From Business and Human Rights to entangled accumulation: Making sense of violence along global value chains

Abstract

‘Business and Human Rights’ (BHR) has congealed as the predominant framework to conceive and address violence in the context of transnational production networks. This article presents an analysis of the assumptions regarding the nature of violence, its underlying economic causes and potential remedies that underpin contemporary BHR regulations. Drawing from literature on primitive accumulation and taking the German ‘Supply Chain Due Diligence Act’ as an example, the text argues that the Act distinguishes legal and illegal forms of doing business in a way that reproduces liberal accounts of capitalism’s relation to violence. In outlawing extreme forms of labour exploitation, environmental harm, illegal evictions and physical repression, the Act disconnects violent dispossession, repression, and over-exploitation from the normal, everyday workings of global capitalism. At the same time, it posits the normal functioning of capitalist accumulation as a non-violent alternative, thus failing to account for the violence of the market and the structural relation between capitalist and other forms of accumulation. Against this backdrop, the challenge for a critical BHR practice consists in using BHR norms to highlight instances of primitive accumulation, while simultaneously envisioning a future of work that does not seek redemption in ‘normal’ capitalist exploitation.