When I sat down with the Venezuelan political activist and media producer, Ambar Garcia, in 2016, I was somewhat taken aback by her sombre prognosis: “If the social movements do not assume the necessary critique for repoliticising the process… then we will not be talking about ALBA in three years.” Unfortunately for those of us who saw great promise in this novel form of international socialism, Ambar’s statement now seems prescient. The search for signs of life within the ALBA-TCP yields a string of summits and agreements that are big on rhetoric and small on delivery of public policy or economic transformation. On the academic side, the flurry over this counter-hegemonic region has certainly tempered. Notwithstanding some recent achievements, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, even sympathetic observers note that “it is unclear to what extent ALBA, as an international coalition, still exists.”
This is not a new problem in the context of ALBA. Christopher Absell revealed the curious metrics of ALBA studies up until 2015, with the number of outputs peaking in 2011 (and dropping precipitously thereafter), while the majority of academic publications focused mainly on the most general (and rhetorical) aspect of the institution, in contrast to more concrete policy outcomes in health, environment, and food. It was precisely this situation that motivated me to witness the creation of this regional institution for myself, with particular interest in its approach to food sovereignty and rural development. When I arrived in Venezuela, it was clear why the organisation leant so heavily on rhetoric; the centrepiece of ALBA’s approach to food sovereignty, in the form of a region-wide Empresas Grannacionales (Grandnational Companies) didn’t exist. To top it all off, Venezuela began its steady descent into the worst food crisis in its history.
Deciphering the actors, processes, contradictions and prospects of ALBA’s food policies formed the substance of my book, Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty. Employing a broadly historical materialist approach to the inter-related determinations of geopolitical integration, state formation, and peasant-led food sovereignty, the book sought to provide a comprehensive political-economic analysis to one of the most beguiling regional institutions in the world. Rather than rehearse the main arguments of the book, this post will deal with the substantive points raised across this symposium.
Let me first begin with enormous thanks to my generous participants, who all devoted their time and attention to the book. Eugenia Giraudo and Armando Van Rankin Anaya both offer useful overviews and reflections, while Kyla Sankey, Chris Hesketh, Angus McNelly, and Aiko Ikemura Amaral take me to task on some really excellent points. The breadth of opinion and insight is truly humbling, and I hope to address as many of these issues as I can.
1. Situating Theory
A key theme that emerges from the symposium is the question of theory. Given the over-sized place of theoretical frameworks across the book – from Marx and Poulantzas to Jacques Bidet and Bob Jessop – the justification of such thinkers for analysing 21st century Venezuela (and its regional project) is certainly necessary. The conceptual tool kit brought to bear on the analysis could be construed as “Euro-centric”, as Kyla Sankey does. Yet one might ask what difference this centricity really makes. This is not to overlook the invaluable interventions within IR, Sociology, and Political Economy on the perils and pitfalls of Euro-centric thinking. Felipe Antunes de Oliveira and Ingrid Kvangraven, for instance, usefully distinguish between several overlapping characteristics, including Euro-centric historiography, ahistorical universalism, the bracketing of non-European agency, elevating “the West” to the peak of a normative hierarchy, and a teleological framework of “progress”. This seems closer to the rotten core of the Eurocentric conception of the world.
However, it is striking how much critical thought stemming from Latin America is indebted to scholars like Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, and others. Notwithstanding the (somewhat underwhelming) decolonial critique of dependency theory as too constrained by “modernity ideas”, Latin American intellectuals bring radically new forms of thought to bear on the issues that most immediately confronted them, from René Zavaleta’s notion of “formación abigarrada” to Veronica Gago’s “neoliberalism from below”. Yet even here we see the stamp of Gramsci, Foucault, and Marx himself. It may have been apropos to make more use of Coronil’s idiosyncratic framework in The Magical State, but I have my own misgivings about this approach. Moreover, as McNelly reminds us, the work of Poulantzas has also made its way into contemporary Latin American Marxist scholarship, particularly among Mabel Thwaites Rey and Tatiana Berringer. My failure to cite these scholars was a gross oversight, but my primary goal was to dig into Poulantzas directly as a means of forging a flexible lens through which to articulate a large number of spaces, scales and actors. It therefore seems less salient to identify the geographical origin of an idea than it is to think through the degree to which an idea may (or may not) take root in different soil. It was in this spirit that I (and more recently others) sought to bring the insights of Poulantzas to Latin American regionalism.
2. From the Outside In (or Inside Out?)
Sankey rightly notes that the emphasis of the book is placed largely within the domestic/regional sphere, to the relative neglect of broader international pressures, supposedly “common to much of the English-speaking discussion of Latin American progressive governments”, and signalling “what the dependency literature might have called an over-emphasis on the internal”. With regards to the first point, there is certainly a sizable literature on contemporary Venezuela that focuses more heavily on domestic conflicts, most notably with Gabriel Hetland, whose long-running debate with Steve Ellner (among others) points towards the tricky balancing act of keeping external and internal dimensions in play. But this “internal” perspective is also common to non-English speaking writers. Quite apart from the sizable criticism of the Maduro government across sites like Aporrea and Links, one of the most incisive contributions to this debate comes from Dante Espinoza, who meticulously sets out the economic context of Maduro’s failures. The crisis in Venezuela, Espinoza suggests, “is not simply one of economic problems but of political will.”
This points towards what I consider to be perhaps the trickiest problem to solve, and potentially the most important for any revolutionary to grapple with: how to change society under adverse external conditions. In relation to Sankey’s second point, then, if we wish to come through on our desire to privilege “Southern” agency, then we ought to take more seriously the contradictions, conflicts, deviations, reversals among progressive governments as a function of the contingent and open-ended process of class struggle. Indeed, as Antunes de Oliveira and Kvangraven point out, “dependency scholars were also concerned with the political economy of domestic structures of production, taking the global structures as a given” (my emphasis). Likewise, imperialism does not cease when a new government steps in, and it does not ease geopolitical pressures when that government attempts to challenge the privileges of domestic classes linked to the imperialist chain. In other words, the structure of imperialism is taken as a given within the late stages of global capitalism. There’s no question about the insidious role played by US imperialism (and the comprador bourgeois class) in the “scaffolding of disputed sovereignty”, as van Rankin Anaya so nicely puts it. And there is an undeniable imperative to affect deep-seated transformation within societies across the Global North if we are ever to see long-lasting justice and equality at the world scale. But until that moment arrives, the premium would seem to be on the creative strategies among socially situated actors who confront a variety of “structures” and turn them either to their advantage, or to their downfall.
This is why (somewhat in keeping with classical dependency theory’s relative focus on domestic class compositions) I sought to read the making of ALBA through a class-relational lens. This perspective prompted me to go beyond more traditional Gramscian approaches to Latin America’s left turn, which (to my mind) tend to overly-focus on state/social movement relations, and a somewhat over-politicised reading of social transformation. Chris Hesketh and Angus McNelly usefully take me up on this point, by showing the relative value of Gramsci’s “passive revolution” as a framing device for the Bolivarian turn. On the one hand, Gramsci’s conceptual pallet, as McNelly points out, would certainly support the much needed balance between the external and internal, by revealing the ways in which the internationalisation of capital has a profound impact on state formation and class composition across countries. Yet while passive revolution helps us to understand the conditions through which certain social dynamics evolve, it does not explain why different examples of passive revolution have such variable outcomes. Indeed, Adam David Morton reminds us, passive revolution is but a “general principle of historical research”, which merely signifies the conflict among ruling/subaltern classes under a specific phase of global capitalism, but it does not in itself explain the difference in “character and outcome” of any historical situation.
By no means do I wish to write off passive revolution as an analytical concept. Indeed, I have only recently begun to dig into the (geo)politics of passive revolution in more recent work on the agrarian roots of the ‘American Century’. But here again, the emphasis is on historically situated actors – from development experts to Mexican officials and campesinos – and their unanticipated strategies of (re)production. Thus, my reservations with large macro-sociological frameworks comes closer to Armando Van Rankin Anaya’s concern with avoiding “fixed logics of praxis that are superimposed upon historical registers.”
All of this helps to give some clarity on why I thought Gramsci’s concept less useful for unpacking the micro-foundational struggles within spaces of industrial/rural production – to the struggle over the manual/intellectual labour divide. Beyond his pre-prison writings on factory politics and the industrial working class in Italy, the closest Gramsci ever comes to such a vantage point is his off-hand remark on the hegemony of “Fordism” emerging from the factory itself (as well as a few other scattered remarks across his carceral writings). But here Michael Burawoy’s comparative analysis of factory regimes in the US and Soviet Bloc offered more finesse for unpacking the particularities of Venezuela’s “socialist production companies”, in this case the Empresas Mixtas Socialistas del ALBA-Arroz.
For all these reasons, Poulantzas, Bidet and Jessop seemed to offer a more flexible and multi-scalar mode of analysis capable of capturing the agent-specific strategies of (re)production within 21st century Latin American regionalism, even in the context of commodity-exporting dependency, which I attempted to do with a schematic representation of different scales (national/regional/global) alongside different “moments” of the Bolivarian project (accumulation/regulation/hegemony).
3. What is to Be Done With the Bourgeois (Colonial) State?
As my research evolved, it became clear that the cipher to the Bolivarian revolution (and its regionalisation) was to be found in the state apparatus itself. In keeping with contemporary critical scholarship on the Latin American state, the style, structure and process of the Bolivarian turn bring into sharp relief the question of state power, political-economic management, and the texture of the hegemonic bloc. The question as to whether, or to what degree, the bourgeois (colonial) state can be an effective vehicle for popular emancipation has gained much traction in recent years. Chris Hesketh in particular maintains a (quite warranted) scepticism as to the compatibility between a decentralised form of popular (Indigenous) sovereignty and the crushing weight of sovereign state-space. Such scepticism is due, sadly, to the repeated failures of radical social forces in Latin America to challenge, reshape, and govern the capitalist state apparatus for purposes geared largely towards the dilution, or eventual overthrow, of capitalism.
So, has the state failed to support, or worked against, forms of popular (food) sovereignty? Hesketh would suggest it has, in light of how neo-extractivism “renders alternative forms of sovereignty unlikely.” This unlikely victory of popular sovereignty is interpreted as definitive proof that multiple sovereignties are, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson suggests, “incommensurable” with the ontology of colonial state-space. But what is the source of this incommensurability? Is it simply the bare ontology of colonial cartography – incapable of admitting any other form of sovereignty (Indigenous or otherwise) within its spatial remit –, or rather the clash of developmental imaginaries between differentially situated groups? By this I simply mean that the dynamics of territorial displacement, violence, and class exploitation were not invented by colonialism; even Aileen Moreton-Robinson seeks to avoid an “anthropological romanticism [that]… posit[s] Indigenous peoples as caring sharing humans who did not war or take over other’s territories.” The point here is not to underplay the wanton destruction wrought by European colonialism. Rather, it is simply to maintain a more grounded analysis of why certain groups contend over coveted goods, and how those goods are rendered through different imaginaries. Thus, I’m less sure that this problem simply cuts across a coloniality/indigeneity binary. Rather, capital tends to favour those actors, spaces and practices that most immediately augment the production and circulation of value. Precisely “who” ends up doing that is an empirical question, not an ontological one.
It is therefore important (as I argue in the book) to start from the real historical conditions through which human beings make their lives (and history). The image of a homogenous, colonial cartography is more myth than reality. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, for instance, falls into the all-too-common trap of critical scholarship on European sovereignty, which simply takes early modern sovereignty to be “absolute”. Surprisingly, she also cites Morris R. Cohen’s incisive article from 1927 on the relationship between private property and modern sovereignty, yet stops short of revealing Cohen’s most important insight: it is not simply that sovereignty and property become blurred as a function of “territorial integrity”, as Moreton-Robinson claims. Rather, the power of exclusion, as the basis of capitalist relations of production, is what leads to the curious case in which the medieval peasant had almost as much bargaining power against their sovereign lord as did the industrial wage-worker against the Ford Motor Company.
If, then, we approach the problem of sovereignty from a more socio-relational lens, the tension between a homogenous sovereign state-space and a decentralised mosaic of multiple sovereignties disappears. It simply becomes a question of which sovereignties become likely or unlikely under a given mode of production and its historical phase. Under conditions of authoritarian neoliberalism, is the quasi-sovereignty of the Amazon warehouse, or the feudal tech-bro, more likely than the multiplication of community-run urban gardens and participatory municipal budgeting? Most likely, yes. Is the bourgeois (colonial) state the most efficacious (though not the only) route into undermining the former and promoting the latter? Here the debate continues.
But this provides a neat segue into McNelly’s reservations about my treatment of the Bolivarian state. It’s perfectly understandable if the reader comes away with the feeling that the “decision-making institutions at the national level” simply stand in for “the state” itself. Using the examples of participatory budgeting in Brazil and elsewhere, McNelly rightly notes that the power to shape life is not simply ensconced in the highest echelons of the state bureaucracy. But that is precisely what Jessop’s strategic relational approach helps us understand. Thus, if I do (at times) present the Bolivarian state as somewhat overbearing, centralised, and unresponsive to popular initiative, that is simply a reflection of the balance of class forces making up the strategic terrain of the state as a whole, which, as Giraudo points out, “keep[s] bringing us back to the national scale”. Indeed, what participatory budgeting (as well as food sovereignty initiatives) help to underscore is the manner in which the political geography of the capitalist nation-state is far more flexible and contestable than we might otherwise think. Moreover, it shows how these forms of popular initiative often come into fruition not in spite of, but because of, the state institutions through which they operate.
4. On Blind Spots
While I have thus far attempted to answer some of the well-placed objections from the symposium, there are a number of substantial limits that should be addressed. Sankey rightly seeks more substantial insights into some of the protagonists of the book, like the Coordinadora Agraria Nacional Ezequiel Zamora. I admit the details on this significant rural movement in Venezuela was somewhat thin, while a richer portrait of their social base and political orientation would have provided more depth. Alongside this, McNelly makes an excellent observation about the limitations of my broader comparative analysis of food sovereignty movements across ALBA states in Chapter 4. Specifically in the case of peasant movements in Bolivia, my treatment of their class differentiation and relationship to the state was far too one-dimensional, largely due to a lack of attention to the internally related determinations of race and Indigenous identities in the making of rural class configurations. Here, McNelly draws our attention to the ways in which the eventual fragmentation of rural classes finds its roots within the racial identities of different groups, particularly the peasant-led CSUTCB as an organically integral element to the MAS’s social base, and the Indigenous movements CONAMAQ and CIDOB, who eventually split from Morales’ coalition due to ever-expanding incursions into Indigenous territories in the lowlands. This re-signifies the important difference (which I grossly underplayed) between a class in itself and for itself, with the latter only intelligible through the elements of race, gender and social reproduction, and how these aspects become essentially contested between different groups claiming similar symbolic or cultural signification, though with different developmental imaginaries driving dissonance and conflict.
Finally, along with Sankey, Aiko Ikemura Amaral asks where the place of food actually sits in this account of food sovereignty politics. The question of food as political, cultural and quotidian is of course central to its function as a tool of either emancipation or servitude. Yet the book was less focused on the “downstream” aspects of food systems, and more concerned with disentangling the spatial, social and economic aspects of “upstream” dimensions – from the soil to the silo. This was largely due to a conscious choice of perspective that aimed to bring a more macro-systematic framework to the cultivation of food under capitalist relations of production, and how those relations can be bent (or broken) by those seeking to go beyond the confines of capitalist exploitation/commodification.
Yet while the element of consumption – of food as social practice – offers a window into deeper entanglements between race, gender and culture (as Ikemura Amaral rightly notes), it must be kept in perspective with the broader (inter)national shifts in commodity/technological frontiers. The story of the arepa encapsulates all of these determinants, with an early effort to “whiten” Venezuelan society through Green Revolution technologies and a steady import of wheat flour, only to shift the domestic market to harina precocida de maiz (precooked corn flour), an ingredient almost indistinguishable from (white) wheat flour, with marketing campaigns targeting poor women, and offering substantially reduced cooking time for a dish largely consumed by the working class.
As Ikemura Amaral also suggests, the story of rice can be read through a similar lens of alimentary domination. But, as Judith Carney reminds us, the embodied knowledge of rice cultivation among African slaves provided a degree of leverage and bargaining power with respect to their enslavement (at least temporarily). Rice is not simply an object with a single function, but an historically specific artifact whose social effects are derived from the ways in which property-power/knowledge-power organise the production/circulation/consumption of a given object in service of a specific rationale of governance. Thus, to ask “what other products are essential in… food sovereignty” necessitates a contextualisation of the specific socio-economic challenges of the society in question. In the case of Venezuela, workers at ALBA-Arroz were largely fixated on staple crops capable of producing at scale, in order to feed a largely urbanised population. Venezuelan peasants are all too eager to work with their comrades within Empresas Mixtas Socialistas, both as a marketing outlet for their raw product, and to support the burgeoning political geography of the “point and circle”. But producer/consumer managed markets, like El Panal or La Alpargata Solidaria, also offer a complementary dimension in which fruits and vegetables are sold along lines of solidarity rather than impersonal price signals. Thus, the “concrete dimensions of production and reproduction” span the entire gamut of socio-spatial relations, from the farm and factory floor to the community market and kitchen table. My book was only able to capture a part of this broader mosaic, and I greatly look forward to seeing how other activists and scholars expand our scope and knowledge of this ongoing struggle to transform food into an instrument of freedom.
The contributions to this symposium provide an invaluable supplement to the main ideas and arguments in Cultivating Socialism. They remind us of the radically multi-dimensional character of agrarian change and social struggle, and to the spaces, scales and myths enveloped within the contestation over food, sovereignty, and power. I would like to again thank the participants for their generous contributions, I can only hope that the above reflections have done some justice to these insights.
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