In
this article, we aim to demonstrate that the low prices of goods produced in
the global South and the attendant modest contribution of its exports to the
Gross Domestic Product of the North conceals the real dependence of the
latter’s economies on low-waged Southern labor. We argue that the relocation of
industry to the global South in the past three decades has resulted in a
massive increase of transferred value to the North. The principal mechanisms
for this transfer are the repatriation of surplus value by means of foreign
direct investment, the unequal exchange of products embodying different
quantities of value, and extortion through debt servicing.
The
incorporation of huge Southern economies into a capitalist world system
dominated by global North-based transnational corporations and financial
institutions has established the former as socially disarticulated export
dependencies. The miserably low wage rates within these economies is predicated
upon (1) the pressure imposed by their exports having to compete for limited
shares of the largely metropolitan consumer market; (2) the drain of value and
natural resources that might otherwise be used to build up the productive
forces of the national economy; (3) the unresolved land question creating an
oversupply of labor; (4) repressive comprador governments, who benefit from and
accept the neoliberal order and are therefore unable and unwilling to grant
wage rises for fear of spurring workers’ demands for greater political power;
and (5) militarized borders preventing the movement of workers to the global
North and, hence, an equalization of returns to labor.
The Imperialist Globalization of Production
The debate on value transfer and unequal exchange is not new. Today, however, an increasingly large proportion of the goods the world consumes are produced in the global South. Production is not, as in the 1970s, limited to primary and simple industrial goods like oil, minerals, coffee, and toys. Rather, despite relatively low manufacturing “value added” (of which more below), virtually all types of industrial inputs and outputs are produced in the global South: these include chemicals, fabricated metal goods, machinery and electrical machinery, electronics, furniture and transport equipment to textiles, shoes, clothes, tobacco, and fuels.1 But why, and how, has this shift in the location of production happened?
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| Italiano |
The Imperialist Globalization of Production
The debate on value transfer and unequal exchange is not new. Today, however, an increasingly large proportion of the goods the world consumes are produced in the global South. Production is not, as in the 1970s, limited to primary and simple industrial goods like oil, minerals, coffee, and toys. Rather, despite relatively low manufacturing “value added” (of which more below), virtually all types of industrial inputs and outputs are produced in the global South: these include chemicals, fabricated metal goods, machinery and electrical machinery, electronics, furniture and transport equipment to textiles, shoes, clothes, tobacco, and fuels.1 But why, and how, has this shift in the location of production happened?
The
change in the international division of labor is a product of capitals’
perennial quest for higher profits and is based, first, on enormous growth in
the number of proletarians integrated into the capitalist world system and,
second, on the substantive industrialization of the South over the past three
decades. This was made possible by the dissolution of the Soviet and Eastern
European “actually existing socialist” economies, the opening of China to
global capitalism, and the outsourcing of production to India, Indonesia,
Vietnam, Brazil, Mexico, and other newly industrializing countries. The result
was an increase of at least one billion low-wage proletarians within global
capitalism. Today over 80 percent of the industrial workers in the world are located
in the global South, while the proportion falls steadily in the North (see
Chart 1). We may be living in post-industrial societies in the North, but the
world as a whole is more industrial than ever.
Chart 1. The Global Industrial Workforce, 1950–2010
 |
| Sources: John Smith, “Imperialism and the Law of Value,”Global Discourse 2, no. 1 (2011): 20, https://globaldiscourse.files.wordpress.com. The 2010 industrial workforce data was extrapolated from 2008 sectoral distribution of workforce in the International Labor Organization’s (ILO)Key Indicators of the Labor Market (KILM), 6th edition (ILO, 2010); Economically Active Population (EAP) from the ILO’s Laborsta database, http://laborsta.ilo.org/default.html; and projection of “more developed regions” industrial workforce includes the ILO estimate of recession-induced decline. The ILO categories “More” and “Less” developed regions roughly correspond to the contemporary categories “Developed” and “Developing” economies, respectively. |
The
industrialization of the South was not anticipated by the dependency theory of
the 1960s and ’70s. It held that the capitalist center must block any advanced
industrial development in the so-called periphery, so that it remains a
supplier of raw materials, tropical agricultural products, and labor-intensive
simple industrial production, which is to be exchanged for the advanced
industrial products of the center. Few analysts had foreseen the
industrialization of the South as driven by trade with and investment by
metropolitan capitalism.
However,
the South’s industrialization came to provide a (temporary) solution to
capitalism’s economic and political malaise in the 1970s, manifested on one
side by a declining rate of profit, the oil crisis, and pressure from the labor
movement in the North for ever-higher wages and, on the other, by the national
liberation struggles of the South. Yet the South’s industrialization was not a
concession to its demands; quite the contrary. Rather than a step towards a more
equal world, it has resulted in a deepening of imperialist relations on a
global scale.
This
new imperialist political economy rests on two foundations. First, the
development of new productive forces in electronics, communications, transport,
logistics, and management: computers, the Internet, mobile telephones,
container transport, and the development of globalized production chains with
newly minted management regimes. Second, the development of neoliberalism with
the removal of national barriers for the movement of capital and goods, the
privatization of public and commons spheres, the establishment of new global
institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), G-meetings, and other
forms of global political management, and new military strategies aimed at
containing and rolling back the spread of national and socialist developmentalism.
In
this new accumulation regime, it is not only capital and trade in finished
goods which have become transnational; production itself has become globalized
in value chains. The sub-processes in the production chain are located in those
places where the cost of production, infrastructure, and tax laws are optimal
for capital. A car or a computer is produced using inputs and components from
hundreds of firms, located in many countries, and the product may be assembled
in different parts of the world.
Neoliberalism
has brought about a new global division of labor in which the global South has
become “the workshop of the world.” Global capitalism increasingly polarizes
the world into Southern “production economies” and Northern “consumption
economies.” The main driver behind this process is unquestionably the low wage
level in the South. As such, the structure of today’s global economy has been
profoundly shaped by the allocation of labor to industrial sectors according to
differential rates of exploitation internationally.
The
enticement for big business to outsource production or to invest in Greenfield
projects in the South is considerable. The difference in wage levels is not
just a factor of one to two, but often one to ten or fifteen.2 Indeed, in
2010, of the world’s three-billion-strong workforce, approximately 942 million
were classified by the International Labor Organization (ILO) as “working poor”
(almost one-in-three workers worldwide live on under $2 a day).3
According
to World Bank economist Branko Milanović (see Chart 2), in 1870 global
inequality between world citizens was considerably less than it is today. More
strikingly still, from being predominantly driven by class (that is, in
Milanović‘s non-Marxist conception, the share of national income), inequality
today is driven almost entirely by location, the latter contributing 80 percent
of global inequality. Thus, he writes, “it is much more important, globally
speaking, whether you are lucky enough to be born in a rich country than
whether the income class to which you belong in a rich country is high, medium
or low.”4 What is not
said is that the geography of inequality is the product of the economic, legal,
military, and political structures of past colonialism and latter-day
neocolonialism. These historical factors form the basis for the class struggle
that determines what Marx referred to as the “historical and moral” aspect of
wage levels.
Chart 2. The Level and Composition of Global Inequality in 1870 and 2000 (Gini Decomposition)
 |
| Sources: Branko Milanović,The Haves and Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 112; Francois Bourguignon and Christian Morrison, “The Size Distribution of Income Among World Citizens, 1820–1990,”American Economic Review 92, no. 4 (September 2002): 724–44; Branko Milanović,Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), fig. II.3. |
The low level of wages in the South creates not just a higher global rate of profit than would otherwise be obtained; it also affects the price of goods produced in the South. In mainstream economics, the formation of the market prices for a personal computer through the production chain could be described as a “smiling curve” for “value” (sic) added (see Chart 3).5“Value added”—which in mainstream theory is simply equivalent to the new added income measured in conventional price terms—is high in the first part of the chain, with highly paid research and development, design, and financial management located in the North, whereas the curve falls in the middle, with low-wage labor in the South producing the physical product. Value added/price rises again towards the end of the curve with branding, marketing, and sales taking place in the North, despite wages for retail workers being amongst the lowest in those countries.
Chart 3. Wages, Value, and Price Formation along the Global Production Chain
In
the logic of the “smiling curve,” the main part of the value of the product is
added in the North, while the labor in the South, which manufactures the goods,
contributes only a minimal portion thereof. According to this view,
multinational corporations perform a public service by reducing the price of
consumer goods. In truth, however, low market prices for such goods conceal the
fact that workers have to live in miserable conditions due to the low wages and
grueling working conditions in the Southern part of the production chains.
In
Marxist terms, by contrast, value is the sum of direct and indirect
socially necessary labor time that has gone into producing a commodity (in
the form of currently performed or “living labor” and capital or “dead labor,”
respectively). Although, as we will see, the market price of a commodity
regularly diverges from its value, it is ultimately determined by value. Thus
if one were to draw the curve for the Marxist concept of value added, in a
production chain for computers, it would take more or less the opposite form of
the smile curve—a kind of “sour smiley” (see Chart 3). But if there is a
correlation between value in the Marxist sense and the market price, how does
this transformation from the sour smiley of value to the happy smiley of market
price take place?
The Value–Price Transformation
Irrespective
of other differences between economic theories, they tend to agree that the
price of production of a commodity is equal to the price of the material inputs
plus the remuneration of those who are bestowed with a claim on a part of the
value of said production. This second part is subdivided into the part accruing
to wages and the part accruing to all other claims: profit, rent, interest,
etc.
But
what is the independent variable of the economy that determines prices? In
neoclassical economics, the ultimate determinant is “the market,” that is, the
subjective needs and preferences of the consumer. These needs and preferences
determine the prices of the final goods and these, in turn, determine wage
costs and profit levels. Accordingly, prices serve the purpose of measuring
demand in the market and arise through exchange between competitive traders.
By
contrast, Marxist value theory situates the determination of prices on the
production side of the economy. The cost of production, or cost price, is the
stepping stone in the transition from value to market price. The cost price of
a product consists of the costs of “constant” capital (raw materials, machines,
buildings, fixed plant, etc.) and “variable” capital (that is, wages). On top
of the cost price, the market price must cover at least the average rate of
profit. This is because commodities need to be produced and reproduced
continually, and if capitalists do not recover the cost of production plus a
profit when they sell, (re)production stops. Therefore, in Marxist economics
market price reflects the cost of (re)production.
How
do we measure the cost of production, that is, the inputs required to produce a
commodity? We cannot use prices in general to measure inputs, since prices are
what we are trying to explain in the first place. One thing, however, is common
to all inputs to a commodity: human labor. All market prices in a capitalist
economy are in the final instance tied to the extent of consumption of labor.
What Marx called “living labor,” or labor-power, is no ordinary product. Its
price—the wage—is determined not only by reproduction costs (its own cost of
production: food, housing, education, and so on), but also by political
struggles—class struggle—reflecting power relations between classes and groups
in society. Thus whilst supply and demand can give the final touch, the basic
factor underlying market price is the cost of (re)production, and with it the
price of labor-power.
For
Marx, the prices of standard commodities are determined by their values. In
competing with rivals for profit shares, firms must reduce the necessary labor
time required to produce commodities by introducing the latest technologies.
Competition within a sector leads to the formation of standard prices for
standard commodities, whilst competition across industrial sectors results in
the appropriation of an average rate of profit by standard producers within
each. Added to the cost of production, this average rate of profit generates
the prices of production as “modified” market values.6
The
price of production of a specific commodity, however, is not the same as its
value, though the aggregate price of all commodities is the same as aggregate
value. Workers in different firms paid the same wage rates and working the same
hours each day create the same sums of surplus value, that is, the
difference between the time the worker spends reproducing their own labor-power
and the total time they are employed. As such, we might expect more
labor-intensive firms to create the most surplus value and, hence, command the
highest rates of profit. The movement of capital between firms and industrial
sectors, and the resultant changes in supply and demand, however, ensures that
price levels ultimately settle around the point at which the rate of profit is
the same in all industries.
As
capital is withdrawn from industries with low rates of profit and invested in
those with higher rates, output (supply) in the former declines and its prices
rise above the actual sums of value and surplus value the particular industry
produces, and conversely. Thus capitals with different organic compositions
(the ratio between constant and variable capital) ultimately sell commodities
at average prices and surplus value is distributed more or less uniformly
across the branches of production according to the total capital—constant and variable—advanced.7An average rate of
profit is formed by competing capitals’ continuous search for higher profits
and the flight of capital to and from those industrial sectors producing
commodities in high or low demand. Overall, where one commodity sells for less
than its value there is a corresponding sale of another commodity for more than
its value.
It is
through their transformation into market prices that value and surplus value
are distributed among capitalists within and between sectors. The uneven
distribution of value occurs because of high/low organic and value compositions
of capital, rent extracted through both monopoly and monopsony, relative
productivity, and the tendency towards equalization of profit rates. It occurs
between capital and labor through the respective shares—profits and wages—each
receives as a result of prevailing class relations. Crucially, it also occurs
between nations because of differences between the national market price of
labor capacity (the wage) and the market price of those goods which labor consumes
(the wage bundle).
The Global Framework
Today,
the prices of production are determined on a global scale insofar as capital
has the ability to circulate transnationally to secure the highest profit on
its investment. The mobility of capital across national borders and the
tendency towards an equalization of the rate of profit, despite massively
divergent rates of exploitation (the ratio between the labor time necessary to
produce labor capacity and the concrete labor expended), is the precondition
for the formation of global prices of production. As Marxist economist Henryk
Grossman noted:
In effect price formation on the world market is governed by the same principles that apply under a conceptually isolated capitalism. The latter anyway is merely a theoretical model; the world market, as a unity of specific national economies, is something real and concrete. Today the prices of the most important raw materials and final products are determined internationally, in the world market. We are no longer confronted by a national level of prices but a level determined on the world market.8
The
accumulation of capital takes place on a world scale to the extent to which
there exist no legal or political impediments to free trade and investment. As
capitalist relations of production advance, the value created by labor at the
world level is linked to the world “average” level of development of the
productive forces. According to Nicholas:
For Marx, as soon as a good becomes integral to the reproduction of an economic system based on exchange, the labor expended in its production becomes part of the labor required for the reproduction of the whole system and qualitatively equivalent to all other labor expended in the production of all other goods which are similarly integral to the reproduction of the economic system.9
This
holds true both for national and international economies. However, the price of
labor-power—the wage—differs enormously on the global level between North and
South.
In a
world where the market price of goods tends to be global while the market price
of labor capacity varies because of class struggle—both historical and
contemporary—the result is a redistribution of value from countries with a low
market price for labor capacity to countries with a high market price for such.
Thus imperialism must be explained in the context of the transformation of
value into price. To claim that this shifts the concept of exploitation from
the sphere of production to that of circulation, however, is disingenuous.
It is
human labor that creates value and surplus labor that creates surplus value.
However, (surplus) value is not a physical property that labor adds to goods
like some kind of molecule incorporated and stored in the product. Rather,
value and the transformation of value into market price is the result of social
relations between labor and capital and between different capitals. It is the
transformation from value to market price that ensures that the accumulation
process continues on an expanded scale. This expanded circuit of capital
involves the transformation of value and surplus value into profit, and the
transfer of value from the South to North according to the low prices paid for
goods produced in the former by the latter. Exploitation does not, therefore,
occur in one particular sector of production or national economy; it is the
result of the total global capital accumulation process.
We
may now move from these theoretical considerations to a specific example of this
dynamic, namely, the globalized production of the ubiquitous Apple iPad.
The Core of the Apple
On
the basis of detailed research carried out by Kraemer, Linden, and Dedrich10 into
Apple’s production chains, Donald A. Clelland has analyzed the size and
transfer of value within the world system through the mechanism of market
price.11
The
iPad is produced by Apple, a U.S.-based company. Between mid-2010 and mid-2011,
Apple sold a little more than 100 million iPads. Apple is the exemplary
instance of a “fabless”—fabricationless—company. Apple develops, designs,
patents, and sells computers and communications equipment while it outsources
the actual manufacturing process of the goods it sells. All iPads are assembled
in China. Apple has integrated 748 suppliers of materials and components into
its production chain, 82 percent of them based in Asia—351 of which are in
China.12
At
each node in the production chain, there are inputs of materials to which are
added wages, management, overhead costs, and profits. The total monetized price
of these factors, in all nodes of the chain, equals the sales price. This is
what Clelland calls the “bright value” in a commodity chain.13
The
market price of an iPad in 2010–2011 was $499, with the factory price being
$275. Of the factory price, barely $33 went to production wages in the South,
while fully $150 of Apple’s gross profit margin went to high design, marketing,
and administrative salaries, as well as research and development and operating
costs sustained mainly in the global North.14 The
distribution of this “value” in wage and profits is well represented by the
“smile curve.”
However,
the capitalist world-economy takes the form of an iceberg. The most studied
part—the “bright value” appearing above the surface—is supported by a huge
underlying structure that is out of sight. Unlike the iceberg, the
world-economy is a dynamic system based on flows of value from the underside
toward the top—from South to North. These flows include drains that take two
forms: visible monetized flows of bright value and hidden flows that carry
“dark value” generated by the unrecorded value of cheap labor and labor reproduction
by the informal—non-wage-labor—sector and unpaid ecological externalities. The
term “dark value” is inspired by the recognition by physicists that ordinary
matter and energy account for only 5 percent of the known universe, “dark
matter” and “dark energy” account for the rest. Just as unaccounted dark energy
drives the expansion of the universe, “dark value” is hidden, uncompensated
labor that drives the expansion of the capitalist world-system.15
If
the iPad were to be assembled in the United States, the wage cost of production
would not be $45 but $442. And if we go one step deeper into the production
structure of the iPad, into the sub-components and raw materials inputs, we
learn that most of these material inputs are also produced in the South with an
approximate wage-cost of $35 per iPad. If this production also took place in
the United States, its wage cost would be approximately $210.
The
workers in Apple’s iPad production chain are not paid less because their
productivity is lower than that of workers in the North. In fact, they are
probably more productive. Apple’s suppliers are world leaders employing
state-of-the-art technology. Their managerial personnel drive employees using
Taylorist methods and longer work weeks not legally tolerated in the North.
Suppliers organize schedules to intensify worker productivity, with daily
shifts of twelve hours and tight speedup supervision being routine. Working
weeks surpass sixty hours because workers are required to work overtime
exceeding legal regulations.16 Thus it is
not surprising that in 2011 when Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, was asked at a
White House dinner by President Obama “What would it take for Apple to bring
its manufacturing home?” Jobs replied: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”17
By
the time a commodity has gone through numerous nodes of a global chain to
arrive at the doorstep of the consumer, it has incorporated not only the inputs
of low-paid labor-power but also massive amounts of underpaid and unpaid labor
and ecological inputs. Capitalists drain hidden surpluses from household and
informal-sector activities. A long dark-value chain of food producers and
informal-sector activities is needed to generate the productive capacity and
the survival maintenance of every waged laborer. This flow of dark value lowers
the reproduction costs of peripheral labor and, thus, the wage level that
capitalists pay. These household and informal sectors are not outside
capitalism, but are intrinsic components of global commodity chains.
Ecological
degradation, pollution, and depletion comprise an array of externalities
through which Apple suppliers extract dark value. Each iPad uses thirty-three
pounds of minerals (some of which are rare and limited in supply), seventy-nine
gallons of water, and enough fossil fuel–based electricity to generate
sixty-six pounds of carbon dioxide. Moreover, the production of an iPad
generates 105 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions.18 All of
these ecological burdens are put on the shoulders of China and other Asian
countries, while the product is consumed in the North. Ecological degradation
is an externality that is embedded in the iPad as dark value. Looking only at
pollution costs, Clelland estimates that Apple escapes the costs of $190 per
unit that it would have to pay in the United States for ecological
externalities.19 Capitalism
is dependent upon, even driven by, all these forms of dark value. These factors
never appear in the accounting of production costs; they are invisible “gifts”
to capitalists and to buyers.
Marx
thought that the value of labor-power must decline with the increased
productivity of labor, and that where it did not, the tendential fall in the
general rate of profit thus occasioned must intensify. Under imperialism and
the global system of national oppression established thereby, however, monopoly
capital is able to guarantee low cost prices for workers’ consumption goods
produced by superexploited labor in the South. Alongside the parallel
cheapening of constant capital through low cost intermediate and raw materials
goods imports, the sale of inexpensive consumer goods imports to (superwaged)
workers in the imperialist countries cheapens the value of labor-power there,
thus increasing the level of supposed “surplus value” produced locally. As such,
northern workers appear to be more productive in terms of the profits they
generate. In terms of “productivity,” however, the principal measure of
“productivity” is not “value added” per hour of labor—this depending upon sales
prices inflated by monopoly, transfer pricing, unequal exchange, and state,
military, and police intervention to repress labor costs overseas—but hourly
labor costs relative to profits generated at the global level.
Contrary
to the claims of many metropolitan labor activists, then, it is not only
capitalists in the North who benefit materially from the superexploitation of
low-wage southern labor. “In the case of the iPad, most of the expropriated
dark value is realized, not as corporate profit, but as consumer surplus in the
form of cheaper goods. Consequently, the core citizen becomes an unwitting [?—authors]
beneficiary of this exploitative system when (s)he uses one waged hour to
purchase a product that embodies many more lower-waged and unpaid hours and
many under-valued material and ecological inputs.”20
The Political Perspective
The
political perspective established by the present analysis is that the potential
for revolutionary change in the twenty-first century arises from the South.
There hundreds of millions of new industrial proletarians concentrated in
factories under severe conditions are being paid an incredibly low wage,
wholesale corporate land privatization is depriving millions of poor farmers of
land and income (they are then forced to seek back-breaking employment at the
most meagre wage), and the difference between Northern and Southern living
conditions is plain for all to see, thanks to the globalization of information
and media exposure.21
This
contradiction must eventually manifest itself in anti-capitalist movements
towards (and beyond) socialism. In the global South reside those classes with
both the objective interest and the capacity to resist global neoliberalism.
Similar to the wave of anti-colonial national liberation movements that erupted
across the Third World from 1945 to 1975, we foresee the possibility of a new
wave of anti-capitalist movements in the coming years.
Owing
to the central position of the new proletariat in the South, its strength in
the global economy is much greater than it was under the wave of national
liberation that swept the world in the 1960s and ’70s. However, the political
realization of that strength is not at all given. The subjective forces are not
in place either in the South or in the North. As such, the task of the global
left is huge. In the 1970s, millions struggled and died for socialism. Today
those fighting for socialism are comparatively few. Socialism is not a strong
“brand.” The division of the globe into South and North is reflected in a
division of the global working class, so that a section thereof is provided
with enormous economic and political benefits that have helped secure its
allegiance to the imperialist status quo. This allegiance is, of course,
bolstered by consumers’ acceptance of the propaganda of state and corporate
media monopolies. It is one of the most profound problems facing today’s
socialist forces globally.
To
tackle these problems we must first take a global perspective on the struggle
so as to match the globalization of capital. Only from this global perspective
can we work out effective local strategy and tactics. To try to find lucrative
solutions to the present crisis by means of national protectionism (whether of
the social-democratic, “green,” or fascist varieties) is not only
anti-solidarity, it is also a loser’s strategy—an inevitable race to the
bottom.
Notes
1. ↩United
Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), “Table 8.4. Developing and
Developed Countries’ Share of Global Manufacturing Value Added by Industry
Sector, Selected Years, 1995–2009 (percent),” Industrial Development
Report 2011 (New
York: United Nations, 2011), http://unido.org
, 146; see also “Table 8.7. Share of Manufacturing Employment for
Developing and Developed Countries, by Industry Sector, Selected Periods Over
1993–2008 (percent),” 151.
2. ↩Zak Cope, Divided World Divided Class:
Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labor under Capitalism, second
edition (Montréal, Quebec: Kersplebedeb, 2015), 378–82.
3. ↩Benjamin
Selwyn, “Twenty-First-Century International Political
Economy: A Class-Relational Perspective,”European Journal of International Relations (December 3, 2014): 1–25, http://academia.edu.
4. ↩Branko
Milanović, The Haves and Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of
Global Inequality (New
York: Basic Books, 2011), 113.
5. ↩The smiling
curve was first proposed by Stan Shih, the
founder of Acer, around
1992. According to Shih’s observation, in the personal computer industry, both
ends of the value chain command higher values added to the product than the
middle part of the value chain. If this phenomenon is presented in a graph with
a Y-axis for value-added and an X-axis for value chain (stage of production),
the resulting curve has the shape of a smile.
6. ↩Howard
Nicholas, Marx’s Theory of Price and Its Modern Rivals (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 30, 39–40.
7. ↩Marx refers
variously to thetechnical composition of capital, thevalue, or price, composition of capital, and the
organic composition of capital. He writes: “I call the value
composition of capital, in so far as [emphasis added] it is determined by
its technical composition and mirrors the changes of the latter, theorganic composition of capital.” As Paul Zarembka
has written, however, the qualifier is a significant one since the value of
labor-power (variable capital) “can change with-out any change in the technical
composition in circumstances in which workers themselves can receive more or
less, while producing with the same technology.” See Paul Zarembka,
“Materialized Composition of Capital and its Stability in the United States:
Findings Stimulated by Paitaridis and Tsoulfidis (2012),”Review of Radical Political Economics 47, no. 1 (2015): 106–11. For Marx, as
capital (dead labor) accumulates and is increasingly employed relative to
living labor, the organic composition of capital rises and the rate of profit
tends to fall.
8. ↩Henry
Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (London: Pluto Press, 1992; originally
1929), 170.
9. ↩Howard
Nicholas, “Marx’s Theory of International Price and Money; An Interpretation,”
in Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, eds., Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
10. ↩Kenneth L.
Kraemer, Greg Linden, and Jason Dedrick, “Capturing Value in the Global Networks:
Apple´s iPad and Phone,” University of California,
July 2011, http://pcic.merage.uci.edu.
11. ↩Donald A.
Clelland, “The Core of the Apple: Dark Value and Degrees of Monopoly in the
Commodity Chains,”Journal of World-Systems Research20, no. 1 (2014):
82–111.
12. ↩Ibid, 83.
13. ↩Ibid, 86.
14. ↩Ibid, 88,
with figures drawn from analysis of data in Kenneth Kraemer, Greg Linden, and
Jason Dedrick, “Capturing Value in Global Networks,”
Personal Computing Industry Center, University of California–Irvine, 2011, http://pcic.merage.uci.edu.
15. ↩Clelland,
“The Core of the Apple,” 85.
16. ↩Ibid, 97.
17. ↩Ibid, 98.
18. ↩Ibid, 102.
19. ↩Ibid, 103.
20. ↩Ibid, 105.
21. ↩In discussing
the findings of theInternational Labor Organisation Global Wages Report 2014,
Patrick Belser notes: “wage growth in developed economies almost stands at
zero, and global wages are growing by 2 percent. If you take China out of the
equation, the global wage growth is quite simply cut in half.” See Patrick
Belser, “Fiscal Redistribution: Yes, but Inequality
Starts in the Labor Market: Findings from the ILO Global Wage Report 2014/2015,”Global Labor Column, 2014, http://column.global-labor-university.org.
At this rate of growth, we may generously assume that wage levels in the global
South will catch up with those in the global North, where they are at least ten
times higher on average, in about 500 years.
Torkil Lauesen has been an
anti-imperialist activist and writer since the late 1960s. His publications in
English include “It’s All About Politics,” as well as an interview with
him—both of which can be found in Turning Money into Rebellion, edited by Gabriel
Kuhn (PM Press, 2014).
Zak Cope is the author of Divided
World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour
under Capitalism (Montréal, Canada: Kersplebedeb, 2012 and 2015) and
co-editor, with Immanuel Ness, of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism
and Anti-Imperialism(Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in fall 2015).
Título en italiano: “L’imperialismo e la trasformazione dei
valori in prezzi”
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