Capitalist Value Chains

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).

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.

• 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