Social and Environmental Upgrading through Global Value Chains? A review of the book by Selwyn and Bernhold.

In Capitalist Value Chains: Labour Exploitation, Nature Destruction, Geopolitics (Oxford University Press, 2025), Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold provide a powerful critique of the mainstream global value chain (GVC) literature in its various versions. In particular, they criticise their emphasis on the possibilities of social and environmental upgrading through an expansion of GVCs. Instead, they convincingly argue that capitalist value chains (CVCs) intensify the exploitation of workers and the environment alike.  In this review, I will highlight some key contributions of the volume while raising a couple of conceptual and empirical concerns.

 

Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry

Polycrisis has become a widely used concept. Politicians, public intellectuals and academics alike are drawing on it when describing our current global situation. In my article ‘Dissecting the Polycrisis, Charting the Conceptual Terrain of Enquiry’, recently published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, I explore how we can distinguish between fundamental crises on one hand, and crises, which are simply the concrete manifestations of those deeper, structural crises on the other. In this blog post, I summarise the main conceptual and empirical findings of the article.

Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism: Review of William I. Robinson’s latest book.

In his latest book Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (CUP, 2025), William I. Robinson provides a masterful analysis of the current crisis engulfing global capitalism. Robinson is clearly one of the best contemporary Marxist thinkers when it comes to investigating the current dynamics tearing capitalism apart. In this blog post, I will highlight some of his major contributions while also point to some of the blind spots in his analysis.

 

EU Court Upholds Minimum Wage Directive in Victory for Social Europe

‘The Court of Justice of the European Union has delivered a landmark verdict on the EU Minimum Wage Directive that I would characterise as “Social Europe 2, Liberal Europe 1”.’ In this guest post, Roland Erne argues that this ruling represents another example of an unintended yet politically motivated “spillover” of policymaking powers to the EU level—one that ironically stems from employers’ own strategic miscalculations during the financial crisis.

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Review of Kevin B. Anderson’s latest book.

In his recent book The Late Marx’s Revo-lutionary Roads (Verso, 2025), Kevin B. Anderson reveals Marx as a flexible, inquisitive thinker, who is constantly striving to analyse new avenues of revolutionary possi-bilities, unafraid to revise earlier held, firm believes. He thus builds on his previous work Marx at the Margins, in which he had established Marx’s rejection of a unilinear understanding of historical development. In this blog post, I will highlight some of the key contributions of Anderson’s latest volume.

 

On the storm to come: Right-wing extremism moving centre-stage in British politics.

‘We Want Our Country Back’ – On Saturday, 6 September, the third Saturday in a row, English nationalists draped in union jack and St George flags protested noisily outside the Best Western Hotel in Long Eaton, where many asylum seekers have been housed. Shouts of ‘Stop the Boats’ were combined with anti-trans, anti-Palestine and anti-left slogans, intermixed with direct personal attacks on migrant supporting counter-protesters, taking up position on the other side of the road in front of the hotel itself. In this blog post, I will discuss why these developments mark a dangerous turn in British politics.

 

Politicising Commodification: book review of Erne et al

In their major monograph Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Roland Erne, Sabina Stan, Darragh Golden, Imre Szabó and Vincenzo Maccarrone provide a masterful study of the main policy drive underpinning the European political economy since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In this blog post, I will outline the main theoretical and empirical contributions as well as provide some critical reflections.