The prestige and impact of trade and global supply chains have taken a hit in the era of President Donald Trump, with the United States—the world's largest economy and consumer market—launching tariff wars across the globe, including on key economic partners like Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union (EU). The growing hostility toward trade among the US right diverges from much of the international right, many of whose leaders—from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India to President Recep Tayyip Edroğan in Turkiye—have merged right-wing politics with enthusiasm for global trade and investment. It has also spurred support for ‘free trade’ among US liberals, with polls suggesting Democratic support for free trade policies reached 74% in 2025, jumping from 43% in 2024 (Kafura and Dong 2025). More than just a temporary blip, North American polls generally indicate growing support among liberals and progressives for free trade over the past two decades, despite the central role played by the Left in the antiglobalization movement of the 1990s and early 2000s (Wolfe and Acquaviva 2018; Friedhoff 2021). Major international liberal institutions, moreover, like the World Bank and the WTO, long ardent promoters of free trade, have continued to expound its virtues while emphasizing its role in facilitating the formation and expansion of Global Value Chains (GVCs) (or global supply chains), credited with improving efficiency, spurring technological innovation, driving growth and, ultimately, fighting poverty. Seeking to confront and counter this trend, Benjamin Selwyn and Christin Bernhold, in their new book, Capitalist Value Chains, provide a rich and detailed exploration of GVC thinking today (Bair 2009; Ponte et al. 2019). They note that much of the initial research into GVCs in the 1970s and 1980s had a critical view of value chains, often rooted in the World Systems Approach (WSA), distinct from much of today's more celebratory tone. Selwyn and Bernhold chart how original GVC analysis was highly suspicious of capitalist development, concerned with uneven economic development and the limited power of subordinate states to confront transnational capital, and critical of the idea that ‘comparative advantage’ could fight poverty, particularly when advantages were said to lie in low-waged labour, intensified resource extraction and increasing dependence on Northern markets. Over the years, while critically minded GVC research has continued to explore the roots of poverty and inequality, Selwyn and Bernhold argue the dominant approaches have moved away from structural understandings of how social problems emerge. Instead, they depict them as problems that can be solved if government and ‘lead firms’ (transnational corporations that govern global supply chains through their dominance of investment capital, technology, core market access, patents and intellectual property) select the right strategies of economic and social ‘upgrading’. The challenge, for Selwyn and Bernhold, is that GVCs have become framed as the solution to the problems they cause. GVC analysis is correct in describing how lead firms manage and coordinate globalized production, setting prices paid to suppliers and often determining wages and working conditions. What is often avoided or downplayed, however, is that lead firms do not carry these activities out in pursuit of growth, wealth and development for all, but for their own private profits. For this reason, Selwyn and Bernhold advance the idea of ‘Capitalist Value Chains (CVC)’, aimed at recentring the specific capitalist dynamics behind the chains; in particular, how they allow transnational capital to extract surplus value from workers along the chain, depressing wages and working conditions and intensifying the sociogeographic concentration of wealth within capitalist firms. The book argues that, given their central role in reconfiguring class relations between and within countries, value chains have become ‘a key organizational form of today's capitalism’ (1). Far from creating harmonious market conditions, CVCs intensify geopolitical rivalries between states as they aggressively work to build competitive advantages. The assumption that successful upgrading among some states, such as China, can be replicated by others, is a ‘fallacy of composition’, (56) that fails to recognize how the success of some is built on distinct conditions that cannot be replicated, as well as the economic subordination of other states further down the chain. Selwyn and Bernhold offer an extensive, sweeping and formidable litigation rooted in classical Marxism, demonstrating how CVCs allow capital to extract surplus value from workers in both absolute terms (pushing down wages and extending the work day) and relative terms (enhanced productivity, technology and surveillance). They are highly critical of the standard poverty lines advanced by the World Bank, which are well below living wage calculations, fail to take into account the costs of social reproduction (including childcare, education and healthcare), lag behind productivity (with highly productive workers in the global South often receiving poverty wages) and ignore the conditions of labour, including long hours, dangerous and unhealthy work and intensified surveillance and control. Selwyn and Bernhold document a range of cases of ‘immiserating growth’—intensified worker exploitation, intertwined with gendered and racial oppression—in electronics in China (Chapter 5) and Vietnam (Chapter 4), footwear and clothing in Central and Eastern Europe, Cambodia and the United Kingdom (Chapter 7), garments in Bangladesh (Chapter 9) and agribusiness in Argentina (Chapter 8). They also challenge those in favour of environmental upgrading, arguing CVCs intensify the appropriation and destruction of natural resources and inherently drive climate change. Efforts to reduce GHG emissions per unit are invariably overwhelmed by increased production, transport and consumption overall. Green capitalism, they argue, is an ‘oxymoron with no historical precedent’ (206). Throughout, Selwyn and Bernhold draw on a broad notion of labour, which includes a range of social groups (industrial and service workers, unpaid labour in the social reproductive sphere, petty commodity producers and self-employed managers) positioned toward and against each other ‘through exploitative capitalist relations of production’ (160). In the case of Argentina, they focus on agribusiness upgrading in soybean production since the 1990s and the country's rapid emergence as the world's third largest soybean producer. While often upheld as an economic success story, Selwyn and Bernhold demonstrate how the big winners have been lead firms (particularly the Argentine agribusiness corporation, El Agro), who dominate processing, biotechnology, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and machinery. These firms have raked in immense profits, even as many formerly independent small scale farmers have experienced a ‘downward trajectory’ (173) in class differentiation, whether losing land and becoming rural labourers, intensifying their highly dependent relationship on El Agro or becoming comanagers of leased land owned by corporations. The resulting situation is one where small scale farmers or comanagers find themselves extracting surplus value from landless rural workers, while themselves subject to surplus extraction from powerful agribusiness firms, who actually drive the process. Selwyn and Bernhold systematically expose the ‘cognitive dissonance’ (5) in mainstream analysis, perpetually recognizing the persistence of poverty and inequality, while always insisting it is something GVCs have yet to overcome. The challenge that remains is how to overcome GVC dominance, politically and economically, as well as ideologically and culturally. Selwyn and Bernhold take up this challenge by mapping out a research and political agenda that confronts the ‘capital-centric’ approach to mainstream GVC analysis, with their own ‘class-relational’ one representing ‘the perspective of workers’ (231). They argue in favour of worker-led development along supply chains, where workers organize strikes and other labour actions along key ‘choke points’, (35), disrupting chains and mobilizing for better wages and conditions. It has been worker struggles within China, for instance, that have raised the minimum wage and led to workers gaining a greater slice of the economic pie. At the same time, Selwyn and Bernhold caution against assuming what has worked in some countries or locations will necessarily work in others. While some workers at specific factories, docks or rural settings have successfully organized to demand better conditions, others have confronted different circumstances, constrained by more repressive states, weaker labour laws or limited organizational resources. Despite the persuasiveness and strengths of their argument, two important challenges remain. First, can the divergent views on GVCs be divided along such a distinct binary—between elites and workers—given its complex ideological politics and the perpetually shifting mixture of alarm and support for value chain integration, including among millions of workers and farmers that often support promarket parties? There is, of course, mass movements mobilizing against GVCs and free trade, but also extensive support, however undefined or contradictory it might appear at times, in the North and the South. While Selwyn and Bernhold carry out an immensely important task in ‘exposing the logical failings of mainstream GVC research’ (234), less is said about support for GVCs in more dispersed ways, linked to popular imaginary around modernity and achievement. General support for GVCs often resists critique and demonstrates a deeply held devotion to globalized mass consumption and production, with success or failure in GVCs taken as a barometer not just for economic success but cultural superiority and global status (Böhm and Batta 2010; Kapoor and Fridell 2024, 45–63; Sioh 2024). Second, connected to the above, given the extensive penetration of global capital into our everyday lives, even the most radical governments—despite initial resistance—have often been led back to seeking better GVC integration, exporting natural resources or developing dynamic new industries. This tension has been captured by a popular quote often attributed to Keynesian economist Joan Robinson: ‘The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism’. Such tensions have often led even ardent critics of GVCs to work with farmer, worker, environmental, human rights and trade justice groups in activist and advocacy campaigns that, inevitably, end up advancing better forms of value chain integration to meet immediate material needs and build a broad base of support—whether advocating for Fair Trade, human rights due diligence, policies aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or Modern Slavery legislation. The depth of this tension is not fully unpacked by Selwyn and Bernhold, although it is often approached indirectly, revealing the uncertainties many of us struggle with. One major instance is China, which they analyse as a successful example of social and economic upgrading. Selwyn and Bernhold critique mainstream GVC thinking for failing to recognize the extent to which China's rise has been built on the repression of millions of low-paid workers, while at the same time, arguing the Chinese model has successfully challenged Western capital and represents a ‘contemporary case of catch-up development’ (39), which needs to be defended against US imperialist aggression. Both arguments are, in my view, correct, but they also point to how hard it is to get beyond GVC thinking and practice when confronted with the actually existing dynamics of the global economy. This tension is also apparent in Selwyn and Bernhold's nuanced self-reflection on their own framework, its political limits and possibilities. Although viewing worker-led development as essential to confronting the power of capital along GVCs, they also ‘caution against overly optimistic readings of workers power in particular sectors and places, which all exist within an exploitative, dominating system of capital accumulation’ (36). Workers are neither powerless nor is the success of worker-led action guaranteed, given the powerful forces lined up against them. Worker agency, however, remains the key ingredient in ongoing efforts to advance justice, combat inequality, and envision new ‘ways in which we can think beyond this damaging system of global production’ (234). Capitalist Value Chains marks a major advance in this undertaking and will no doubt spark a great deal of new analysis, fresh debate and urgent action. This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 435-2023-0729. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Gavin Fridell (Tue,) studied this question.