Capitalist Value Chains

Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

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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. .

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-10-22
Mått156 x 16 x 234 mm
Vikt598 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor320
FörlagOUP OXFORD
ISBN9780198887836

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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).

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

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.