World Systems Theory and related concepts often come up whenever people try to explain why Westerners are psychotic counterrevolutionary scum, etc. It’s often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans. We might say “White Minnesotan Joe Cracker wants child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics.” And yeah, that makes sense up to a point…

But Joe Cracker might not understand the relevant supply chain or even the basic composition of his smartphone. He probably doesn’t even know about the existence of said exploitation, much less its nature or purpose. Maybe Joe Cracker WILL revolt without his cheap goods, but he probably doesn’t actually know what goes into producing them or keeping the prices down. So what decisions is he making that render him “complicit” in the profiteering of some massive international corporation like Apple? Falling for their ads?

It’s also worth pointing out that his iPhone doesn’t actually make him richer any more than a Hulu membership does. It’s a cute little toy, but it doesn’t obtain food, housing, medicine or fuel. It’s a cell phone with a billion bells and whistles and a monthly subscription fee. One could starve to death with it in hand. Is this really the “wealth transfer” we keep talking about? This is the socialized bribery Americans perfected?

It seems to me that Joe Cracker is complicit in fuck-all. He doesn’t materially benefit from low wages in southeast Asian textile plants even if he wears one of those shirts they make every single day. It seems that he’s just a different kind of poor from the Bangladeshi serfs who make his sneakers, the kind of poor with tap water, McDonalds, and WiFi. Poor overseas workers make the stupid shit, poor Americans buy the stupid shit, and they both struggle, but at least Joe Cracker has some killer kicks to go along with the Taco Bell and the wireless internet in his shitty apartment. The Nike execs, meanwhile, can smoke cigars and watch the line go up from the VIP lounge.

“Bread and Circuses” seems like a much better explanation for the behavior of these Westerners. Who says Joe Cracker has a good reason for throwing his verbal weight behind an ongoing genocide in Gaza, screaming about nuking Moscow over a slice of Ukraine, and pearl-clutching about the 100 billion victims of Communism in Xinjiang?

  • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
    17·
    7 days ago

    You may be thinking about this in the wrong way. You say, for instance:

    It’s often suggested that white Americans in particular love third-world exploitation because it directly benefits those same white Americans.

    I don’t know who would say that white yanks love exploiting the global south. It’s simply a fact that they benefit disproportionately from imperialism. Minnesotan Joe Cracker may not even want “child slavery in southern Africa so he can get his cheap electronics” but that child slavery and US-imposed oppression is the mechanism by which he can enjoy his cheap electronics.

    Nobody is claiming that yanks can’t be poor, suffering, or oppressed. Look at Joe Cracker, who drinks tap water, enjoys the odd McDonald’s, and uses an iPhone. These are luxuries for many, many people who lack:

    • potable water
    • a fully nutritional diet
    • road infrastructure
    • access to consistent electricity or any kind of telecommunications network, including/never mind WiFi (and yes, it’s a luxury—have you considered what it might be like to give birth at night in a place that has no electricity and where you cannot contact a medic to talk you through the process, never mind arrive in time to help?)
    • safe indoor ovens for cooking
    • it’s an endless list – and as bad as things are in the US, for most people that list is substantially shorter.

    As Parenti argues, the US ruling class wants the third-worldisation of the US. There is homelessness, non-potable water in Flint, and roads and rail that barely function. Let’s look at some statistics to see the other side of the equation.

    Note: another comment in this thread tries to work out and explain why a Vietnamese worker is no worse off than a US worker. The logic, unfortunately, distorts the picture. I’ll use four examples to demonstrate that yanks do benefit materially from imperialism, whether they ‘love’ it or choose it or hate it.

    1) Unit Labour Costs

    The Vietnamese or Indian factory cannot be viewed in isolation even if this is where the product is ’made’. The description is false and hourly wages are not equivalent. The ‘made in’ place is the final assembly point, usually where the head-company finds the lowest unit labour costs. Intan Suwandi summarises why unit labour costs are more important than base hourly wages or similar metrics. She writes in Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (a recommended book, less than 180 pages excluding endnotes) (p. 56):

    Unit labor cost is a composite measure, combining data on labor productivity and compensation to assess the price competitiveness of a given set of countries. It is typically presented as the average cost of labor per unit of real output, or the ratio of total hourly compensation to output per hour worked (labor productivity).

    There’s a chart on p. 59, which:

    reports average hourly labor compensation in manufacturing industries in 2017 U.S. dollars, illustrates a massive discrepancy in wage levels that exists between economies of the Global North and Global South. Here, hourly compensation is converted into actual dollars—representing the hegemonic foreign exchange/reserve currency determining the purchase price of labor, profit margins, and international financial flows—rather than applying a purchasing power parity conversion

    The chart shows that isolated hourly wages are meaningless. Unit labour costs by state in 2000–14 USD were (approx.):

    • Germany $46
    • UK $42
    • US $38
    • Japan $33
    • Mexico $7
    • Indonesia $4
    • China $2
    • India $1

    The data is not the most recent but here are some other details (endnotes omitted):

    In 1996 … a single Nike shoe consisting of fifty-two components was manufactured in five different countries. The entire direct labor cost for the production of a pair of Nike basketball shoes in Vietnam in the late 1990s, retailing for $149.50 in the United States, was $1.50, or 1 percent. Unit labor costs for [PUMA] sneakers … in China in the early 2000s were so low that the hourly profit on each pair of sneakers was more than twenty-eight times greater than the hourly wages workers in China received to make the sneakers.

    A 2019 study … interviewed 1,452 Indian women and girls, including children 17 years old or younger—85 percent of whom did home-based work “bound for export to major brands in the United States and the European Union”—[and found] that these workers earn as little as fifteen cents per hour. They “consist almost entirely” of female workers from “historically oppressed ethnic communities” in India, and their work typically involves “finishing touches” like embroidery and beadwork.

    These … exploitative economic relations help us understand the reality of labor-value commodity chains and how they relate to global labor arbitrage. In essence, each node or link within a labor-value chain represents a point of profitability. Each central node, and … link in the chain, constitutes a transfer of value (or labor values). This is partially disguised by conventions with respect to GDP accounting and hence ways of computing value added. In effect, as numerous analysts have now shown, labor values generated by production are … not registered as arising in the peripheral countries due to asymmetries in power relations, in which multinational corporations are the key conduits.

    Hidden in … pricing and international exchange … is an enormous gross markup on labor costs (rate of surplus value) amounting to super-exploitation, both in the relative sense of above-average rates of exploitation and also, frequently, in the absolute sense of workers paid less than the cost of the reproduction of their labor power.

    Suwandi then mentions that much of this wealth goes to 26 billionaires. You might retort that poor Joe does not benefit in the same way as them. He doesn’t. He benefits when those 28 use their wealth to keep the US on top and keep the cheap goods flowing. Are the Nikes and iPhone ‘cheap’ to Joe? Maybe not; but they’re a lot cheaper than they are to Joe’s Indian counterpart, Jewana.

    2) Purchasing Power

    Another way of viewing the same equation is considering (i) purchasing power and (ii) the source of wages. (i) I’ll quote myself summarising Zac Cope’s Wealth of (Some) Nations (pp. 34–7):

    … keeping the numbers simple.

    • Take two workers, one in the global north (A), the other in the south (B)
    • A is paid $10/hour to make ’widgets’
    • B is paid $1/hour to make widgets
    • A and B both make 1 widget an hour and they want to buy each other’s widgets
    • B must work 10 hours: 10 x 1$ = $10 = one of A’s widgets @ $10/each
    • In the same hours of work, A can buy: 10 x $10 = $100 = one hundred of B’s widgets @ $1/each
    • The ratio of purchasing power is 1:100.
    3) Functional Exploitation

    (ii) The second example looks at a value chain where one worker is e.g. in India and the other in Minnesota:

    How does A [functionally] exploit B? …

    • Multinational Company (MNC) makes pens and sells them for $40
    • Materials, use of tools, rent, and energy, etc, cost $2
    • It takes two hours of labour to produce each pen, one hour each from A and B
    • MNC pays A for part of the job and pays B for the other part of the job
    • MNC pays A $10 for their hour of work, and pays B $2 for their hour of work: $12 total for labour Production costs are $14 in total, leaving MNC with $26 profit per pen. Forget … for a moment [that the MNC steals] $26 [value] produced by the labour of workers … we are interested in the relationship between A and B (… mediated by MNC)
    • If the total cost of labour is $12 and two labour hours are needed to produce each pen, each labour hour costs $6
    • If A is paid $10 but only produced $6 worth of value, then A was paid $4 more for their hour of work than they produced
    • If B is paid $2 but produced $6 worth of value, then B was paid $4 less for their hour of work than they produced
    • The extra $4 given to A comes directly from the value produced by B, meaning A functionally exploits B [even if the MNC exploits both].

    A does not wake up and think ‘I’m going to exploit B today’. But it doesn’t matter. By they time they both go to bed, that is what [they did].

    4) Environmental Benefits

    Then there is the environmental damage caused by living in the US. The global south will disproportionately pay for the decadence of late stage capitalism but the emissions are overwhelmingly produced in or for the north—a hidden benefit of being poor in the US (not to say that many will not suffer from climate change). Andrew L Fanning and Jason Hickel:

    There are 129 countries from the global South in our analysis, which are home to more than 80% of the total population, but their aggregate cumulative emissions surpassed fair shares of the 350 ppm carbon budget only in 2012—more than two decades after the world as a whole[.] … The remaining 39 countries in our analysis are from the global North, and we find this group of high-emitting countries used up its collective fair share of the 350 ppm carbon budget by 1969, then overshot its 1.5 °C fair share by 1986 and then surpassed its 2 °C fair share by 1995 (Fig. 1c). As of 2019, this group of countries has already exceeded its collective fair share of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by more than 2.5 times, with cumulative emissions measured from 1960.

    On average, yanks benefit materially and significantly from imperialism and suffer less from its harms. Many of these will see themselves as poor. They may be poor. Still, yanks will generally demand a higher stake from the loot and demand not to suffer the consequences long before they consider turning off the tap. This does not mean that yanks cannot be educated to realise their position in imperialism but it’s an uphill struggle. For more: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/497897

    • NikkiB@lemmygrad.mlOP
      5·
      7 days ago

      Thank you, this was very through and insightful. I see now that I was being a little flippant in my failure to distinguish between absolute poverty and relative poverty. I didn’t account for the parameters “yanks” operate within and how that affects their decision making. Sometimes it’s hard to read your own reflection.

      • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
        1·
        7 days ago

        You’re welcome. It’s a difficult topic. I also had to come to terms with some uncomfortable truths, being in a similar place. I had to realise that I wasn’t just getting paid better than colonised people just because I’m willing to work nights and weird shifts.

        As for ‘yanks’, I was over the character limit and saved just enough to get under by replacing ‘settler’ and ‘USian’. I don’t like to use ‘American’ because that label is much broader than settlers the US. It’s not intended as an insult. Well, no more than if I were to call someone British, French, or German lol

    • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml
      11·
      7 days ago

      I may be wrong, but the examples you have cited don’t appear to make sense.

      In the first example, it is assumed that the selling price of both widgets is equal to their labor cost, and that it is possible for A to buy B’s widgets and vice versa. The latter condition implies an international market for these widgets where B’s employer sells widgets for $1 while A’s employer sells the same widgets for $10 while A’s employer is not priced out of the market.

      In your second example, the selling price is $40. Constant capital costs are $2 and variable capital is $12.

      From this we get that the value produced by living labor (of A and B) is $38 (price - constant capital) in 2 hours total, or $17 per hour. Thus A is exploited for $7 (surplus rate = 7/10 = 70%) while B is exploited for $15 per hour (surplus rate = 750%).

      While B was exploited more than A, this does not mean that A is exploiting B, functionally or otherwise.

      • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
        2·
        7 days ago

        They’re great points, actually. I think I’ve lost something in trying to condense and simplify the points within the character count. I’m going to try to have another read of the source and re-check numbers. If I’ve not simplified faithfully, you may be onto a string critique of Cope. I’m not certain just, though—I’ll have to think about it.

        I have a feeling that it’s me who’s missed out some of the explanation. I’ve got to figure out where. It could be in suggesting, in the first example, that A and B are buying widgets off each other.

        In the second, the $12 is the portion of value created by labour that the employer(s) is willing to give to the workers. The workers there are in the same value chain and contribute to one product. They could both have a pay rise if the bourgeois wasn’t involved. But, crucially, worker A will usually side with the bourgeois before they side with worker B. This is because (and I accept the numbers that I’ve given as my example don’t show this clearly) worker A realises (i) under the current arrangement, they are paid well because worker B is paid so poorly (the functional exploitation) and (ii) it is far easier to collaborate with the employer for another few dollars of the profit than to overthrow the system just so that worker B can have parity (which does not necessarily benefit worker A and may be a positive disbenefit).

        Could be worth me quoting directly rather than putting it in my own words but I remember it’s quite complex (hence me using a simplified version). I’ll take a another look.

        • Sodium_nitride@lemmygrad.ml
          2·
          7 days ago

          I’m not certain just, though—I’ll have to think about it.

          NP, I can wait for you to clarify your arguments and get the quotations. In the meantime, I can try addressing the points you presented.

          In the second, the $12 is the portion of value created by labour that the employer(s) is willing to give to the workers.

          The amount of value given to workers is not decided by how much the employers are willing to give. It is determined by a combination of the costs of reproducing labor and the bargaining position of workers. The arguments I have heard from Marxists critical of unequal exchange theory are that the value given to workers in the third world is so low largely because

          1. Women in third world households do a lot of unpaid domestic work, reducing the cost of reproducing labor
          2. The large presence of rural migrant workers drives down wages in the third world

          Of course, even without unequal exchange, super exploitation and the financial dominance of the dollar remain, leaving the first world bourgeoise with virtually unlimited purchasing power. The big controversy as far as I know is whether or not imperialism actually provides a net benefit to first world proles given the costs. Unfortunately, I still don’t have enough technical understanding of the global economy to answer this question on either side of the debate.

          it is far easier to collaborate with the employer for another few dollars of the profit than to overthrow the system just so that worker B can have parity (which does not necessarily benefit worker A and may be a positive disbenefit).

          On a political level, I certainly have seen many liberals/conservatives justify exploiting the third world because they believe it benefits them. So I agree with this.