Dispossession, Class Formation, and the Political Imaginary of Colombia's Coffee Producers Over the Longue Durée: Beyond the Polanyian Analytic

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 South. Among this work is a spate of recent scholarship celebrating a number of flagship movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico or the landless movement in Brazil, which are interpreted as efforts by rural communities to resist the threat posed by the commodification of livelihoods and the privatization of natural resources. In this article, we aim to problematize what we diagnose as the "Polanyian analytic" underlying accounts of the current conjuncture which emphasize the imminent potential of neoliberalism to spawn protective counter-movements of the sort described in The Great Transformation. We do so through an analysis of the Unidad Cafetero Nacional (UCN) movement, an organization of Colombian coffee farmers that effectively mobilized large numbers of cafeteros in the 1990s to protest the liberalization of the global coffee market and the decline of state support for the domestic coffee sector. While the UCN may be read as a struggle to resist the dispossession of Colombian coffee farmers, we argue that it represented a particular segment of rural producers who wanted, first and foremost, a restoration of their relatively privileged status within the political economy of Colombian agriculture. Our interpretation of the UCN suggests that whether movements emerge in response to neoliberalism depends on the political imaginaries of the social actors who would create them, and further, that these imaginaries are produced through processes of class formation over the longue durée that shape the meaning of dispossession in particular contexts.