Do users of this sub concur with the notion that Western Capitalism or the Social Democracies in particular, sustain themselves by benefiting out of super-exploitation of labour in the global south? I’ve been thinking a lot about the aforesaid question after watching Paul Cockshott’s video on Unequal Exchange where he attributed the lack of adequate wages and exploitation to relatively underdeveloped and inefficient productive forces in the global south by contrasting the productivity of the Steel Industry in the U.S with that of India’s. Furthermore, he also deemed the dependency theory to be ‘Anti-Working Class’ since it downplayed the exploitation meted out to the workers in the global north. Conversely, if we look at the Service Sector which includes the likes of I.T, Consultancy, Banking and Law where the nature of productive forces (in terms of development and efficiency) is more or less the same all over the world. Nevertheless, it is a known fact that a software engineer or a financial analyst in the global south would be substantially lowet when compared to their counterparts in the imperial core. The overarching question that i want to put forth is whether Cockshott is wrong about unequal exchange or am i overlooking anything important?
IMO Cockshott is wrong on this one, and that’s his imperial chauvinism showing when he says things like: “third-world workers are less productive so that accounts for the differences in standard of living”. On this and many other points he’s been thoroughly debunked by dependency theorists like John Smith.
Dependency theorists are looking at value transfers and standards of living in the modern day, using first-hand evidence and ILO statistics. I’m sure some have replied / debunked Cockshott’s views on that, and I’d like to see it.
