The Political Economy of Value: What Wine Tells Us about Contemporary Capitalism

In this open access book, Stefano Ponte offers a theoretically ambitious, empirically rich interrogation of the value struggles at play in global value chains; using the wine industry as an exemplar, he provides a new and fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism and the inequalities it engenders.
There is no better product than wine to unmask some of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Wine is one of the most fragmented and diversified industries, and one that is not yet completely dominated by large corporate interests. It is also where all sorts of antagonisms against the power of capital are taking place.
Value Struggles shows how these tensions and contradictions play out over the valuation of place, nature and people. Through a detailed analysis of South African and Italian wine, it shows that predatory accumulation is about extracting value not only from labour, but also from place, nature and people’s identities as owners of tangible and intangible assets. This book explains how power is exercised in contemporary capitalism, by whom, and with what consequences for producers, workers, and nature - both in the Global South and the Global North.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Stefano Ponte is Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Centre for Competition, Regulation, and Economic Development at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His previous books include The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (Zed, 2005, with Benoit Daviron); Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy (2005, with Peter Gibbon); Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (2011, with Lisa Ann Richey); and Business, Power, and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains (Zed, 2019).