Community Restaurants/Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detour?

Dual Presentation: Community Restaurants with Benjamin Selwyn / Postcapitalism: Alternatives or Detour? with Greg Albo Community Restaurants: Decommodifying Food as Socialist Strategy with Benjamin Selwyn The outbreak of Covid-19 has exacerbated many of the system’s worst aspects. In the UK, the birthplace of free wage-labor based capitalist agriculture, the pandemic has exacerbated existing food inequities. The pandemic has stimulated discussions about how to remedy the world’s corporate-dominated food system. The most popular alternative visions propose shifting production and consumption away from meat increasingly to plant-based diets produced according to agro-ecological principles. While these approaches could be part of a broader solution, until now they have tended to eschew explaining the food system’s inequities in class-relational terms. Post-Capitalism: Alternatives or Detours? with Greg Albo The main political reference points in opposition to neoliberalism today – the constituent organizations of the Party of the European Left, the platforms associated with the left coalitional Iberian governments, the policy proposals that emerged from the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, and the Bernie Sanders candidacy in the Democratic Party presidential primaries – converge in a common rejection of social democracy's political cynicism and economic agenda seeking a return to one or another variant of competitive corporatism. The characteristic programme has been along the lines of the annual Euro-Memorandum: an anti-austerity, ‘Keynes-plus’ reversal of the economic policy regime of neoliberalism, recalling the alternative economic strategies of the 1970s, but now set within a far less ambitious transitional policy matrix. Recorded online, 2 May 2021.