The Latin American regional institution of the ALBA-TCP (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América-Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos) has garnered much deserved scholarly attention due to its radical rhetoric and novel forms of geopolitical cooperation and regional development. However, extant studies of ALBA provide little insight into the concrete actors at the helm of its development policies. To expand our understanding of this regional organisation, the present article offers a critical political economy perspective into the class dynamics of food production within ALBA, via empirically grounded research findings. Mobilising Nicos Poulantzas' theory of the capitalist state, as well as subsequent innovations in neo-Poulantzian theory, the analysis reveals how the spatial organisation of food production exhibits a markedly statist character. With specific focus on a series of ALBA-created rice-producing factories located in Venezuela, I show how the prevailing relations of production within these factories assumes a state-capitalist form, which runs counter ALBA's philosophy of social empowerment. Overall, the ALBA region's organisation of 'shared development' remains highly fragmented and un-coordinated in the context of food production, vastly underwritten by the circulation of Venezuelan oil rents, and ultimately subsumed under the power of the bureaucratic state. There is, therefore, a conspicuous gap between the discourse of ALBA and the reality of its political economy.
This article seeks to make a critical contribution to the “sovereignty problem” in food sovereignty (FS) studies. Contemporary scholarship has largely struggled to answer the question of who or what is sovereign within the realm of FS politics—underpinned by the relocalisation of agrarian production, sustainable nature–society relations, and a radical democratisation of food systems. Although the most recent scholarship has made significant progress on this issue, I offer an alternative historical materialist account of sovereignty understood as the combination of rights and territory. From a critical Marxian perspective, I deconstruct the basis of sovereign power as the intersection between social property rights (exploitation) and territorial governance (political technology) congealed within both capital and the state. This approach thus provides some clarity as to the necessary breaks required to establish an FS regime (self‐directed labour and cooperative territorial governance). The framework is then applied to the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. While witnessing some important achievements, Venezuela's FS experiment has encountered a number of contradictions. As this case study shows, peasant struggles aiming to retake control over production and establish cooperative forms of governance must traverse the entire terrain of the state and thus affect a broader socialisation of society's sociopolitical infrastructures.
This paper seeks to contribute to the English School's (ES) understanding of the European Regional International Society (ERIS) through the work of Karl Polanyi. While ES theory has long been interested in regional international societies, its general approach remains limited to a methodologically internationalist frame that fails to capture the dynamism and historical change of regional formations. We therefore aim to better ground the ES account of the ERIS within a more robust political economy framework that incorporates domestic dynamics with international processes. The article first examines the making of the nineteenth-century liberal order and its eventual breakdown during the turn of the century—the “great transformation”, which ultimately informed the rationale for the European Community (EC). We then focus our analysis on the EC's Common Agricultural Policy. With specific examination of sugar production, we explore the tensions and contradictions bound up with the formation of a protected domestic and regional sugar market, the pressures it exerted on the wider international society, and the ways in which European officials skillfully exploited the post-Cold War liberalization of international society as a means of (partially) “disembedding” European sugar. Lastly, we hope that this article begins a new conversation on how the tenets of political economy (Polanyian or otherwise) might, at long last, make an impact on ES theory.
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