From
the onset of globalisation around the late 1970s, early 1980s global production
has increasingly been organised across borders. Large transnational
corporations (TNCs) have emerged organising transnational production in what is
frequently referred to as GVCs. Selwyn and Bernhold’s key contribution is that
they locate their analysis of transnational production within what Marx
referred to as the ‘hidden abode of production’. Thus, instead of GVCs, they
are talking about capitalist value chains (CVCs) and ‘argue that CVCs are
historically specific configurations of [international] capitalist class
relations that contribute to heightened exploitation of labour and
appropriation of nature by capital’ (P.6).
Their
analysis is based on a detailed understanding of Marxist political economy and
the way exploitation is increased through a combination of absolute and
relative surplus extraction within CVCs (P.24). ‘Under capitalism, economic
growth is driven forward by capital’s insatiable and never-ending demand for
profit rather than for human or environmental need’ (P.230). Thus, the
exploitation of human labour and expropriation of nature are both regarded as
essential for capitalist accumulation. Even if one CVC is able to upgrade
socially or environmentally, this individual success cannot be generalised as a
possibility for all (P.216; P.231).
Selwyn
and Bernhold’s second major contribution is their focus on workers’ plight. In
an impressive range of empirical examples throughout the volume, they
demonstrate how working people are losing out in CVCs. Key here is their notion
of immiserating growth regimes. ‘Where workers do not earn sufficient wages in
a normal working day to sustain their and their family’s social reproduction
costs, we comprehend such dynamics as arising from immiserating exploitation
organized through immiserating growth regimes’ (P.134). Rather than enabling
development, CVCs cause widespread poverty. Importantly, the authors go beyond
the World Bank’s international poverty line of $2.15 per day and in line with
the Asia Floor Wage focus on a living wage, which also includes, for example,
access to health services and education in addition to a minimum wage (P.135). Ultimately,
capitalist competition ensures that poverty wages have system-wide
implications. ‘Immiserating exploitation in one part of the world, and the
profits deriving from it, exacerbates pressures upon capitalists in other parts
of the world to adopt such strategies of accumulation’ (P.157).
Equally, Selwyn and Bernhold are extremely good in highlighting the causal dynamics underpinning relentless environmental destruction due to the expansion of capitalism through CVCs. ‘CVC hyper-specialization entails an increase in production, transportation, and energy use – accelerating climate breakdown and mass environmental ruin’ (P.206). Savings as a result of new technologies will only increase investment and accumulation due to capitalist competition, resulting in yet further environmental destruction. The increase in global trade underpinning the expansion of CVCs and the related shipping industry are a key factor of climate change (P.213). Selwyn and Bernhold, in short, successfully unmask the myth that an expansion of CVCs would help addressing the ecological crisis (P.218).
As
impressive conceptually and empirically this volume is, there are a number of
shortcomings in my view. First, CVCs have driven the transnationalisation of
production, which in turn has underpinned the emergence of transnational
capital as leading class fraction at the global level (Bieler and Morton
2018: 107-30).
And yet, the authors portray TNCs such as Apple or Microsoft simply as US
capital, being increasingly challenged by Chinese CVCs, i.e. Chinese capital. Thus,
the authors are in danger of falling into a state-centric trap in their
analysis of transnational capital, conflating particular class fractions with specific
states. Yes, states such as the US, Japan and today China have facilitated the
transnationalisation of ‘their’ large corporations. The strategic
considerations of these TNCs today have, however, outgrown their initial home
country setting.
Second,
the authors overlook the structuring conditions of the capitalist social
relations of production and here especially the way capitalism is inevitably
prone to ever larger crises. Together, their rather state-centric approach to
CVCs as well as their disregard of capitalism’s crisis tendency have
significant implications for their understanding of geo-politics. Capital is
presented as all powerful and almost completely dominant at the very moment, when
increasing geo-political conflicts tear at its very structure. The Israeli
genocide of the Palestinian people, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the
Israeli-US attack on Iran and the numerous tariff wars incited by the US not
only against China but countries across the world are all signs of a global
capitalism steeped in crisis. The book was completed in 2024, but some of these
developments had already been apparent by then.
William
Robinson’s analysis of global capitalism’s crisis may provide an explanatory
corrective here. Robinson illustrates well how against the background of a
declining rate of profit global capitalism has become engulfed in a crisis of
overaccumulation with companies increasingly struggling to find profitable
investment opportunities for their record profits. ‘Since 1980, uninvested
corporate cash holdings have ballooned to 10 percent of GDP in the United
States, 22 percent in Western Europe, 34 percent in South Korea, and 47 percent
in Japan’ (Robinson 2025: 33). As it is the
role of states as nodal points in the global political economy to ensure the
continuation of capitalist accumulation, more and more governments around the
world step in not only trying to ensure the fortunes of ‘their’ particular
capitalist class fractions, as Selwyn and Bernhold may argue, but even more
importantly to attract investment by transnational capital. In other words,
when analysing the internal relations between global capitalism and
international geo-politics, we have to focus on the way and the degree to which
the interests of transnational capital have become internalised within various
state forms (Bieler and Morton
2018: 123-8).
Even the US has to work hard to ensure capital investment and to date it is
doubtful to what extent it will be successful at securing some reshoring of
manufacturing by corporations such as Apple. Ultimately, it is this heightened
level of state intervention which underpins the current volatile global
geo-political environment characterised by trade wars and military conflicts.
I am
also sceptical of the authors’ argument that ‘China has evolved from the
workshop of CVCs, via technological innovation, to become a challenger to
increasing numbers of US high-tech CVC firms’ (P.112). By contrast, King argues
that is especially the ‘grip over the high-end of the labour process—in
particular over microchips—that the United States is now wielding against China
in the “trade war”’, which indicates China’s continuing subordinate position (King 2021: 238). Moreover, capitalism’s
internal contradictions and related crisis tendency have affected China too. ‘A hypertrophied
financial sector, including banking assets that ballooned to some $50 trillion
in 2021, not including shadow finance; a runaway spiral of household and
corporate debt that went from 178 percent of GDP in 2010 to 287 percent in
2021; overcapacity; a slowdown in growth rates; and social polarization’ (Robinson
2022: 73). China’s Belt and Road
initiative is also a vehicle of creating profitable investment opportunities to
counter its own crisis of overaccumulation. Whether China will be able to catch
up or not, only the future can tell.
Importantly, however,
Selwyn and Bernhold illustrate clearly in line with their wider argument that
Chinese workers have not benefitted. Their case study of the electronics
industry in China is a harrowing story of extreme exploitation (PP.148-53). They,
thereby, debunk the liberal myth of Chinese development having moved millions
out of poverty as well as the left-progressive phantasy that China provides a
successful alternative to free market capitalism from a workers’ perspective.
Third, the volume is
excellent in that it stretches the analysis of CVCs to geopolitics and the
environment. However, there are only a few references to the importance of the
sphere of social reproduction and almost none to the significance of racist forms
of oppression for capitalist accumulation. Arguably, though, patriarchal and
racist forms of oppression are as important for capitalist accumulation as is
access to cheap natures (Bieler
2025: 920-4). One example here is provided
by Selwyn and Bernhold themselves, highlighting how workers at the bottom of
CVCs are paid below the value of their own labour power reproduction (P.232).
Nevertheless, how would such a regime be viable unless these workers have
access to resources beyond the sphere of production? In China, rural
agriculture continues to ensure the reproduction of labour power in addition to
wages in manufacturing (Qi
2014). Clearly, more
detailed, systematic engagement with the way of how capitalist accumulation
depends on expropriation in the sphere of social reproduction would have added
further depth to the authors’ analysis.
Moreover, the authors
dismiss rather quickly the concept of ‘unequal exchange’ (P.29). Nevertheless,
can we not understand the way of how surplus value is siphoned off from supply
firms to lead firms inside CVCs through this notion? In turn, extending our
understanding by drawing on the work of Marini, we then also comprehend the structuring
pressures underpinning immiserating growth regimes. In order to make up for
lost surplus value to lead firms, supply firms in the periphery of CVCs are
structurally compelled due to capitalist competition to intensify the (super-)
exploitation of their workers, pressing wages below the value of labour power
and, thus, the necessary level to ensure workers’ social reproduction (Marini 1973/2022: 132).
Finally, throughout the
volume the authors critically review a host of mainstream literature in a whole
range of different areas. As appropriate as these reviews are, I am wondering
whether it would not have been more fruitful to engage with alternative historical
materialist, feminist or racial capitalism literature instead. Is it not time
for radical, left scholars to break loose from the confines of mainstream
academia? Too often we are held back by the endless regurgitation of
positivist, empiricist and ahistorical analyses, ultimately damaging our own
critical explorations.
My
criticisms should not, however, be read as dismissing the huge contributions of
this book for understanding the ways CVCs really work to the detriment of
workers and the environment. A must-read for everyone interested in how the
latest phase of capitalism pushes humanity towards the brink.
A shorter version of this review was first published by the LSE Review of Books blog on 12 March 2026.
Andreas Bieler
18 April 2026
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