Value Struggles (Ponte 2025) - Weekend Book Review

English Podcast starts at 00:00:00Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:15:16Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:30:15Danish Podcast Starts at 00:46:23ReferencePonte, S. (2025). Value Struggles: Looking at Capitalism through the Wine Glass. London: Bloomsbury Academic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350378667Youtube channel link https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcherConnect on linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/Welcome to 🎙️ Revise and Resubmit, and to this episode of Weekend Book Review 📚🍷Today I am diving into a book that looks like wine, smells like wine, but hits like a theory seminar: “Value Struggles: Looking at Capitalism through the Wine Glass” by Stefano Ponte. 🍇✨Ponte is not just a casual wine lover with a laptop; he is a Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School, and Director of the Centre for Business and Development Studies, where he spends his days tracing how power, profit, and inequality flow through global value chains, especially in the Global South. 🌍📊 His earlier work on coffee, agro food trade, and sustainability standards has already made him a go to name if you care about how everyday commodities become vehicles for quiet, grinding forms of domination and resistance.In this new book, he turns the wine glass into a lens 🔍🍷. We travel from South African vineyards, scarred by colonial legacies and racialised labour, to Italian terroirs, where artisanal pride collides with the cold logics of financialisation and branding. The book unpacks how value is extracted not only from workers’ hands, but also from places, landscapes, and identities as tangible and intangible assets. It is here that Ponte sharpens his idea of “predatory accumulation”, showing how capitalism drinks deeply from soil, culture, and reputation, not just from labour time.What gripped me is how the book treats wine as both pleasure and battlefield. 🍷⚔️ While big brands push uniform, globalised bottles, counter movements fight back with narratives of craft, origin, biodiversity, and justice. At the same time, we are reminded that “sustainable” labels can sit uneasily on top of exploitative gendered and racialised labour, and that every tasting note might hide a story of someone’s precarity. This is not a book that lets you sip innocently.And yet, within these value struggles, Ponte also traces spaces of experimentation and resistance: local initiatives, alternative circuits, more sustainable viticulture, and attempts to re write what counts as value in the first place. 🌱💡 It is critical, but not cynical. Academic, but strangely intimate. Like a good wine, it lingers and then surprises you with a second, more political aftertaste.So in this episode of Revise and Resubmit: Weekend Book Review, I am going to ask:👉 If we really look at capitalism through the wine glass, what exactly are we tasting – the grape, the terroir, or the quiet, continuous work of power itself? 🍷❓Huge thanks to Stefano Ponte for writing this book, and to Bloomsbury Academic for publishing and making it open access 🙏📖.If you enjoy this kind of deep dive into books on capitalism, power, and everyday commodities, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, check out the Weekend Researcher YouTube channel 🎧📺, and remember that Revise and Resubmit is also available on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast. 💿✨