COVID-19 and Imperial Value: Commodity Chains, Global Monopolies, and Catastrophe Capitalism

ABSTRACT

Why has the COVID-19 pandemic manifested itself differently in different parts of the capitalist world-economy? The analysis here examines the way in which the system of “imperial value,” as articulated by Samir Amin and others, has governed the relations of individual nation states to the onset of SARS-CoV-2. The result is enormous disparities between the Global North and the Global South, as well as between countries that are relatively more capitalist and those that are relatively more socialist, along the socioeconomic spectrum. The impact of COVID-19 is thus mediated by a country’s position within the global value chain dominated by monopolistic multinational corporations. In this way, the structure of the contemporary world system has only served to worsen the global effects of the pandemic, in line with the general character of today’s catastrophe capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• imperialism
• global commodity chains
• catastrophe capitalism
• socialism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Parts of this and the following paragraph draw on Foster and Suwandi (2020, 12–13).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Intan Suwandi

Intan Suwandi is an assistant professor of Sociology at the Illinois State University, United States. She is the author of Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 2019).

John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is a professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, United States, and the editor of Monthly Review. His most recent book, The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020), is the winner of Deutscher Memorial Prize 2020.