Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics

Is it true that Global Value Chains (GVCs) 'boost incomes, create better jobs, and reduce poverty', as commonly claimed? In this compelling book, Selwyn and Bernhold show how the mainstream notion of GVCs obscures their capitalist character. To transcend this shortcoming, the authors introduce the concept of Capitalist Value Chains (CVCs). They explore how and why CVCs generate many highly exploitative jobs, new forms of poverty, are stunting real human development, and are destroying the world's environment. CVCs are a historically-specific configuration of capitalist class relations that have been restructured and bolstered through geopolitics. The authors argue that rather than waiting for the elusive benefits of 'economic, social, and environmental upgrading' as promoted in mainstream GVC scholarship, workers' collective actions can improve their pay and conditions-under historically and geographically specific conditions of uneven development. The authors clearly explain how, instead of striving to make CVCs more 'resilient', progressive political economists need to envision a world beyond these capitalist relations of generalized exploitation and appropriation. .

Table of Contents:
1: Introduction 2: Capitalism, Class, and CVCs 3: The Mainstreaming of GVC Theory 4: The World Bank's Perspective on GVCs: An Immanent Critique 5: Making CVCs: The Role of Geopolitics 6: The Supply Chain Resilience Agenda: Unveiling Its Geopolitical and Class-Relational Dynamics 7: CVCs and Poverty: Immiserating Growth-Regimes 8: Economic Upgrading through Class Differentiation 9: Social Upgrading from Below? 10: CVCs and Nature Destruction 11: Conclusions

About the Author :
Benjamin Selwyn is Professor of International Relations and International Development, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex. He researches, writes, and teaches about international political economy and development from the vantage point of value chains, food and agriculture, and labour. His previous books include The Struggle for Development (2017). Christin Bernhold is a Junior Professor of Economic and Political Geography with a focus on Bioeconomy and Sustainability at the University of Hamburg. Her research group investigates corporate strategies in the German meat industry. Her broader academic interests include value chains, agrarian change, and international class relations. Her previous book is titled Global Value Chains and Uneven Development (2022).

Review :
The twenty-first century world economy is organized around what corporate CEOs, Wall Street investors and now nearly everyone else are accustomed to call global value chains. But what exactly are these value chains that so continuously circulate around the globe? The authors of this book reveal that these are in reality capitalist value chains. They then take you on a fascinating journey into the hidden abodes of global capitalist value chain production, exchange, and distribution, and the effects on the relations of labor and capital, Global North and Global South, and humanity and the environment. If you want to know about the political economy of global power in our time, there are hundreds of works you will want to study. But first read this book. Capitalist Value Chains takes a familiar concept, Global Value Chains, and approaches the empirical evidence with a newly constructed theoretical lens. Unlike most of the literature, it places capital, class struggle, collective action, and geo-politics at the center of the understanding of the expansion of capitalist production and trade. Anyone who wants a new theory of capitalism and enjoys the company of articulate, provocative, off-beat intelligences should read the book. And maybe pick a fight with it. The results are in. The gains from globalization have been captured at the top. In clear and concise prose, Selwyn and Bernhold explain how, and why it could not have been otherwise. Drawing on essential tools of class-relational analysis, Capitalist Value Chains is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the contemporary architecture of uneven development and the accelerated destruction of nature. Capitalist Value Chains pushes readers to think critically about participation in global value chains as a 'development' tool - reminding us that the exploitation of labour and nature are deeply embedded at the core of capitalism. It shows how capitalism makes it impossible to generalise economic, social or environmental upgrading and concludes that 'immiserating growth regimes' can only be counteracted by a class-relational conception of labour and by collective action.