''Metachains'' from Immanuel Wallerstein's Perspective

Capitalism is above all a historical social system. The distinctive aspects of this system, called historical capitalism, emerge in the way capital is put into use and its purpose. The system is based on the fundamentals that capital is put into use in a way that it can grow itself and that past savings have the character of capital to the extent that they are only used to accumulate more capital.
Before modern times, it was usual for people to make a decision to invest capital in order to accumulate more capital, but it was very difficult for them to succeed. The reason for this is that people obtain the labor factor to produce, the necessity of the distribution system required for the marketing of the produced goods, the existence of a group of buyers who have sufficient resources to buy the goods, and the use of this profit for a new rational investment by selling the produced goods in a profitable manner. This is because the "chain of capital transfer" is often incomplete. The reason why one or more links in this chain of transactions are missing is that the said items forming the chain are not "commodified" sufficiently yet.

For these reasons, historical capitalism has brought a widespread commodification not only in the exchange processes but also in the production, distribution and investment processes, thus ensuring that all processes are shaped by the market. Since capitalism is a self-directed process, capitalists have worked for the commodification of more and more social processes in all areas of economic life in order to accumulate more capital. However, production processes are also linked together in commodity chains.

In order to understand commodity chains well, it is necessary to move away from the narrow perception that the market is the place where the first producer and the end consumer meet. Because the majority of the transactions in the market are the exchange transactions between two intermediate producers existing in the long commodity chain. In these transactions, the buyer buys input for his own production process, while the seller sells a semi-finished product. This situation creates a price struggle in the intermediate markets. For the buyer, the price struggle is an effort to sever from the seller the profit earned from all previous labor processes along the commodity chain. Although the determinants of the price struggle are supply and demand in the intermediate market, the monopoly restrictions that affect this supply and demand should not be ignored. In addition, it cannot be mentioned that supply and demand interaction determines the price in case the buyer and seller, which is called "vertical integration", are ultimately the same company. Both the big business houses of the past few centuries and today's multinational corporations have tried to fit as many people as possible into the commodity chains. Therefore, vertical links rather than parties in conflict of interest determine the structure of exchange processes within commodity chains.

When looking at the commodity chains geographically, it is seen that there are many starting points, but several destinations. That is, commodity chains tend to move from the periphery of the capitalist world economy to the centers. Since the beginning of historical capitalism, it has been known that almost all commodity chains transcend state boundaries. Commodity chains represent an increasingly widespread and hierarchical social division of social work, functionally and geographically. This hierarchy of space in the production processes causes a great polarization between the central and peripheral regions of the world economy in terms of real income and living levels as well as capital accumulation locations. The reason for this polarization is that commodities move through the transfer of some of the profits produced as a result of unequal exchange processes from one region to another, based on the differentiation that occurs in the market due to the temporary scarcity of a complex production process or artificial shortages created by the military. Therefore, this situation creates a relationship where the losing region is called the periphery and the winning region is called the center. As one of the mechanisms that increase the polarization in the center-periphery relationship, vertical integrations within the commodity chains are important actors in the production processes. Thanks to vertical integrations, it has become possible to shift a larger part of the total profit towards the center than before. The shifting of profits towards the center concentrated the capital in these regions. As a result, mechanization has increased in the central regions and the producers in these regions have gained an additional competitive advantage.

The concentration of the capital in the central regions has enabled the states in this geography to reach the political and financial power that will enable them to put pressure on the surrounding states. In this way, the centers could be oppressive for peripheral states to specialize in jobs at lower levels of the commodity chain, even to employ lower wages in their own lands and to create suitable household structures for workers to sustain their lives.
In the historical process; The production structures of countries (which types of goods will specialize in the production of countries will gain comparative advantage), dramatically different wage levels in different parts of the world, and the tendencies of international capital movements have been determined by historical capitalism. Commodity chains have always been one of the leading roles of historical capitalism in this process.
 
Merve TOSUN
Research Assistant
Istanbul Gelisim University
Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences
Department of International Trade and Business