Table Of ContentWINNER OF THE PAUL A. BARAN – PAUL M. SWEEZY
MEMORIAL AWARD
Established in 2014, this award honors the contributions of the founders
of the Monthly Review tradition: Paul M. Sweezy, Paul A. Baran, and
Harry Magdoff. It supports the publication in English of distinguished
monographs focused on the political economy of imperialism. It also
applies to writings previously unpublished in English, and includes
translations of new work first published in languages other than English.
Please visit monthlyreview.org for complete details of the award.
PRAISE FOR VALUE CHAINS
“Demonstrates how global value chains are based upon, and deepen, the
exploitation of labor by capital and the geographical transfer of value
from global South to global North. Suwandi illuminates how lead firms
use mechanisms of value chain governance to enhance the control of
geographically distant labour. This work stands in, and contributes to, the
monopoly capital tradition of Magdoff, Sweezy, and Foster. An important
and valuable contribution to emancipatory social science.”
—BENJAMIN SELWYN, Professor of International Development,
Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, UK; author,
The Struggle for Development
“Uses the concept of labor-value chains and thoughtful empirical work
to reveal the ways in which multinational corporations extract surplus
from the global South at worker expense. In contrast to mainstream
celebrations of capitalist globalization, Value Chains leaves no doubt that
globalized production is best understood as a new form of imperialism.”
—MARTIN HART-LANDSBERG, Professor Emeritus of Economics,
Lewis and Clark College; author, Capitalist Globalization: Consequences,
Resistance, and Alternatives
“This is a marvelous, highly accessible book. It zeroes in on global
value chains, the most important transformation of the neoliberal era,
and weaves excellent theoretical insights and empirical research into
a notable contribution to literature on global political economy and
Marxist theories of imperialism.”—JOHN SMITH, author, Imperialism in
the Twenty-First Century
Value Chains
The New Economic Imperialism
INTAN SUWANDI
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2019 by Intan Suwandi
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from the publisher
ISBN paper: 978-158367-781-0
ISBN cloth: 978-1-58367-782-7
Typeset in Minion Pro and Brown
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS, NEW YORK
monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface | 7
1. The Hidden Abode of Global Production | 13
2. Labor-Value Commodity Chains: Power and Class
Relations in the World Economy | 42
3. Flexibility and Systemic Rationalization: Control in
Labor-Value Commodity Chains | 68
4. “We’re Just a Seamstress”: Case Studies of Two
Indonesian Companies | 98
5. The New Economic Imperialism: Looking through
the Eyes of the Global South | 151
Appendix 1: Statistical Notes | 173
Appendix 2: Notes on the Methodology
for the Case Studies | 177
Notes | 179
Index | 209
To Keagan Arkatedja,
my fiery Red
Preface
AS A CHILD LIVING IN JAKARTA, Indonesia, in the late 1980s,
I was familiar with the blatant inequalities that characterized
the city. Mansions built right next to the slums were something
familiar, although I lived in neither. The presence of poverty was
everywhere. I remember vividly seeing an old man ridden with
leprosy pulling a cart full of blocks of ice, every single morning on
my way to school. Or a classmate, sitting right there next to me,
wearing socks that were full of holes and a uniform with faded
colors because it was really old. These experiences were enough to
evoke questions about wealth and poverty early in my life. “Why
are there the rich and the very poor in this country?”
Later, in middle school—where kids from affluent families could
buy Nike shoes or basketball shirts that were made not too far
from where they lived by workers who were paid a fraction of the
final price of these items—one of the first things we learned about
Indonesia was that we were a part of the “third world.” Then the
question developed into, “Why do we belong in the third world?”
At that time, I couldn’t find a satisfying answer. Little did I know
that this question would become the basis of more questions that
later flourished and became the starting point of my studies.
8 VALUE CHAINS
One of the answers I found after I emigrated to the United
States was that we live in an imperialist economy that perpetuates
inequalities on a global scale, largely through the exploitation and
expropriation of the periphery by the core. Marxist political econ-
omy has allowed me to examine this issue in depth with critical
eyes, and myriad thoughts offered by critical and radical scholars,
both from the Global North and the Global South, have provided
me with resources to conduct my own research and formulate my
own analyses. This book is a result of this long process of trying to
understand how imperialist relations embedded in contemporary
capitalism are sustained, perpetuating the division between the
North and the South through the mechanisms of drain and value
capture.
The analysis may be theoretical at times, or it may use terms
that are technical. But at its center is a narrative about real people
whose lives are affected by the processes of globalized production
in significant ways, especially workers who are controlled on the
factory floors in the South through management practices gov-
erned by capital’s interests. Within the complex configurations of
the global chains of value, and behind the rhetoric of “decentral-
ized” production networks, there lies the not-so-good “old” stories
of exploitation and unequal exchange.
But if the question concerns the working class, one may ask,
why does my study focus on what the company executives from
dependent suppliers have to say? Don’t they belong to the group
whose allegiance is obviously to the Northern capital they serve?
My answer is this: I believe that one needs to understand how
capital works in order to defeat the system that has produced so
much misery for so many people. You can’t fight something you
don’t know well. And we can learn how this system works, its logic
and requirements, from the individuals who make sure that it runs
daily at the point of production, the “experts” who know the nooks
and crannies, who juggle the demands given by their multina-
tional clients and the need to directly control labor, often in order
to meet those very demands. Dependent suppliers located in the
PrEfACE 9
South can be viewed as a critical node within the global commod-
ity chains characterized by arm’s length contracting. They give us
a picture of how the chains work and reveal what forms of power
relations exist in them. They also show us how to connect the dots
between capital that rules from the metropolis and workers who
toil in the industrial complexes in the periphery.
This book offers a picture of the imperialistic relationship
between the North and the South. I hope it is a solid one, but it
is obviously not the picture. Nevertheless, even though this book
does not focus on the other aspects of imperialism, including
those that are intertwined with gender, race, militarism, and the
environment, the discussion of the exploitation and expropriation
of the periphery intersects with these aspects, and should create
further conversations in relation to them. I also hope that this
work can be connected to other works that have examined not
only the question of imperialism but also the question of what the
working class and oppressed peoples in the world have done, and
can do, to liberate themselves from a system that both exploits and
expropriates them.
This book may not be a guide to how to end imperialism once
and for all. The analysis I provide here, however, implies that capi-
tal, the big power that controls the global chains of value, is not
omnipotent. In today’s imperialist world economy, antagonistic
class relations are as clear as ever, and ongoing struggles between
capital and labor are something real. They occur everywhere.
They are not a theoretical construct or mere Marxist jargon. This
shows that changes are happening, that labor has never surren-
dered to the miserable fate prescribed to them by capital. If the
reality of imperialism is often denied in today’s world, the force of
this denial always begins with those at the top of the global power
hierarchy. The vast majority of people at the bottom are not fooled.
They know what it is they continue to oppose.
If I could time-travel to Jakarta, back to the years when I was in
middle school, I might have to tell my younger self some depress-
ing answers to her question about why her country belongs to the
