of toxic masculinity. How can I continue to believe in the practicability of anarchism with so much evidence to the contrary in the so-called “developed world?”
I still think that anarchism would be a preferable system of social organization, but regard myself as a libertarian socialist instead, objecting to both political and economic systems of domination.[2] And I remain vegan, even as I finished a Ph.D. and have left the San Francisco Bay Area, first for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and now Erie, in the same state.
It is a source of enormous sorrow and frustration that my education has not translated into gainful employment, that I suffer the financial precarity of the ‘gig economy,’ and that I lack the time and resources to pursue my scholarly interests.
But while I have many regrets, my decisions to remain vegan and child-free are not among them. I wish my species was more enlightened and more kind.
[1] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021); Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902; Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006).
[2] This is in contrast to capitalist libertarianism and its even more extreme “anarchocapitalist” variation, which object only to political—not economic—domination.