Abstract:

Political violence and social decomposition accompany the spread of neoliberal capitalism in many parts of the world and have prompted a shift away from labor conflicts focused on workplace demands to forms of collective action rooted in broader forms of social struggle. Yet social scientists have barely kept pace with these processes. Many anthropologists understand globalization as flows of people, commodities, information, and images that are disconnected from political and economic conflicts and detached from institutions that regulate social life and deploy violent force. As a result, much of the anthropological literature naturalizes globalization and portrays it as an oversimplified process.

This paper examines how neoliberal labor policies, political violence and corporate restructuring have disrupted the social relations of work among Colombian Coca-Cola workers and given rise to new geographies of political struggle. First, it considers how state-sponsored terrorism abets the restructuring of Coca-Cola production in accord with neoliberal principles. Assaults on the union, as well as the murder, intimidation, and physical displacement of working people, have ruptured the institutions and social relationships through which workers provide for themselves and make demands on the company. All of this has given rise to new divisions among Coca-Cola workers, made the strike an ineffective tool of resistance, and forced a dwindling number of unionists to remap the terrain of political action.

The paper then explores how the combined pressures of neoliberal restructuring and political violence moved workers to internationalize their conflicts with the Coca-Cola company and frame them as human rights issues. They did so by allying with other beleaguered groups in Colombia, by-passing the Colombian state, and building ties to trade unions, student organizations, intellectuals, and solidarity groups in other countries. By so doing, they transcended narrow, workplace demands and placed the practices of a powerful multinational corporation under the lens of international scrutiny. Grasping these initiatives is important if social scientists are to understand how power, inequality and violence undergird the creation and limitation of new social geographies of struggle, and if they are to comprehend the new forms of sociality and resistance that working people are forming.