The big takeaway for me is that despite the typical depiction, it’s medium skilled labor that makes up the bulk of the value created by the global south that the global north enjoys, not low skilled labor.

Every time I see this guy's name I read it as Jackson Hinkle and am surprised he's having an actually good take.

And yet Neoliberals still parrot the idea that the Global South actively participates in unequal exchange of their own volition, ergo it's justified.

Plundering.

How much of that labour is consumed exclusively by millionaires and billionaires in the North?

Yet received wisdom in the west is that it goes the other way round. Talk to the average westerner about global inequality and you almost always get some version of "We give them so much aid but the non-white brainpan is simply too predisposed towards sloth and corruption for it to work"

Meanwhile we westerners have ridiculously high thoughts of ourselves. Imperialism? Never heard of her, the reason we're rich is simply our superior Judeo-Christian protestant work ethic and our civilised values of free market liberal democracy. Sometimes this autofellation can take absurd forms, just this day I saw a serious news outlet claim that the fact that clothing shops have racks of clothes on the sidewalk outside the shop is somehow the result of an uniquely enviable level of trust and morality.

The average westerner lives in a completely alternate reality. They are no better than medieval peasants who believed that India/Abyssinia/Atlantis was populated by giants, headless people and mermaids.

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.

This whole thread is why this is one of the best sites on the internet right now

What's a receipt chair?

For those that are interested MR also did a post about this too recently. Further thoughts on the economics of imperialism

There are also a few interesting charts and obvious correlations for example

We found that since the end of WW2, the imperialist bloc (IC) annually got around 1% of their GDP through the transfer of surplus value in international trade from the rest of the major ‘developing’ economies (DC) in the G20; while the latter lost about 1% of their GDP in surplus value transferred to the imperialist bloc. And these ratios were rising.

What I also found was that after accounting for the debits ie income flowing out, the NET position was even starker. The annual net flow of income to the G7 economies was around 0.5% of G7 GDP. Indeed, the top five imperialist economies (G5) obtained a staggering 1.7% of their annual GDP from such net inflows. In contrast, the BRICS economies lost 1.2% of their GDP a year in net outflows.

If you look at the net income flows for each G7 and BRICS countries, the biggest gainers over the last two decades have been Japan with its huge foreign asset holdings and the UK, the rentier centre of financial circuitry. Those BRICS countries that have lost the most (as a share of their GDPs) have been South Africa and Russia.

What's the relationship between unequal exchange theory and Marxist economics? I've seen at least one attempt to theorize unequal exchange as a category directly in Marx's analysis in Capital. But then there's Paul Cockshott who argues unequal exchange theory is un-Marxist because it regresses to a pre-Marxist, moralist notion of exploitation, over the scientific categories explored by Marx and Engels. In Cockshott's opinion, exploitation occurs even when equivalents are exchanged, and therefore there is no need for an unequal exchange theory.

I lean towards the unequal exchange view and see Cockshott's argument being myopic. Just because surplus value is extracted even with the exchange of equivalents, doesn't mean unequal exchange doesn't also persist as a discrete phenomenon. Assuming equivalents are actually exchanged feels very Capital vol. 1 -brained.

But I'm curious if anyone who knows this subject better could help me work through it.

This is an underestimate. It includes China (which I'd argue isn't being exploited), Israel, Iceland and Monaco as global North.

Workers in the global South contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, and 91% of labour for international trade.

The South provides the majority of the world's labour in all sectors (including 93% of global manufacturing labour).

jesus I knew it was bad but not that bad