"Is it true, as the World Bank claims, that Global Value Chains (GVCs) 'boost incomes, create better jobs, and reduce poverty'? In this hard-hitting book, Benjamin Selwyn, Christin Bernhold, and Dara Leyden show how the mainstream notion of GVCs obscures their capitalist character. To transcend this shortcoming, the authors introduce the concept of Capitalist Value Chains (CVCs). This book shows how and why CVCs generate many highly exploitative jobs, new forms of poverty, are stunting real human development, and are destroying the world's environment. CVCs are a historically-specific configuration of capitalist class relations that have been re-structured and bolstered through geo-politics. The book argues that rather than waiting for the elusive benefits of 'economic, social and environmental upgrading', as promoted in mainstream GVC scholarship, workers' collective actions can improve their pay and conditions-under historically and geographically specific conditions of uneven development. Instead of striving to make CVCs more 'resilient', progressive political economists need to envision a world beyond these capitalist structures of generalised exploitation and appropriation"--