Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger

ABSTRACT

This article applies an anarchist lens to the food sovereignty movement. It analyzes food regimes as capitalist agriculture regimes which rely on the State’s monopoly on hunger, wherein the State relies on the dispossession of people from their land and food systems, the protection of property, and the primacy of capital. The interdependence of this State-capital-property trinity is violently enforced, and manufactures compliance through counterinsurgent strategies of social war. The State monopoly on hunger justifies a new offshoot of the larger food sovereignty movement, a prefigurative praxis which dismantles all food regimes to build new counter-worlds: food anarchy.

KEYWORDS:

• State theory
• anarchism
• food regimes
• food sovereignty

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers, who helped improve this article tremendously with their feedback. I am grateful to Alexander Dunlap for his extensive comments and assistance with this article, generous willingness to help me grow as a scholar/human, influence on my thinking, patience, and friendship. I thank Michael Bell, Morgan Robertson, Matt Turner, and Ned Molder for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this article. Conversations, friendship, and comradeship with JT, Allison Hellenbrand, Aaron Cutler, Nevada, Julian Goldberg, Kaci Tobin, Emma Gunuey, Jagravi Dave, the Madison Really Really Free Marketeers, Madison Infoshop, Feed the Peeps, folks in the struggle against the Reindahl Park encampment eviction, and the Atlanta forest defenders, all contributed greatly to this article’s development (and to my life). Thank you to fellow members of the Anarchism and Ecology graduate seminar, held jointly between the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Kentucky in the Spring of 2021, for creating the lively Zoom learning space in which the idea for this article germinated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Sustainable Agriculture Systems Coordinated Agricultural Program grant no. 2019-68012-29852 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Notes on contributors

Hannah Kass

Hannah Kass is an ex-farmworker and joint Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on food sovereignty movements, political agroecology, plantation geographies, anarchism, abolition, carcerality, agrarian political economy, and autonomous agri-food systems. Follow her on Twitter @hkasserole.