Denaturalizing the Market: Primitive Accumulation, Class Reformation, and the Rise of Colombia’s Anti-Neoliberal Countermovement

• In Event: 573 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. Labor Formations in the Global South

Abstract

This paper addresses what labor movement scholars are calling the “Polanyi-problem” - how societal movements can effectively re-embed neoliberal markets back into society - by drawing upon recent interpretations of Karl Marx writings on primitive accumulation and class formation. The author focuses on the case of Colombia’s coffee farmers (cafeteros) – a class of producers whose historically-privileged modality of class reproduction was undermined by the liberalization of the coffee market in the 1990s and who have engaged in two major waves of protest aimed at re-embedding the coffee market back into society (1993-2001; 2013-2014). While similar in terms of movement targets, tactics, and general goals, a significant shift has occurred in the cafeteros’ demands which is reflective of a fundamental transformation of their class identity away from one that ‘naturalized’ their dependence upon the coffee market to meet their subsistence needs and towards one that ‘de-naturalizes’ their dependence upon this market. This ‘denaturalizatization of the market’ undermined their ability to mobilize around a privileged form of class identity. Yet, it provided them with the ability to generalize their struggle beyond the confines of the coffee economy and therefore develop into a broad, national anti-neoliberal agrarian Polanyian counter-movement.

Author

• Phillip A. Hough, Florida Atlantic University