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

Mark Tilzey

doi:10.17645/pag.v7i4.2091

Abstract

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 <em>livelihood</em> 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.

Highlights

This article contends that if food democracy is to realize its full potential, it should entail something closely akin to ‘radical’ food sovereignty
We suggest that food democracy remains inadequate to its task if it fails to address the social-property relations underpinning capitalist food regimes; and that its singular focus on ‘democracy’ rather than addressing political economy is symptomatic of its differential locus in the global North, and its association with ‘progressive’, rather than ‘radical,’ food sovereignty
If not the ‘multitude’ of civil society, which social interests and forces are likely to advocate and carry through such a programme of ‘radical’ food sovereignty? We argue that such interests and forces comprise in the main the ‘precariat’ of the global South―the middle/lower peasantry, informal sector workers, and indigenous groups

Summary

Introduction

This article contends that if food democracy is to realize its full potential, it should entail something closely akin to ‘radical’ food sovereignty. It stands in contrast to ‘orthodox’ Marxism, represented for example by Bernstein (2010) and Jansen (2015), characterized by its class reductionism, its instrumentalist view of the state, its reification of developmentalism, and its failure to comprehend the profound importance of the ecological dimension Deploying this approach, we suggest that food democracy remains inadequate to its task if it fails to address the social-property relations underpinning capitalist food regimes; and that its singular focus on ‘democracy’ (the reified sphere of ‘politics’) rather than addressing political economy (the dialectical relation between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’) is symptomatic of its differential locus in the global North, and its association with ‘progressive’, rather than ‘radical,’ food sovereignty (see Tilzey, 2017). The ongoing dynamics of resistance, and the prospects for substantive food democracy as ‘radical’ food sovereignty in these two states, are explored in the latter part of the article

The Shortcomings of ‘Formal’ Food Democracy

The Prospects for Food Sovereignty as Counter-Hegemony

Conclusion