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#Post#: 32408--------------------------------------------------
Evilness of Western Civilization, Economic Explanations
DIR By: antihellenistic
Date: March 24, 2026, 11:20 pm
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Evilness of Western Civilization, Economic Explanations
--- Quote ---
> Highlights
>
> • Rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of
resources from the global South.
>
> • Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in
Northern prices.
>
> • The South’s losses outstrip their aid receipts by a factor
of 30.
>
> • Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and
global inequality.
>
> • The impact of excess resource consumption in the North is
offshored to the South.
>
> ....
>
> Emmanuel and Amin argued that unequal exchange enables a
“hidden transfer of value” from the global South to the global
North, or from periphery to core, which takes place subtly and
almost invisibly, without the overt coercion of the colonial
apparatus and therefore without provoking moral outrage. Prices
are naturalized on the grounds that they represent “utility”, or
“value”, or the outcome of “market mechanisms” such as supply
and demand, obscuring the extent to which they are determined by
power imbalances in the global political economy. Price
differentials in international trade therefore function as an
effective method of maintaining the patterns of appropriation
that once overtly defined the colonial economy, allowing blame
for “underdevelopment” to be shifted onto the victims.
>
> This pattern remains entrenched despite the fact that, with
the rise of neoliberal globalization in the 1980s, manufacturing
has shifted overwhelmingly to the global South, to the point
where Southern countries contribute the vast majority of the
world’s industrial labour and industrial production (Smith,
2016). Northern appropriation from the South comprises resources
and labour embodied not only in primary commodities but also in
manufactured goods, including high-technology products such as
smartphones, computer chips, cars, designer fashion, etc., along
with intermediate parts. Most of this appropriation occurs
through global commodity chains, wherein Northern firms deploy
monopsony and monopoly power to depress Southern suppliers’
prices at every node, from extraction to manufacture, while
setting final prices as high as possible (Suwandi, 2019,
Clelland, 2014).
>
> ...
>
> We know that excess energy and material consumption in
high-income nations, facilitated by appropriation from the rest
of the world, is causing ecological breakdown on a global scale.
Tracing flows of resources embodied in trade allows us to
determine the extent to which Northern appropriation is
responsible for ecological impacts in the South; i.e.,
ecological debt (Roberts and Parks, 2009, Warlenius et al.,
2015, Hornborg and Martinez-Alier, 2016).
>
>
HTML https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S095937802200005X-gr1.jpg
>
> ...
>
> ...Net flows of material resources from South to North mean
that much of the impact of material consumption in the North
(43% of it, net of trade) is suffered in the South. The damage
is offshored.
>
> ...
>
> Our results indicate that most of the North’s excess
consumption (58% of it) is sustained by net appropriation from
the global South; without this appropriation, material use in
high-income nations would be much closer to the sustainable
level.
>
> ...
>
> Once we have established the scale of physical drain from the
South, the question becomes how best to represent the value of
this drain in monetary terms. This is a fraught terrain, because
the value of resources and labour cannot be quantified in
dollars, and there is no such thing as a “correct” price. Prices
under capitalism do not reflect value or utility in any
objective way. Rather, they reflect, among other things, the
(im)balance of power between market agents (capital and labour,
core and periphery, lead firms and their suppliers, etc); in
other words, they are a political artefact. In the process of
production, the primary objective of capital is to depress the
prices of inputs as much as possible, and, in the absence of any
countervailing political force, ideally toward zero. Indeed,
this is the process that enables appropriation through global
commodity chains and international trade. Quantifying value
transfer therefore is not a matter of measuring the use-value
(much less the ecological value) of appropriated resources and
labour, or defining what the South could earn under fairer
conditions, or determining how existing income should be
apportioned. Rather, it is a matter of representing the drain in
terms of existing market prices within capitalism. While prices
by definition do not reflect value, they do allow us to compare
the scale of drain to prevailing monetary representations of
production and income in the world economy.
>
> ...
>
> The dominant explanation for wage inequalities hinges on
productivity differences: Northern exports have higher
“value-added” because they embody higher labour productivity,
the argument goes (e.g., Subasat, 2013). But this argument is
tautological, and there is no evidence for the underlying claim.
The conventional metric of productivity (GDP per unit of labour)
is determined by prices, not by workers’ actual productivity
(Fischer, 2011, Fix, 2018).
>
> The disjuncture between wages and productivity is revealed by
data on unit labour costs. The gap between unit labour costs in
Northern and Southern economies demonstrates that the difference
in wages is greater than the difference in productivity. In
other words, wage inequalities exist not because Southern
workers are less productive but because they are more
intensively exploited, and often subject to rigid systems of
labour control and discipline designed to maximize extraction
(Suwandi et al., 2019). Indeed, this is a major reason why
Northern firms offshore production to the South in the first
place: because labour is cheaper per unit of physical output
(Goldman, 2012).
--- End Quote ---
Source :
Hickel, J., Dorninger, C., Wieland, H., & Suwandi, I. (2022).
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the
global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015. Global
Environmental Change, 73(102467).
HTML https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467
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