Rent and Surplus in the Global Production Network: Identifying ‘Value Capture’ from the South

This article critically reviews the contemporary global production network (GPN) analyses from the perspective of Marxian political economy. 1 The GPN analyses focus on rents created at various nodes of the production network, and it ignores the fact that returns from interventions at specific stages in the value chain are not independent of the entire process of surplus creation and realization. Rents from innovation depend on the movement of the average capital in the particular industry and the way political economy of institutions allow certain ‘scarcities’ remain protected while others being drawn into the realm of competition. The article also argues that the GPN analyses hardly explain the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of firms within such networks. It is argued that the dynamics is primarily governed by the relative position of individual capital and its technical composition with reference to the capital that assumes average levels of technology in that industry at a particular point of time.