Rowan Lubbock’s Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA and the Politics of Food Sovereignty is an important book for understanding the agrarian dimensions of Venezuela’s socialist experiment and the ALBA regional integration project at both the theoretical and empirical levels. The rise of Food Sovereignty as a central organising demand for agrarian movements in Latin America in recent years raises several questions: who is sovereign? sovereignty over what? from what? To address these questions, Lubbock develops a class-relational conceptual framework for understanding modern sovereignty as an ‘historically specific combination of rights and territory – or the right to exploit labour and the territorial organization of social production’ (p. 9). From this, the struggles within food sovereignty are conceived as projects seeking ‘self-directed labour and cooperative territorial organization’ (p. 9). This enables Lubbock to analyse the difficulties faced by diverse agrarian movements in very different local and national circumstances as ‘the strategic necessity of confronting the duality of modern sovereignty – condensed within spaces of capitalist production and the capitalist state itself’. Lubbock’s ability to synthesise a wide range of theoretical and historical material (albeit quite Anglo- and Euro-centric) and apply it to the context of Latin American Food Sovereignty struggles is admirable, and I largely agree with the book’s theoretical propositions and analytical conclusions.
While I learned a lot from this book, I nevertheless thought the conclusions could be more firmly supported with a firmer grounding in insights from academic literature relevant to the Latin American context and at times agrarian political economy. For example, I agree that Nicos Poulantzas’ notion of the “democratic road to socialism” provides a helpful theoretical framework for thinking about the politics of food sovereignty in Venezuela and Latin America, but I thought this analytical framing needs to incorporate the context of dependency, or the limitations faced by any project for building participatory democracy presented by the specific dynamics of production, property and power pertaining to commodity-exporting societies with subordinated integration into international financial and political structures. While these dynamics play a prominent role in the book’s later political analysis (e.g. ‘movement-state relations were overdetermined by the prevailing accumulation regimes within each national space’, or Fernando Coronil’s ‘magical state’), I would have been interested to see their incorporation into its theoretical propositions. This would lay the ground for a theoretical framing not only of the specificity of struggles for sovereignty under capitalism, but also in the Global South. It must be said that this shortcoming is common to much of the English-speaking discussion of Latin American progressive governments that Lubbock draws on – what the dependency literature might have called an over-emphasis on the internal and neglect of how the external interacts with the internal.
One strength of the book is the theoretical and historical discussion dedicated to the “Hidden Edifice” of sovereignty and ‘the ways in which struggles over property revolve around struggles for land ownership’. But I thought this should have been matched by a discussion of the dimension of food (and agriculture) in food sovereignty struggles. Lubbock remarks that ‘the regionalization of food sovereignty should have been ALBA’s most far-reaching initiative, both economically and politically.’ But it is not clear to me, from an agrarian political economy perspective, that this should be the case. Across Latin America and especially in Venezuela, rural populations have long been in decline, agriculture bears increasingly less economic weight or political clout and historical land movements are comparatively very weak today. It is arguable that achieving the food sovereingty movement’s goals would make very little difference to the majority-urban poor populations, in which case, why should food sovereignty have been a cornerstone of the ALBA project? These factors, it seems, could also be important in explaining many of the book’s observations, like the failure of agricultural cooperatives and lack of dissemination of agroecological practices.
The book’s methodological approach is broad — an ‘encompassing comparison’ in Charles Tilly’s sense — aiming to explore the ‘contested and contradictory dynamics of building a participatory food regime at multiple political scales’ (p. 4). While I found the shortcomings of the ALBA project insightful, I nonetheless thought that a more in-depth historical and social exploration of the agrarian social movements discussed (especially in Venezuela) would have better supported the theoretical prepositions of the book. For example, we are given the context of rural de-population, NGO-ization, transnationalization of movements, and the contradictions between food sovereignty and extractivism, but the case study evidence falls short of illuminating how these dynamics play out in the agrarian classes that form the basis of Venezuela (and ALBA)’s food sovereignty movements. Important organisations like the Coordinadora Agraria Nacional Ezequiel Zamora are dealt with quite briefly and we are left wondering some basic questions: What is the class basis of the movement? What are their traditions in relation to agro-ecology? What are their strategies and demands? Who are their leaders? How have they related to the state? I thought that some of the central theoretical problems the book raises — on territory and sovereignty, the tensions between co-optation and sovereignty — would have been better addressed with closer attention to these questions.
The strength of the book lies in the case study of the ALBA-arroz occupation, which enables Lubbock to interrogate the production of ‘knowledge-power’ in pursuit of cooperative production beyond the rhetoric of Bolivarian socialism. The insights provide an original and thoughtful perspective on the shortcomings of Venezuela’s socialist project, or why the capture of state power was not translated into alternative forms of production. Having learned a lot from this case study, I nonetheless wondered whether stronger connections could have been made between this and the earlier chapters if Lubbock had followed up on his theoretical framing more thoroughly. In the academic literature surrounding the food sovereignty movement, the focus is on peasant land struggles, agro-ecology, and territorial production, and the role of agricultural workers is often overlooked. The case study of an agricultural factory raises questions of who is included in territorial sovereignty and what food sovereignty means for agricultural workers that I would be interested to see interrogated further.
For agrarian political economists like myself, Cultivating Socialism offers an important intervention on two counts. It demonstrates the relevance of Marxian conceptual tools for a critical history of the agrarian dimension of Venezuela’s socialist project and demonstrates the limitations of scaling up food sovereignty.
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