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.