Limits to Supply Chain Resilience:

A Monopoly Capital Critique

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.

While global supply chains are promoted as generating positive gains—for firms and workers, North and South—there is mounting evidence to suggest that they represent organisational forms of capitalism designed to raise the rate of surplus value extraction from labour by capital and facilitate its geographic transfer from the Global South to the Global North. As demonstrated in a previous Monthly Review article (“World Development under Monopoly Capitalism,” November 2021), global supply chains have contributed to dynamics of concentration in leading firms, and a marked shift in national income from labour to capital across much of the world.

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