Abstract
The product of 20 years of research by Philip Hough, this wonderful book is full of insights. Importantly, Hough’s longue durée approach responds to academic, popular, and policy analyses that define Colombia’s “problem” as coca trafficking and/or the revolutionary guerrilla group, the FARC. Digging into development in the Colombian periphery of the world-system, or what he terms the “margins of the global market,” Hough insists, “the state’s underlying problem is neither the FARC nor the coca economy, but rather how to respond to a crisis of surplus population” (p. 29). The struggles and livelihood of squeezed workers who produce commodities are placed within a multiscalar, world-historical analysis that illustrates the best that world-systems analysis has to offer.
Following Giovanni Arrighi and his early work on Calabria, Hough’s book demonstrates, “Just as there are multiple paths to capitalism, so too is agrarian transformation compatible with multiple outcomes” (Bair et al., 2019: 394). Moreover, core and periphery nations are not defined a priori; rather core-ness and peripheral-ness of particular commodities is examined historically. Appearing in the series on Development Trajectories in Global Value Chains (GVCs), Hough adds an explicit focus on labor that contributes to critical studies of commodity chains. Methodologically, in addition to multiple rounds of sometimes difficult fieldwork and deep analysis of secondary data and insights from historians and ethnographers both from the West and from Colombia, Hough painstakingly built a “coercion dataset” based on newspaper and human rights data from 1975 to 2018. A series of figures from the data set accompanies and bolsters the narrative.
Hough develops a theory of labor regimes as hegemonic class projects that rely on the social production of commodity production and labor control. From mechanisms of labor control (extra-economic force and “silent compulsion of the market”) and degree of control of the labor process (effective or ineffective), four ideal types of labor regime emerge (p. 40): effective labor control via (1) “hegemony” (with markets) or (2) via “despotism” (with extra-economic coercion) and ineffective or less effective labor control via (3) counter-hegemony (with markets) or (4) “crisis of control” (with extra economic coercion).
The bulk of the book is comprised of three commodity case studies, two chapters each, in which Hough traces how labor regimes are produced and change over time: coffee and the rise and fall of the hegemony of the coffee producer’s organization Fedecafé; bananas and the peripheral proletarianization of banana workers amid despotism; and coca and the rise and fall of the counter-hegemony of FARC, notably as a quasi-statal coca producers organization. Importantly, Hough argues, not all agro-exports are the same, but over time, all three labor regimes have shifted during neoliberalism toward ineffectiveness (types 3 and 4) and rendered workers precarious and oppressed but by different sorts of violence—from the state supported by US hegemony, corporate-sponsored paramilitaries, and the FARC.
The most stereotypical peripheral case is banana despotism in the north coast Urabá region. Rather than a move “up” the commodity chain, Hough describes a move “into” competition after nationalization of production brought the end of the foreign-dominated “banana republic.” Democratization then opened a brief period of labor organizing, cut short by violent repression of workers—this time by paramilitaries engaged by corporations rather than the US-supported national army—Urabá has been re-peripheralized. The combined pressures of peripheralization and proletarianization or “peripheral proletarianization” have intensified. By contrast, there was good reason for developmental optimism in Colombia’s coffee-growing region, Viejo Caldas. The producer organization, Fedecafé, achieved commodity chain “success” as the United States supported the International Coffee Agreement, and it was able to “move up” the coffee commodity chain and access core-like profits. “Upgrading” was not attainable, however, because it “would entail a major offensive” against roasters and processors (p. 90). Worker radicalism produced a “hegemonic social compact” (p. 48), the Pacto Cafetero, in which expanded production was exchanged for stable livelihoods and considerable social protections. When US support was withdrawn and the ICA collapsed, Fedecafé became caught between the extra costs and effort to certify high-end coffee and the larger volumes of cheap coffee absorbed into “mixed blends” by transnational corporations. Improving the lot of dependent cafeteros through fair and sustainable coffee is already practiced on 40 percent of Colombian farms, but, sadly, Hough notes that production volume already exceeds global demand for fair and sustainable coffee. Overall, coffee has declined from 77 percent of exports to less than 7 percent; farmers “organize to preserve their lives as market-dependent cafeteros” (p. 109) and are symbolically supported by Fedecafé which retains associational power that reaches beyond Urabá and has bolstered an anti-neoliberal movement in national politics.
Read through Hough’s world-historical approach to labor regimes, frontier coca may be the most fascinating case for readers. Coca production became a livelihood strategy and supported the FARC’s attempt—later destroyed by US-supported massive militarization and neoliberal opening to capitalist investment—to build “counter-hegemony.” Colombia’s government engaged in weak and failed efforts at agrarian reform, supported by USAID and the World Bank in the region while the Colombian cattle ranchers and their business organization, Fedegán, advanced a land-hungry transnational dairy sector reliant on coercive dispossession. The FARC, facing repression in the urban areas, found success in the remote rural Caguán where (after early opposition to coca) they embraced cocaleros with parastatal-like oversight including price stabilization and living wages in the 1980s and 1990s. Amid all that, FARC—very much like Fedecafé—was able to produce core-like income and construct a stable class of cocaleros, not to mention $1 billion per year in revenue (p. 273). The FARC in effect had to become a state rather than rely on the state. But, violent repression by the FARC itself grew. It began to “specialize in using terror to obtain market advantages” (p. 236) as the figures from Hough’s coercion database reveal. Militarization with US support as part of the twin war on drugs and terrorism finally led to FARC’s (partial) defeat and the 2016 peace agreement.
There are a few minor weaknesses to the book. I have a mild concern as a reviewer that the complexity that is the book’s strength may also limit its readership and impact. There is a lot to keep track of, and the index is woefully incomplete. At the risk of contradicting myself, some topics could have been added or explored more. First, though concerned with surplus population, he does little to address the urbanization of the country from 60 percent in 1975 to over 80 percent today. Second, while paying close attention to the ecological characteristics of commodities that shape their land-extensive and/or labor-intensive trajectories, Hough does not explore the nonhuman environmental impacts. Third, the increasing role of China as investor, commodity importer, and rising hegemonic power is underplayed, which is surprising given Hough’s attention to hegemonic power dynamics shaping Colombian developments.
At the Margins of the Global Market offers a profound contribution to world-historical analysis. It should be read by all those interested in commodity chains, labor regimes, and peripheral agrarian change, as well as specialists in Colombian history, politics, and development. Instructors of upper division courses might elect to focus on a single commodity, but to grasp the full import of Hough’s comparative analysis, I highly recommend reading the whole book. Combining multiple rounds of fieldwork, a carefully constructed coercion dataset, commodity analysis, and political history, Hough’s writing departs significantly from the descriptive and business-friendly approaches that dominate the value chains literature. His analysis of labor regimes as hegemonic class projects demonstrates that “upgrading” is not just a matter of the capacity of states embedded with firms (per sociologist Peter Evans) or “strategic coupling” (per economic geographer Henry Wei-chung Yeung). Rather, outcomes of commodity production are contingent on a combination of scales and relations—hegemonic cycles at the global level; states and lead business organizations, some acting like quasi-states at the national level; characteristics of the commodities; and most significantly, labor relations at the local and regional levels. Most provocatively, Hough claims that local labor regimes in rural Colombia are not only shaped by but also shape the historical rise and decline of US world hegemony. The book concludes thoughtfully with reflections on how to get out of the “toxic developmental conundrum” (p. 46) of Colombia and many peripheral countries. Commodities are not destiny. The key, Hough argues, is not to de-peripheralize from the margins of global markets, which is always a fraught strategy from the periphery. Rather, we should be concerned with how to de-proletarianize systems of production so that workers are less reliant on markets to live. In fact, a variant of the title of Hough’s conclusion, “Toward Labor-friendly Development in an Era of World-Systemic Crisis” such as Labor (Un)friendly Development might have been a catchier title for this terrific book.