Capitalist Value Chains by Benjamin Selwyn (.PDF)
File Size: 3.1 MB
Capitalist Value Chains:Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics by Benjamin Selwyn
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Overview: Is it true, as the World Bank claims, that Global Value Chains (GVCs) ‘boost incomes, create better jobs, and reduce poverty’? In this hard-hitting book, Benjamin Selwyn and Christin 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). This book shows 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 historically specific configurations of capitalist class relations that have been re-structured and bolstered through geopolitics. The book argues 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. Instead of striving to make CVCs more ‘resilient’, progressive political economists need to envision a world beyond these capitalist structures of generalized exploitation and appropriation.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Educational
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