To my knowledge there are no western bourgeois economists that are asking these kinds of questions and doing this kind of research. That right there is incredibly telling. You could probably develop an entire sub-field of economics around researching the unequal exchange between global north and global south, and yet no one is drilling into it. I wonder why…

This is some of the most important research Marxian economists can do right now. We all know the very first objection that westerners have to socialism: that it “doesn’t work”, and the fact that western capitalist countries were so much wealthier than AES states like the USSR, DPRK, and Cuba is proof of that. In additional to various historical advantages (colonialism) and improper comparison (why aren’t we comparing Haiti and Cuba instead of the US and Cuba?), so much of why capitalism “works” in the US is exploitation of labor in the global south.

And what this says is… to make a fair comparison, you have to massively increase the cost of most goods that you buy without a corresponding increase in wages. Change that and the living standards for most Americans would fall off a cliff. It’s obvious that the standard of living that most Americans enjoy that they credit to the “miracle of capitalism” is really just from the exploitation of labor in the global south. And on top of that, the American quality of life is also juiced by unsustainable environmental degradation (if everyone consumed like Americans, we would need five earth’s worth of resources to keep up).

Eliminate exploitation of the global south and unsustainable environmental degradation, and American workers would have living conditions similar to what Engels describes in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.