Limits to Supply Chain Resilience: A Monopoly Capital Critique, with Prof. Benjamin Selwyn
As the COVID-19 pandemic expanded across the world in early 2020, it generated the “first global supply chain crisis.” Global supply chains represent the integrative structure of contemporary global capitalism, and any disruption to them potentially threatens the functioning of the system itself.
In this talk, based on a recent piece appeared in the Monthly Review, Prof. Selwyn argues that while the resilience agenda seeks to revive global supply chains, it is in fact contributing to policies that are hastening the concentration and centralisation of capital and increasing geopolitical dimensions of capitalist competition. Indeed, far from contributing to a more stable global political economy for the economic benefit of all, the supply chain resilience agenda represents an attempt to reassert the power of monopoly capital in core economies over subordinate capitals, peripheral and semi-peripheral states, and above all, over labour.
Benjamin Selwyn is a Professor of International Relations and International Development at the University of Sussex. He is author of three single authored books, and of several journal papers that have shaped the debate on global supply chains and their role in contemporary economies.
Recording available on the ReTraCE ITN YouTube channel.
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