Chapter 9 traces worker repression in and around the 1877 worker protests. The crucible of low-road capitalism delivered the Great Strikes of 1877, but the layers of enforcement - from citizens and local police to militia and national troops - reveal the exclusive nature of the new industrial order. Since the Panic of 1873, railroad corporations had maintained profitability by lowering the wages of their workers. By 1877, workers’ wages moved from unequal to unsustainable as many now earned half their 1872 pay. While social and political leaders spoke sympathetically of laborers and their low earnings at the start of the Great Strikes, soon, in response to violent acts of working-class resistance (usually against corporate property), such rhetoric disappeared. Instead, these leaders framed workers as vagabonds and criminals - persons in need of surveillance and control. The workers’ violence was used as a reason to attack workingmen’s bodies and labor mutualism. When mixed with the hostile differences of liberal society, differences intended to keep wages low and the working class divided, the laborers on the bottom endured the greatest physical and economic harm.

Argentina transitioned from military dictatorship to democracy in 1983 and elected Raul Alfonsin as President. Alfonsin attempted to lower Argentin's tariffs and pass other neoliberal policies, but his economic reforms were blocked by a series of thirteen general strikes launched by the CGT, the labor union confederation led by Saul Ubaldini. When Alfonsin left office in 1989, Argentina's average tariffs still stood at 25 percent, only three percentage points lower than they had been in 1982, the last year of the military regime. By 1991, however, Alfonsin's successor, President Carlos Menem, was able to low tariffs to just 12 percent. This chapter tells the story of how Menem used labor repression to overcome union opposition and quickly open Argentina's economy.

In the mid-1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attempted to lower India's tariffs and open the country's economy to global competition. Gandhi's trade policy proposals led India's protectionist labor unions to launch a series of general strikes that helped to block these reforms; Gandhi left office in 1989 with India's average tariff still above 80 percent. This chapter continues this story into the 1990s, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched a new attempt at trade liberalization. By 1996, Rao managed to lower India’s average tariffs to 37 percent - a major success compared to Gandhi's efforts, but relatively gradual liberalization compared to many other democratic developing countries. This chapter draws on archival research to illustrate how Rao used labor repression to weaken union opposition to his economic reforms.

This chapter introduces the idea that developing countries with democratic governments repeatedly opened their economies while cracking down on labor unions.

This chapter begins by comparing the developmental ecologies of bananas and coffee, showing how banana production for export has tended to arise on capital-intensive and fully proletarianized plantations dominated by vertically integrated transnational fruit companies. The spread of proletarianized and peripheralized banana regimes in the early part of the twentieth century generated local labor unrest throughout the banana-producing regions of Latin America, but this unrest was largely quelled by partnerships between authoritarian governments and the banana companies. This partnership unraveled as British world hegemony collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the world banana market was reconstructed under US world hegemony through a process of vertical disintegration that transformed banana transnationals into buyers/distributors and created spaces for the formation of local banana exporters through domestic development initiatives. In Colombia, this process transformed Urabá’s banana zone into a key site of development, but it only permitted entrance into a peripheral niche of the market. Collective action strategies akin to the ICA for coffee failed to generate opportunities for upgrading, pressuring Colombia’s banana planter-exporters to become heavily reliant upon the authoritarian practices of the National Front regime to quell worker unrest and maintain labor control on Urabá’s banana plantations.

This chapter introduces the question of why capitalist development in Colombia has resulted in contradictory outcomes, including endemic political violence and labor repression that exist alongside regular elections, stable economic growth, and deeply entrenched political conservativism across large segments of the country’s working class. To understand these contradictions, it reconceptualizes them as labor regime dynamics that vary significantly across three global commodity-producing regions (coffee, bananas, coca) and across developmental periods of time (pre-developmentalist, developmentalist, neoliberal). It then lays out the conceptual framework and methodological approach of the book, which draws from and extends insights from labor regimes, global commodity chains, world hegemonies, and comparative and world historical sociology. Finally, it provides an overview of the structure of the book and its main findings.

This chapter analyzes how Urabá’s despotic labor regime shifted to a deep crisis of labor control in the 1980s and then returned to despotism in the 1990s. It argues that that shift to crisis was not due to any significant changes to the international banana market, as was the case for Colombia’s coffee regime of Viejo Caldas. Instead, it was caused by the democratization of Colombia’s political system, which opened up new spaces for labor mobilization and worker’s political participation. In Urabá, however, this democratization process undermined Augura authoritative power over the region’s banana plantations and local political offices and therefore threatened to undermine their capacity to adapt to their peripheral niche in the international banana market. By the 1990s, Augura was able to regain control of the banana labor regime facilitating the paramilitarization of the region. I conclude with a discussion of how the rise of paramilitarism in Urabá was not the result of Colombia’s adoption of neoliberal reforms, but was instead a regional solution to peripheralization in the context of political democratization.