Paper Short Abstract:

This paper analyses Korea’s agrifood system over the last decade using Veblen’s insights addressing deeper issues of ‘structuration’ in capitalist agrifood system, suggesting digital technologies can act as a trigger for self-organisation, but only valid when connected to Veblen’s radical-theory.

Paper Abstract:

In contemporary-capitalism, deepening various socioeconomic-inequalities-and-crises, it is inevitable to make major ‘adaptations’ (‘self-organising-changes’). The fundamental-challenge must be institutional: the established-institutions are inadequate, so a greater-period-of-experimentation is necessary. This is why we should look at the basics-of-institutional-theory in Marxist-economics, outside ruling-neoliberal-consensus. Nevertheless, ‘truly-deeper’ concern, which puts this-literature (albeit extremely-affluent-capacity) at vulnerability in challenging the ruling-consensus, is weak-connection to radical-theory, particularly of an economic-anthropologist Thorstein Veblen, on the-issue: whether can the digital-technology truly act-as-a-trigger of self-organisation for a new-resilient-agrifood-system? This question leads to sub-questions: (1) how does capitalist-agrifood-system get to organisation-and-structuration in real-world (objectivity); (2) what is its ‘truly-deeper-originator’ of crisis; (3) how the digital-technology acts-as-a-trigger for self-organisation; (4) whether it ‘truly’ acts-as-a-trigger to self-organise a new resilient-agrifood-system, in philosophical-value ‘justice’ and history; (5) if untruly, what the normative-solutions are, addressing current political-landscapes-of-possibilities between reformism-versus-radicalism. This paper, which defines ‘self-organisation’ as an ‘institutional-process-of-change with a struggle-to-reorganise-reconstitute-restructurate an order-out-of-disorder,’ aims to critically-reflect on these questions with the institutional-matrix of self-organisation structurated by market-vs-non-market; pro-capital-vs-anti-capital, through a deeper-understanding of radical-theory, particularly of Veblen, and applies it to an empirical-case-study (with quantitative-data-analysis) on Korea and the agrifood-system during the last-decade. By doing so, this paper argues: that beyond the superficial-issues of 'market-versus-State' and ‘Keynesianism-versus-neoliberalism’, there are deeper-issues of 'structuration’ within the capitalist-agrifood-system in Korea, which most institutional-theories-in-Marxist-economics have well-addressed, and argued that the digital-technology can be a trigger-to-self-organisation. However, these are in-turn only-valid when truly-connected to radical-theory, particularly of Veblenian, which critically connects ‘digital-technology’ with a long-term vision, looking beyond such a capitalistic-system.