In his book, Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty, Rowan Lubbock provides a novel approach to understanding not only some of the shortcomings of ALBA as a revolutionary project, but beyond that, how food systems and emancipatory politics cannot be understood without looking at the multiscalarity of social relations. One of the key contributions of the book is to present a multiscalar approach to study food regimes, but also to broader dynamics of sovereignty and the ‘sovereignty problem’ the author highlights, one – in his words – which is rooted in sovereignty as ‘the right to exploit labour and the territorial organisation of social production’.
Scale is usually understood as a ‘container’ – the location where social activities take place: the urban, the national, the global, appear as these ‘ontologically given’ arenas that organise the world and our lives. However, there is nothing ‘natural’ about these scales, they do not exist before the specific social relations that give them meaning. The analysis in this book, as the author points out, helps us problematise this ‘natural’ view of scales – the assumption of them as static – and places emphasis on the complex combination of institutional frameworks, class struggles, and social production – and additionally, the production of space and scale.
We cannot understand the emergence, establishment, and ultimately, demise of ALBA without understanding the ways in which the accumulation regime, regulation and hegemonic project of the Venezuelan state shaped the emergence of ALBA as a new regional space, as well as the role of social movements at a communal and local level, their capacity (or lack of) to create their own spaces within the statist and regional power structures, and the pressures from global and hemispheric powers. As the book clearly explains, ALBA was determined by the centrality of Venezuela, and in turn, the centrality of oil for the Venezuelan development project, creating this illusion of development. This ‘illusion’ seems to emanate from imaginaries of development grounded on natural resources and their exploitation, expectations and ideas of how development should be achieved nationally that are dependent on extractivist activities – these ‘imaginaries’ being quite common in Latin America (for example, among others, Pellegrini and Perrault and Valdivia explore the role of hydrocarbons in national imaginaries in Bolivia and Ecuador).
These interactions even promoted or allowed the conditions for the creation – even if eventually unsuccessful – of new scales and new social relations that shaped them. For example, Chavez’ project or vision of ‘point and circle’, sites of production in connection with self-organised communities of which the ALBA-Arroz is a relevant example of this. As the author points out, these represented a new political geography centred around socialist production and were considered key in building food sovereignty. Yet the particular forms of, in this case, state property and its relationship with labour limited the success of these spaces of production as new scales of organisation. However, while it is usually capitalism which is considered as creating new scales or scalar fixes – building on David Harvey’s conceptualisation of ‘spatial fix’, which denotes the tendency of capital to search for different coherent and stable geographical configurations in the aftermath of overaccumulation crises – this example shows us how emancipatory projects can also create new scalar fixes for more democratic and socialist forms of territorial and productive organisation.
In particular, ALBA was a project that aimed at building an emancipatory project at the regional level. Regionalism has been studied as a response to, or an interaction with, the forces of economic globalisation and global hegemony, with open regionalism conceptualised as enhancing countries’ capacity to insert themselves into globalisation, or market integration as a way to protect from the negative impacts of globalisation. The case of ALBA, as it is presented in this book, show us the possibility of regionalism built on a regional identity or cohesion, on a new regional sovereignty. As Lubbock points out, this was a project that was eventually pulled in different directions: the nation and the region. It ultimately reflected the experience of regional institutions as an aggregation of national states, rather than something that could overcome and exist beyond the overlap with national borders; one that could acknowledge multiple scales, not only the national, but also local, communal, and new scales in between. The question that appears is to what extent can ALBA be seen as a ‘rescaling’ of the political and socio-economic socialist project of Chavez, and or was ALBA necessary for the consolidation of this project at the national level? The book points to the key global or hemispheric context for the emergence of ALBA, and the need for an institutional, political articulation of what social movements had been claiming, but these dynamics keep bringing us back to the national scale, particularly to the contradictions of the Venezuelan state.
This book is also successful in highlighting other contradictions that can help us understand why the Bolivarian project ultimately failed in dismantling capitalism and its principles. One of these contradictions is that between food sovereignty and agribusiness – can they co-exist? Agribusiness as the dominant force in contemporary food regimes has the capacity to shape and determine relations of production and space at a multiplicity of scales. The book points to the fact that even with the promotion of cooperatives and social enterprises, the landed presence and production of agriculture based on a neoliberal mode of production (agribusiness) expanded in this region. Ultimately, the analysis sheds some light on the limitations of a political project that emphasised popular sovereignty and building a socialist project of state, labour and nature relations, while relying on international exports of primary resources – in other words, on an extractivist accumulation regime. This, in turn, points to the tensions emerging from understandings of nature/human relations. On one hand, there is an accumulation regime based on the continuous Cartesian divide between human and nature, one that enables capitalism’s reliance on cheap nature, cheap food, cheap labour, as Patel and Moore point out. And on the other hand, approaches and projects that emanate from groups with alternative views of these relationships, understandings of sovereignty that aim to challenge prevailing notions of what is nature and how we should relate to it.
Lubbock looks at the limitations and the inherent contradictions of both the political economy of the Venezuelan state and the ALBA project, shedding light on how this experience of emancipatory politics managed to develop new spaces, new scales, new forms of sovereignty. These can also be looked at as a moment of hope, the potential of what can be achieved, and a learning opportunity for the left, particularly in Latin America. Cultivating Socialism has a richness and depth of theoretical, historical, and empirical analysis that makes it a key contribution on several areas: by rethinking the concept of sovereignty from a Marxian approach, and its linkages to rights and territory; highlighting the opportunities and challenges faced by the food sovereignty movement; rethinking regionalism and regional politics – including at the hemispheric level; as well as of course politics of emancipation and the relationship between state and social movements.
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