MARX V. DARWIN: Vegan revolution or vegan evolution?
Our current vegan movement should be to nourish both evolution and revolution at the same time. We need to continue vegan outreach, helping people to make the small steps that the Vegan Evolution needs (like dietary vegans finally becoming ethical vegans), but also encourage people to make the big steps that the Vegan Revolution needs (like disrupting the animal exploitation industries with effective tactical pressure campaigns that aim for systemic change).
JORDI CASAMITJANA: It was the German philosopher Karl Marx who in the 19th century theorised about how people would inevitably revolt when facing the injustices of the capitalist society. He postulated that in a capitalist industrialised society (like the one he and most people in the West were living in at the time), a revolution of the oppressed class against the ruling class would be inevitable. After the publication of his 1867 book “Das Kapital”, his theories influenced many revolutionaries (such as Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, etc.)
If the passing of decades has not proved all his theories yet, it has not disproved many of them either, as many of the capitalist societies he was talking about ended up experiencing a revolution of the oppressed people (be that the working class, the slaved race, or the invaded ethnic group). Indeed, revolutions sparked by a sense of social injustice have liberated many oppressed people over the centuries…
It does seem that many revolutions work because the objectives of those running them could be achieved relatively quickly, the societies where they took place changed significantly, and the changes last a long time (some may last forever). However, there is a price for a quick change, though. Many of these revolutions were bloody and came about fast because violence was used to propel them.
Is violence necessary to achieve the goal of any revolution? Not really. Historians also use the term “revolution” for other revolutions that took much longer than a few decades, and that were not directly associated with arm conflicts or violence between humans. For instance, the Agricultural Revolution (lasting about 1000 years in the Neolithic period), the Commercial Revolution (11th Century-18th Century), the Scientific Revolution (1543-1687), the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) the Digital Revolution (1960 and still going), and the Artificial Intelligence Revolution (which just started but I think will last for a long time). All of these have transformed the world in a way that seems permanent (although nothing is really permanent in this Universe). So, these longer revolutions also seem to work in terms of transforming the world…
There have been many intellectuals and scholars theorising about revolutions before and after Karl Marx came along, as there have been many theorising about the evolution of the components of Nature (atoms, galaxies, stars, planets, continents, mountains, rocks, live organisms, or societies) before and after the English naturalist, geologist, and biologist Charles Darwin came along… However, after the publication of his famous book “The Origin of Species” in 1859 in which he explained how the evolution of living organisms we see was possible through a simple process called natural selection, Charles Darwin has become a symbol of the concept of Evolution.
We now know that everything we see in the Universe evolves from a simple state to a more complex state, or vice versa, through gradual incremental changes that are almost imperceivable at any given time… the evolution of the human family of different humanoid species, what we call the Hominids, started about 6 or 7 million years ago in Africa, but those initial human ancestors did not start from a vacuum but were themselves the product of biological evolution that started about 3.8 billion years ago with the first life forms that, gradually, with the natural selection process Darwin discovered, diversified in all the species we see today… Another good example is the evolution of human language, which started about 200,000 years ago and has not stopped yet, creating new languages from the gradual accumulation of small changes over millennia…
The use of money (or currency) to buy stuff is another interesting human social phenomenon that gradually evolved over millennia, probably starting about 30,000 years ago. So was the evolution of law and legal systems, war, transport, metallurgy, writing, and even the concept of companion animals (it probably started with the domestication of dogs also about 30,000 years ago)…
Even Carnism evolved gradually in all human societies… Arguably, carnism started a few million years ago when early hominids left the trees (the providers of the fruit needed for their ancestral frugivorous diet) and tried to be scavengers in the African savanna which probably moved them towards omnivorism…
The question is, if carnism, the opposite of veganism, ended up dominating humanity through evolution, not revolution, should we expect that veganism, and its ultimate expression of a complete vegan world, would also come about via evolution, not revolution? Would the world become vegan by individual uncoordinated small steps that happened organically without design, as the world became carnist this way? Would the world become vegan in millennia, rather than decades, via evolution?…
if today we are only experiencing a vegan evolution, would we need to wait millennia before this slow pace leads to the vegan world (if we ever make it that far considering the current climate and pandemic crises), or sometime in the future the vegan revolution will begin and achieve the vegan world much faster?…
if we leave it to evolution alone, we may be too late. We may manage to build the vegan world in a few millennia, but only from the ashes of a planet we almost destroyed, killing many sentient beings in the process. Perhaps the few survivors of climate Armageddon can build the vegan world from the rubble, but is this the vegan world we are dreaming about right now? No, it’s not. Our vegan world is the world we build to save the current world with all its inhabitants from the global crises we have initiated. Our vegan world is a solution from the best of humanity, not a consequence of the worst of it.
If we haven’t started the non-violent vegan revolution yet, we must get our acts together and probably start it soon, because time is ticking fast, and when you are running out of time, revolutions are what you need…
Perhaps everything we have been learning about evolution and revolution may give rise to a new concept where both happen at the same time, and gradual change is accelerated with periods of fast growth (in fact, the evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium postulates precisely that, and its been gaining credence in the last few years). Perhaps we should call this new concept Re-evolution.
If that is the case, if re-evolution will be the method that will guarantee us success, the role of our current vegan movement should be to nourish both evolution and revolution at the same time, so by the time the revolution is enacted, everything will be in place. We need to keep fostering every small progress on any front (social, commercial, scientific, political, legal, etc.), including single-issue campaigns, ignoring that, right now, it may look like they are not having any significant effect in the bigger picture (remember that evolutionary progress is normally undetectable at any given time).
However, simultaneously, we should keep continuing building the foundations of a peaceful revolution, reinforcing the integrity of the vegan philosophy and its core principles (by preventing its conceptual dilution with the right gatekeeping), and ensuring that the vegan movement is strengthened and looked after properly (by increasing its size, diversity, and resilience).
We need to continue vegan outreach helping people to make the small steps that the Vegan Evolution needs (like veganphobic meat-eating carnists becoming questioning omnivorous, then pre-vegan vegetarians, then dietary vegans, and finally ethical vegans), but also encourage people to make the big steps that the Vegan Revolution needs (like making influential ethical vegan politicians and decision-makers from carnists and start changing the system from within). But we also need to disrupt the animal exploitation industries with effective tactical pressure campaigns that aim for systemic change, so the revolution will have less turning to do when the time comes.
To get to the vegan world soon, we need the vegan infrastructure, the vegan people, but also the vegan power, because this is what it takes to move society around quickly. Perhaps one day would be Vegan Power Day. SOURCE…
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