The economist Alice Amsden鈥檚 work unmasked the dirty secret underlying capitalist development: it relied on states breaking all the rules of the free market. But her work also showed that industrialization required corporate discipline, not welfare.
For American defenders of economic liberalism and free markets, China鈥檚 rise has been deeply disorientating. Unmoved by concerns about the market distorting effects of picking winners, the Communist Party of China has engaged in a focused campaign of industrial policy, using the state to discipline firms that have gone on to become globally competitive.
For the economist Alice Amsden, who came to prominence in the late 1980s for her writing on global development and died in 2012, the success of China would not have come as a surprise. Amsden began her career as powerful development institutions such as the World Bank were touting deregulation and privatization as solutions to global poverty. But the experience of the postwar years, in which South Korea 鈥� a recurring object of study for Amsden 鈥� used industrial policy to drag itself into middle income status, was a refutation of the orthodoxies rehearsed at Davos and in the International Monetary Fund.
The embrace of state subsidies to firms, tariffs, and large-scale infrastructure spending under Joe Biden and Donald Trump鈥檚 presidencies is partly a concession to the kind of developmentalist thinking advocated by Amsden. However, Amsden, a fellow traveler, if not devotee, to Marxism offered a more ambivalent assessment of the records of late industrializing nations like South Korea and China than defenders of Biden/Trumponomics are perhaps willing to countenance. For her, the repression of labor was as important to the success of these nations as large-scale economic coordination.
Defenders of capitalism argue that cooperation is undermined by individuals鈥� tendency to take more from society than they contribute. The economist Elinor Ostrom refuted this idea, but without identifying capitalism as the real cause of exploitation.
Socialist arguments that cooperation and collective action represent the basis of a better society are often dismissed by supporters of capitalism. 鈥淗uman nature,鈥� so the argument goes, is inherently self-seeking.
The so-called 鈥渇ree-rider problem鈥� purports to prove that large-scale cooperation is unsustainable because individuals seek to benefit from the collective action of others while minimizing their own contribution. This tendency is, the argument goes, a barrier to collective solutions to social problems.
Rather than cooperate, individuals should allow market forces to dictate how they decide to allocate their time and resources. Such arguments are applied by supporters of capitalism to explain why rational collective resource management and attempts to tackle climate breakdown are unlikely to succeed without the aid of market forces.
Since capitalism emerged as the world鈥檚 dominant economic system, its defenders have argued that private property rights and the pricing of natural resources are the only way to collectively manage our social goods.
The economist Elinor Ostrom provided a sharp critique of such notions from within the framework of mainstream economics. She demonstrated that cooperative management of natural resources can preserve rather than degrade them, and that trust between strangers can be established, expanded, and become the basis of collaborative ways of managing what she described as 鈥渃ommon-pool resources.鈥�
Within the field of sustainable development studies, her work became highly influential and helped to bring the notion of 鈥渢he commons鈥� to a broader audience. However, outside of academia, she remains largely unknown 鈥� a glaring oversight in a world in which education, water, and even land are increasingly run and managed for and by private companies.
The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon鈥檚 The Wretched of the Earth 鈥榯he bible of decolonisation鈥� as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world (). Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world鈥檚 population. 鈥楩or centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world,鈥� he wrote. 鈥楧eportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power鈥� ().
One of the reasons for Fanon鈥檚 popularity among those who want to decolonise development is that he argued that post-colonial countries should forge their own paths to development rather than attempting to follow already developed countries. 鈥楾he Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it,鈥� he warned. 鈥橭n the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them.鈥�
Not only did Fanon explain the horrors inflicted by colonialism upon native populations; crucially, he also conceived of real human development as a process rooted in a collective labouring class (comprising workers and poor peasants) transcending capitalist brutality.
However these two elements of his thought 鈥� the critical identification of the violence of colonialism, and a real human developmental alternative to it 鈥� have often been disconnected by thinkers influential to the decolonial movement. This represents a dangerous misinterpretation of Fanon. It obscures his vision of a decolonised world and the social forces able to construct it.
Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow鈥檚 advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.
Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor countries to become more like rich ones.
To facilitate such growth, policymakers, international institutions, and many academics urge poor countries and their populations to adopt modern ways of thought and action, dispensing with familial or communal loyalties and embracing the benefits of capitalist markets and impersonal bureaucracies.
Those who adopt this perspective insist that such modernization will be beneficial for developing societies in the long run, even though there will always be those who lose out and seek to resist the process. However, since the benefits of economic growth and cultural change outweigh the losses, it is legitimate to forcefully suppress such opposition.
No thinker was more influential in theorizing and popularizing such notions of development underpinned by violent coercion than Walt Whitman Rostow (1916鈥�2003).
As the COVID-19 pandemic expanded across the world in early 2020, it generated the 鈥渇irst global supply chain crisis.鈥� 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 response to the crisis, the global supply chain community, encompassing academics and policymakers keen to promote their purported benefits, are proposing ways to increase supply chain 鈥渞esilience.鈥� The notion has been defined by the World Trade Organization and Asian Development Bank as 鈥渢he ability of these chains to anticipate and prepare for severe disruptions in a way that maximizes capacity to absorb shocks, adapt to new realities, and re-establish optimized operations in the shortest possible time.鈥� Enhanced global supply chain resilience is to be pursued through a range of policies to be implemented by lead firm managers and supported by states.
While global supply chains are promoted as generating positive gains鈥攆or firms and workers, North and South鈥攖here is mounting evidence to suggest that they represent organizational forms of capitalism designed to raise the rate of surplus value extraction from labor by capital and facilitate its geographic transfer from the Global South to the Global North. As demonstrated in a previous Monthly Review article (鈥�,鈥� November 2021), global supply chains have contributed to dynamics of concentration in leading firms, and a marked shift in national income from labor to capital across much of the world.
Capitalism, as Karl Marx observed, is rooted in the exploitation of labor by capital through the latter鈥檚 ability to extract surplus value from the former. It is characterized by dynamics of concentration and centralization of capital, where fewer and larger firms increasingly dominate each economic sector. These dynamics are intrinsically related to capitalism鈥檚 uneven geographical development and the reproduction of geopolitical tensions and rivalries. As Harry Magdoff once wrote:
Centrifugal and centripetal forces have always coexisted at the very core of the capitalist process.鈥� Periods of peace and harmony have alternated with periods of discord and violence. Generally the mechanism of this alternation involves both economic and military forms of struggle, with the strongest power emerging victorious and enforcing acquiescence on the losers. But uneven development soon takes over, and a period of renewed struggle for hegemony emerges.
In fact, a recent World Bank publication explicates how the COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating capitalism鈥檚 inner monopolistic tendencies:
COVID-19 could cause a further rise in corporations鈥� market power because large corporations are in the best position to withstand the economic downturn and deploy new technologies.鈥� In the past three recessions, the share prices of US firms in the top quartile across 10 sectors rose by an average of 6 percent whereas the share prices of those in the bottom quartile fell by 44 percent. The same divergence has been evident since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.
This article argues that the resilience agenda represents an ideological justification and fortification of these very same tendencies鈥攐f labor exploitation, of concentration and centralization of capital, and of an increasingly geopolitical dimension to capitalist competition.
Following this introduction, the first section of this article outlines the emerging notion of resilience as formulated within the global supply chain community. The next section discusses how the first response by firms and states to the COVID-19 crisis was to make workers bear the brunt of the crisis. The concluding section identifies the geopolitical dynamics of resilience, focusing on the White House鈥檚 2021 report,聽Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth.
Indian economist Amartya Sen has posed a devastating challenge to the dominant capitalist understanding of development. But Sen鈥檚 own analytical framework doesn鈥檛 go far enough in exposing the inherently exploitative logic of capitalism.
Amartya Sen is one of the most influential thinkers about development in the contemporary world. Since the 1970s, he has published widely across the disciplines of economics and philosophy. He received the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1998. In 2010,聽Time聽magazine rated Sen as one of the world鈥檚 one hundred most influential people.
There is a predominant notion of development trumpeted by international institutions, many academics and journalists, and politicians of most stripes. It holds that economic growth provides the basis for human development. Given that under capitalism, economic growth is for the most part rooted in capital accumulation, 鈥済rowth-first鈥� notions of development are essentially capital-first notions.
This way of thinking places capitalist firms, managers, and the states that back them at the helm of the human development project. It conveniently excuses the ways in which such growth generates, and is often based upon, novel forms of poverty and oppression for workers. Sen鈥檚 writings pose a major challenge to the growth-first/capital-first idea of development.
Global value chains (GVCs) 鈥渂oost incomes, create better jobs and reduce poverty,鈥澛犅爐he World Bank. Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1991 and the reintegration of China into the global economy, world trade has become increasingly organized through GVCs. For example, the components and inputs for Apple鈥檚 iPhone, an icon of contemporary capitalist globalization, are made by聽聽in over fifty countries.
Transnational corporations (TNCs) 鈥� labeled 鈥渓ead firms鈥� in the academic literature 鈥� established GVCs as part of their competitive strategies, outsourcing existing work or starting up new activities in countries where labor costs were cheap. State managers across the Global South increasingly gave up on establishing integrated domestic industries and sought instead to enter GVCs as component suppliers. Today, over four hundred fifty million workers are employed in .
Many prominent figures suggest that these systems of production and distribution represent radically new development opportunities. As the former secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 脕ngel Gurr铆a, :
Everyone can benefit from global value chains . . . encouraging the development of and participation in global value chains is the road to more jobs and sustainable growth for our economies.
The academic Gary Gereffi, the intellectual father of GVC analysis, that development across the Global South requires supplier firms 鈥渓inking up with the most significant lead firm in the industry.鈥�
In reality, GVCs are a great boon for some of the world鈥檚 biggest companies, but not for their workers. It would be more accurate to describe many GVCs as聽.
Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang is a brilliant, best-selling critic of neoliberal orthodoxy. But Chang stops far short of taking the necessary next step: questioning the capitalist system itself.
Ha-Joon Chang is a rarity in the contemporary world: an聽聽who is highly critical of the neoliberal free-market orthodoxy, advocates progressive social change, writes and speaks accessibly, and is very, very popular.
Chang鈥檚 books have sold millions of copies, and he is a regular contributor to mainstream media outlets. According to Chang himself, his aim is not simply to challenge free-market orthodoxy, but also to support, through his work, the kind of 鈥渁ctive economic citizenship鈥� that will demand 鈥渢he right courses of action from those in decision-making positions.鈥�
While socialists can learn a lot from Ha-Joon Chang鈥檚 work, we also need to read it critically and identify some of the gaps in his thinking. Chang鈥檚 self-professed aspiration is to promote an alternative form of capitalism, but our goal should be to develop an alternative聽迟辞听capitalism.
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