Arghiri Emmanuel and Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future Relevance

In the 1950s, the anticolonial liberation movement was on the rise in Africa. In Congo, this was represented by the movement led by Patrice Lumumba. Emmanuel became engaged in Congolese politics, reflected in his articles in the newspaper Le Stanleyvillois. In the spring of 1960, Emmanuel became an economic adviser for Lumumba, developing a program for a postcolonial Congo. However, on July 16 of that year, Emmanuel was kidnapped by Belgian settlers and deported to Nairobi on a British military aircraft. He maintained contact with Lumumba, who, in a letter to Emmanuel written in his short period as president before being liquidated, asked him to return to Congo.⁴ The Belgian Ministerium of Justice on their side declared Emmanuel a threat to national security, and the Congolese embassies in Europe would not give him a visa. After the killing of Lumumba by Belgian soldiers in January 1961, Emmanuel continued to advise the independence movement on economic matters. From his paper dated June 27, 1961, on Congo’s economy in the transition from colony to an independent state, there are the first formulations of “unequal exchange”:⁵

Colonialism maintains the colonized countries in the system of monoculture or some export crops and the extraction of raw materials. This is the clearest part of colonialist exploitation, an exploitation which is carried out not only for the benefit of the colonizer but on behalf of all the industrial countries…. When an industrialized country exchanges its products with an underdeveloped country, it actually exchanges one hour of national labor for 5, 10 or 15 hours of labor in the other. This exchange rate in turn prohibits the underdeveloped country from carrying out its own capitalization and emerging from underdevelopment. This cycle must be broken.⁶

Deported from Congo, Emmanuel ended up in Paris, planning a new turn in his life. In 1961, at the age of 50, he began to study socialist planning. Maybe he had plans to acquire knowledge of planning hoping to return to an independent Congo. Maybe he had developed some ideas on international trade through his experience in Congo that he wanted to elaborate. However, despite many attempts, Emmanuel was unable to return to Congo due to political developments, and instead embarked on an academic career.

Unequal Exchange

After less than two years of studies, in 1962, Emmanuel introduced the notion of “unequal exchange” in an article, written together with Charles Bettelheim.⁷ Emmanuel received a doctorate in sociology based on his thesis, “L’échange inégal,” from the Sorbonne in 1968. Unequal Exchange was subsequently translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Serbian, and English, the latter by Monthly Review Press in 1972.⁸

Emmanuel’s critique of David Ricardo’s classic theory of international trade and its modern neoliberal versions, which state that all parties benefit from the exchange, builds on Karl Marx’s theory of value. Marx had plans to investigate foreign trade more closely in a fourth volume of Capital, but never had the opportunity to write it.⁹ Emmanuel picked up this loose end and put forward his thesis, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. At the time of publication, it was criticized for focusing on circulation—international trade—rather than the sphere of production, where the exploitation of labor is assumed to take place. However, this perception is wrong, both regarding the theory of unequal exchange and the Marxist theory of exploitation in general.

The core of the theory of unequal exchange is the Marxist concept of value.¹⁰ It assumes the existence of a global value of labor on one side, and, on the other side, a historical capitalism, which has polarized the world-system into a center and periphery with a correspondingly high- and low-wage level. This difference in the price of labor entails a value transfer, hidden in the price structure when commodities are exchanged between the center and periphery of the world-system. The central point is not the exchange itself, but the difference between the global value of labor and the different prices of labor power.

The concept of value unifies the production and the circulation spheres, which are both necessary in capitalist accumulation. Marx was very clear about the relationship between production and circulation in the valorization of capital: “Capital cannot…arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation.”¹¹ To be certain, the labor power in the sphere of production is a precondition for surplus value, but the goods have to be sold on the market to turn the surplus value into profit: the accumulation of capital.

At the center of Emmanuel’s work is the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the imperative to expand accumulation—to produce more and more commodities—on one side, and on the other side, the inability of the market to absorb the production and hence realize the profit for continued accumulation. The “historical” solution to this contradiction became the development of “unequal exchange.” Through the imperialism of trade, value was transferred from the superexploited proletariat in the periphery of the world system to the center—expanding the power of consumption, hence balancing the expanded accumulation. This “historical solution” was not a cunning plan by capitalism but one generated by the class struggle of the proletariat in Northwestern Europe and North America.

Emmanuel’s book is political economy on a high level. It is not an easy read, but it is also rewarding, much like Marx’s Capital.¹² In addition to his systematic and rigorous argument, another appealing characteristic of Emmanuel’s writings is that he dares to break with established left-wing orthodoxies. In June 1970, Emmanuel wrote in Monthly Review:

The most bitter fruits of my work on “L’échange inégale” was the negative conclusion arrived at regarding the international solidarity of the working class…loyalty to the nation transcends internal conflict of interest, on the one hand, while on the other, it grows stronger in the consequence of international antagonism. National integration has been made possible in the big industrial countries at the cost of international disintegration of the proletariat…. As I said in my book, when the relative importance of the exploitation which the working class suffers through belonging to the “proletariat” continually decreases as compared with that which it benefits through belonging to a privileged nation, a moment comes when the aim of increasing the national income in absolute term takes precedence over that of improving each section’s share relative to that of the others. This is what the workers of the advanced countries have well understood, becoming, over the last half-century, increasingly “social democratized”—either by supporting the social democratic parties already in being or by “social-democratizing” the Communist Parties themselves.¹³

In the 1970s, hundreds of articles in academic journals and left-wing magazines discussed Emmanuel’s concepts of unequal exchange. He became a well-known academic, together with people like Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein. However, his “scandalous” idea, that the workers of the rich countries benefited from the transfer of surplus value from the workers of the poor countries, made him few political friends in the so-called first world. However, the Indian Marxist historian Jairus Banaji states that: “Emmanuel’s work is the closest Marxist counterpart I can think of to [Frantz] Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth or to the films of Glauber Rocha and Fernando Solanas.”¹⁴

Unequal Exchange in the Twenty-First Century

Why return to a theory of imperialism from the 1970s? The answer is simple: Because the past fifty years have made Emmanuel’s work more relevant than ever.

Neoliberal globalization changed the economy of the world-system profoundly in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The development of productive forces—computers, mobile phones, the Internet, the standard container, and new logistic systems—all made possible the control and management of production globally. The distance between place of production and market became less relevant. Industrial production was outsourced on a massive scale from the Global North to low-wage countries in the Global South in search of higher profit. A new international division of labor was created. It was no longer just raw materials and tropical agricultural products from the third world competing against industrial products from the North. In the 1950s, industrial goods made up only 15 percent of the exports of all so-called third world countries combined. By 2009, the number had risen to 70 percent.¹⁵ This was the result of all kinds of industrial production, from high-tech electronics and cars to washing machines and designer clothes organized in global production chains stretching from the Global North to the South and back again. The financing and control of the whole process and research and development remained in the Global North. The production process was outsourced to the Global South. The main markets for consumption were still located in the Global North, where branding, sales, and service took place. Often, the subcomponents of an electronic device or a car were produced in different countries in the Global South, where conditions for profit were optimal, before assembly. Hence the value-transfer did not only take place in the international trade between countries but also through the price formation of the product within a company’s various departments.¹⁶

The low level of wages in the South creates not just a higher global rate of profit than would otherwise be obtained; it also affects the price of goods produced in the South. In mainstream economics, the formation of the market prices for a smartphone, for example, through the production chain, could be described as a “smiling curve” for so-called value added. “Value” added in mainstream theory is simply equivalent to the added cost of production in each step of the production chain in conventional price terms. The “value” added is high in the first part of the chain, with highly paid research and development, design, and financial management located in the North, whereas the curve falls in the middle, with low-wage labor in the South producing the physical product. “Value” added rises again toward the end of the curve with branding, marketing, and sales taking place in the North despite wages for retail workers being among the lowest in those countries. In the logic of the “smiling curve,” the main part of the value of the product is added in the North, while labor in the South, which manufactures the goods, contributes only a minimal portion. In Marxist terms, by contrast, value is the sum of socially necessary labor time that has gone into producing a commodity. Thus, if one were to draw the curve for the Marxist concept of value added, in a production chain for a smartphone, it would take more or less the opposite form of the “smile curve”—a kind of “sour smiley.”¹⁷

In total, the global labor force engaged in capitalist production increased by 61 percent between 1980 and 2011. Three-quarters of this workforce live in the Global South. China and India alone account for 40 percent of the world’s labor force.¹⁸ This means there has been an expansion of capitalism of historic magnitude, and a shift in the balance between Global North and South. In 1980, the number of industrial workers in the South and North was about equal. In 2010, there were 541 million industrial workers in the Global South, while only 145 million remained in the Global North.¹⁹ The center of gravity for global industrial production thus no longer lies in the North but in the South. Despite this change, the wage level remains low in the South. The consumption power able to absorb the production to realize profit and continued accumulation is mainly located in the Global North. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the core countries have become dependent on production in the periphery, and the periphery dependent on consumption in the center. These can be referred to as “producer economies” and “consumer economies,” connected via global chains of production.

A recent study by Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour has quantified the size of unequal exchange:

Researchers have argued that 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. Here we assess this empirically by measuring flows of embodied labour in the world economy from 1995–2021, accounting for skill levels, sectors and wages. We find that, in 2021, the economies of the global North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South, across all skill levels and sectors. The wage value of this net-appropriated labour was equivalent to €16.9 trillion in Northern prices, accounting for skill level. 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. Unequal exchange is understood to be driven in part by systematic wage inequalities. We find Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill. While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income.²⁰

Ecology and Unequal Exchange

The consumption level in the center is not only an expression of economic inequality. The imperial way of living poses a threat to the world ecosystem.²¹ Ecological sustainability was more or less absent from theories of imperialism in the 1970s. Emmanuel, however, was aware of it. The periphery was not just underdeveloped, the center was overdeveloped. In 1975, he wrote: “If the present developed countries can still dispose of their waste products by dumping them in the sea or expelling them into the air, it is because they are the only ones doing it. Just as their inhabitants can still travel by air and fill the world’s skies only because the rest of the world does not have the means to fly and leaves the world’s air routes to them alone and so on.”²²

On the basis of Emmanuel’s economic model of “unequal exchange,” a whole school of theorists has related the notion of “unequal exchange” to ecological devastation. As Alejandro Pedregal and Nemanja Lukić have written: “The extension of the analysis of unequal exchange to the ecological field has incorporated the role of consumption and externalization in the environmental burden of the ecological footprint and other global and local ecosocial imbalances into the study of trade and labor. This has served to enrich research on the impact of these imbalances between the valorization of natural goods and manufacturing on all types of ecosystems and societies.”²³

John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark emphasize that “transfers of economic values are accompanied in complex ways by real ‘material-ecological’ flows that transform relations between city and country, and between global metropolis and periphery.”²⁴

Unequal exchange combined with political and military power allow the Global North to import and consume natural capital far beyond its natural limits. The capitalist market obliges poor countries to surrender their natural capital and pursue unsustainable economic development. The consequence is that we are not only confronted with an increasing divide between rich and poor, but also with a dying planet.

What makes the ecological dimension of unequal exchange different from the economic one is that the borders between the countries that benefit and those that suffer cannot be drawn as clearly. Most environmental problems are global problems; they are not confined to individual countries and they cannot be solved by them. Pollution in China can already be detected on the west coast of the United States. Neither the pollution of our air and oceans nor climate change respect national borders.

There is a need and possibility to build a bridge between the political economy of unequal exchange and political ecology. As Pedregal and Lukić write: “Combined, they can offer a totalizing ecological view on the integration of our economies within global capitalism, providing us with a systemic perspective on the hierarchization of the distribution of ecosocial burdens across the planet, as well as the tools to overcome those hierarchies.”²⁵

Migration as Unequal Exchange

In recent years, the migration of labor has been included as a form of unequal exchange, notably by Immanuel Ness in his book, Migration as Economic Imperialism: “It grasps the stark reality of neoliberal migration and imperialism, and its continuity rooted in unequal exchange between the Global North and the Global South which originated in the European colonial project of resource extraction over the last three centuries.”²⁶

It might seem a contradiction in terms to add migration of labor as a form of unequal exchange, because the prerequisite for unequal exchange is the relative free mobility of capital and trade of goods, while the restricted mobility of labor by national borders upholds the difference in wage levels. However, historically and today, there are forms of labor migration that take the difference in wage level with them in the migration process.

In the past, the European settlers took their relatively high wage levels with them as they settled in the periphery of the world-system in past centuries, turning North America, Australia, and New Zealand into part of the center by more or less eliminating the original population. European settlers also turned South Africa, Namibia, Rhodesia, Belgian Congo, Kenya, Algeria, and Palestine into a small version of the polarized world-system by creating a sharply divided labor force in terms of wages and an apartheid structured society, both based on brutal racism.

Similarly, in the migration from the periphery to the center, the labor force perpetuated the low remuneration. For African slave labor, it was no wage at all. For Chinese and Indian contract labor in the Western Hemisphere, remuneration was far below that of European settlers. We see the same pattern today. The sanctioned and unsanctioned migration of labor from Latin America, Africa, and Asia into the center results in workers receiving a much lower wage than the homegrown labor force, a difference upheld by racist attitudes and structures in the center.

As the difference between the global value of labor and different wage levels of labor is the central point in the theory of unequal exchange, it makes sense to relate it to the migration of labor. Value can be transferred through the price-structure when countries with relative low wages exchange goods with countries with relative high wages, but value can also be transferred through the migration of labor power from the periphery to the center in order to produce goods and perform services at a lower wage than earned by the resident working class.

The Crises of Imperialism

Neoliberalism gave capitalism forty golden years, but beneath the surface resistance has been brewing. With the decline of U.S. hegemony, the rise of China, and the development of a multipolar world-system, the world is undergoing a profound change not seen in the past hundred years.

Today, this polarized world-system has reached a turning point. In the first three decades of neoliberal globalization, the transfer of value by unequal exchange had been steadily growing. However, the rise of China as the world’s leading industrial power has broken this dynamic for the first time in two hundred years. Keeping its national project intact, China changed from being a spring of value transfer to a competitor to the Global North on the world market. The value transfer of unequal exchange from South to North has begun to decline for the first time in the past 150 years. The rising wage levels in China are a main factor contributing to this decline: “Between 1978 and 2018, on average, one hour of work in the United States was exchanged for almost forty hours of Chinese work. However, from the middle of the 1990s…we observed a very marked decrease in unequal exchange, without it completely disappearing. In 2018, 6.4 hours of Chinese labour were still exchanged for 1 hour of U.S. labour.”²⁷

The center no longer has the advantage of a monopoly on high-tech industrial production, and it is losing the grip of global finance and trade. To uphold its hegemony, the United States is splitting and eroding the former neoliberal world market via trade wars, sanctions, and blockades, killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Resisting Unequal Exchange

The value transfer of unequal exchange is a pillar upholding the current capitalist world system. It contributes to the development of the current two major contradictions in the world. The contradiction between declining U.S. hegemony versus the rise of China and the emergence of a multipolar world system, and the contradiction between the capitalist mode of production versus the earth’s ecological systems. The economic and ecological unequal exchange are implicit in international trade and the global production chains.

In the wave of anti-imperialism in the 1970s, the third world demanded a “new economic world order,” which came to nothing. National liberation and the ambition to create socialism were not enough to cut the pipelines of imperialist value transfer. The newborn revolutionary states did not have the power to change the polarizing dynamic caused by unequal exchange. They could not simply increase wages and prices for the raw materials and agricultural products they supplied to the world market. No matter their aspirations, the economies of the newly independent countries were determined by the dominant capitalist world market.

Today the nations of the Global South are beginning to construct a new economic world order, creating alternative trade patterns and financial institutions, and using their own currencies instead of U.S. dollars. The decline of U.S. hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world-system opens up “a window of opportunity”—creating a space for progressive states and movements countering imperialist exploitation by unequal exchange. The United States is still a forceful power, but the South is on the offensive. While the transformative power of the third world in the 1960s and ’70s was based on “revolutionary spirit”—attempted ideological dominance over economic development—the current transformative power of the Global South is based on its economic strength.

Countering unequal exchange can offer the basis for a global coalition creating a new international order. The rule of imperialism and effect of unequal exchange has, however, divided the working class along hierarchical lines of nationality and citizenship, race and ethnicity, and gender. As Marx noted: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”²⁸ Hence, the main drivers of the struggle will be found in the Global South. They have the immediate material interest in getting rid of unequal exchange.

In the 1980s, Samir Amin advised the countries in the third world to delink from the imperialist economic system, in order to stop the value transfer of unequal exchange.²⁹ However, as Amin pointed out, delinking does not mean isolation—autarky—but the reorientation and subordination of international economic relations to the social and environmental needs of the toiling masses. It requires a mutually complementary and reinforcing process, between the class struggle in each country for the benefit of the working class on one side, and the establishment of external global political conditions that make the restoration of national popular sovereignty possible, on the other side. Building an anti-imperialist front on the state level, balancing U.S. hegemony in the world-system, is an integral and fundamental part of the national liberation project. Putting an end to unequal exchange cannot be pursued in isolation and separately by individual countries. The driving force will be states trying to build socialism and social and national liberation movements in the Global South.

In order to reduce the value transfer, they must regain their economic sovereignty, which has been eroded by neoliberal globalization. They need to redirect their trade-pattern from South-North to South-South. There might still be wage differences, but much less than the North-South difference. They need to develop their productive forces in order to free themselves from dependency on Western technology. They need to develop their own financial and banking system to avoid the dependency of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as well as the U.S. weaponization of the financial system through sanctions and blockades. They need to adopt new means of international payment to reduce the power of the dollar in global markets.

One example of such measures is BRICS. The cooperation between Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which was enlarged in 2023 with new countries, now comprising 46 percent of the world’s population and 36 percent of the world economy, counterbalancing the G7 (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan), with only 10 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the world economy.

BRICS+ is not an anticapitalist organization. The emerging multipolar world system consists of a complex of contradictory currents—between hegemonism and counter-hegemonism, conservative and progressive, capitalist and socialist forces. We have to keep in mind Marx’s words: that no social order disappears before all the productive forces for which there is space have been developed. We are reaching this point. Then—as Marx continues—comes the period of social revolution.³⁰

We are reaching the point where the capitalist mode of production is no longer the most effective mode of production to develop productive forces, but is becoming a global destructive force, both in terms of human societies and the natural environment. At the same time, the transitional mode of production, developed in the shadow of the dominant capitalism and the hegemonic power of the United States, has proved to be more effective in the development of productive forces. The United States can no longer compete with China, which is becoming the leading innovative economic power in the world. The leading capitalist countries are only creating conflicts and wars in the effort to uphold their hegemony, making it impossible to reach global solutions to social and ecological problems facing humanity.

We are approaching the point where the transitional modes of production can move out of the shadow of the capitalist mode of production, releasing themselves from the remaining international bonds and internal methods of capitalism within the transitional mode of production, and transform into a more developed socialist mode of production. It will not happen next year, but in the next decades. It will not happen automatically, but in a difficult and dangerous international and national class struggle.

What about Us in the Global North?

The majority of the working class in the imperialist North still identifies themselves with the national interest of the imperialist national state, believing that it will defend the “imperial mode of living.” This is reflected in the broad popular support for the NATO alliance.

The crises of neoliberal globalization in the past decade have led to the development of populist right-wing movements and even fascism in the Northern lower-middle class and the more privileged element of the working class. It is not unusual that a class formation losing its privileged position moves to the right. In the coming decades, with deepening economic and political crisis, it will be an important task to convince the working class that their long-term interest is to join the anti-imperialist struggle, to put an end to global capitalism. The struggle against fascism may as in the 1930s be of paramount importance.

The bourgeoisification of sections of the working class and its support of imperialism is a historical development, and as such, it opens up the possibility of change in the position and attitude of the working class and maintains a future possibility of the class as gravediggers of capitalism.

Since October 2023, the war on Gaza has created a new generation of anti-imperialists in the Global North, not seen since the protests against the Vietnam War. The mobilization of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is also a schooling in organization and of how the system works: about the power instruments of the state, about the media, and about imperialism in general. Anti-imperialists in the North are still a minority, but an important minority. In the solidarity movement with Palestine, we see local people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Palestinians in the diaspora. Refugees and migrant workers can be an anti-imperialist Trojan Horse within the Global North. Because of their position in production and service, they are not powerless, and their affiliation with family and hope for the economic development of their homeland in the Global South may be stronger than their loyalty to a state that barely tolerates their stay.

Notes

1. ↩ Mao Tse-Tung, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?,” in Mao: Four Essays on Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), 134.
2. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, “The Upheaval of Middle East Greek Forces in April 1944,” Greek Review, June 19, 1982, 12–17, republished at unequalexchange.org.
3. ↩ See Emmanuel’s defense before the judges: “Welcome to the Arghiri Emmanuel Association,” YouTube video, 1:11, July 11, 2023, posted at unequalexchange.org.
4. ↩ Patrice Lumumba to Arghiri Emmanuel, November 12, 1960, republished at Torkil Lauesen, “Emmanuel’s Association with Patrice Lumumba and His Expulsion from Congo,” Arghiri Emmanuel Association, September 17, 2024.
5. ↩ See also Héritier Ilonga, “Arghiri Emmanuel, the Law of Unequal Exchange, and the Failures of Liberation in the DR Congo,” Review of African Political Economy, September 4, 2024, roape.net.
6. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, “The Congo before Independence,” July 27, 1961, republished at Joseph Mullen, “Arghiri Emmanuel’s 1961 Analysis of the Congo Crisis,” Arghiri Emmanuel Association, July 4, 2024.
7. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel and Charles Bettelheim, “Échange inégal et politique de développement,” Problèmes de planification, no. 2 (Paris: Sorbonne Centre d’Étude de Planification Socialiste, 1962).
8. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
9. ↩ In the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote: “I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market.” Karl Marx, Preface (1859) to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 29, 261–65.
10. ↩ Torkil Lauesen, “Marxism, Value Theory, and Imperialism,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, eds. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 1st edition, 2019).
11. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), vol. 1, 268.
12. ↩ Iskra Books has just republished my introduction to the theory of unequal exchange, along with a new afterword: Communist Working Group, Unequal Exchange and the Prospects for Socialism (London: Iskra Books, 2024).
13. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, “The Delusions of Internationalism,” Monthly Review 22, no. 2 (June 1970): 13–19.
14. ↩ Jairus Banaji, “Arghiri Emmanuel (1911–2001),” Historical Materialism, n.d.
15. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), UN Handbook of Statistics 2009 (New York: United Nations, 2020), unctad.org.
16. ↩ Torkil Lauesen, Riding the Wave: Sweden’s Integration into the Imperialist World System (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2021), 140–41.
17. ↩ For more on the Marxist concept of value, see Torkil Lauesen, “Marxism, Value Theory, and Imperialism,” in eds. Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2nd edition, 2021), 1751–65.
18. ↩ International Labour Organization, World of Work Report 2011 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2011), ilo.org.
19. ↩ Intan Suwandi and John Bellamy Foster, “Multinational Corporations and the Globalization of Monopoly Capital: From the 1960s to the Present,” Monthly Review 68, no. 3 (July–August 2016): 124.
20. ↩ Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour, “Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy,” Nature Communications 15 (July 2024): 6298.
21. ↩ Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2021).
22. ↩ Arghiri Emmanuel, “Unequal Exchange Revisited,” IDS Discussion Paper no. 77, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, 1975, 66–67.
23. ↩ Alejandro Pedregal and Nemanja Lukić, “Imperialism, Ecological Imperialism, and Green Imperialism: An Overview,” Journal of Labor and Society 27, no. 1 (March 2024): 105–38.
24. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” in Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge, eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 187.
25. ↩ Pedregal and Lukić, “Imperialism, Ecological Imperialism, and Green Imperialism,” 129.
26. ↩ Immanuel Ness, Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (Cambridge: Polity, 2023), 16.
27. ↩ Zhiming Long, Zhixuan Feng, Bangxi Li, and Rémy Herrera, “S.-China Trade War: Has the Real ‘Thief’ Finally Been Unmasked?,” Monthly Review 72, no. 5 (October 2020): 6–14.
28. ↩ Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
29. ↩ Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990).
30. ↩ Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.