3 - Fedecafé’s Labor Regime in the Arc of US World Hegemony

Summary

This chapter begins by illustrating how Fedecafé avoided the social contradictions of their fully proletarianized labor regime by engaging in collective action efforts with other coffee-exporting countries that de-peripheralized their niche in the international coffee market.While Fedecafé’s early efforts to upgrade up the coffee commodity chain fell flat, the shift in the world hegemonic context and rise of US world hegemony during the postwar decades opened opportunities for collective action efforts among coffee producer-exporter countries that became institutionalized through the International Coffee Agreements (ICA). This geopolitically regulated international coffee market system provided Fedecafé with core-like profits that were essential to the viability of their Pacto Cafetero and therefore to the establishment of a hegemonic regime in Viejo Caldas. This chapter then discusses how the world historical context shifted in the 1980s, with the United States abandoning its support for the ICA system in favor of a deregulated coffee market. It closes with a discussion of how this unraveling of US world hegemony re-peripheralized Colombia’s niche in the international coffee market. This downgrading of Colombia’s niche in the market, combined with the regime’s dependence on fully proletarianized producers, undermined Fedecafé’s hegemony and pushed the region into a series of contemporary crises of labor control.