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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.