The Revolutionary Potential of Food Sovereignty: Applying Lenin’s Insights on Dialectics, the State, and Political Action

Abstract

This essay elaborates a conception of sovereignty that highlights its revolutionary potential. Its argument addresses the nature of different movement strategies in the ongoing struggle for food sovereignty and how movements ought to confront the state while simultaneously using it to create a transformative, potentially anticapitalist form of governance. This claim is built from critiques of the state and sovereignty in studies of radical democracy. The essay then presents how Lenin connects sovereignty to proletarian governance. A revolutionary conception of sovereignty, developed by placing discussions of Lenin’s work in dialogue with practices of food sovereignty, is found in collective political action that suspends state power and challenges private property to create alternative economic and noneconomic forms of organization. This dialectical rendering of sovereignty entails constructing a new order by simultaneously conflicting with and acting through the existing one.

Key Words:

• Dialectics
• Food Politics
• Food Sovereignty
• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
• Revolution

Notes

1 See “For Immediate Release: Black and Afro-Indigenous Farmers Share 2015 Food Sovereignty Prize,” accessed 25 September 2019, http://foodsovereigntyprize.org/this-is-a-new-posts.

2 See Estes (2019, 108–11, 199) on the contested land claims with respect to the Fort Laramie Treaty and how a coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups opposed corporations.

3 See “Food Security: Concepts and Measurement” in FAO (2003, chap. 2).

4 For the statement and its importance with respect to International Peasant’s Day, which is honored to commemorate the massacre of landless activists in Brazil in 1996, see “National Farmers Union, Canada Stand in Solidarity with Our Brothers and Sisters Globally,” La Via Campesina website, 17 April 2019, https://viacampesina.org/en/17-april-national-farmers-union-canada-stand-in-solidarity-with-our-brothers-and-sisters-globally.

5 See “What Is Food Sovereignty,” NFFC website, accessed 27 September 2019, https://nffc.net/what-we-do/food-sovereignty.

6 For a statement on privatization versus commons, see Installation: Requests of the Youth for Europe, accessed 30 September 2019, http://www.confederationpaysanne.fr/sites/1/mots_cles/documents/INSTALLATION-English.pdf.

7 See Le Blanc (2012) for more examples of these kinds of biographies.

8 This shows the error in Draper’s (1987, 96) comment that Lenin advocated a “no-law” understanding of dictatorship.

9 Also, see Lenin ([1916] 1975, 378): “For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.”

10 According to article 281, “Food sovereignty is a strategic objective and an obligation of the State in order to ensure that persons, communities, peoples and nations achieve self-sufficiency with respect to healthy and culturally appropriate food on a permanent basis.” The subsequent fourteen sections allude to environmental protections, tax policy, public policies, and cooperative support initiatives as means to promote food sovereignty. See Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, updated 31 January 2011, http://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html.

11 For their presentation of this theme, see “What We Stand For: Fair Prices. Local Jobs. Fresh Foods,” NFFC website, accessed 29 April 2021, https://nffc.net/about-us/what-we-stand-for.

12 See Wu (2018) for this argument.

13 A short description of the FWAF actions was previously available at “Campesinos’ Gardens,” FWAF website, accessed 22 October 2018, http://www.floridafarmworkers.org/2011-08-08-16-02-46/campesinos-gardens. An archive is available via the Wayback Machine, accessed 6 May 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20181004225616/http://www.floridafarmworkers.org/2011-08-08-16-02-46/campesinos-gardens. For a story on the gardens, see “Farmworker Association of Florida: Sowing the Seeds of a Local Food Economy,” W. K. Kellogg Foundation website, accessed 22 October 2018, https://www.wkkf.org/what-we-do/featured-work/farmworker-association-of-florida.