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.