Some genius takes:

The whole Global North/South split is a pet peeve of mine as a social scientist working in development policy. It's a bunch of outdated garbage from the Cold War that was really just a thinly veiled dogwhistle for 'white/the good Asians' and 'not white'. It doesn't hold up to any rational examination. South Africa was part of the Global North until white rule under Apartheid ended, and now they're in the Global South. southern nations.

Real educated economist chimes in:

Jason Hickel is an anthropologist (read: not economist) and degrowther. Despite having no background and seemingly almost no understanding of economics as a field, he somehow continues to get 'economics' papers published in reputable journals despite their obvious low quality. But to anyone with a cursory understanding of economics, it should be entirely unsurprising that exports from developing nations to developed are more labor intensive than vice-versa. This is not a novel conclusion and is not 'appropriation', but is entirely explained by a concept in economics called comparative advantage.

Another genius owns the article epic style

This paper is a demonstration of why input-output (IO) models are bad for economic research. IO models were used by the soviet central planners to allocate resources. IO models are bad for research for the same reason the are bad for planning. The authors look at “embodied labor” (adjusted for human capital), the idea being that any two things produced by an hour of (human capital adjusted) labor must have the same value (btw, this “labor theory of value” goes back to Adam Smith, and was later promulgated by Marx).

Other facts that the authors’ framework will struggle to explain: why is it that the poor countries that most integrated with global trade networks became rich (s korea, Japan, Singapore) or are otherwise growing quickly (china, Panama, Vietnam)? Why is it that countries with severe barriers to trade with the global north struggle to grow (n Korea, India for second half of 20th century)? That’s very hard to explain if trade with the global north is fundamentally exploitative.

  • RuthlessCriticism [comrade/them]
    ·
    5 months ago

    People cling to pre-Marxist unequal exchange theories because they are reassuring, they are, however not true. Where is the unequal exchange happening? When India exports rice, which stage is unequal exchange? Why do those people sell the rice for less than its value? Marx explains quite clearly why surplus value extraction happens. The unequal exchange believers totally fail to do the same.

      • RuthlessCriticism [comrade/them]
        ·
        5 months ago

        A huge section of the working class in the global South has been “rendered superfluous” by the inability of modern production methods to soak up enough labor to prevent rising unemployment, and this alone, even before we take into account the much harsher labor regimes prevalent in low-wage countries, exerts a powerful force that makes “the price of their labour-power fall below its value.”

        This is totally incoherent. I doubt this author has ever read Marx, they certainly haven't grasped the thrust of his argument.

        Slightly more systematic analysis:

        Part1 is an unremarkable and outdated if largely correct collection of empirical points. Fine.

        Part 2 rests largely on incorrect empirical claims.

        Companies like Apple and H&M export no capital to Bangladesh and China—their iPhones and garments are produced by arm’s-length production processes. Untrue. Also if some Taiwanese company is doing the capital export, that is still imperialism as Lenin defined. This resonates powerfully with contemporary global capitalism, where imperialist transnational corporations share the spoils of super-exploitation with myriad service-providers and their own employees, and where the biggest cut of all is taken by the state.

        Apple famously a highly taxed company. Also there is no evidence that Apples shares spoils with its employees, moreover there is no reason to believe they would do so and every reason to believe they wouldn't.

        In general this article seems to be laundering a non-materialist argument and world model via a smattering Marx and Lenin quotes, largely without making any attempt to understanding the quotes themselves. Laundering the total rejection of Marx and Lenin via their own words by totally misunderstanding them. It really isn't worth my time to fully dissect this article, so I leave it here.****