Value/Commodity Chains, Global

Commodity Chains

Commodity chain analysis has its roots in world-systems analysis and was spearheaded by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein in the late 1970s. The modern world-system is considered to have globalized out of Europe beginning in the 16th century and is characterized by an unequal interregional division of labor through which economic surplus is siphoned out of the more (semi)peripheral regions to buttress capital accumulation in the core. Hopkins and Wallerstein noticed that, for the study of the unequal exchange within this world-system, the concept of international trade was fundamentally insufficient because it missed out on the process of regional specialization of production within a world system. They therefore launched the idea of a commodity chain as a metaphor to reconstruct the regional networks of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity. The methodological suggestion was clear yet demanding: Take an ultimate consumable item (e.g., this book) and trace back the set of inputs that culminate in it, such as the raw materials, the transportation mechanisms, the labor input into the material processes, the food inputs into the labor, and so on.

The theoretical promises of the commodity chain perspective were triple. First of all, mapping these chains could shed light on the different levels of economic expansion, integration, and regional specialization throughout history, making it possible to map the boundaries and geography of the world-system. Second, by studying the way in which profits and value are created at different nodes of the production chain, this type of analysis could empirically study what world-systems analysis had always theoretically assumed: Comparatively high-mechanization, high-profit, high-wage, high-skill labor activities would show to cluster together in certain regions of the world economy (the core) vis-à-vis the peripheral comparative opposite. Third, and perhaps most important, by studying the way in which profits and value move along the different nodes of the commodity chain, the analysis could evaluate how unequal exchanges work at the commodity level, questioning who controls the exchanges and who profits from them. The additional ideological added value of the approach was that it could reveal the underpinnings of Western consumerism by tracing the production chain of cheap consumer goods like footwear, apparel, or electronics to the sweatshops of Bangladesh or the low-wage export zones of Mexico.

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