Life and Times: The World Unspun (2026)

The Life and Times column from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since I can remember I’ve had a subscription to the New Internationalist magazine. Its watchword, ‘The World Unspun’, marks it out as a campaigning publication which aims to present matters of both local and global importance in as direct and straightforward a way as possible. Its main focus has always been what used to be called the Third World, now more commonly known as the Global South, but it also ranges more widely across issues it sees as vital to humanity as a whole. Its stance is supportive of what it sees as ‘progressive’ movements reflecting a will to see humans across the globe live in a more peaceful and united fashion than at present.

Even if I don’t always necessarily share its analysis of situations and developments, I’ve never found it anything less than a refreshing read with a lively Letters page that’s ready to publish readers’ views, even if in disagreement with its own stance. Over the years some of these letters have come from members of the Socialist Party, including myself. Its 80-odd pages always range widely over a variety of themes, normally of a topical nature, with a layout, presentation and illustrations which are always of the very highest professional standard.

The current edition (Jan-Feb 2026) has as its ‘Big Story’ a series of articles on nuclear weapons and the arms trade, while several short pieces look at, for example, the effects of Hurricane Melissa in Haiti, Malaysia’s round-ups of Rohingya refugees, plans to reinstate the death penalty in Kyrgyzstan, and Trump’s deportation drive in the US. There are reports from Ethiopia, Venezuela, Iran, Peru and India, and its ‘View from Brazil’ is an example of how, while broadly supportive of the more liberal government that recently came to power there, it does not fail to analyse and be critical of how the authorities’ war on drug gangs has led to the deaths of many innocent and poverty-stricken people. Its longest single feature, entitled ‘Neocolonialism in Gaza’ refers to what is happening there as ‘repackaged neocolonialism’ and provides powerful and dramatic descriptions of a war that has not yet fully abated and where ‘365 square kilometers … has been subjected to the equivalent of six times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima’ and ‘the bodies of thousands of slain Palestinian are yet to be recovered’. It warns chillingly of a future in which ‘a site of mass killing’ is turned into ‘a stage for profit’.

And there is much else. For example, an informative and extremely well-formulated and designed 4-page ‘cartoon history’ of Christopher Columbus depicts the horrors that the explorer’s ‘discoveries’ inflicted on countless indigenous people. And there are several pages of book, film and music reviews, and even an ‘Agony Uncle’ column, which, in the current issue, tries to answer in an entirely serious and balanced way a reader’s ‘ethical’ dilemma about cat ownership in the face of the mass killing of birds and other mammals by domestic cats. The regular two-page ‘country profile’ in this issue is on Iran and provides a highly informative and objective sweep of that country’s history and its current situation complemented by interesting and statistical analysis, none of which is complimentary to the current regime there. The magazine also contains a certain amount of advertising, mainly for ‘ethically’ produced goods and services, some of them coming from the New Internationalist cooperative itself.

While the overall thrust of the New Internationalist is what socialists would see as reformist in its support for political and social reforms and gradual improvements in economic conditions for the working majority, it does not seem entirely antagonistic towards the more ambitious objectives of the Socialist Party. This is as instanced by its willingness to publish letters our members have sometimes sent pointing towards a more profound, indeed revolutionary, kind of social change, where the current system of individual states and production for profit would be replaced by a united world society of common ownership, democratic control and free access to all goods and services.

Indeed, I am waiting to see whether a letter I myself have recently sent to the magazine will be published. In it I’ve replied to another reader’s letter which expressed dissatisfaction with the suggestion made in an article that governments throughout the world could be divided into two types: ‘authoritarian regimes’ and ‘liberal democracies’. The reader saw that division as over-simplistic and suggested rather that states should be divided not into two types but into seven according to their political complexion. What I have suggested in my response is that, although such distinctions might be useful for some purposes, what’s far more significant – at least for those of us looking forward to fundamental social change – is not what divides countries and nations according to type of regime but rather the overarching economic system they are all part of (ie capitalism), with its characteristics of wage labour, buying and selling, and tiny minorities owning or controlling the vast majority of the wealth. And this was the case, the letter goes on, whether countries are run along totalitarian lines, or as so-called liberal democracies, or anything in between. It concludes that it’s the economic system as a whole that needs to be got rid of via majority global consciousness and democratic political action and replaced by a society of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and production solely for need.

As I’ve said, the New Internationalist is pretty good at publishing letters that don’t align with their own preoccupations. Will they publish this one? Let’s see.

Howard Moss

Material World: Paycheck to paycheck (2026)

The Material World column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

We’re used to hearing that the overall standard of living in the West is significantly higher than in the countries that make up what used to be known as the ‘Third World’ but are now commonly referred to as the ‘Global South’. For many of these, most sources indicate progress in expanding access to basic necessities such as water, sanitation and health facilities. Yet a recent joint report by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that approximately 1 in 4 people globally, or close to 2.1 billion, lack access to clean drinking water and that this contributes to roughly 3.5 million deaths per year, nearly 400,000 of these children under five.

More broadly, according to an Oxfam International report from June 2025, 3.7 billion of the world’s population, or around 45 percent, live in conditions of moderate or severe food insecurity with over 700 million living on less than 2.15 dollars per day and 3.4 billion living on less than 5.50 dollars per days. This means that many are unlikely to have the money to eat regularly and so will often skimp on food or skip meals. In addition, the business data website Statista has reported on a United Nations estimate that around 1.1 billion people worldwide, including around 50 percent of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are living in slums, described as ‘areas of self-built, unsanitary housing where extreme poverty is rife’.

How does all this compare to the standard of living in what is seen as ‘the richest country in the world’, the USA? We would expect it to be a lot higher overall, and indeed it is. But what are things actually like? Wildly differing figures on living standards, poverty and deprivation are to be found depending on the sources you consult. For example, the CNN Business website recently reported on a Bank of America analysis which estimated that around 1 in 4 (24 percent) of American households are barely getting by – living ‘paycheck to paycheck’, as they put it.

The bank’s statisticians combed through data on millions of customers to track how much they spent on basics such as housing, groceries, childcare and utilities and found it constituted over 95 percent of their income ‘leaving little to nothing left over for the “nice-to-have” things like going out to dinner or taking a vacation, let alone saving’. One of their interviewees who had a degree but was working in a construction business about to shut down is quoted as saying ‘to be 34 and living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, things are pretty crappy right now’.

However, a different survey came up with a quite different result, which was that the proportion of workers living paycheck to paycheck was not 24 percent but 67 percent. This figure emerged from the Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report by the PNC Bank, based on workers aged 21 to 69 working full time at companies with more than 100 employees. It painted a picture of workers struggling to cover everyday expenses, especially with cost of living currently outpacing wage growth. A Newsweek report on this survey quoted Taylor Nelms, vice-president of research and insights at the Financial Health Network, as saying: ‘The percentage of U.S. households that say they spend more or the same as they bring in has been remarkably consistent, hovering around 50 percent over the past several years but right now it’s compounded by high housing costs, insurance premiums, and the return of student loan payments. These are the areas where households feel most squeezed’.

There’s clearly a big difference between these survey results, but whichever figure you take as reliable, it’s clear that many millions of people in the world’s ‘richest country’ are not only not rich but are materially insecure and struggling to keep their heads above water, with some in particularly straightened circumstances. The CNN report highlights some of the typical symptoms of this – people falling behind on their bills, minimum credit card payments being made, an increased percentage of borrowers late on their car loans (referred to as ‘a clear sign of financial distress, especially since car loans are historically the last payments Americans are willing to miss’), and people filing for bankruptcy having incurred large medical debts while ill. Nor does any of this take into account the undoubtedly worse conditions of those who have no employment at all or are homeless or not registered to work. The current estimate of the number of unemployed people is 4.4 percent of the workforce, so 7.6 million people living in even worse circumstances than those ‘just getting by’.

What conclusions can we draw from this? First and foremost that, though wage and salary workers in what is usually considered the most advanced part of the Western world are undoubtedly better off on the whole than their counterparts elsewhere, this does not prevent many of them from suffering poverty and insecurity. And this in a world which, if it were organised rationally (ie, with a system aimed at catering for the needs of all and not the profits of a few), could provide abundantly for all of its 8.3 billion population. Already in fact the world possesses enough productive capacity to eliminate global poverty many times over. Yet this can never happen as long as we have a system – the market system – which ensures vast wealth inequality between the tiny minority of people who own most of the resources and the large majority who own little more than their skills and energies and their ability to sell these for a wage or salary.

It is no kind of aberration, therefore, that the USA has, according to Forbes Magazine, 905 billionaires with a combined wealth of 7.8 trillion dollars and that, according to Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent of households in the United States hold 30.5 percent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of a system (production for profit) that has no mechanism for meeting the basic needs of the whole of humanity and will always fail to do that. This being the case, it is as clear as it can possibly be that the majority of the world’s workers need to take collective and democratic political action to bring that system to an end and replace it by one that will be cooperative, moneyless, wageless and based on free access and production for use.

Howard Moss

Letter: World Wide (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

World Wide

After having received two issues of the Socialist Standard I must say what an excellent magazine it is, exploring the fundamental principles of both capitalism and Socialism. Although I largely agree with the aims of your organization there are a few points in your declaration of principles that I disagree with. (1) The Working class is not confined to those who "produce but do not possess”, as over half of its number work in the so called service industries, and a good many others are on the dole. (2) The population of this country benefit from the exploitation of the less developed countries, just as the capitalist class benefit from the exploitation of the working class, and therefore requiring a majority of the population of this country to be in favour of Socialism before its establishment is, on an international scale, like demanding that a majority of the capitalist class must be in favour beforehand on a national scale. Being a socialist, and therefore an internationalist, I consider this prerequisite of Socialism to be both undemocratic and politically naive. (3) I do not consider that the SPGB is the only party ‘seeking working class emancipation’, and consider that if you accepted this you could play a very constructive part in the victory of revolutionary Socialism in this country. After 73 years I would have thought that you would have realized that there was something wrong with your methods. (4) Socialism, at least in the short term, will not make material poverty 'give place to comfort’ for the majority of this country’s population, as first the discrepancy between our wealth and that of the less developed world has to be rectified. Despite these disagreements I do strongly sympathize with your party and its aims, and would like to find out more about its views.

K. Knight, 

Exeter

Reply:

On point (1): You are correct. The working class is not confined to those employed in manufacturing industries but consists of those who do all of the necessary work of capitalist society. The definition is based not on the kind of work but the need to work. The vast majority own no part of the means of production and distribution and must therefore sell their mental and physical energies. their labour-power, to the capitalist class. Those “on the dole” share the same class relationship to the means of living as their employed fellow-workers.

(2) The capitalist class exploits the working class by paying workers less in wages than the value of the wealth which they as a class produce. Workers in this country (as in the rest of the world) are paid for the value of their labour-power. They do not get a bonus because of conditions in, say, South America. Following the dictates of the system capitalists everywhere seek to invest and trade in the most profitable manner and will take advantage of conditions in the poorer areas of the world. The propertlyless majority in the less developed countries are exploited by their "local" capitalist class.

We do not understand how the requirement that a vast majority of the working class must be in favour of Socialism in order to get it can be undemocratic.

(3) We do not know of any other party, in this country, which has Socialism as its sole aim and there is no other way to working-class emancipation. There are other parties which share some of the same terminology but they are only interested in our support on their terms, i.e. for some short term or reformist aim. We cannot have Socialism until the vast majority of the working class is ready to organize to that end. If it were possible to get Socialism on our own and make the world a present of it we surely would. For 73 years only the SPGB has kept the issue of Socialism clear and alive. During that time the same arguments have rotated in opposition—and workers have followed leaders up the same blind alleys. There is no short cut to the spread of Socialist knowledge. However if you have some fresh ideas or can tell us of some different method we are ready to listen.

(4) We agree with you that the first priority for Socialist society will be to ensure that every human being has enough to eat. Socialism will very quickly solve such problems as hunger by removing the fetters from production.

Editors.

Material World: Taking the gold (2024)

The Material World Column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

World View: U.N. Report – No challenge to capitalism (2002)

From the September 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

But for the damning up-to-date statistics it provides, the recently published 2002 United Nations Human Development report could have been written by any reform-minded political analyst with a knowledge of current and global affairs, for as could be expected there is little here that challenges the functioning of capitalist society and class-based antagonisms. The system itself is not seen as being at fault, but the distribution of political power and the workings of the myriad national and international institutions that operate within capitalism.

United Nations: head in the clouds?

The report tells us that whilst globalisation creates greater interdependence between countries and organisations, the world is far more fragmented, both between the rich and the poor, and between the powerful and the powerless. It informs us that whilst many developing countries are making progress on several fronts, for instance with regard to universal primary education, for much of the world the prospects are bleak, with progress continuing at such a small pace that it will take an estimated 130 years to rid the world of hunger.

Whilst economists hail the growth in new technologies, economic integration and new “economic opportunities”, certain perennial facts are hard to ignore, with 2.8 billion people existing on less that $2 per day and one percent of the world’s population receiving as much income as the poorest 57 percent. And although the proportion of the global population living in “extreme poverty” is said to have fallen from 29 percent to 23 percent – this being accounted for by economic growth in East Asia – the number of people living in extreme poverty has risen in sub-Saharan Africa from 242 million to 300 million, with 20 of these African countries poorer than they were 20 years ago.

To halve the proportion of people living on $1 per day would take an annual 3.7 percent increase in per capita income in developing countries. However, 127 countries with just over a third of the world’s population have not grown at this pace, with their share of the number living in poverty actually increasing.

Formal political equality

In a more interdependent world, argues the report “good governance”, “democracy” and “fair and accountable institutions” are essential for development. It further argues that “democracy helps protect people from economic and political catastrophes such as famines and decent into chaos” . In support of this theory, India is cited where, claims the report, there has been no famine since independence in 1947, in spite of chronic food shortages.

Democracies, it states, also contribute to political stability and wars are more frequent in non-democratic countries. These benefits of democracy are attributable to “a virtuous cycle of development”, with political freedom allowing people to campaign for policies [reforms] that expand social and economic opportunities and, all in all, allowing more people to partake in policy decisions and debates. This said, the report does then point out recent and poignant instances of people fighting for political democracy in the hope of gaining enhanced social and economic opportunities, only to have those hopes dashed. After the collapse of Soviet style capitalism in the 90s for instance, “income inequality and poverty rose sharply in Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. And despite more widespread democracy, the number of people in Sub-Saharan Africa continued to increase”.

To its credit, the report does state that “neither authoritarianism or democracy is a factor in determining either the rate of economic growth or how it is distributed”. It further informs us that “granting all people formal political equality does not create an equal desire or capacity to participate in political processes – or an equal capacity to influence them”. And here the report is critical of the power money plays in politics with the USA in particular, singled out. In the 2000 US election, presidential candidates spent $343 million on their campaigns. Inclusive of spending by their respective parties, an estimated $1 billion was spent on the 2000 US election. A year later, Michael Bloomberg would spend a staggering $74 million just to become New York City mayor, $47 million more than his nearest opponent and close on $99 per vote.

The report is also mindful that politicians are “disproportionately influenced by business interests”. In the 2000 US election, corporations made $1.2 billion worth of political contributions and in India, big business provides major political parties with 80 percent of their funding – perhaps one reason why voter turn out is decreasing across the world with similar decline in political party membership in many countries.

Whilst the world is arguably a more “democratic” place than it was a decade ago, with 140 countries holding multi-party elections (the greatest number in history) only 80 of these, accounting for 55 percent of the world’s people, are “fully democratic by one measure”. Moreover, there are still 106 countries that impose significant restrictions on civic and political freedoms, and in 61 countries there is no free press. Although the number of countries ratifying the six main human rights conventions and covenants has increased notably in the past decade, there still remains 41 countries who are yet to ratify the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, with 51 countries refusing to ratify the ILO’s Convention on Freedom of Association

The media also comes in for scrutiny in the report, which points out that “commercial and political pressures will always skew the playing field in the marketplace of ideas”. Even so, a free and independent media is seen as an “essential pillar of democracy”. But whilst globalisation has tended to reduce state ownership of the press, it has had the effect of intensifying concentration in private ownership. In Britain, just four media groups control 85 percent of daily newspapers. In the US, some six companies control virtually all the media

Rich and powerful

In the field of health and education, some 800 million have gained access to improved water supplies and almost 60 countries, accounting for half the world’s people have halved hunger or aim to do so by 2015. In the last 30 years infant mortality rate has fallen from 96 per thousand births to 56 per thousand births. On the downside, however, 30,000 children die each day of curable diseases (one every three seconds) and 500,000 women die as a result of pregnancy of childbirth every year (almost one per minute).

When it comes to international trade, the report states: “On average, industrial country tariffs on imports from developing countries are four times those on imports from other industrial countries. In addition, countries that belong to the …OECD provide about $1 billion a day in domestic agricultural subsidies – more than six times what they spend on official development assistance for developing countries.”

This imbalance is further reflected at the WTO. Whilst a lustre of democracy is afforded the running of the organisation, in truth “decision-making occurs by consensus, heavily influenced by the largest and richest countries”. And of almost 740 NGOs certified by the WTO’s 1999 ministerial conference in Seattle, 87 percent of these were from industrialised countries.

Ironically, the more representative global institutions, i.e. the UN General Assembly and the UN Social and Economic Council, are similarly the least potent. “The reality,” observes the UNHDR, “is that powerful countries…tend to gravitate towards institutions that give them the most influence . . . they take their power with them: whether it be to the WTO’s ‘Green Room’ meetings or the meetings on the IMF executive board.” Representatives from the UK, USA, Germany, France, Japan, the Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia account for 46 percent of the voting rights in the World Bank and 48 percent in the IMF.

Although this aims to be an impartial report, about political power and institutions, on the national and global level, and how they shape human progress, and whilst it is often critical of the status quo and postulates how advances in human development lie in improved democratic governance systems, it remains a report that is never going to contribute to the solving of the problems that it identifies for the simple reason that it was never going to query he premises and basic contradictions of capitalist society. The UN, as a capitalist institution itself, was never going to criticise the profit system and how it prioritises profits over real human needs and how, even in the most advanced democracies of the day, the drive to make profit impinges upon every aspect of our lives.

Whilst we would certainly not sniff at such improvements in global democracy – they would, after all, give countless millions the chance to at last determine their own future and further smooth the way for socialism – we are not to be found advocating reform of the present system. If the history of reforms teaches us anything, it is that they can easily be accommodated by the capitalist system. Democracy would thus be used by the master class to their own advantage, giving them the mandate to carry on their injustices, but in a democratic manner, and elected governments would remain as they are at present – the executives of the capitalist class.

In March of this year, at the UN Conference for the Financing of Development in Mexico, the world’s leaders and policy makers assessed moves towards development and poverty eradication goals which were laid down at the UN Millennium summit of 2000, pledging a global effort to realize these goals by the year 2015. The indicators considered, the UNHD report suggests that “without a dramatic turnaround there is a real possibility that a generation from now, world leaders will be setting the same targets again”. We can only comment that even with a “dramatic turnaround” in world-wide democratic procedures, the injustices of capitalism would still prevail and the maxim of capitalism would still apply: “can’t pay – can’t have”.

John Bissett

New words, old tunes, same dance (2002)

From the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again the ever gullible African “leaders”, intellectually bankrupt as they always are, have allowed themselves to be ridiculed by their local and Western economic advisers. This time around they have been hoodwinked into adopting a 201-point nonsensical package of a so-called African Renaissance project christened the “New Partnership For Africa’s Development”. (NEPAD). Foremost among the shameless stooges dishonestly claiming authorship of the bogus document are Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade, Nigeria’s Obasanjo, and South Africa’s Mbeki. Adopted in 2001 at Abuja, Nigeria. NEPAD is now gathering momentum with conference upon conference being organised to extol its virtues. It is therefore our duty to expose this cankerworm that it is.

 

The architects of this programme claim that they are inspired by what they see as an increasing number of African countries with “good governance”. In their words “the number of democratically elected leaders are on the increase” (No. 44) and “across the continent democracy is spreading” (No. 45). This view of theirs leaves conscious people wondering what “democracy” stands for here since the state and its institutions all over Africa still remain fundamentally as elitist as when the colonialists introduced them here. Political parties are still the personal organisations of a few wealthy individuals who always employ all sorts of dirty tricks to win elections. To assume, therefore, that there is a democracy in Africa (or even in George W. Bush’s USA) which serves as a basis for development is to daydream.

They go further to talk (in No. 8 and 27) of consolidating and celebrating the “gains” that Africans have achieved through the years. Nothing could be more preposterous and an insult to the suffering masses. The ordinary people of Africa have seen their living conditions jump from the frying pan into the fire all these years – which in fact is even why the NEPAD came into being. What then are the economic gains to consolidate? Is it the increasing poverty, illiteracy, disease, starvation, squalor, etc? Or maybe the leaders are thinking their five-star hotels and beautiful beaches which are exclusively reserved for the wealthy Western tourists and World Bank and IMF “experts”.

Not unexpectedly, and like all other previous theories and strategies for development (which woefully failed), the document claims that NEPAD differs in approach and strategy from the earlier plans and initiatives in that it is an African-owned and African-led programme (Nos. 59 and 60). But this argument comes up against a two-pronged snag. In the first place Africa is not a homogenous unit. The continent comprises a mass of hewers of wood and drawers of water on the one hand and a few privileged fat cats sitting on Africa’s wealth on the other hand. These two groups have interests which are miles apart. The idea that NEPAD “is based on the agenda set by African peoples through their own initiatives and of their own volition to shape their own destiny” (No. 48) and that “we are, therefore, asking the African peoples to take up the challenge of mobilising in support of the implementation of this initiative” is sheer nonsense.

The mere existence of leaders and the led; the privileged and the unfortunate ; or the “smart” and the “dull” is itself a reflection of the class-divided society that is ours. It is therefore not strange that the small fry fat cats who have by mere stroke of luck seen themselves in comfortable seats will present to us such a programme as NEPAD. It is meant to perpetuate their privileged class interests.

The other problem of this idea of African-owned and African-led program lies in the fundamental issue of funding. All the garbage about the Africanness is completely negated by their No. 181 which merits quoting in full: “the various partnerships between Africa and the industrialised countries on the one hand and multi-lateral institutions on the other will be maintained”. The “partnerships” in question include among others: the UN New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s; the African-Europe summit’s Cairo Plan of Action; the World Bank-led Strategic Partnership with Africa; the IMF-led Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers; the Japan-led Tokyo Agenda for Action; the African Growth and Opportunity Act of the USA; and the Economic Commission for Africa-led Global Compact for Africa. The objective will be to rationalise these “partnerships” and to ensure that real benefits flow to the “donors” who put up the money.

But perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of this mammoth illusion relates to its modus operandi. A good lot of ink was sunk into the usual rhetoric of “capacity building”; “a safe African environment”; “empowerment”; “ensuring competitiveness”; “enforcing inalienable rights”; “eradicating female genital mutilation”; “providing education, health care, shelter, and food for all”; etc. Each item is exhaustively described but nothing resembling how they would implement the lofty goals is mentioned. The nearest the document ever goes by way of how they would achieve their aims is found in No. 49 which states inter alia that “to achieve these objectives African leaders will take joint responsibility for . . . strengthening mechanisms for conflict prevention, management, and resolution at regional and continental levels”.

Clearly, those who drew up this farce of an agenda did not have any illusions on the continued presence of conflicts and war. They therefore did not hesitate to include the setting-aside of large sums to beef up the military strength of their respective countries to enable them deal with conflicts. Now considering the fact the armaments industry is one of the most lucrative of all capitalist ventures, one can not fail to see through the evil designs of the “partnership” to lubricate this enviable avenue of amassing ill-gotten wealth.

On the other hand, these leaders being dreamers felt that “it is with in the capacity of the international community to create fair and just conditions in which Africa can participate effectively in the global economy and body politic” (No. 41), unaware, due to their warped ideological inclination, that the profit-oriented system has no room for fair play and justice; that profit-seeking knows no morals. And consequently, the leaders’ conviction that “what is required . . . is bold and imaginative leadership . . . as well as a new global partnership” is pathetically naïve.

To cut a long story short, there is no way that the disadvantaged masses of Africa and indeed of the whole world can be salvaged through any design that is shaped by so-called “leaders” and which design operate along the lines of the present money-dominated system. Democracy and development demand the exclusion of leadership; people must organise and relate to each other as equals if progress is to be made. An Arab proverb states that “there are two people who never get satisfied; the one seeking money and the one looking for knowledge”. And since money is known to be the root of all evil, the money seekers (capitalists who control the means of production and distribution of wealth) will unscrupulously stop at nothing to make their profits. But as knowledge is enlightenment it leads to truth and justice. So, our first step in correcting the ills of human society through truth and justice is to understand the capitalist system and how it can never work to the advantage of the dispossessed masses of Africa and everywhere else.

Suhuyini Nbang-Ba

Global rollback (1999)

Book Review from the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dark Victory, The United States and Global Poverty. New edition by Walden Bello with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau, Foreword by Susan George, Pluto Press, 1999 (paperback 162 pages)

Socialists should be grateful to Food First and the Transnational Institute for bringing out a revised edition of their handy little book detailing the extent of global poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and war. We do not have the resources to do the desk research to compile all these detailed facts and figures, or to send photographers out to take pictures of destitute people picking over rubbish dumps or police firing on protesters. The authors are enlightened enough to see that capitalism is the culprit, making their analyses useful, without drastic re-interpretation, for the work of presenting the Socialist Party’s critique of capitalism and the socialist alternative. Our argument does not change essentially from year to year, but it is important that we relate it to the world situation as others see it.

The central message of the book, which accords with our case, is that political and social changes that seem to benefit the majority only happen if they advance capitalist interests, and are dismantled willy-nilly when those interests change. The particular scenario focused on is what the authors call the “global rollback” of advances in economic development in the South, and the New Deal and the Welfare State in the North, so that corporate America shall enjoy sources of cheap raw materials and labour, and not be threatened by competition from Japan and the Newly Industrialising Nations.

Having with “relentless scholarship . . . crisply laid out” (Susan George in the Foreword) the disastrous consequences of US capital’s “dark victory”, the writers eventually get around to considering how the world is ever going to recover from this. There is an encouraging paragraph headed “The Role of Working-Class Solidarity” which states that “the globalization of production . . . has brought home to workers in both North and South . . . their common subjugation to the capitalist calculus of short-term profitability”. If such an advance in majority consciousness were really what has happened, socialists would be tremendously excited, but later this is referred to as merely “glimmers of hope on the labor front”. Pious hopes are expressed in “the power of the conviction that human rights, peace, and environmental welfare are indivisible and transcend the . . . limits set by corporate capital in the name of ‘national sovereignty’ when it suits its objectives”. One is reminded of the high-sounding verbiage produced by one of the many conferences of pressure groups, charities etc.

It is not until the final chapter, an Epilogue focused on “the Asian Economic Implosion”, that anything resembling a solution to the world’s problems is put forward. The writers declare that “the state must be reformed along the lines of more transparency, more accountability, and more democratic surveillance of government, but the aim of this enterprise is not to banish it as an economic agent but to enable it to more effectively regulate the market”. They go on to say: “What is being advanced here is not just the reform of the state but the transformation of the economic regime. While market and state must continue to play a vital role, the fundamental mechanism of production, distribution, and exchange . . . must be democratic decision making by communities, civic organisations, and people’s movements”. Why the capitalist class and their political servants should consent to handing over the reins to this well-meaning coalition is not made clear. Given the degree of worker solidarity and understanding the authors believe exists in the world today, how much simpler and easier to just get rid of the capitalist mess altogether and bring in a socialist society.

Chris Marsh

Bird’s Eye View: Neither God nor state (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Neither God nor state

The 1st of this month is Iranian Islamic Republic Day. According to Ramin Mazaheri (greanvillepost.com, 6 February), ‘…after 43 years Iran’s revolution has become entrenched in global political history as the most successful political revolution of our contemporary era’ (bit.ly/356Z1Ka). Apparently the vast majority of the 99 percent (98.2 percent) of the electorate) voted for the establishment of an Islamic republic. Those who realise they were taken for April Fools include imprisoned trade unionists. Tragically, over 43 years many thousands of our class have been executed, including minors, under a theocratic dictatorship where those convicted of adultery, alcohol consumption, blasphemy, burglary, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution, along with, of course, political dissidence, as well as many other ‘crimes’, can pay the ultimate price. We must not forget the state-sanctioned use of juveniles as troops during the mass slaughter that was the Iran-Iraq war, or the oppression of women. Add chronic corruption, obvious class division and we can say that only assorted fundamentalists see the revolution as successful. And the suffering grows:

‘Iran has returned 820,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines donated by Poland because they were manufactured in the United States… TV quoted Mohammad Hashemi, an official in the country’s Health Ministry, as saying that Poland donated about a million doses of the British-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine to Iran. ‘But when the vaccines arrived in Iran, we found out that 820,000 doses of them which were imported from Poland were from the United States,” he said. Hashemi said “after coordination with the Polish ambassador to Iran, it was decided that the vaccines would be returned.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, in 2020 rejected any possibility of American or British vaccines entering the country, calling them “forbidden”‘ (whdh.com, 21 February).

Toll: more than 270,000 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.

Strange bedfellows

Fundamentalists are not limited to book-burning fakirs issuing fatuous yet often fatal fatwas. ‘…Republicans aren’t going to stop with abortion bans…’ (Cue ‘Handmaid’s Tale’: Michigan Republicans say 1965 Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control was wrong, alternet.org, 21 February). According to Planned Parenthood,

‘In 2006, Nicaragua enacted a complete abortion ban, including in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the woman is at risk. Access to sexual and reproductive health information and services is seriously lacking, and the country now has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Latin America.’

Recall, Ortega was returned to power in 2007 as the Catholic president of Nicaragua. He named his wife as Vice President and stated: ’This revolution – in which women have participated shoulder to shoulder – has opened the doors to the full participation of women in all spheres: political, social and economic (theweek.co.uk, 4 August, 2016) – nonsense only matched by that of another President Ronald Reagan, calling Nicaragua a beachhead of communism. Nicaragua is one of 24 countries in the world where abortion is totally illegal under any circumstances, including when the woman’s life or health is at risk. Maternal mortality is 98 per 100,000, 118th in the world. And leftist/nationalist fundamentalists claim that the empowerment of women in Nicaragua has been achieved.

Cannot see the wood for the trees

‘Conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 are having a clear impact on the global poor, in many cases having joint incidence upon those living in poverty, the World Bank’s report concludes’ (‘Inequality Kills One Person Every Four Seconds,’ipsnews.net, 14 February). The article’s conclusion echoes that of Dr. King, who focused famously on the ‘Triple Evils’ of poverty, racism and militarism, ie, symptoms rather than the underlying disease and one reason why Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer winning historian, could say of MLK that ‘all the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then’ (nytimes.com, 4 April 2018). Fundamentally idealistic, reformists eschew revolution in favour of another spin on the misery-go-round. Consider, capitalism causes the rivalries that lead to war in the modern world. Conflicts between states and within states can result from competition over markets, sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes, exploitable populations and areas of strategic importance. ‘Russia’s president knows exactly what he wants, and it’s not eastern Ukraine. His interests are all about oil and gas and supply routes. The rest is smoke and mirrors’ (thedailybeast.com, 1 March 2015).

With regard to climate change, all enterprises and states seek to minimise costs and releasing greenhouse gases into the environment is a way of reducing monetary costs. Human and environmental needs always come second, if at all, in the profit system. Capitalism’s primary imperative is always to produce more and accumulate capital or otherwise lurch into economic crisis. ‘…companies are continuing to invest vast sums in exploration and new fields, which the IEA said last year could not be brought to fruition if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C’ (theguardian.com, 11 February). Nearly six million deaths, twelve times that of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, due to Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide. Given that the knowledge and resources exist to reduce the number of epidemics and minimise the possibility of them becoming pandemics, the vast majority of these deaths can be considered premature. Capitalism has eradicated rinderpest and smallpox, yet the driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profit not health. According to March’s Scientific American, ‘Global billionaire wealth grew by $4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021, and at the same time more than 100 million people fell below the poverty line’ (bit.ly/3BTn7nk). And ‘The poor, no matter where they live, will suffer the greatest lasting toll’ – until, that is, we organise as a class for the conquest of the earth and all its resources.

Not Revolution at All (2022)

Book Review from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World. By Jeremy Friedman. Harvard University Press £28.95.

This book covers attempts to build so-called socialism in developing countries. Case studies deal with Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola and Iran, each supported by a great deal of detailed documentation. It is not about socialism at all, of course, but still contains a lot of useful information and interesting discussion, about such topics as rivalry between the rulers in Moscow and Beijing, and the use or not of parliament.

The examples are very different from each other. In Indonesia the ‘Communist’ Party (PKI) was not in power, but Russian aid was supposed to help build heavy industry and so increase the role of the working class. Sukarno’s dictatorship eventually resulted in the killing of perhaps half a million PKI members and supporters. In Chile Allende ‘saw himself as creating a completely new model of socialist revolution’, but he was not in full control of the Congress and was able to do little more than nationalise the copper industry. The end in 1973 was another coup and thousands of deaths. Nyerere in Tanzania claimed to want socialism without class struggle, but his agricultural reforms (‘forced villagization’) led to a drop in production and massive food imports. In Angola there were competing ‘liberation movements’ and from the mid-70s there was a combination of ‘political Leninism with a mixed economy’, resulting in a ‘Leninist oligarchy’ that skimmed profits and preserved its political power. Despite its vast oil resources, the country exemplified ‘Leninist capitalism’, where a kleptocracy justified itself on the grounds of national development. Iran shared with Indonesia the influence of Islam, but land reform was not implemented, and the idea that an Islamic state would mean a more just economic system proved baseless.

Friedman concludes that the Russian rulers’ idea of state-led industrialisation did not deliver what was promised, and so the market had to be re-introduced (not that it had ever gone away). He talks briefly about various definitions of socialism, but does not refer to the idea of a classless stateless global society. He sees the ‘Leninist model of politics’ as an enduring legacy, and a number of organisations built on such lines still hold power in southern Africa. The Cold War did not end so clearly in the less developed parts of the world, but the claim in the final paragraph that ‘the attempt to build a socialist future in the Global South was real’ is simply unsupported. Rather, there were attempts of various kinds to expand the role of capitalism (not necessarily state capitalism), with Russian and/or Chinese support. The book is a useful reminder that non-Bolshevik efforts to build ‘socialism’ also existed and failed.

Paul Bennett

Who benefits from lower ‘Third World’ wages? (2021)

From the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We conclude our series refuting the view that workers in the developed capitalist parts of the world exploit workers living in the ‘Third World’.

Third Worldist ‘anti-imperialism’ basically contends that the interests of workers in the Global North are objectively aligned with the capitalists there in seeking to perpetuate the ‘super-exploitation’ of the Global South. Allegedly, this super-exploitation has the effect of raising these workers above the status of an exploited class by enabling them, via a process of ‘unequal exchange’, to receive the full value of their labour contribution.

As Jason Hickel explains:

‘It was the Egyptian economist Samir Amin – a well-known critic of neo-colonialism – who first articulated this argument in the 1970s. He noticed that that if we look at the labour that goes into producing goods for trade between the south and north, we see that workers in the south are paid much less than their northern counterparts – even when adjusted for productivity or units of output per hour. This means that when the north buys goods from the south, they pay far less than those goods would otherwise be worth. In other words, the north effectively siphons uncompensated value out of the south’ (Guardian, 18 May 2017).

While this explanation might seem superficially plausible, there is an intrinsic problem (as we saw last month) with trying to quantify the magnitude of this global transfer of value – let alone quantify the extent to which workers, as opposed to capitalists, in the north allegedly benefit from this transfer – due to value being based on the elusive notion of ‘abstract labour’. Hence the use of price as a surrogate measure. But while the sum of all values must equate with the sum of all prices, for any given commodity, value and price must necessarily diverge under conditions of disequilibrium resulting from the continual adjustment of supply and demand to each other.

Take the commodity, labour power – the skills the worker sells to the capitalist. Its price is the wage that worker receives. However, this transaction is conditional upon the capitalist expecting to make a profit by employing the worker. A business is not a charity. It is not concerned with the well-being of its workforce as such. Competition between businesses pushes such sentiments aside and imposes on all the overriding need to secure a profit.

Without profit the business risks being bankrupted. This is as true in the Global North as in the Global South and it is surely significant that the overwhelming bulk of capital – even foreign direct investment – originating in the North is invested there and not in the South. That wouldn’t happen without the prospect of profit.

Profit is the money form of the economic surplus the worker produces in exchange for a wage. She produces more value than she receives in her wage. Hence she is ‘exploited’. It doesn’t matter whether she is ‘well paid’ or not. Whether she can ‘purchase the product of ten hours of another worker’s labour through one hour of her own’ as Zac Cope puts it, is simply not relevant (Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism, 2012, p.173) Her means of purchasing that product – her wage – is conditional upon her producing a surplus for her employer in the first instance and, thus, being exploited.

Wage levels and the rate of exploitation

What determines the ‘rate of exploitation’ cannot simply be inferred from the level of wages paid to workers; it must take into account, also, their productivity. Paradoxically, higher paid workers can be subject to a higher rate of exploitation if the ratio of the surplus they produce compared to the size of their wage packet is higher than in the case of a low-paid worker. However, this can change if you reduce the wages of the low-paid worker thereby increasing his rate of exploitation.

Commentators, like John Smith, argue that depressing wages below their value in the Global South – super-exploitation – is now the primary mechanism under capitalism for increasing the rate of exploitation (Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 2016). Capital is highly mobile today while labour, hemmed in by national borders, is relatively immobile. This obstructs the equalisation of international wage rates (but not the equalisation of profit rates whereby surplus value is siphoned out of the Global South). Multinational corporations can play one poor country off against another in their quest for lower production costs while a corrupt ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ running these countries assists in this race to the bottom by imposing political repression and banning trade unions.

This argument has merit but, still, we cannot overlook differential rates of productivity. According to Hickel:

‘Southern workers are probably at least as productive since these days many of them work in foreign-owned factories (think of Apple’s iPad factories with highly efficient technology and rigid Taylorist rules, designed to extract as much as possible from every movement).’

Clearly, this is just cherry-picking. The vast majority of Southern workers don’t work in foreign-owned factories. Some do and, doubtless, productivity in these cases matches Western levels. But you have to look at the situation across the country as a whole to get a more realistic picture.

Even in an emerging industrial powerhouse like India, the formal sector accounts for only 10 percent of the workforce, the rest working in the informal sector. Globally ‘a staggering 2 billion workers are in informal employment, accounting for three in five (61 per cent) of the world’s workforce’ (ILO, World Employment Social Outlook: Trends 2019).

These are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global South. Given the paucity of formal sector jobs and the lack of unemployment benefits, workers here often have little option but to eke out a living in the low-paid informal sector. This is characterised by rampant ‘underemployment’ and relatively inefficient small-scale ‘involutionary’ forms of activity.

There is some truth in Hickel’s claim that ‘wages are not somehow naturally low in the south – they have been made low by design. Wages are an effect of power’. But his explanation is incomplete. The bargaining power of those workers is, in turn, undermined by the depressing effect on wages caused by mass unemployment and, even more, underemployment, which is much more pronounced in the South.

The much larger ‘industrial reserve army’ also helps to explain the persistence of generally more labour-intensive forms of production there and, by extension, the significantly lower per capita productivity. According to the ILO there is a strong correlation between output per worker and international variations in wage rates (bit.ly/2OhfIK2).

Indeed, Marx himself maintained that ‘The more productive one country is relative to another in the world market, the higher will be its wages as compared with the other’ (Theories of Surplus Value, Ch. 8). Key to this is raising the ‘organic composition of capital’ via mechanisation thereby bringing about a fall in the rate of profit.

Ironically, Cope himself contends that ‘the capitalist system has been able to maintain itself in recent decades’ only because, among other things, ‘industrialisation of large parts of the Third World have ensured the entry of millions of (super-)exploited workers into the global workforce. This has undoubtedly raised the rate of profit by reducing the rate of growth of the organic composition of capital’ (ibid p.201). So he is effectively conceding that production there is more labour-intensive and we can assume this means less productive in per capita terms.

There is a further point to consider. As we saw earlier, part of Cope’s argument rests on the claim that most Northern workers are ‘unproductive’ in the sense that they do not produce, but are financed out of, surplus value. But what of the Global South? While some workers in the small formal sector could be classed as unproductive – for example state employees – in the much larger informal sector the predominant form of labour – 70 percent in sub-Saharan Africa – is ‘self-employment and unpaid family work’. Strictly speaking, this does not constitute productive labour either since it does not involve what Marx called the ‘exchange of capital for labour’ which is a precondition for such labour being considered ‘productive’.

However, to reiterate – being ‘unproductive’ does not mean not being exploited. ‘Being exploited’ does not depend on you being directly involved in producing surplus value but rather on your functional contribution to a wider system of surplus extraction.

Furthermore, even if 80 percent of the world’s productive labour is ‘performed in the Third World by workers earning less than 10% of the wages of First World workers’, as Cope claims, one should bear in mind that at least 80 percent of the world’s population lives in the Third World anyway.

As for workers there earning less than 10 percent of the wages of First World workers we need to relate this to international differences in price levels. In this regard, the position of Third Worldists comes across as muddled.

On the one hand, we find Cope suggesting that workers in the Global North benefit from the ultra-cheap prices for goods produced by super-exploited workers in the Global South; on the other we are told by him that ‘as soon as these goods enter into imperialist-country markets, their prices are multiplied several fold, sometimes by as much as 1,000%’(p. 159). This is because the capitalists there can ‘afford’ to pay their workers higher wages to buy these goods which presumably means they are making a profit by employing them.

Who benefits from lower import prices?

Wages, being the price of labour power, will tend to adjust to changes in the prices of other commodities. Cheapening the price of imports into the North by intensifying the exploitation of Southern workers will not materially benefit workers in the North. Actually, if anything, it has induced capitalists to outsource production to the South and close down factories in the North at the expense of northern workers.

Like water finding its own level wages will ultimately tend to gravitate towards the value of labour power. Marx’s observations on the early nineteenth-century struggle to repeal the Corn Laws which restricted food imports to boost domestic prices are pertinent here:

‘The English workers have very well understood the significance of the struggle between the landlords and the industrial capitalists. They know very well that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to reduce wages, and that industrial profit would rise by as much as rent fell’ (bit.ly/2LvHt0p).

While it is undeniable that there are marked differences in wage rates between the North and South there are some suggestions that the gap may be closing. A report in the Economist noted that while wage growth in the advanced countries has been slight or stagnant: ‘The crucial change that has taken place over the past decade or so is that wages in low-cost countries have soared’ (19 January 2013). Ironically this has encouraged a limited ‘reshoring’ of manufacturing back to the US where wage stagnation has made US manufacturing slightly more competitive.

Of course, we are still quite a long way off from the ‘equalisation of international wage rates’ but current developments seem to be tending in that direction. In Asia, for example, wages have been growing annually nearly ten times faster than in the world’s richest nations (Nikkei Asian Review, 28 November 2018).

Moreover, if you apply ‘purchasing power parity’ exchange rates to reflect the varying costs of buying an identical basket of goods in different countries, the gap between rich and poor countries narrows considerably. Cope himself notes that ‘according to calculations based on data compiled by the Union Bank of Switzerland, OECD wages have an average 3.4 times more purchasing power than non-OECD wages’ (p.163).

This is far less than the cited ratio of 1:11. This difference can be adequately explained in terms of factors already discussed such as differential productivity rates. But compared to the difference in purchasing power between capitalists and workers everywhere in the world, it is pretty negligible.

It is this fundamental class division that the proponents of Third Worldist ‘anti-imperialism’ wilfully obscure in their pointless pursuit of a reactionary nationalist agenda in an age of global capitalism.

Robin Cox

Unequal exchange: who benefits? (2021)

From the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We continue our examination of theories which claim the workers in the advanced capitalist countries share in the exploitation of those in ‘The Third World’.

In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) Lenin suggested that some workers in the advanced countries, comprising a ‘labour aristocracy’, were bribed out of the ‘enormous superprofits’ made in the ‘colonies and semi-colonies’. While this claim is questionable at many levels he did at least acknowledge such superprofits were ‘obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their ‘own’ country’, meaning workers there continued to be exploited in the Marxian sense.

Not so in the case of modern ‘Third Worldist’ exponents of the Labour Aristocracy thesis, like Zac Cope. Cope surpasses even Lenin in putting his own spin on this Leninist version of bourgeois trickle-down economics. In his view, workers in the advanced countries generally are not exploited at all:

‘It is commonly supposed by socialists that if a person earns a wage she must, ipso facto, be exploited. However, if one worker is able to purchase the product of ten hours of another worker’s labour through one hour of her own, then that worker is benefiting materially from the exploitation of the other worker. In other words, where the labour content of the worker’s consumption is in excess of the amount of labour (value) she supplies, she partakes in the exploitation of her fellow worker’ (Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism, 2012, p.173).

If this worker is not exploited then presumably Cope will agree that her capitalist employer is not making a profit by employing her. Which raises the question: why is she being employed?

According to Cope, producing surplus value is ‘increasingly the sole preserve of superexploited Third World labour’ (p.176). In short, almost all workers in the Global North are ‘unproductive’ meaning they are financed out of, rather than produce, surplus value.

True, most workers involved in manufacturing now reside in the Global South. However, productive labour is not limited to producing physical goods – a point Marx made in criticising Adam Smith’s overly ‘physicalist’ approach to the labour theory of value. Many services have been commodified under capitalism and the workers providing them must be considered productive of new value too.

More importantly, Cope departs radically from Marx in assuming that just because a worker is unproductive they cannot be deemed to be exploited. While unproductive labour may not in itself produce surplus value it is still nevertheless absolutely indispensable to the extraction of surplus value. A commodity’s value is only realised insofar as it can be sold but the labour involved in selling it is technically unproductive as it adds no new value.

Referring to clerks employed by a merchant capitalist, Marx observes:

‘The unpaid labour of these clerks, while it does not create surplus-value, enables him to appropriate surplus-value, which, in effect, amounts to the same thing with respect to his capital. It is, therefore, a source of profit for him. Otherwise commerce could never be conducted on a large scale, capitalistically’ (Capital Volume 3, Ch.17).

Saying unproductive workers are not part of the exploited working class is like saying the battalion signallers back in the army’s HQ do not belong to the army because they don’t do any actual fighting.

Unequal exchange

Let us now consider the claim that workers in the rich countries allegedly partake in the exploitation of workers in poor countries via a global ‘transfer of value’. This is said to involve various mechanisms – some hidden, some explicit.

These include, ‘transfer pricing’ or ‘trade misinvoicing’ practised within transnational corporations as a means of tax evasion; income flows in the form of repatriated profits, interest on loans, and property rents; ‘seigniorage’ and the profits made from circulating banknotes abroad and, finally, profits made from the buying and selling of financial assets abroad.

However, none of these examples in themselves seem to hold any obvious benefits for the workers in the rich countries. They all seem to work exclusively to the advantage of the capitalist owners of the businesses concerned. As Marx noted with reference to the repatriated profits made from foreign trade: ‘The favoured country recovers more labour in exchange for less labour, although this difference, this excess is pocketed, as in any exchange between labour and capital, by a certain class’ (Capital, Volume 3, Ch. 14).

But what about the mechanism alluded to by Cope – namely, ‘unequal exchange’?

This concept was developed by Arghiri Emmanuel, whose major work, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade was published in 1972. Emmanuel saw unequal exchange as being embedded in various processes that were subjected to a tendency for profit rates to equalise under competitive capitalism.

To briefly explain. Just as the prices of particular commodities do not necessarily coincide with their values, so the profits a particular business makes do not necessarily coincide with the surplus value generated by its workforce. According to Marx, it is only at the economy-wide level (these days the global economy) that ‘the sum of all profits in all spheres of production must equal the sum of the surplus values, and the sum of the prices of production of the total social product equal to the sum of its value’ (Capital Volume 3, Ch. 12).

Since living labour is the sole source of profit – the money form of surplus value – a business with a high ‘organic composition of capital’ (‘capital intensive’) will tend to have a lower rate of profit than one using labour-intensive technology. Indeed, the falling rate of profit accompanying industrialisation of the advanced countries is often cited as a reason, historically, for the imperialist expansion of those countries into parts of the world where an abundant supply of cheap labour was said to make for higher profits to offset the falling profit rate at home.

However, under competitive capitalism these different profit rates will tend to equalise through the interactions of supply and demand for the goods in question. In so doing, commodities produced in labour-intensive industries (or parts of the world) would sell at prices below their values while, for capital-intensive industries, the opposite would be true. In terms of international trade this translates into a redistribution of surplus value from the Global South to the Global North.

This is one example of ‘unequal exchange’ but Emmanuel’s argument goes further: even if the ‘organic composition of capital’ was identical across the world, there could still be a transfer of surplus value from the Global South to the Global North. Why?

The reason lies with the sharp differences in wage rates between them which get to be reflected in the prices of goods exchanged in international trade. High-priced goods from the North are exchanged for low-priced goods from the South (whose capitalists then try to compensate for this by further cutting wages – super-exploitation). In this way some of the surplus value generated in the South is redistributed to the North, depriving the former of the ‘means of accumulation and growth’.

In a world in which capital is mobile but labour is mostly not – think of ‘Fortress Europe’ – the normal competitive process by which wages, the price of labour power, tend to gravitate towards value is effectively blocked by national borders which means other contingent factors can become more prominent in determining wage rates.

Sharing out surplus value

‘Surplus value’ is the key signifier of exploitation under capitalism. The rate of exploitation – s/v or the ratio of the surplus product to the overall wages bill – can be stepped up in several ways: (1) increasing ‘absolute surplus value’ by lengthening the working day; (2) increasing ‘relative surplus value’ by raising productivity (for instance through mechanisation) and (3) by pushing wages more or less permanently below the value of labour power – ‘super-exploitation’.

Marx did not rule out (3) but saw it as being less significant, historically than (1) and (2) in the genesis of capitalism.

While all three modes of increased surplus value extraction can operate concurrently, for modern proponents of the labour aristocracy thesis, super-exploitation (of the Global South) is easily the most dominant mode. However, even if this was the case, it does not follow that super-exploitation is confined to the Global South only; it is arguably to be found in the Global North too, notably in the guise of the low-wage ‘gig economy’.

Moreover, it is one thing to argue that super-exploitation in the Global South aids the redistribution of surplus value to the Global North; it is quite another to argue that workers in the latter benefit from this redistribution and not just the capitalists who in Marx’s words ‘pocket the difference’ arising from unequal exchange.

From a Marxian standpoint (which Cope professes to espouse), exploitation can be inferred from the fact that the working class as a whole produces more value than it receives in the form of wages and salaries. However, value itself is based on the concept of ‘abstract labour’, not concrete labour, and this distinction is absolutely crucial.

A commodity’s value is the ‘socially necessary labour time’ that goes into producing it, from start to finish, which is only revealed in a very approximate sort of way through market prices. It is an industry-wide – meaning global – average. Thus, attempting to isolate one section of the working class (the Global North) from another (the Global South) in order to calculate their relative contributions to the production of value – even if this was feasible – is methodologically suspect since what is then being measured is no longer, strictly speaking, ‘value’. Value is a social construct that only acquires resonance from the standpoint of the economy as a whole.

The point is that you cannot empirically measure a commodity’s ‘value’. It can only be theoretically inferred or guessed at. It is a constantly fluctuating potentiality that can change even after a commodity has been produced precisely because it is a notional average. So focusing exclusively on the labour contributions of workers in the South vis-à-vis the North strips it of that quality of being a notional average.

According to the labour theory of value it is not so much individual capitalists that exploit their own workforce but rather the capitalist class as a whole that exploits the working class as whole. This is because production today is a completely interconnected and globalised process. The fruits of this collective exploitation – surplus value – are, so to speak, pooled and redistributed to different capitals in proportion to their magnitudes as an average rate of profit.

Cope notes:

‘Firstly, of necessity, this essay utilizes statistical data that measure the results of transactions in marketplaces, not value-generation in production processes. GDP, or value-added, figures are obtained by subtracting the cost price of a firm, nation or region’s inputs from the proceeds of the sale of its outputs. This equation of value with price ensures that the process of production itself, and the surplus value arising from it, is rendered invisible and value appears to be generated largely through the circulation of money’ (p.157-8).

But the ‘equation of value with price’ is precisely what Marx himself ruled out, arguing that ‘The possibility, therefore, of quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former from the latter, is inherent in the price-form itself’ (Capital volume 1, Ch. 3). It is only in their totality that values and prices equate.

Ironically, the very kind of statistical data Cope is forced to rely upon – ‘of necessity’ – refutes his claim that workers in the Global North constitute a non-exploited class. Thus, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US factory workers in 2012 produced on average $73.45 per hour in output whilst the average hourly wage was only $23.32 (bit.ly/3hW62iX).

So approximately two thirds of the added value these workers contributed, they did not receive payment for. Indeed, since the 1970s, while productivity of American workers generally has grown by 69.3 per cent, wages have grown by only 11.6 percent (bit.ly/2LyJAzY).

Very clearly, then, not only are these workers exploited but the rate at which they are exploited has been steadily increasing.

Next month we conclude our series refuting the view that workers in ‘Global North’ share in the exploitation of those in the ‘Global South’.

Robin Cox