Yeah but your comrades are at least leftist. In many so called “vegan activism” orgs there are a lot of libs and people who say “no politics here”.

My litmus test to organize around it is to check whether they use the term vegan or antispeciesism to describe their activism. The latter usually implies at least leftist people in the org.

The struggle is real. Although in my experience I would say that doing vegan activism generally is “activism on easy mode” compared to communist agitation.

If you start the conversations off the right way and with context that gets people to think about animals, whether it’s a video, VR experience, information about the animal agriculture industry, etc. it’s a very straightforward A --> B for a lot of people. If you think animal abuse is bad --> don’t support animal abuse.

Of course there is the background of misconceptions about everything from health and nutrition, sustainability concerns (somehow), believing it’s more expensive to be vegan, thinking there must be a “right” way to murder an animal, etc. But in my outreach conversations I make a conscious effort to not argue with people.

The main goal is to get them to express their empathy for animals and confront the contradictions in their actions and values. Once they understand this, understand what veganism actually is and that it’s not a diet, it becomes much easier for them to address the information part as they’re already motivated by the “why”. From that point I don’t spoonfeed them information or argue with them, I just give them resources that they can look into on their own time.

Maybe for me it’s also a difference in experience because I haven’t had that many conversations regarding communism with many people. I feel that it’s impossibly hard. For veganism, all I needed to realise was this one contradiction regarding animal exploitation and abuse, and just inform myself mostly about diet stuff. For communism, it’s a process that took years, a lot of reading, a lot of correcting misconceptions about communism itself, a lot of history, a very large change in worldview, even though I would’ve described myself as an “anti-capitalist” for a long time before that.