Practising democracy in agrifood collectives: Building political communities in-against-and-beyond capitalism and the state

Abstract

This thesis sets out to analyse how democratic praxis in grassroots agrifood collectives contributes to the fostering of sustainability transformations that take a critical stance towards capitalism and the state. I analyse whether and how collectives develop alternative social and political forms that are neither based on, nor reproduce, statist and capitalist practices, norms, and institutions, as well as how they unsettle and challenge these structures through their democratic praxis. For this, I draw on a conceptualisation of democratic praxis as the diversity of political practices that contribute to an infinite, collective, continuous, and practical interrogation on how to live together based on the presupposition of equality and the generation of autonomy.

The different chapters of the thesis demonstrate the broad diversity of democratic praxis in grassroots agrifood collectives. They show that doing democracy in these collectives is based on a diversity of institutions, operational practices and practices of (re)production in which not only humans but also a variety of other-than-human actors are involved. The collectives under scrutiny in this thesis developed mechanisms to redistribute power and created new political relationships with other-than-human actors (based on reciprocity and responsibility rather than on extraction and exploitation). They were reflective about their political practices and the exclusions they performed, and they developed procedures as well as experimental practices to either become more inclusive or acknowledge and enforce the exclusions they deemed necessary. In addition, they (re)politicised the agrifood system and their relationships with human and other-than-human members, and acknowledged interdependencies and entanglements with a variety of lifeforms in their attempted construction of vibrant, more-than-human political communities. Finally, these collectives approached democratic praxis as a permanent tension and accepted that doing democracy, becoming-interdependent, and generating autonomy have no external foundation nor justification and, thus, require continuous collective experimentation. As such, the democratic praxis of grassroots agrifood collectives constitutes sustained attempts to do politics differently, to make concrete interventions in the social-ecological coordinates of contemporary capitalist societies, and to explore the enactment of a variety of possible collective futures and lifeworlds.