Interested to hear people's thoughts! I wasn't sure how better to title this, because it hits on quite a few points - most of which are familiar, but cast in interesting light and drawing upon many atypical sources.

An example of what the author tackles:

One of the most referenced parts of The Communist Manifesto is that in which Marx and Engels pilloried what they regarded as ‘conservative, or bourgeois, socialism’:

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.

Left-wing critics of vegetarianism tend to reach for this passage when characterising the adoption of a plant-based diet as an essentially conservative act. According to this critique, those who do not eat animals, or who choose to buy meat produced under more humane conditions than those found in factory farms, are privileged tinkerers around the edges of a society they have no wish to change (except in the kind of nominal, hippie-cum-hipsterish fashion satirised in the TV series Portlandia) because it basically suits them. Furthermore, this analysis implies that, within a Marxist framework, animals cannot be exploited at all because they fall outside of the field of labour relations with which Marx, having rejected traditional, moralistic theories of exploitation, was concerned.