Peasant counter-hegemony towards post-capitalist food sovereignty: Facing urban and rural precocity

This chapter argues that there are compelling reasons, both social and biophysical, to sustain advocacy of a counter-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and radical position to which the notion of food sovereignty is central. A key part of the legitimating narrative of capitalism is the portrayal of this process of agrarian transition to modernism as an apolitical and ineluctable teleology, supported by an imaginary involving the conversion of former peasants into workers with relatively secure prospects of employment, usually through migration to urban-based industry. The imperial mode of living of the Global North is sustained by the state-capital nexus on the basis of the unlimited appropriation of resources and labour power from the Global South, and on a disproportionate claim upon global ecological sinks, that is, the capacity of the environment to absorb waste. The development of ‘social articulation’ in the Global North and the sub-imperium is thus premised on a world resource system hugely biased in favour of these centres of accumulation.