how long are glowies going to keep pushing the un-Marxian notion of "unequal exchange"? the people who support it seem to believe the following:
>that raw materials in the ground have value>that value can be created in exchangebut anyone who has read Capital knows that the free gifts of nature have no value. the notion that value is created in exchange is a Proudhonian one, and Marx spends many pages in Capital tearing it down
nothing is "stolen" from say Africa that isn't stolen from Northern workers as well, and in greater quantity, namely their surplus value, which Northern workers produce in much greater amount per worker than Southern workers do. Northern workers are
more exploited than Southern workers are, not less
the people who push unequal exchange do not seem to understand what "exploitation" means in the Marxian sense. it doesn't mean "has bad working conditions". it means squeezing value out of the working population. Southern workers aren't "overexploited" as the moralfag Parenti puts it. it is precisely the opposite. capital squanders Southern labour power. it doesn't exploit it
enough. as Frantz Fanon points out, Subsaharan Africa lies largely fallow. why? because it keeps the OCC low and the RoP high. the entire point of Europe divvying up Africa was cartelization to prevent competition and having to invest in MoPs
even Hakim pushes this nonsense (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjLmYCfKU7o). the South exporting larger amounts of raw materials while importing finished goods is somehow "unequal". the paper cited by Hakim (
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 by Hickel et. al.) measures so-called "raw material equivalents". it is effectively a mass theory of value, the consequence of which is that a country exporting one ton of iron is entitled to one ton of gold in return. which is complete nonsense of course. it does similarly with labour, where it is not the
social labour that is measured, but concrete labour. the fact that Southern labour power exchanges for Northern labour power at a ratio of 13:1 can just mean that Northern labour is 13 times more productive than Southern labour. this is perfectly in line with Northern MoPs being more developed than South
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