The limit of economic boycott under capitalism and alternative strategies

Introduction

One of the common arguments animal rights activists use to persuade the public (and themselves) to end animal exploitation is through “supply and demand”. This is the idea that through our consumer choices we can sway the methods of production, by “voting with our dollar” to create the change we want to see in the world.

I have used this narrative in my own outreach countless times, but is this method effective? Can we end animal exploitation through economic boycott under the current economic and political system? This consumer based method of advocacy submits that our primary means of influencing change is economic. By changing our consumptive practices, producers will respond by exploiting fewer animals in reaction to our purchasing power.

In contrast to this extolling of individual change, is advocating for systemic change. This methodology argues that without challenging the political, economic, and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation.

These two positions reflect the differences in underlying ideology towards social change that occur more broadly than in animal rights activism and are present in all movements for social change.

The first position advocates that changes we make in our consumptive habits are then reflected in products made and sold by markets always looking to follow social trends.

The second position rejects this model of change through consumption, and indeed critiques the entire system of consumption that would allow such violence to exist in the first place.

In this article, we will frame these positions as “boycott veganism” for those using their consumer practices, and abstention, as their mode of change creation, and anti-speciesism activism for those looking to change systems through protest and direct action

The two are not mutually exclusive, indeed abstention from any animal products is naturally present in anti-speciesism activism, and those engaging in boycott veganism also engage in system change. Indeed, it may be more accurate to view these as points on a veganism — anti-speciesist spectrum.

This essay critiques the limitations of boycott veganism, when it is seen as an endpoint in an individual’s practice of veganism, but also acknowledges the valuable role this individual change plays, and aims to reframe this supposed dichotomy of individual versus systemic change.

Using boycott to influence producer behaviour

Under a neoliberal market economy businesses succeed through growth, rewarding profit as the driver of the economy. Within these conditions, businesses aren’t neutral or rational actors that respond to consumer demands. They are profit driven machines that engage in unethical marketing and business practices to extract as much capital as possible.

Transnational technocapitalism, as we know it today, has arisen historically as a conscious threat to both organisms and environment, turning both into little more than “resources” and “externalities” for its own assault on a greater rate of profit reaped. Their profit-maximizing algorithm makes them shift as many costs as possible to workers, taxpayers, nature and future generations, all of whom are off their balance sheets.

There is an implicit need to feed growth. There is nothing cyclical or resourceful about capitalism, it is an attempt at infinite extraction of finite resources. As long as you are putting money into the economy you are supporting some form of political and economic arrangement, no consumption is apolitical.

When trying to shop “ethically” there are still hidden elements like labor and environmental issues. Capitalism shifts the blame, saying consumers dictate what they make. Corporations greenwash and repackage the ethical dilemma as consumer choice implicating individuals as the arbiters of moral choice. It is easy to forget how terrifyingly massive, invasive and manipulative the marketing apparatus that we exist inside of is. It literally preys upon base human instincts, while none of the things we need to survive are “for sale”. Air quality, water quality, sea levels, biodiversity, community — all of the products we buy will negatively impact these.

Animal agriculture has been used as a vehicle to colonise and exploit the world (see so-called Australia, an ancient land decimated by commercial agriculture where 56% of the total landmass is used for grazing). It mandates the use of private land, exploitation of resources and displaces communities. This practice, even outside of capitalism, exploits and kills beings, but under capitalism also results in massive resource use and production of waste. Animal bodies are thrown away in a system that doesn’t respond to actual need but is in fact divorced from reality in search of “productivity”.

Businesses have developed defence mechanisms to help maintain this productivity when so-called ‘consumer-demand’ changes. Capitalism can absorb threats to its system and turn them into opportunities, and for some industries, use the backing of the government to mandate their security despite changes in segments of society that would otherwise force them to change.

Relevant to this essay, the addition of plant-based options by a non-vegan company does not signal a moral shift, rather it reflects a cynical attempt to bring in new markets. Through doing so, corporations can increase their market share and become more profitable whilst not changing their core business. Indeed, some of the worst offenders may even avoid or end boycotts of their business simply by adding a plant-based option. The same vegans who previously spat on that company will now sing their praises for having merely added a new option that caters to them.

But even boycotting these companies regardless of vegan options does not force them to act in moral ways. When faced with a loss of profits, they will shift these costs elsewhere. They may do so through the following:

Developing new trading strategies

Importing and exporting in new ways

Adjust and capitalise on profit in new markets or products

Take advantage of more flexible and free trade policies

Develop internal efficiencies

Lower market prices and production costs

Create more efficient cost and scale economies (Intensive Megafarms)

Create cheaper ways to slaughter more non-human animals

Breed non-human animals to be more adaptable and “efficient” (i.e shorter lifespan for more flesh)

Exploitation of workers

Forcing refugees and most vulnerable to work for lower wages

Prisoners or inmates taken advantage of for cheap or free labor

Cut wages, benefits, and staff

Collusion with government and regulators

Subsidies and buybacks

Lobby government to adjust regulations

Make minor shifts in welfare conditions and re-package as “ethical”

Marketing

Co-opt a new (vegan) segment of the market and release a new products

Greenwash existing products

Industry sponsored “research”

Collusion with media

Discredit the animal rights message, attack the people pushing the message

If we want to influence these conditions to help animals should we be using our “dollar” or is the framework itself broken?

Problems with boycott veganism alone

Can we measure success through the growth of vegan consumerism? Capitalism has told us we can buy more stuff and still be green. Is creating new wants through a “market” of ethical consumers going to make any meaningful change? Has veganism been sold to people in the form of products? There are limitations to the idea that we can buy our way to equality. Framing animal liberation as an economic issue, rather than an ethical issue misses the structural and systemic barriers. This form of veganism (boycott-veganism) addresses the content (i.e. animal products) and not the form/structure (i.e. capitalism) of the global market that facilitates the exploitation of animals as commodities and obstructs people from transforming society.

Vegan consumerism doesn’t offer a new solution, it offers the same system of production. Mainstream veganism has marketed itself as a project for growing the economy. We fetishise the growth of vegan companies even though vegan product ranges are still owned by multinationals. Plant-based substitute foods that are replicating the modes used in fast food, convenience food and packaged goods still drive consumer capitalism and preference farmed animals over wildlife, disadvantaged humans and the environment with packaging and waste. It is both possible and desirable for animal exploitation and veganism to exist at the same time for those in pursuit of profit. More vegan products does not correlate to animal liberation, nor does it advocate for total liberation for all exploited beings and ecosystems.

The emphasis on smaller personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive systemic change. This new obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of corporate interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed.

Asking individuals to change their economic behaviour shifts the onus to people, not systems who create the situation. Veganism as an economic boycott does not even universally enable people to practice veganism. This also further marginalises populations of disadvantaged people with little to no financial and/or geographic access to adopt a vegan lifestyle. Inherent in the model of consumer advocacy is an inequality of power which marginalises those without the capacity or access to influence through monetary means. If our domain for change is seated in economic capacity, then some will have less “votes” than others. This is also a resignation that our power is no longer as citizens with equal voices, but as consumers with varying capacity to enact change.

A vegan world will not be brought about by the asocial, amoral market. Mainstream vegan discourse and activism’s focus on economic boycott and conversions of individuals is problematic not because it is wholly ineffective, but because it is insufficient. Relying on “conversions” of people using sales techniques internalises and reiterates capitalisms methods and measures of success. Without challenging the political, economic, and social structure of society, veganism as a movement will make little progress reducing and abolishing animal exploitation. Has there ever been a social justice movement that was preceded by a mass consumer movement?

Attempts to change the system will be co-opted, if not outright destroyed, by capitalism. Demand for non-human animal products is not the root cause, perceived demand is. A personal boycott has to be noticed by market analysis and wholesale producers, or it counts for nothing on that front. Restricting one’s diet and consumption alone in hope for animal liberation is, in essence, a tactic divorced from theory and strategy.

Even if consumer vegans were able to make significant dents in the national market, all this will be reversed by the rise of the affluent animal-eating class in the developing world to whom animals raised nationally will be exported, or — in “a race to the bottom” — to where the industry will be exported — displacing farmers and wildlife and externalising production costs upon their communities. We, therefore, must work to destroy the systems that allow non-human animals to be viewed as commodities. Just because there are more vegan options doesn’t mean we are destabilising the speciesist system in a meaningful way — indeed we cannot even impact all aspects of exploitation and slaughter through our consumptive practices.

Even if all consumers the world over made the ethical choices, industry, military, agribusiness, and governments are embedded with speciesist ideologies that aren’t affected to the degree we might assume through our consumer choices, and indeed we have no power to influence this as consumers.

Consumer advocacy pacifies the consumer into thinking this is enough. Instead of standing up for animals as consumers, we need to stand up for animals in the totality of our social and political lives.

Moving beyond the personal whilst avoiding perfect-world filibustering

This of course, does not mean we should not be vegan. Being vegan is the absolute bare minimum standard we should advocate for but we must recognise that the goal of total liberation means more than our consumptive practices — it means radically changing our systems of production and society. But to do so, we require committed individuals taking action, and a wider receptive audience. We still need individual action — simply waiting for “the revolution” does not free anybody, but must recognise that the changed individual is not the endpoint. We also cannot stall taking personal action because ‘perfection’ is not yet feasible but we also cannot ignore the need for collective action.

Engaged activism, that is stepping beyond our consumer habits, is necessary to achieve animal liberation. What kind of action can we take beyond our consumer choices? The two main threads discussed are, changing individuals actions and changing systems. Although both methods differ in their scope, they can also work in symbiosis, this is not an either/or scenario, it is important to understand their limitations and advantages.

We need both individuals making changes in their personal lives, and also joining to take part in collective action to change more individuals and to target the systemic structures that facilitate speciesism themselves.

Individual change alone will not solve the problem, but to have collective action you still require individual action. Individual change is something you can do immediately in an obvious way, while institutional change is more vague and long-term, and still requires motivated individuals who have already made a personal change. Therefore, despite the criticisms levied both in this article and elsewhere, individual change is still an essential change to advocate for (but not the only change). What is key, however, is not falling into the neoliberal trap of shifting all responsibility to the individual who is still forced to exist within unjust systems.

Take for example the frequent attempts to shame vegans on grounds of hypocrisy — be it the exploitative labour of bees in crop production, animal products in things such as money or electronics, or exploitative labour practices in food and other consumable production. We cannot merely boycott all offending products or achieve some state of ‘purity’ in which we are beyond reproach, and to suggest that we cannot advocate for change whilst not being pure ourselves is cynical nonsense from people unwilling to shift at all.

Indeed there is an element of hypocrisy in calling for the end of animal exploitation while still consuming under capitalism — that doesn’t make the demand to end animal exploitation wrong. It does, however, show that the issue goes beyond our personal consumption, indeed something we cannot control to some state of ‘purity’, and rather it reflects the systemic nature of the issues we face.

Understanding the benefits, and limitation of individual action alone is essential. For example, engaging in an individual boycott has social signalling qualities outside of monetary or economic signalling. Individual veganism is still something we must do, even if, on its own, it won’t end the animal-industrial complex. It is a precursor to broader collective action by changing daily activities to be more in-line with a moral belief system. It creates an example of an alternative way of living in a way that others can come to understand and emulate, and serves to normalise the practice and way of living.

Convincing individuals to shift their consumption is important to embolden people to demand to ask for systemic change, however, the necessary action in society will not arrive until there is an active culture that sufficiently demands it and drives this change. Where a traditional boycott works insofar as it targets specific companies or products with a collective force, an individual boycotting without collective action is unlikely to signal to the producer being boycotted. The key here is the creation of a collective force for change.

Anti-Speciesist Action Collective — Rodeo Protest

These choices must be visible and resonate with public opinion more broadly. We still have to shop as responsibly as possible, but we need to spread these ideas outside of our private spheres and recognise that our consumptive habits are not the end-point in creating a more just world.

We also need to stop listening to the systems that have a vested interest in us bickering amongst ourselves and achieving less. Individual boycott is a step, don’t let it be an endpoint but also don’t be made to feel that you are a ‘lesser vegan’, especially if there are barriers to you engaging in outward activism. Speak up about what these barriers are and work with activists to reduce them. Not all forms of activism can be accessible to all — being arrested for blockading a slaughterhouse, for example, will pan out very differently depending on the activist in question.

In our society where minorities face far harsher persecution by the law, it is not a leap to expect that what another activist may receive community service or a fine for, may result in the death of another. Individuals with disabilities may not physically be able to participate in some forms of activism and they should not be made to feel as though they are second-tier activists for this. On the flip-side, those who are willing and able to put their freedom and bodies on the line and face horrific consequences for their civil disobedience should not be derided as being “bad for the cause” or “giving veganism a bad name”.

Veganism is about liberation, not being well liked or purity politics, we need multiple tactics to achieve this. Being kind to each other, being supportive of each other, and acknowledging that whilst not every kind of activism is accessible or feasible for every activist, that does not reduce the value of that action.

Systemic change — the goal that is also used as an excuse

We can feel powerless in a broken system, there is a real sense that one cannot make a difference against an oppressive system that marginalises individual voices. Industry lobbying, media flack and cultural defence mechanisms make systems advocacy a tough fight. This is why we need collective and institutional change on a structural level, not only just individual or consumer change.

MP Andy Meddick of https://animaljusticeparty.org

Systems advocacy seeks to influence social and political systems to bring about positive change for certain groups (in this case non-humans) through changes to laws, policies, cultural practices, health and education. In this scenario, we aren’t relying on individuals to make personal choices, we are looking to mitigate those choices from the outset. We need to find what systems are preventing people from making their behaviour consistent with their core anti-speciesist beliefs and we need to change those systems.

We may be allocating our resources poorly when we ask individuals to change their diets instead of asking them to help us campaign for institutional change. There is much more public support for institutional change than a willingness to change individual habits. People are defensive, and find lifestyle changes difficult as a concept. Whereas the public generally agrees that animal cruelty is wrong, changing only our own diet can be demotivating and seen as a mere drop in the bucket while taking collective action feels more tractable and impactful. It’s likely that institutional messaging makes the audience view the issue as being both more serious but a solution more achievable, given that it’s so large in scope and urgent enough for us to be taking society-wide action.

Change within the current system

Within-systems change includes the animal law area, which tries to influence governments to improve the treatment of animals through legislation. Other efforts are put into changing industry regulations and animal welfare standards. Some aspects of system change might include;

Achieving legal changes

Regulations

Incremental prohibition

Focusing on the production system of animal products and services

Save animals directly from their exploitation

Impede the use of nonhuman animals

Close down businesses that use nonhuman animals

Change the whole production system by providing alternative pathways

Change the system to benefits vegans

Changing social norms through education, health, advertising bans, ethical super options, insurance benefits for vegans and other lobbying

Normalises system of ethics in existing cultural norms

These strategies might include raising the costs to the abusers until they exceed the perceived benefits of their actions. The tactics can be any nonviolent means that will increase those operating costs without causing a greater public backlash. Part of this arm of our strategy would involve exposing the brutality of the industry directly to consumers. Another mode is heavy regulation of producers that would increase the costs of meat, eggs, and dairy market-wide. As much as abolitionists may dislike using government to solve problems, in our present society any headache we can give animal-harming capitalists is a move worth considering (but make no mistake — we cannot settle for these changes alone).

‘Meat The Victims’. (Photo: Instagram)

A longer-term goal is a system of pricing that factors in the monumental health care and environmental impacts of raising for slaughter untold billions of animals each year. These are called “externalities” — costs of economic activity that are not taken account in the price of a product. An early step toward this objective could be the enforcement of product labelling that highlights how animals and the environment were impacted by the process of making and delivering everything we consume.

If the aim is to hurt company sales, individual boycotts rarely succeed. But if the aim is to undermine companies that stand in the way of a movement, there is a greater chance that a boycott may work through a targeted campaign. This could be sought by targeting a specific producer or seller, and on-boarding the public to join the boycott through a pressure campaign.

Targeted boycotts can be effective, especially when backed by sabotage actions, but when the boycott is not levied against a specific target — a product or company, but against an entire industry and huge class of goods, it simply cannot work.

These outcomes also move veganism towards the mainstream. They change the social environment that people live in to one where veganism is viewed in a more positive light. They make it easier to be vegan. This would mean advocating for changes to the health and medical systems so they educate the public about the healthiness of vegan food and to support people in adopting vegan diets. For schools, this could include the curriculum offering consideration of different ethical approaches to how we relate to other non-human animals.

Finally, advertising by the animal industries are of course biased and we should attempt to have advertising of animal products legally banned on health grounds as has been done with smoking.

Picture: 3AW

The downsides to these within-system changes, of course, is that the goals are incremental, slow, and still facilitate speciesism. Whilst these changes will make differences to the individuals exploited, and potentially reduce their numbers, they do very little to challenge speciesism head-on and indeed they centre affluent humans at the struggle instead of the non-human victims. Outsourcing moral responsibilities to governments or corporations disempower the individual action which is a precursor to collective systemic action, so we must acknowledge that in our calls for systemic change, individual change is still also required. The actions taken by governments and corporations are also still driven by a speciesist ideology which will never liberate non-human animals.

Change the system itself

It is not just the practice of inequality that contributes to environmental and trans-species violence; it is the construction and persistence of ideas that maintain these inequalities.

— David Naguib Pellow, Total Liberation

Veganism, in its earliest conception, was never just about food choices: it was a radical activist praxis (both theory and action) of a manifest desire to act in a way that prefigures an inter-species politics of justice and total liberation.

Within this strategy, we must view capitalism as an inherently irrational, exploitative, and destructive system, and sees the state as a corrupt tool whose function is to advance the economic and military interests of the corporate domination system and to repress opposition to its agenda. We must also realise that speciesism is not wholly a product of capitalism, merely amplified and systematised by it.

The fact of the matter is, capitalism treats animals horribly. While many civilizations have normalized abusive behavior towards animals, capitalism tops them all in the intensity, frequency.

We must use a broad, critical understanding of how different forms of oppression are interrelated, seeing human animal, nonhuman animal, and earth liberation as inseparable projects; and, thus, promote an anti-capitalist alliance politics with other rights, justice, and liberation movements who share the common goal of dismantling all systems of hierarchical domination and rebuilding societies through decentralisation and democratisation processes.

Change the hierarchy of power relations

Remove unjust power from hierarchies

Push for anti-capitalist and anti-statist politics

Advocate for intersectional total liberation

Solidarity with other social justice movements

Mutual aid

Sharing economies

Open access community gardens and improving access to fresh food in disadvantaged areas

Share-housing cooperatives

Strengthening unions and worker’s rights

Community programs to assist those in poverty, and/or individuals with mental and physical health issues

Rebuilding communities to improve access to essential services such as improved public transport, and combatting ableism in our social and urban structures

A great article by Jonathan Dickstein discusses re-centering veganism as action for oppressed beings (alongside other social justice movements such as feminism, anti-racism or anti-homophobia). The use of language, however pedantic this may initially appear, must evolve to encapsulate the goals and ambitions of the movement. Veganism has been co-opted to largely mean a plant-based diet and unhelpfully focuses the core message on the lifestyle or philosophy of humans, rather than centering non-human animals. This creates the environment in which vegans are viewed as merely living an inconvenient and noisy lifestyle, as opposed to being a movement looking to remove speciesism from our systems in the same way we aim to remove racism, homophobia, ableism and sexism. Most people understand the concept of discrimination already, and speciesism is just another form of discrimination.

In its name veganism refers to neither the oppressed group nor the injustice that the group suffers. Rather, it refers to a group of humans who live, and more specifically, consume in a particular exclusionary manner. By reframing veganism, not as a consumer activity, but as an anti-speciesist ethical framework, we will build a path to a radically more animal-friendly society will not be achieved by lifestyle choices alone, no matter how popularly implemented. We must look to anti-speciesist action as the moral baseline.

Anti-Speciesist Action Collective

Moreover, as Magnus Vinding rightly states:

“Anti-speciesism implies veganism.”

The anti-speciesist is necessarily vegan. Veganism is a, but not the way of living of the anti-speciesist. Anti-speciesism implies veganism, but veganism does not exclude speciesist behaviour. Anti-speciesism also implies the recognition of interlocking oppressions. This, in turn, implies inclusive campaigns for environmental justice, food justice, and health justice. The links come into view through anti-speciesism, not veganism.

Anti-speciesism must work to dismantle the system that allows or endorses exploitation of non-human animals — something that requires collective action and challenges to the system which enables this exploitation to thrive. There is much to learn from other social justice movements about re-shaping dialogue surrounding animal rights, to legitimise the movement in the eyes of the public and bring about changes to social consciousness.

At its core, this is a fight against oppression — we should act accordingly.