Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was born on August 30, 1948 and raised in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. In high school he excelled in academics and athletics. After Hampton graduated from high school, he enrolled in a pre-law program at Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois. Hampton also became involved in the civil rights movement, joining his local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His dynamic leadership and organizational skills in the branch enabled him to rise to the position of Youth Council President. Hampton mobilized a racially integrated group of five hundred young people who successfully lobbied city officials to create better academic services and recreational facilities for African American children.
In 1968, Hampton joined the Black Panther Party (BPP), headquartered in Oakland, California. Using his NAACP experience, he soon headed the Chicago chapter. During his brief BPP tenure, Hampton formed a “Rainbow Coalition” which included Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang and the National Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization. Hampton was also successful in negotiating a gang truce on local television.
In an effort to neutralize the Chicago BPP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Chicago Police Department placed the chapter under heavy surveillance and conducted several harassment campaigns. In 1969, several BPP members and police officers were either injured or killed in shootouts, and over one hundred local members of the BPP were arrested.
During an early morning police raid of the BPP headquarters at 2337 W. Monroe Street on December 4, 1969, twelve officers opened fire, killing the 21-year-old Hampton and Peoria, Illinois Panther leader Mark Clark. Police also seriously wounded four other Panther members. Many in the Chicago African American community were outraged over the raid and what they saw as the unnecessary deaths of Hampton and Clark. Over 5,000 people attended Hampton’s funeral where Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference eulogized the slain activist. Years later, law enforcement officials admitted wrongdoing in the killing of Hampton and Clark. In 1990, and later in 2004, the Chicago City Council passed resolutions commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.
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Hi again comrade! Thank you for the thoughtful message and questions. There were several at once so let me know if my reply here misses anything you would like to talk about. I'll try to split it up into topics.
One topic is personal moralism, in general, and how just one person making dietary changes seems distant from animal liberation. Of course, it is always good to remember that veganism isn't a diet (and you also indicated this), but instead a moral position about ending unnecessary exploitation and harm to animals, particularly by elevating their value to be similar to how we think about people (as commies we also struggle to liberate humans). In understanding that we seek animal liberation balanced by what is practicable, diet often comes up because it is the most obvious and direct way in which we normally exploit and harm animals in our daily lives. It is ususlly just one small step removed from doing the violence ourselves. We effectively just pay for someone else to do that for us, someone that is often also personally psychologically harmed by the process, and pay for the distribution network that makes it possible to buy the product at the store. It is also usually one of the easiest ways to start living consistently with the principles of veganism, as you only really need to eat a B12 supplement and can otherwise eat just as (im)balanced of a diet as you would like. There is both a consistency aspect to this - if you think X should happen and you can easily do a small part of X yourself in your life, why not do it? - and often a personal aspect, as the more you spend your empathy for other animals the less possible it is to stomach animsl products.
In addition, there is the seeming disagreement between the personal moralism and individual shaming with veganism vs. the communist approach to societal change, i.e. we are all working for revolution from the perspective of class struggle and mass organization, where individualism is often used as propaganda by liberals to pretend that their system of exploitation, death, and crisis is actually liberating and will work out just fine if you just recycle that bottle and vote. But as we struggle collectively, we must also acknowledge that agitation and organization also requires moral outrage, requires principled positions centering care for our fellow humans, and these positions don't just fall in our lap from material conditions alone, but from networks of people building empathy from scratch, running boycott campaigns (e.g. BDS), creating media packets, making memes, etc etc. Veganism tends to operate at this same level. As a subsidiary without sufficient buy-in to be part of any major party platform. We can't ban animal exploitation because we lack power. We will lack sufficient power under capitalism indefinitely, most likely, and will need power concentrated with the people, the workers, to achieve snimsl liberation. But to build towards that, and to reduce harm, we can currently spread consciousness, form clubs, commiserate, and do what we can as individuals according to our morality.
In terms of personal impact being small, sure, of course. But imagine you believed in, sat, Palestinian liberation while being, say, a US-based settler moving into a Palestinian's stolen home. A person can contort themselves to live with this contradiction, but it is far better to just not take the house. There is even that meme where a settler says if he doesn't do it, someone else will. In reality, we know that movements begin when individuals adopt consciousness, live closer to their ideals, and then see room for organizing with those who think and live like they do. That by peeling away settlers, we hurt the settler cause. By making the occupiers flee, we strengthen resistance. The quantitative becomes qualitative through struggle, we just need to understand and navigate and prioritize.
There is also the topic of veganism in ML states. The ML states that have done the best are those that do not impose unpopular policies on the population simply because it is the morally correct thing to do. Instead, they build a base for their own economic development and against their primary threats. Their focus, when it comes to liberation, has always been about humans, and in addressing it from two angles: (1) in enjoining liberation struggles as part of the overall revolution (the struggle against societal mysoginy, racism, etc), where the oppressed groups became an integral part of the struggle before they won the revolution, and (2) in responding to popular sentiment during the phase where the revolution must be defended, e.g. Cuba's rejection of homophobic policy. Veganism doesn't currently fit into either categoru in any states run by communist parties. There is no material basis for the oppression of vegans and therefore to include them as a revolutionary force and it is not a common enough sentiment that any governments have needed to enshrine state veganism or anything like that. Just because I think it is the right thing to do as part of struggling for yet more liberation does not mean I expect states run by MLs to force it on the public. They certainly have bigger fish to fry rather than making themselves unpopular at home to placate Western vegans. Even so, there are vegan communities in every communist country and the food most amenable to adaptation by vegans is that of the Global South, where many animal products have historically been unaffordable. Individuals are fighting the good fight there as well, building consciousness within their countries. They do the same things that vegans do basically everywhere - they change their consumption habits and congregate.
Another topic is when individuals have other challenges with food and that veganism presents yet another. An important aspect of veganism is in doing what is practicable, to do what is feasible. So this is just saying that changing one's diet is harder. I wouldn't dictate the rate at which you would make any changes, I would just suggest making those that are feasible without harming yourself. Maybe try thinking about what comfort food are already accidentally vegan or could be modified to be vegan without any downside and see how it goes? That kind of thing. There is no one right way because there is variation in how people relate to food. But everyone can take steps of one kind of another because there are always small ways to make changes. A person can be vegan and consume animals products because it is not practicable to avoid it, and in fact, it is literally impossible to perfectly avoid it because supply chains are opaque and you just know that there is some nonsense in it occasionally (like some honey in a sweetener). Though at the same time, a vegan will be looking for how to minimize and avoid it.
Another topic is the dairy industry. I just want to make the quick point that the dairy industry is the meat industry and it is not possible for cows to generate milk without regular pregnancy, and that regular pregnancy means excess cows among other things. It would potentially be possible to create a vegan dairy industry some day if some group wanted to maintain dairy cows themselves living good, long, normal lives and not waste the milk, but as you mention, it would be orders of magnitude more energy intensive to do so and would be much more rare. Really, it would create a bad incentive, so it would probably be something very challenging to do. It is not really possible under current conditions, it requires extreme exceptions like having a rescue cow that is milked like one time in its life and then never again (for 20-30 years!).
Another topic is domesticated animals, like cows, living better lives than wild animals. This is not true, as their lives are cut very short in order to maintain prices and how they do live is often quite cruel. Even in comparison to the cold cruelty of nature, it is pretty bad. Though really, even if we went the animal welfare route rather than the animal liberation one, it would be very odd and unnecessarily cruel to create an industry that is basically about breeding and raising pets to be eaten even though they don't need to be. Those things are at odds.
Another topic is pets. Some vegans are against having pets, but in my experience this is the minority, and most people in favor of animal liberation do not think it is wrong to have pets. Of course, this is a disagreement that it is fine to engage in, I just want to point out that it is not identical to being vegan.
Another topic is animal testing. The vast, vast majority of animal testing is unnecessary and vegans oppose it. Animals are tested on because cosmetics companies want to stay relevant and trendy, not because cosmetics overall actually need research. This also applies to most scientific research involving animals, unfortunately. In many ways this is an example of how non-veganism can lead people to disregard the value of animals, as animal research is done in a cavalier way and without any gravity whatsoever for the animals, or, sometimes, an odd contradiction where they follow certain animal welfare procedures but are doing a project that is poorly thought out, or one that is for a harmful purpose, or one that is done incompetently and must be repeated, or one that could be done better without animal research, etc etc. If the researchers were vegan they might do 100X fewer of such studies and push back on "standards" that require certain kinds of testing despite it being unnecessary. It is the normalization of violence against animals that permits all of this to happen, and part of that normalization is the wider interest in material development and profit. At the same time, the animal welfare procedure that do exist are largely there in response to animal rights advocacy.
Hope this is a helpful rrsponse to your thoughts and questions!
Happy to chat!
CW: I just realized that I shouldn't quote you without honoring your CWs, too! So I'll also throw everything under one.
Supply chains are opaque when it comes to this. It is more or less obvious when certain animal products are in food and avoiding them has a direct impact in the industry. Vegan restaurants and foods marked as vegan would not exist without the establishment of a subcommunity to market stuff at.
If this were also possible with cobalt I would say we should also do that. But we also don't need to really convince anyone that child labor / slavery is bad. If a package said "child labor/slavery free" and others didn't people woild buy the former (mostly). The actual barrier there is not popularity, but the capitalist system itself. So we organize as socialists to overthrow it.
On top of the opacity, to actually free yourself from child exploitation re: electronics, you would need to basically boycott all of them. Not just smartphones, but every device with a chip in it. No computer, no television, no microwave, no oven, no audio system, no care at medical facilities, etc. It is possible to do this, but not particularly practicable, and again, the connection between your individual action and the desired outcome would be nebulous.
A lot of this is really about people getting mentally exhausted from anti-vegan sentiments, in addition to personally getting upset about the violence vs. how seemingly easy it would be for people to stop harming animals as we do. It is actually quite reminiscent of arguing with liberals and reactionaries from a socialist position, as vegans come from a position of empathy and trnd to have knowledge that non-vegans don't. There are anti-vegans that make posts just to "trigger" vegans (reactionary behavior) and there are people that repeat the same kinds of reasoning against going vegan that can eventually wear people down, particularly if they do not have a large amount of patience. To properly advocate for veganism you need basically the exact same thick skin as an organizer, there is a lot of overlap in experience with the work of socialist organizing at an individual level.
Another angle is to think about what distinguished our grandparents on this platform - the "dirtbag" left in the US. Some forms of effective advocacy are very different from the usual 1-on-1 organizer strategy. Instead, you shock and jostle and don't take the other person seriously. This can actually work very well to unseat people from a sense of complacency, as they were otherwise thinking of their position as a perfectly redpectable position that can be debated in the marketplace of ideas when really many ideas and defenses of ideas are not complicated or even justified, but are just socially entrenched. IMO this very community failed to live up to appreciatimg this idea when it banned dog-posting from the vegan circle-jerk subreddit lifeboat community. That's our bread-and-butter agitation style!
Out tastes can actually be fairly plastic. I didn't think I would ever dislike the appearance, smell, or taste of animal products but they do actually bother me now.
Self-interest isn't actually that effective of a thing to build on unless it leads to consciousness and the realization of power. The confluence of self-interest and the overthrow of capitalism, for example, is due to class conflict, the likelihood that workers can recognize that their bosses are short-changing them, that the system itself is unstable and leads to crisis that builds on how obvious class antagonism is, and, most importantly, the primacy of labor itself over the production process.
For example, it is not in the overall interest of the working class, even in the imperial core, to support capitalism. But time and time again, labor and the working class have become supporters of Imperialism and the wider capitalist system through (1) false consciousness and (2) the existence of an immediate self-interest in maintaining the status quo. For example, white workers myopically seeing an advantage for themselves by upholding the racist capitalist systems even though worldwide liberation would make their lives much better.
Following this line of thought too early or too heavily when organizing often leads to bad outcomes, even. If you yell an American that we are oppressed by the system but that Americans in particular receive the fruits of others' labor via unequal exchange, chauvinists will often double down with their new knowledge. A person must not just be self-interested, but be interested in mutual liberation and the liberation of others, expanding their empathy, in order to have real solidarity and internationalism.
Had to split my comment in two for it to be post-able!
vegan discussion just in case!
This may be logic dependent in alienation. At the end of the day, it is an animal dying for the purpose of capitalism and your personal eating of it. That latter part has been the case since domestication. But due to industrialized farming and advancea of science, it is possible to thrive without it and to know that it is possible to thrive without it. At our level of discussion it is of course just an individual thing and it takes into the system of production, but that is the case for all struggle.
Consider this: consumption, now, is just an act of buying what is sold under the capitalist system. It is amoral relative to that process and the humans involved in it. It will sell whatever it can relative to what is socially possible and its historical embedding. But this does not resolve the moral question, and it does not change the scale of personal involvement. Killing to eat an animal now is not lesser than killing to eat an animal 2000 years ago so far as the act against the animal is concerned. What has changed is the productive system that makes it even less necessary. As Marx noted, capitalism is itself a revolutionary evolution of class conflict, it has displaced older systems. We are embedded in it and can take stock of our current situation in it, in all its multitudes.
No doubt. In addition to your example, reducing one's own direct consumption overall is a good rule of thumb for slightly removing oneself from particupation in the horrors of the economic system. It is just one step removed, but focusing on second hand items is one way to do this, including re: cobalt. For this reason I usually thrift, yard sale, ebay, etc my things. Or go through Chinese sellers (or manufacturers) whose productive sources are reasonably determined. For example, a Chinese seller of a Titanium item is getting that thing sourced 100% through China except in the rare of cases. Being sourced from China is not an inherent good, it is a country with good and bad things, but it is a socialist project and I can be confident that Chinese titanium things is unlikely to involve child laboe and will contribute to the productive forces of China. I hope they will de-dollarize my dollars eventually, lol.
But to self-crit, I so not expecr everyone to so this and I don't think it is a something to build into any kind of movement at the moment. But veganism can be. It is simple enough to describe and attempt to follow. Sometimes, a concordance between what should be and what can be done now is empowering.
If it is relevant at all, I have a steam deck that I upgraded with an aftermarket SSD and I plan to use it for a long time so as to reduce my consumption while still enjoying my hobbies, which give me strength to organize and socialize. It offers a way to avoid building a gaming machine for dealing with graphics cards or an endless upgrade cycle. Though I am not overly invested in trying to navigate electronics supply chains, just avoiding new HP purchases due to BDS.
This can't be quantified. The two things aren't directly comparable and the computer stuff has murky supply chains. We can't make perfect or good consumption choices and shouldn't spend too much time worrying about them. I just think most vegan stuff is fairly practicable and changes one's relationship with animals for the better, and as we grow in number, communities' relationships with animals for the better, serving the cause of animal liberation.
Haha, this is basically the moral accounting system of a particular popular show that ended a few years ago. I think the question of being a good person is so poisoned by capitalism that I would avoid even thinking about it outside of ensuring one sticks to their principles as best they can while seeking knowledge and empathy.
But I can say that avoiding animal products is usually practicable, can be done in any way that is amenable to you and ensuring your well-being, and that upon adopting this you will find an additional level of moral consistency that can help ready you for further struggle.
Ye, exactly. Our modes of communication do not allow for a cohesive form of rhetoric that ticks all boxes, so we make do with people using different strategies simultaneously. Sitting down and reading books together is the way to be thorough. But nobody does that without agitation.
I don't think level of activity is something that changes morality or practicality. If sitting on a couch meant 2 million kids died we would just avoid sitting on couches. No real activity required, just a conscious choice based on understanding what the small action led to. Luckily it is straightforward to not sit in a couch and it is straightforward to avoid animal products.
The correlation is that a person does actively buy and personally eat an animal product when they could just not, just like a person does actively "buy" the house and fo live in it when they could not. Cheap housing is even an incentive! But the cost...
In a way, these things are only really different through capitalist alienation. If you knew that Bob from down the street did it at your request it wouldn't change very much about the equation, and would depersonalize it less. The decision to kill and eat the animal is the same but its comodification through a market has made appear as something else, socially.
In my example the person had already been kicked out by the Zionist entity, ghus completing the analogy of depersonalization even though everyone knows it is, in reality, incredibly personal and a form of disposession.
Let me counter with this: personal organizing efforts also do not matter much compared to what is necessary. It is only in aggregate and by following a correct course that we reach viable methods of liberation. If we value our own contributions at all, then these kinds of things do become comparable. Because we know what is necessary, we dedicate our lives to revolution, even knowing we are just a part of a whole.
Yes, this is basically describing one-person PR. It is why I vote. I don't really care about bourgeois electoralism on a personal level bit the liberals I interact with cannot understand my meanings unless I can viably relate.
I think it is more likely that they don't think about it at all. Or that they adopt the predominant social view of it. Veganism is not strong enough to elicit any kind of response from a political class.
But veganism is a moralistic position that does not have a strong social movement in any country, so it would be an imposition without justification. Naturally, countries promote what is foreseeably practicable in their current social context. More efficient animal ag, an expansion of plant-based foods that are more efficient (soy is ubiquitous!), questions of how to make industrialized agriculture sustainable, etc. I can tell you, definitively, that at least one socialist country advances by promoting conferences and research around these kinda of things and lets the nerds sort it out.
Comrades too comrade telepathy, lol. I did think about neuralink at one point while writing that. Though unflrtun even the most boring run-of-the-mill NIH stuff also falls into this category.
etc
It has mostly just increased the scale. Animals were killed after about 1/10th of their lifespan, medical care was non-existent, calves were removed early from mothers and raised for slaughter months later, veal was just this but with less mobility, chickens fought each other in cramped conditions, pigs were fed garbage, etc etc.
Alienation changes the social relation, making one have a relationship to commodities rather than their own or others' production. You know Bob that has chickens. You don't know basically anything about the decontextualized off-white slabs in the refrigerator section, only that it is basically fungible with the other slabs and how much it costs.
Re: using one's labor to do bad things, being the paid animal torturer is just one step removed from the supermarket slab. The conditions and lives of livestock are usually torturous and slaughter isn't exactly kind. As stated earlier, you're effectively just paying someone to do the deed for you. Capitalism helps by making it so you don't have to know their name or directly interact with them and ensures they get paid as little as possible. Being a laborer for the imperial machine is bad, but can be hard to quantify for comparisons. For example, what does one thing of the precarious immigrant workforce that gets stuck with jobs like janitorial work at the bombs sales department? How do we consider the personal complicity of the person clearing the waste bin of someone that just got a big bonus for being part of a successful big bid contract? What if they are employed by that person to clean their personal home instead? What if they are a professor that taught them skills for that job? There is a network with degrees of proximity and we should do our best to remove ourselves from the closest ones in the ways practicable.
It's a spoiler for the show so I won't say unless you want a spoiler!
It is different in experience, in the social relation. But not the outcome. "It would already be produced" is an argument that always pops up in conversations about consumption and production. Its logic applies just as well to every commodity consumed and produced. The Cobalt would be mined. The animal would be dead. The bomb would get sold. Paying someone to do it for you via commoditization doesn't remove one's culpability, but it can change the calculus on whether it is practicable to abstain and have that translate into decreased demand for the bad thing. For Cobalt, we can't specifically target child labor via consumption choices. For animal products, we can.
In my opinion, personally killing the animal is identically bad for a person to do as paying someone to do it, only maybe a bit worse in that now another worker is roped into the deed. It all also feeds into the normalization if animals as food, materials, commodities, rather than thinking, feeling beings.
If nobody wanted to move into the house there would be no settlers there. It is an essential part of settler-colonialism. The "less bad" option is really just a division of labor for the bad deed, but the total act requires both, they are part of the same whole. The American moving in us complicit and is a very important part of the expulsion.
They understand politics through bourgeouis electoralism and will stop listening if you tell them you don't vote.
Personally I'm enjoying his fall from grace among the wider population because I can really rub IRL libs' faces in it. Tesls owners that believed "smartest man in the world" nonsense lol
Second part:
Just in case
I disagree, there is nothing wrong with my analogy. Once conscious, a person has to actively choose to pay for the more violent option when they could simply not do so, even though it is very obvious which is which. Being consistent becomes a very straightforward abstention and change of habits + plans.
If it is just the 5 or so brands that the most popular BDS campaign says to avoid, I suppose it is pretty similat in practicality. You only have to remember 5 things.
But taking a principled stance against Israeli products in general via consumerism is challenging. I've done lots of local research trying to identify Israeli products for BDS campaigns and it is very challenging. The barcode thing barely even works because they just use other ones now. In contrast, it is very straightforward to identify a hot dog. And only slightly less straightforward to read an ingredients list or explain a vegan dietary requirement to someone you are buying food from.
I'm not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?
This would still result in an internal conflict and would require the political class to be dedicated vegans. In countries run by commies, the political class is mostly built from people trained from ongoing relevant struggles. People from the general population. Veganism is not popular yet, so why would these people all be vegans? You would need to first convince a wider population via other means. Do the groundwork of raising consciousness.
Decreasing animal ag overall is also different from veganism. Many socialist countries do of course care about efficiency and productivity, but what this has so far translated to is industrialization and modernization of animal shared production, not an attempt to remove animal exploitation. Doing the latter would be a risk that requires a very clear idea of what a transition would look like and how your country will survive removing or massively overhauling several of its industries.
Think of the topics of homosexuality and gender identity. While these are issues whose immediate impacts are on a (relatively) small minority in most countries (keeping in mind that propensity to identify is impacted by social context), countries run by commies have repeatedly made strides on this, often far surpassing capitalist countries' policies and the realities of life on the ground. How did they do this? Who are they responding to and what were the social costs? They all emerged from bottom-up movements for liberation and the political class saying, "there is no downaide to this, let us advance in solidarity". There was struggle, but the material calculus was straightforward. With veganism this is not the case. While it would be if the whole world responded as one, veganism in one country would be a cost to take on, and all of these countries are fighting for their lives. Many have adopted aspects of capitalism that they would not have were this not the case, e.g. Vietnam is in a precarious position due to US Empire.
I expect that countries run by commies will tackle this as they advance, but I do understand why it is not something they impose from the top down. It is somewhat separate from the primary antagoniatic geopolitical threats.
IMO it only matters for sharing a vision or for accurately understanding the status quo, as the more immediate challenges are severe. I would love to live in the vegan world where the main struggle is figuring out whether it is ethical to consume pets' milk (I would probably say, "why do you want to!?" at that point lol).
If society were at a point where animal product consumption were so low that it was feasible for the only time to get dairy was during a natural lifecycle and the only time you would consume animal flesh is at the end of a natural life, I don't think the thought of "okay let's eat it" would appeal to most people. Maybe almost nobody. You would, by that point, have conditioned people to be used to not consuming animal products and it would be outrageous to theidea
I think there are way more vegans that are blanket against animal testing than are against pets, but I think it is... I dunno... 50:50 versus those who accept some cases when it comes to medical research. Part of my response was meant to speak to someone that might be thinking in terms of the latter - that even if you are for animal testing in some cases it is important to remember that the vast, vast majority of animal research is completely unnecessary. For every case you can think of where you might try to weigh animal research vs. medical advancement, there are 100 that are completely unnecessary garbage. Like... you'd know before the study that it is not necessary for the work itself or that not enough care was taken.
Another of those things where I would love to be in a world where the thing we are struggling over is how to think about the last 1% of medical research involving animals. When we can make real decisions about something like whether to test a very promising cancer research drug on X vs Y. And by the time we were at that point, we would have the luxury of trying to focus on alternatives and substitutes (e.g. simulatioms, cell lines, GMO'd subjects with no brain, etc), which would be a great problem to have.