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?

  • 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.