Diverse food economies or multi-variant capitalism: the community dynamic shaping contemporary-food systems

Abstract

Community practices are being rehabilitated and reinvigorated due to a set of extraordinary historical circumstances. This paper focuses on the various types of community practice, community discourse, and communitarian reference points influencing national food system dynamics. It begins by illustrating how corporate-dominated food systems have appropriated community concerns and motifs for profit, and describes several of the many counter-responses to corporate-dominated systems. These alternatives are not necessarily anti-capitalist, and are best conceived in Gibson-Graham's postcapitalist politics framework [(2006) A Post-Capitalist Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis] and its language of diverse economies. While numerous alternative systems embed themselves within the capitalist market, they aim to advance multiple ends beyond profitability. Judgements as to whether diverse food economies offer transformative political possibilities lie in answering some fundamental questions about the accumulation and distribution of surplus value and the capacity for people and firms to be accountable to one another for their actions. In discussing this point, I reflect on the reverberations from past community development theorizing.