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My beef with capitalism & the carnivory conundrum

STEVE McGIFFEN on the EU, the intensive food industry and his dog Jim

THE European Union is principally designed to perpetuate the capitalist system by increasing the rate at which surplus value is extracted from our labour.

The propaganda which enables this to continue — and not solely within the EU, of course — embeds its falsehoods so deeply into our consciousness that even people who consider themselves to be opponents of capitalism actually go along with the idea that we should worry about “our” country’s “competitiveness.”

In other words, we want to be exploited more successfully than are workers in other countries, so that we can have jobs at their expense.

It may seem a leap from these musings to a consideration of vegetarianism, and a strange way to begin a response to Ian Sinclair’s recent Morning Star article on the way we treat animals (M Star May 12), but bear with me.

I am trying to explain why I have two Star hats — I am the (largely vegetarian, with a bit of fish thrown in now and again) Commie Chef, and also regularly write a column which deals with EU affairs.

I am a vegetarian not because, as Ian Sinclair’s article criticised Ricky Gervais for saying, I “love animals.”
Ian was right to criticise, as by any standards this is an absurd claim.

As a gardener I don’t love slugs, for example, and have at best an ambivalent relationship with moles and pigeons.

I opened with comments on the EU and the capitalist system to begin to discuss how complicated the issue of vegetarianism is, and how it has nothing at all to do with “loving animals.”

If I love any animal it’s my dog Jim.

This does not, however, make me a “dog-lover.”

As the brilliant US humourist James Thurber once observed: “I have always thought of a dog-lover as a dog that was in love with another dog.”

It’s Jim I love, and just as loving my wife or my mum doesn’t mean I love Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel, loving Jim can’t be generalised to the whole category to which he belongs.

This is the core problem in my view with Gervais’s sentimentality and Ian’s response to it.

I once said to my meat-eating brother, in a discussion of the fact that people in some countries eat dogs, that I couldn’t see the difference between eating a dog and eating a cow.

He made a fine point in response: “Next time a cow gives me a cuddle when I’m feeling depressed, I’ll agree with you.”

Dogs differ from most animals in that they are capable of loving you back: loyally, touchingly, intensely.

This may be true of cats, too, but I have little experience of them, so please don’t be offended if your best friend is a feline.

The late writer Bruce Chatwin argued in his book The Songlines that human beings would probably not have survived without dogs.

Back in the harsh world of the Palaeolithic, we were defenceless — big, clever apes, but with no weaponry to compare to that of the predators around us.

Dogs became a vital part of the armoury we fashioned for ourselves.

If we had survived in some other way, we would be different, perhaps massively so, as dogs would be if they hadn’t teamed up with us.

We domesticated dogs 16,000 years ago, a long time, perhaps as long as 7,000 years before we domesticated any other animal.

Gervais apparently said that “his cat was his most treasured possession.”

Strangely Ian doesn’t pick him up on this, yet to me it shows a very bad attitude indeed.
Jim is not my possession.

He isn’t “my” dog in the way that the computer on which I’m writing is my computer, even if that may legally be the case.
He’s my dog in the way that some people are my friends.

And he’s nobody’s pet — a demeaning word which has no equivalent in Dutch or French, the two foreign languages I can speak.

As the French say, he’s an animal de compagnie (companion animal), or, as in Dutch, a huisdier (animal of the house).

But I’ll settle for “friend.”

So our feelings for dogs cannot be generalised to “animals,” and have no real relationship to whether a person decides to become a vegetarian.

In some cases it might principally be a matter of personal health.

For me, while this is a consideration, the heart of the matter goes beyond that, and even beyond concern for the health of the planet and on to the whole question of the essentially mindless exploitation which drives capitalism’s system of endless accumulation.

Ian asks “what could be crueller than killing an animal and eating it when one doesn’t need to do so to live a healthy life?”

Though the question is intended to be rhetorical, there is an answer — creating a massive industry in order to commit the daily mass extermination of animals in the most horrible ways, and for profit, is much crueller than merely killing an animal.

It is more than brutal, it’s brutalising, exercising a deeply corrupting influence on human society.

Meat reared in ways which respect the animal’s nature and needs while it is alive is another matter, and the reasons I don’t eat it are idiosyncratic and nothing really to do with my main argument as laid out above.

Eating cheese and other dairy products is an inconsistency which I acknowledge, and in doing so accept, also, that the best can be the enemy of the good.

Given the situation we are in, it is much better to persuade people that for a host of reasons they should reduce their meat intake than it is to lecture them piously about the inconsistency of their position.

The capitalist system and the EU and government policies which perpetuate its worst excesses generate vast cruelty.

That is what we — vegetarians and omnivores — should incorporate into our struggle against a system whose treatment of animals reflects in a horrifically distorting hall of mirrors its treatment of people.

Steve McGiffen is the Commie Chef and edits www.spectrezine.org, an EU-critical website which has been haunting Europe for over 16 years.

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