Imperialism, Unequal Exchange, and Labour Export

Abstract

In the international political economy, monopoly capital has become, more than ever, the central player. Through mega-mergers and strategic alliances, this fraction of capital has reached unparalleled levels of concentration and centralization. This trend, associated with the operations of Marx’s absolute general law of capital accumulation, has led to an increasing monopolization of finance, production, services, and trade, leaving every major global industry to be dominated by a handful of large multinational corporations. In the expansion of their activities, the agents of corporate, or monopoly, capitalism have created a global network and process of production, finance, distribution, and investment that has allowed them to seize the strategic and profitable segments of peripheral economies and appropriate the economic surplus produced at enormous social and environmental costs. The main aim of this chapter is to analyse the new modalities of unequal exchange engendered by the implementation of structural adjustment programmes in the Global South. These programmes have been the vehicle for disarticulating the economic apparatus in the periphery and its re-articulation to serve the needs of core capitalist economies, under sharply asymmetric and subordinated conditions. This has led to the emergence of a new international division of labour centred in the direct and indirect exportation of workforce which, in turn, has triggered new and extreme modalities of unequal exchange.