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.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

This chapter traces the origins of Fedecafé’s hegemonic labor regime in Viejo Caldas. It begins by showing how Colombian coffee producers adapted to a peripheral niche of the world coffee market during the era of British hegemony, with semi-marketized small farmers better able to cope with the volatility of prices in the coffee market than large-scale planters that used various proletarianized labor systems. It then shows how Fedecafé emerged as a parastatal development organization charged with consolidating a profitable export sector based upon smallholding farmers. In doing so, it shows how Fedecafé instituted a regulatory social compact (Pacto Cafetero) that protected farmers from the volatility of the market and thus facilitated their conversion into fully proletarianized (market-dependent) farmers. It ends with a discussion of whether the Pacto Cafetero was effective in generating a hegemonic labor regime in Viejo Caldas into the postwar decades.