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Abstract
Global Value Chain (GVC) proponents argue that regional and human development can be achieved through ‘strategic coupling’ with transnational corporations. This argument is misleading for two reasons. First, GVC abstracts firm–firm and firm–state relations from their class-relational basis, obscuring fundamental developmental processes. Second, much GVC analysis promotes linear conceptions of development. This article provides a class-relational framework for GVC analysis. The formation and functioning of GVCs and the developmental effects associated with them are products of histories of evolving, and often conflictive, class relations. A study of export fruiticulture in Northeast Brazil provides empirical support for these arguments.
Notes
1. Cited in Werner et al., “Linking up to Development?,” 1220.
2. Sen, Development as Freedom, xii, 3.
3. See Selwyn, “Liberty Limited?,” for a critical discussion of Sen.
4. Marx, Capital.
5. Selwyn, “Beyond Firm-Centrism.”
6. Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism.
7. Conceptually the GVC approach is perhaps the most firm-centric of the chain approaches, while the GPN approach seeks to incorporate multi-scalar processes with network and extra-network actors. These distinctions, I suggest, represent more conceptual family differences rather than fundamental ontological divergences.
8. Gereffi and Korneiwicz, “Introduction.” See also Hopkins and Wallerstein, “Commodity Chains in the World Economy.”
9. Humphrey and Schmitz, “Governance and Upgrading”; and Sturgeon, “From Commodity Chains to Value Chains.”
10. Bair, “Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains,” 160.
11. Henderson et al., “Global Production Networks.”
12. Taylor, “The Globalisation of Service Work.” See also the recent special issue of Review of International Political Economy 21, no. 1, which, as with so much chain analysis, has no discussion of value and ignores the labour and class dimensions of GVC analysis.
13. UNCTAD, Global Value Chains and Development, 175.
14. Yeung, “Regional Development and the Competitive Dynamics,” 213.
15. Yeung, “Regional Development in the Global Economy,” 14–15.
16. MacKinnon, “Beyond Strategic Coupling,” 237.
17. Yeung, “Regional Development in the Global Economy,” 15.
18. Coe, “Geographies of Production,” 397.
19. The contemporary phenomenon of land-grabbing across large swathes of the ‘developing’ world represents such dynamics.
20. See, for an alternative, Selwyn, “Social Upgrading and Labour.”
21. For an attempt to theorise the inter-relationships between class dynamics, international relations and unintended consequences, see Selwyn, “Trotsky, Gerschenkron.”
22. Kapsos and Bourmpoula, “Employment and Economic Class.”
23. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital.
24. Kelly, “Management’s Redesign of Work.”
25. Fitzgerald, Corporations and Cultural Industries.
26. See Marx’s statement that ‘Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry.” Marx, Capital. I attempt to develop a methodological globalist class analysis over the longue durée in Selwyn, “21st Century International Political Economy.”
27. Bernstein, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, 127.
28. Ibid (emphasis in the original).
29. Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital, 37, 79.
30. Wright, “Working-class Power.”
31. Silver, Forces of Labour.
32. Harris, The End of the Third World.
33. This section draws from Merk, “Global Outsourcing.”
34. Marx, Capital, 476–477.
35. Gereffi et al., “The Governance of Global Value Chains.”
36. Marx, Capital, 448.
37. Braverman, cited in Merk, “Global Outsourcing.”
38. Selwyn, The Global Development Crisis.
39. McMichael, Development and Social Change; and Weis, The Global Food Economy.
40. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism.
41. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, 58–59; and Weis, The Global Food Economy.
42. Swinnen and Vandeplas, “Market Power and Rents,” 111.
43. Dolan and Humphrey, “Governance and Trade in Fresh Vegetables.”
44. Clarke, “Retail Power.”
45. Mackinnon, “Beyond Strategic Coupling,” 237.
46. Wrigley, “The Concentration of Capital,” 1283.
47. Wrigley, “Abuse of Market Power?,” 1546.
48. Marsden and Wrigley, “Regulation, Retailing and Consumption,” 1908.
49. Wrigley, “The Concentration of Capital,” 1283.
50. Marsden and Wrigley, “Regulation, Retailing and Consumption,” 1899.
51. Arce and Marsden, “The Social Construction.”
52. This section draws on Selwyn, Workers, State and Development.
53. Valexport, Há 20 Anos.
54. Estimates provided by the STR and the local Ministry of Labour.
55. Welch, “Globalisation and the Transformation of Work.”
56. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil.
57. O’Donnel, Modernisation and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.
58. Grzybowski, “Rural Workers’ Movements,” 20; and Guivant, Agrarian Change, 4.
59. Welch, “Globalisation and the Transformation of Work.”
60. Grzybowski, “Rural Workers’ Movements,” 21.
61. Souza, “O Impacto.”
62. Chilcote, Power and the Ruling Classes.
63. Johnson, Sharecroppers of the Sertão.
64. Collins and Krippner, “Permanent labour contracts,” 519.
65. Cited in Selwyn, Workers, State and Development, 53.
66. Selwyn, “The Political Economy of Class Compromise.”
67. Interview with Sidrone da Silva Neto, Petrolina, July 2002, cited in Selwyn, Workers, State and Development, 106.
68. The story does not finish here. Employers have hit back at the STR and have tried to undermine its bargaining power by restructuring the rural labour market. Space does not permit an account of this pendulum swing in class relations, but see Selwyn, Workers, State and Development.