A New ‘Emergent’ Powerhouse in the Global Automotive? Uneven Development, Exploitation, and Dependency in Morocco’s Car Industry

The article demonstrates that Morocco’s recent rise as an automotive hub constitutes a peripheral incorporation into the EU-centered car industry, underpinned by the perpetuation of low wages to the advantage of foreign direct investments (FDI) in labor-intensive components and low-cost cars. Through a Marxist lens, this can be seen as structurally related to the inherently uneven character of global production. Nevertheless, geopolitics is also incorporated into the analysis, showing how the relegation of Morocco to a low-wage export platform has been systematically pursued by EU policies of asymmetrical trade integration and migration restrictions, as a counterpart to the semi-peripheral inclusion of Central and Eastern European countries in the EU bloc. At the domestic level, wage compression has been reproduced by state-led policies of accumulation by dispossession, labor precaritization, and repression. Additionally, the state’s FDI-driven industrial policies have contributed to keeping Morocco in the automotive periphery by diverting resources from autonomous development goals and consolidating dependency on transnational capital. Drawing on primary data collected during four months of fieldwork in 2023, this article provides a critical contribution to debates on global production by challenging mainstream perspectives on industrial upgrading through integration into global value chains, while bridging the global and domestic dimensions of uneven capitalist development.