Benjamin Selwyn's research while affiliated with University of Sussex and other places
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Publications (28)
We seek to tackle myriad problems of a global production system in which China is the world's largest producer and exporter of consumer electronics products. Dying for an iPhone simultaneously addresses the challenges facing Chinese workers while locating them within the global economy through an assessment of the relationship between Foxconn (the...
As the internationalization of monopoly capital grows, particularly through the domination of global value chains, the worldwide rate of exploitation and degree of monopoly increase as well.
The World Development Report 2020 (WDR2020) asserts that global value chains raise productivity and incomes, create better jobs and reduce poverty, and proposes state policies to facilitate global value chain-based development. We deploy an immanent critique of WDR2020 to interrogate its claims regarding wages and working conditions. Using the Repo...
Covid-19 has highlighted the destructiveness of modern agro-industry upon biosphere and humanity. Its contribution to environmental degradation intertwines with socio-economic inequality and labour exploitation. There are increasing calls for a green new deal (GND) to counter these dangers. This article argues that a GND for agriculture must combat...
This article shows how the Eastern and Central European export footwear sector has experienced economic and social downgrading and immiserating growth over the last three decades. Based on interviews with 209 workers from 12 factories across six countries, it analyses how intense gender-based labor exploitation—entailing dangerous working condition...
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) generate a picture of a world which, despite continuing challenges, is experiencing the benefits of capitalist development. SDG goal no. 1—the ending of poverty in all its forms everywhere by 2030—is widely proclaimed to be realizable. Global Capitalism is, indeed, an incredibly powerful wealth-generating sy...
How could it be the socialist development? The principal conceptions of the development consider that the accumulation of capital is the ground on which the human development can be reached. In this conceptions of change, the working clases are considered fuel for the development engine, which at the same time justifies their exploitation and oppre...
The proliferation of global value chains is portrayed in academic and policy circles as representing new development opportunities for firms and regions in the global south. This article tests these claims by examining original material from non-governmental organizations’ reports and secondary sources on the garment and electronics chains in Cambo...
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, muc...
This article argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. The article illustrates and explains the divers...
The ‘pink tide’ in Latin America is drawing increasing criticisms from the political left for its inability to confront existing socio-structural inequalities. This article contributes to these debates in two ways. First, as a means of understanding better the development strategies that have been followed by left-leaning governments, it highlights...
This article outlines the theory and practice of labour-centred development (LCD). Much development thinking is elitist, positing states and corporations as primary agents in the development process. This article argues, by contrast, that collective actions by labouring classes can generate tangible developmental gains and therefore that, under cer...
Much development theory is based upon elite-led conceptions of social change. Elite development theory (EDT) conceptualises ‘the poor’ as human inputs into or, at best, junior partners within elite-led development processes. This elitism contributes to the continual (re)framing of the poor as passive beneficiaries of elite policy, and legitimates e...
The nature, subject matter and future direction of International Political Economy has been opened up for debate following interventions by Benjamin Cohen, John Hobson and special issues of the Review of International Political Economy and New Political Economy. Most contributors to the debate are dissatisfied with the current state of Internationa...
Marx and Polanyi both held that socialism, in one form or another, was a preferable and possible alternative to capitalism. Their ideas are seen to offer theoretical tools to understand the tensions and contradictions of capitalism, and to inform ways to overcome them. This paper discusses Polanyi's work from a Marxist perspective in order to illum...
The majority of global commodity chain analysis is concerned with producer firm upgrading, because it is held to engender local-level development. This represents a myopic comprehension of the interaction of firms under capitalism. This article argues, in contrast, that lead firm chain governance and supplier firm upgrading attempts constitute stra...
Karl Marx has often been interpreted as formulating an economic determinist, Eurocentric and historically linear conception of human development. Where they exist, such interpretations understand 'development' as capitalist modernisation. If correct, this critique leaves Marxism ill-equipped to interpret and contribute to transformations of the con...
Citations
... Another form of critique questions whether there may be structural forces which prevent some GVC actors, especially in the Global South, from achieving better outcomes and actually 'catching up' in terms of value capture (see, inter alia, Durand & Milberg, 2020;Milberg & Winkler, 2013). A more radical form in turn holds that GVCs may themselves be constitutive of global inequalities as they transform the relations between capital, labour and nature in ways that reinforce existing inequalities (Baglioni et al., 2020;Baglioni & Campling, 2017;Campling & Selwyn, 2018;Phillips, 2017;Quentin & Campling, 2018;Selwyn, 2015Selwyn, , 2019. Together, these different strands of critical research have shown that the supposed potential of GVC participation for mitigating global inequality has been overestimated. ...
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... 3 cultural power and the processes and dynamics of the 'accumulation of capital by dispossession' that underlie, maintain, and intensify the inequalities now currently being reported in the mainstream development literature (Delgado Wise and Covarrubias 2008;Delgado Wise and Martin 2015;Feldman-Bianco 2015a;Selwyn and Leyden 2021). ...
... Foxconn's expansion in China enhances its China-borne development growth strategy by encouraging internal migrant workers on an ever-increasing scale and providing heavily subsidized land and infrastructure support (Pun et al, 2016). Apple's sales increase in 2009 reached 20,731,000 iPhones, increasing by 93% to 39,989,000 units through production from Foxconn (Chan et al., 2021). However, behind the increasing demand for Apple's production, there is no guarantee of welfare for the employees who work at Foxconn. ...
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... This 'residual' role labour plays in mainstream development analysis is also reproduced in policy studies and reports focusing on global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs), like the World Trade Organization (WTO) 2019 report 'Technological Innovation, Supply Chain Trade, and Workers in a Globalized World' and the 2020 World Bank Development Report (WDR) 'Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains'. These mainstream policy reports betray a linear understanding of development, tautologically conflated with global integration, in a schema where GVCs become both the means and the end of development, despite overwhelming evidence of poor labour standards and the well-documented harshness of workers' livelihoods in supply chain capitalism (Bair et al., 2021;Mezzadri, 2021;Selwyn and Leyden, 2022). ...
... Perhaps a good starting point for a contemporary conversation on this subject is Jess Gilbert's (2015) analysis of the 'agrarian intellectuals' of the 1930s' New Deal, partly because of the recent 'rediscovery' of the idea of a New Deal in imagining a post-pandemic world that is also dealing with the climate crisis (Patel and Goodman, 2020;Ajl, 2021;Selwyn, 2021). Gilbert argues that 'the USDA's leading agrarians were "organic intellectuals" of the midwestern family-farming class. ...
... The repudiation by a state of permanent sovereignty over its natural resources through unequal terms and acquiescence with foreign domination of its economy will only serve to accentuate dependency and undermine its sovereignty. At the core of the existence and being of a state, is the permanent sovereignty over its natural wealth and resources, which is a basic constituent of the right to self determination, and to repudiate that right is to strike lethally at the very heart of state sovereignty (Ikejiaku, 2020;Selwyn, 2020). ...
... Therefore, they tried to foster upgrading with import substitution industrialization (ISI) in the 1950s and 1960s (Sapelli, 2003). Recent critical research on global poverty chains (Selwyn et al., 2020;Selwyn & Leyden, 2022) suggests that these dynamics are reproduced today in the unequal distribution of economic value, and continued exploitation of workers; moreover, the amount of upgrading actually taking place is very low. This is also evidenced by case studies on the dynamics of upgrading in different sectors, which also point out examples where local capacities decreased rather than upgraded following increased market liberalization (Garcia, 2001;Sandoval Cabrera, 2012). ...
... The liberalization of local and international markets for commodities, capital, and labor, pushed via a wide range of neoliberal economic policies by almost all governments worldwide, has been the defining feature of this period (Ricci, 2021). Global value chains have been claimed to lead to new types of worker poverty, and many sectors' mostly female workforces are hyperexploited (given salaries below the level necessary for subsistence) (Selwyn, 2019). Workers in a market economy are under tremendous pressure to meet very high and rising productivity goals, receive base pay that is insufficient to cover their needs for individual and social reproduction, put in a lot of overtime, and as a result of these combined pressures, suffer physical and emotional degradation (Selwyn, 2019). ...
... Nascent market economies do not exist separately from the multitude of more or less formal exchange modalities and networks within which they func- 182 Brumfiel 1994, 4. 183 Campling et al. 2016, 1748. 184 Mielants 2000Jung 2021 clearly evinces such a view. ...
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... As pointed out in the relevant literature, the rapid globalization of capitalism as a strategic response to the over-accumulation crisis after the 1970s and the significant ad-vances in transportation and communication technologies have not only enabled an equally rapid development of tourism, but tourism itself has contributed to these developments and operated as a vehicle for the transnational expansion of capital on a global level [15,25,33]. In many countries, tourism has been promoted as a means to increase market demand and employment, stimulate further economic growth, and overcome a protracted economic crisis. ...
