In this paper I take up Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner's call for a commodity-chains analysis which is sensitive to particular places and articulated-disarticulated modes of capital accumulation. The analytical fix is on the Lower and Middle Caguán area of Colombia, explaining how the region became articulated into (and disarticulated from)

In this paper, the author seeks to explain the trajectories of local labor regime dynamics in Colombia's coffee and banana industries from the post war developmental decades until the present. In order to explain these dynamics, the author first develops a neo-Gramscian ideal-typical schema to highlight the full range of labor regime dynamics emergent in Colombia, including "hegemonic,"

This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge the market despotism paradigm that predominates in scholarly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles. Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral market conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hegemonic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.

Labor scholars and activists draw attention to the ways that the globalization of production and market activities have caused to a race to the bottom in wages and work conditions that has instilled labor discipline throughout the globe. A number of recently published reports by international labor rights organizations, however, have brought worldwide attention to the ways that direct forms of violent repression, rather than the global market alone, continue to be a key modality used to control labor in the contemporary age. This paper examines the link between globalization and labor repression through a macrohistorical analysis of one particularly repressive global industry: Latin American bananas. The author finds that the violent race to the bottom dynamic characterizing this industry is a perverse institutional outcome of a historic wave of labor unrest and economic nationalism in Latin America that launched developmentalist regimes oriented to economic growth through banana production, despite the dispossession and proletarianization that these policies engender. Labor repression therefore occurs as these regimes prioritize the profitability of banana producers in an increasingly competitive global banana market over the demands of banana workers and the dispossessed.

For more than a decade, social scientists have been analyzing the implications of the neoliberal turn in development policy and the implications of market-led agrarian reform for agricultural producers in the global