When the anti-globalization movement flowered at the turn of the 2000s, many campaigns took aim at the bad employment practices of big-name brands like Gap, Nike, and Adidas. As the garment sector was ever more outsourced to newly industrializing countries in Latin America and East Asia, the products sold in the West were increasingly made in low-paid sweatshops. For their workers, this typically meant long hours, poverty wages, violent and abusive bosses, and sometimes life-threatening conditions.

The problem was, even efforts to build worker resistance in the countries concerned often met with a harsh employer response. When workers in outsourced factories did organize unions, the brands on which their employers relied for orders preferred to “cut and run” — shifting production elsewhere in order to keep down costs. Fed by a dynamic where a tiny number of buyers governed the fate of a vast array of suppliers — a situation known as monopsony  — the structure of the globalized garment trade put up severe barriers to worker organizing.

This is the subject of Ashok Kumar’s new book, Monopsony Capitalism: Power and Production in the Twilight of the Sweatshop Age. It combines an analysis of these developments with an anti-capitalist prescription. Kumar traces the developments in capitalist industrialization over the past century, at different sites across the world, in order to identify points of vulnerability for capital and — therefore — points of potential strength for labor.