Every four years the Olympics give us a demonstration of human skills, determination and intelligence. Athletes from around the world compete for honours: yet in each Olympics, it seems, only a handful of countries take home the bulk of the medals. We could reasonably expect raw human ability to be evenly distributed around the globe, and yet, the Olympics shows us that of the 200 countries and territories that compete, US, China, Australia and some European nations will win most of the events.
Racists would attribute this to some sort of inherent national ability and superiority on the part of those nations. Of course, there are more sensible explanations. The Olympics represent the sporting culture of the countries that established them: people in many countries just do not have the same interest in these sports. In many countries, there is not the participation, much less the infrastructure, to find and train the most able sports people.
Engagement in sport requires the time to train, and billions of people around the world are tied to long working weeks (and many of those simply do not have the diet available to realise their sporting potential). On top of which, some states, like the UK, spend millions on training, supporting and honing their athletes.
Further, some states are able to attract talent through migration, offering opportunities and citizenship that others cannot match.
The participation of the other countries is essential to the spectacle, though: after all, for someone to come first someone has to come second, or even last. In many ways, the Olympics can be seen as a mechanism to transfer sporting glory from a global majority to a minority.
North and south
As such, it serves as a good metaphor for the way that wealth is concentrated internationally. In July this year, Hickle, Lemos and Barbour published a paper in the journal Nature Communications entitled Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy. In it they argue ‘wealthy nations rely on a large net appropriation of labour and resources from the rest of the world through unequal exchange in international trade and global commodity chains’.
They analysed data, from 2021, showing the global breakdowns of types of labour performed, and the relative prices/wage costs of that labour. Around the world, they suggest that 9.6 trillion hours of labour were performed in the world economy. 2.1 trillion hours went into traded goods (including services). They divided the world into the global North (based on the IMF list of advanced economies: USA, United Kingdom, etc) and the global South (all other countries).
The overall net balance of trade was in favour of the global North, amounting to 826 billion hours of labour transferred from South to North. They note there is no sectoral imbalance (ie, the global South is not just producing primary products, but also intermediate and finished goods for consumption). The South is not just performing unskilled labour, but highly skilled labour across the full range of economic activities, and ‘This appropriation roughly doubles the labour that is available for Northern consumption but drains the South of productive capacity that could be used instead for local human needs and development’.
They explain that the:
‘Dynamics of unequal exchange are understood to have intensified in the 1980s and 1990s with the imposition of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) across the global South. SAPs devalued Southern currencies, cut public employment and removed labour and environmental protections, imposing downward pressure on wages and prices. They also curtailed industrial policy and state-led investment in technological development and compelled Southern governments to prioritise “export-oriented” production in highly competitive sectors and in subordinate positions within global commodity chains. At the same time, lead firms in the core states have shifted industrial production to the global South to take direct advantage of cheaper wages and production costs, while leveraging their dominance within global commodity chains to squeeze the wages and profits of Southern producers. These interventions have further increased the North’s relative purchasing power over Southern labour and goods’.
That is, through control of international institutions and control of finance. We could add in the raw power of ownership, as many industries when decolonisation occurred still belonged to Northern capitalists. We could add naked corruption as another mechanism. And some capitalists in the periphery choose to invest their profits in the North rather than locally. Although not included in their list, we can add military dominance as well, as some Northern states will use force to ensure their position in the global chains, as well as providing the military resources that prop up rulers in the global South.
Hickle et al find that ‘Southern wages are 87–95% less than Northern wages at the same skill level, ie, for equal work as defined by the ILO. Southern wages are 87% less for high-skill labour, 93% less for medium-skill labour, and 95% less for low-skill labour’. This is also part of the driver for imbalanced trade. They conclude:
‘Given this dynamic, it is clear that the North’s development model cannot be universalised, as it relies on appropriation from elsewhere. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the North’s current levels of aggregate consumption could be maintained under fair trade conditions’.
And as they note:
‘It should be understood that unequal exchange is ultimately driven by the corporations and investors that control supply chains, and the states that determine the rules of international trade and finance, not by workers or consumers’.
Globalised workforce
There is a clear class issue here. The 9.6 trillion hours of labour that the authors calculate are performed in the world economy are performed by a globalised workforce that is being exploited through producing more value through their work than it costs in wages to maintain and reproduce their ability to work. Capitalists, North and South, compete to grab a share of this surplus value. What the authors have in effect uncovered is how successful, and how, the capitalists of the North have been in this struggle at the expense of the capitalists of the South.
They also calculate that ‘globally, labour received, on average, 51.6% of world GDP during the 5-year period 2017–2021’ and that this represents a global decline in the share going to labour. But it does not follow that a more equal sharing between the capitalists of the North and South of the 48.4% up for them to grab would alter this.
Pik Smeet
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