In 2025, sometimes it is difficult to remember that, for two decades or so at the end of the twentieth- and start of the twenty-first century, Latin America was a place of hope. A progressive wave brought left-leaning governments to power across the region, driven by social currents fighting for new ways of organising society, politics and production; that is to say, new ways of organising life. The Zapatista uprising on the 1 January 1994 sparked excitement that Latin America could be a social laboratory once more. After being the cauldron where the economic ideas of the post-War period and the counterrevolutionary violence of the Cold War were first forged, the Zapatistas at once centred Latin America across debates over autonomy, democracy and alternatives to neoliberalism. Factory occupations by the piquetero movement in Argentina, Indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador demanding control over water and other natural resources and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Peasants’ Movement, MST) across South America captured the imagination of a generation of critical scholars. Arguably, nowhere was this truer than in Venezuela, where the charismatic president Hugo Chávez had returned from the brink in the face of a conservative coup d’état in 2003 to pursue what he labelled ‘twenty-first century socialism’.
Whilst much ink has been spilt trying to grapple with where it all went wrong, Rowan Lubbock’s Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty offers a novel reading of the most vexatious case of Venezuela under Chávez, often considered the most radical of this generation of progressive governments. Endowed with spectacular oil wealth, Chávez’s government funded democratic experiments in production and social life and a counter hegemonic regional alternative to the US-sponsored neoliberal Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) called the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América, ALBA). Whilst many have analysed these phenomena separately, few have tried to put the localised experimentations with communal production together with the geopolitics and geoeconomics of regionalism.
This is precisely where one of the central contributions of Cultivating Socialism lies. As well as intervening in debates on food sovereignty and the Latin American Pink Tide, it’s the books reflections on the future of progressive regionalism which is arguably the most interesting. Here, Lubbock positions himself against the wave of Gramscian scholarship central to the fin de ciclo debates in Latin American academia, offering a ‘complementary yet alternative interpretation based on the work of Nicos Poulantzas, particularly his final book, State, Power, Socialism’. While many scholars—including myself—have drawn on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution to interpret the shifting relationships between left-wing governments and popular sectors (from trade unions and piqueteros in Argentina to Indigenous and neighbourhood movements in Bolivia and the popular bases of Chavismo in Venezuela), Lubbock argues this literature often under-theorises production, treating it as exogenous to political processes. For Lubbock, Gramscian scholarship focuses on state/social movement relations at the expense of productive relations. Here a digression is needed. Whilst I am sympathetic to the spirit of the critique, it is too fast and loose. In the anglophone literature, Adam Morton and Chris Hesketh (also in this symposium) have both worked Leon Trotsky’s uneven and combined development framework into Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution. This allows them in different ways to understand the politics of the formation of class relations following the Mexican Revolution and, in particular, to unpick how changes in patterns of land tenure and industrial production shape Mexico’s social formation. Within Latin America, Lubbock names scholars, such as Maristella Svampa and Luis Tapia, that pay close attention to class relations and property regimes in their work. Mabel Thwaites Rey, named as a Gramscian, is one of the few Marxist scholars of recent generations of Latin American Marxists to turn Nico Poulantzas’ theoretical approach towards Latin America. In other words, critical scholars have used Gramsci—at times in combination with other Marxists, including Poulantzas—to analyse class relations and production processes in Latin America, suggesting the opposition presented by Lubbock in the book’s opening is not so sharp as he paints.
This detour notwithstanding, Lubbock’s focus on productive relations through the prism of Nico Poulantzas’ work on the state and Jacques Bidet’s fusion of Marx and Foucault provides Lubbock with a novel theoretical framework that enables him to evaluate ALBA across multiple spatial scales. Rather than theorising sovereignty through the more conventional Weberian lens of the monopoly on violence, Lubbock conceptualises sovereignty as a ‘historically specific combination of rights and territory’ that establishes ‘the right to exploit labour and the territorial organization of social production’ (9), articulated via the dual axes of property-power and knowledge-power. This framework enables Lubbock to present a nuanced analysis of how capital organizes labour processes and spatial configurations to generate surplus value, while the state orchestrates production and social reproduction to secure political order. Such an approach allows Lubbock to theorise food sovereignty in terms of “multiple sovereignties,” drawing on Phillip McMichael’s notion of overlapping and differentiated sovereign powers. These, he argues, converge in spaces of democratically self-directed labour and cooperative territorial governance (42), reframing food sovereignty as a struggle over control of both food production and the territories in which it occurs.
This approach allows Lubbock to make two noteworthy contributions. First, he situates ALBA’s broader trajectories of global and hemispheric regionalism. Drawing on his previous work on the contrasting paths of integration in North and South America to explain why a “United States” emerged in the former but not the latter, Lubbock argues that postwar regional integration was shaped by specific accumulation strategies and spatial-agglomeration effects, underwritten by the U.S. “imperium,” which positioned the United States as a continent-sized island with global reach. This framing allows him to situate ALBA as a counter-hegemonic response to neoliberal regionalism, informed by the legacies of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL, to use its Spanish acronym), dependency theory, and broader worldmaking projects such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. In doing so, Lubbock underscores the historical rationale for ALBA and its potential to reimagine sovereignty and integration from the perspective of Latin America’s popular classes. Indeed, in debates over the so-called Latin American Pink Tide, the radical potential of regionalism is often overlooked.
However, despite its radical promise in theory, Lubbock offers a sobering diagnosis of ALBA’s institutional shortcomings. He explains how, in practice, ALBA functions through a form of “interpresidentialism,” with ‘numerous summits, agreements, and initiatives seemingly pulled out of a hat but with very few actually brought to life’ (46). Building on the work of the great Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil (1997), he frames ALBA as a ‘magical region,’ where spectacle is privileged over substance. Lubbock also analyses how ALBA’s institutional materiality, shaped by a contradictory constellation of class forces, kept popular sectors at a relative distance from regional decision-making, meaning that despite the participatory intent behind many of ALBA’s food sovereignty programmes, they were often top down in practice. Lubbock’s analysis moves beyond the dominant focus on Venezuelan oil rents to examine how ALBA’s institutional form was shaped by divergent hegemonic projects across member states. His comparative study of agrarian reform and food sovereignty movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela reveals the variegated nature of ALBA, conditioned by domestic class politics and state forms. A particularly illuminating diagram (98) captures the tensions between national sovereignty, regional regulation, and WTO-bound accumulation regimes, offering a nuanced account of why ALBA struggled to cohere as a transformative regional project.
Nevertheless, Lubbock’s approach to ALBA does raise some thorny questions, two of which I want to raise here. Firstly, whilst offering a sophisticated theory of the state, at times I feel like there is a slippage between the state, as a multi-scaled terrain of struggle, and its decision-making institutions at the national level. On one level, this is understandable, given the centralisation of power in Venezuela under Chávez. However, subnational governments and apparatuses of the state have long been vital in shaping Latin American politics. The decentralisation drive of the 1990s placed increased importance on municipal politics, perhaps nowhere more so than in Brazil. At times, this multi-scalar characteristic of the state appears flattened out. Theoretically, this comes from a mobilisation of Jessop’s strategic relational approach to the state and a framing of state-civil society relations through the notion of “relative distance” to organs of decision-making. On one hand, this is analytically useful as it allows Lubbock to evaluate what happens to popular food sovereignty or food production initiatives from below when they come into contact with the state. However, on the other hand, at times the organs of decision-making come to stand in for the state itself, tending towards and/or suggesting (rather than explicitly stating) a reductive presentation of the state at the national level. This is not a fatal blow to Lubbock’s arguments, but rather represents an opportunity missed to develop a richer, more theoretically nuanced picture of ALBA that rethinks the form and function of Latin American states across spatial scales.
Secondly, there is the question of how class and class struggle are conceptualised. While class struggle is central to the book’s analytical framework, the concept of class itself remains underdefined. In the methodology section, there are hints of how class operates in the analysis, with Lubbock explaining that he uses
a critical class analysis that hopes to lay bare the specific modalities of power that give rise to particular social agencies… This theoretical and methodological orientation does not, however, necessarily close down convergent analyses into the nature of racial/gendered hierarchies in socioeconomic systems.
The implication here is that class, gendered and racial hierarchies operate separately and intersect post facto, a methodological approach that has been heavily criticised by Marxist feminists in debates around social reproduction. Lubbock’s framing risks reproducing a latent class reductionism, where racial and gendered hierarchies are acknowledged but treated as analytically distinct from—rather than constitutive of—class relations. This has implications for how class struggle is understood throughout the book, leading to disproportionate focus on relations of production above other relations and spaces where class is constituted.
One example will suffice in demonstrating the limitations to such a framing. When discussing food sovereignty and ALBA projects in Bolivia, Lubbock provides an overview of the shifting class alliances linked to agricultural production, largely focusing on the agroindustrial elite and the landless peasant movement in the eastern lowlands. He concludes that agrarian movements fragmented along pro- or anti-government lines during the 2010s (114). He explains how large sections of the Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinas de Bolivia (CSUTCB) were tightly integrated into the state apparatus (principally through the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, the Ministry of Land and Rural Development, and the regional Comunidad Andina de Naciones regional institution), while other organizations, such as Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, CONAMAQ) and Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia, CIDOB), resigned from the “Unity Pact” in 2011 and were subsequently sidelined and divided. For Lubbock (116), quoting Jeffery Webber, the reproduction of agrarian capitalism in Bolivia has thus led to a ‘decapitation of peasant movements, the containment of independent peasant militancy, rather than a fundamental transformation of the state apparatuses and political economy of the Bolivian countryside’.
This is where the latent productivism in the definition of class rears its ugly head. Splits in social movement-state relations are presented as a result of the stratification of agrarian capitalism in Bolivia and the pro-business position of the Evo Morales Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) government after 2010. However, this is only one side of the story. It is undoubtedly a factor but does not explain the fragmentation within movements; there are other important dynamics at play. First, the genealogy of the CSUTCB as a peasant movement and CONAMAQ and CIDOB as Indigenous movements shapes differences in the political organisation, goals and political subjects at the heart of each organisation. That is to say, class for itself operates through racial identities and existent political organisations within civil society. Second, the origin of the MAS from within the coca growers’ movement and as the political instrument of the CSUTCB meant that there was an organic relationship between the CSUTCB and the MAS and a contingent set of political alliances driving the integration of other movements into the MAS political project. Third, the production of a hegemonic form of Indigeneity in the image of Morales was used to justify state development projects and the colonisation of the sub-tropical and tropical regions of the lowlands. In other words, there is more going on than simply a shift in production regimes, and the historical development of infrastructures of class struggle (to borrow from Webber’s work on Bolivian social movements) and race – the production of a hegemonic Indigenous subject – is central to class struggle in Bolivia. A clear definition of class—treating relations of production, social reproduction, gender and race—as dialectically internal to one another would have allowed Lubbock to add more nuance to his discussions around the transformation of agrarian production in ALBA’s sphere of influence.
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