Food Democracy as ‘Radical’ Food Sovereignty:Agrarian Democracy and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance to the Neo-Imperial Food Regime

This article argues that a thoroughgoing and meaningful food democracy should entail something closely akin to "radical" food sovereignty, a political programme which confronts the key social relational bases of capitalism. The latter comprise, in essence, "primitive accumulation", the alienability or commodification of land and other fundamental use values, and market dependence. A thoroughgoing food democracy of this kind thus challenges the structural separation of the "economic" and "political" spheres within capitalism and the modern state (the state-capital nexus), a separation which enables purely political rights and obligations (‘political’ freedom or formal democracy) whilst simultaneously leaving unconstrained the economic powers of capital and their operation through market dependence ("economic" unfreedom or the lack of substantive democracy). We argue that much "food democracy" discourse remains confined to this level of "political" freedom and that, if food sovereignty is to be realized, this movement needs to address "economic" unfreedom, in other words, to subvert capitalist social-property relations. We argue further that the political economy of food constitutes but a subset of these wider social relations, such that substantive food democracy is seen here to entail, like "radical" food sovereignty, an abrogation of the three pillars upholding capitalism (primitive accumulation, absolute property rights, market dependence) as an intrinsic part of a wider and more integrated movement towards livelihood sovereignty. We argue here that the abrogation of these conditions upholding the state-capital nexus constitutes an essential part of the transformation of capitalist social-property relations towards common "ownership" -or, better, stewardship- of the means of livelihood, of which substantive food democracy is a key component

Dependency, Imperialism, and the Super-Exploitation of Labour-Power and Nature in the Global South

This paper explores the continuing and deepening theoretical and political relevance of the work of Ruy Mauro Marini on dependency and imperialism (Marini 2022) to the issue of super-exploitation of labour-power and nature in the Global South (and more specifically Latin America), a process of neo-extractivism in which 'land-grabbing' plays a key role. Contemporary dependency and imperialism, embodied in neo-extractivism, takes place, it is argued, through three mechanisms: the super-exploitation of labour-power (Surplus Extraction 1) and the super-exploitation of nature (Surplus Extraction 2), and on the disproportionate claim by the imperium and sub-imperium upon ecological sinks differentially located in the Global South (Surplus Extraction 3). In relation to Surplus Extraction 1 and 2, the main focus of the paper, what we appear to be witnessing is 'disarticulated' accumulation through two principal, juxtaposed mechanisms: Surplus Extraction 1 comprises superexploitation 'within' the capital-labour relation, comprising selective zones of industrialisation, and labour-intensive plantation production, and reliant upon the labour force's continued status as a semi-proletariat, affording capital a 'subsidy' by remunerating labour-power below its value; Surplus Extraction 2 takes place through 'accumulation by dispossession', whereby land cleared of its previous inhabitants through 'land grabbing' affords, through the accumulated labour of those prior inhabitants embodied 'nature', a massive boost to surplus value production by capital-intensive agro-extractive activity. These surplus extractive mechanisms, it is argued, may be understood on the basis of Marini's highly innovative development of the Marxian labour-theory of value, which the paper seeks to further develop in relation to the labour-power/nature nexus of contemporary extractivis

Ill Fares the Land:Confronting Unsustainability in the UK Food System through Political Agroecology and Degrowth

The U.K. food system exhibits strong unsustainability indicators across multiple dimensions, both in terms of food and nutritional insecurity and in terms of adverse climate change, biodiversity, and physical resource impacts. These indices of an unsustainable and inequitable social metabolism are the result of capitalist agriculture and society in general and, more specifically, of neoliberal and austerity policies adopted with vigour since the global financial crisis. The causal, capitalistic, and, latterly, more neoliberal bases of the U.K. food system are delineated in the first section of the paper. These bases are then detailed in terms of their impacts in exacerbating climate change, biodiversity (and resource) decline and loss, and food and nutritional insecurity. The political narratives and policy frameworks available to dissemble, mitigate, or, more rarely, to address (resolve) these impacts are then delineated. It is argued that the only policy framework available that strongly integrates food security (social equity) with ecological sustainability is political agroecology and an accompanying degrowth strategy. The final section of the paper details what political agroecology and degrowth might entail for the U.K. food system

Food democracy as radical political agroecology:securing autonomy (alterity) by subverting the state-capital nexus

Food democracy and political agroecology, as closely allied social movements, have become associated in the main with what may be termed ‘agrarian populist’ and postcolonial problematics. While certainly ‘radical’ in relation to hegemonic neoliberal, or sub-hegemonic ‘national developmentalist’, framings of contemporary agricultural and ecological crises and their mitigatory responses to them, populist food democracy and political agroecology, it is argued here, fail convincingly to identify causality underlying the ‘political’ causes of these capitalogenic contradictions. Whilst more convincing in identifying such causality in the ‘ecological’ domain in terms of the need to ‘localize’ and ‘re-territorialize’ food production and consumption networks, in its ‘political’ aspect populist food democracy and political agroecology demonstrate a failure to specify key ontological drivers of capitalogenic contradiction in terms of state, capital, class, and, more generally, power relations in their historical particularity. These shortcomings of ‘populist’ food democracy and agroecology in their ‘political’ aspect are exemplified by reference to key academic texts arising from the movement. The paper then proceeds to identify how these populist assumptions differ from a Marxian derived understanding of contradiction and the resulting proposal for a ‘radical’ political agroecology as substantive food democracy