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The income gap between the global North (the advanced economies of the core) and the global South (the developing economies of the periphery) has increased by between 170% and 270% since 1960, according to a study by the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, recently published in the journal New Political Economy. The research, conducted by ICTA-UAB economists Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, delivers a blow to the popular narrative that poorer countries are "catching up" to richer nations through capitalist growth. The study, titled "The myth of catch-up development: trends in core-periphery inequality from 1960 to 2023", is the first to analyze income inequality over the entire period with complete annual data for 173 countries representing 99.9% of the world population. The findings challenge claims made by prominent figures like Steven Pinker, who in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now argued that capitalism and market liberalization are driving a "Great Convergence".

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While 18 relatively small states—including South Korea, Taiwan, Greece, Portugal, and several Eastern European countries—have been reclassified as "advanced economies" by the IMF since 1980, the study emphasizes that these cases represent exceptional geopolitical integration rather than a generalizable development pathway. According to Jason Hickel, ICREA Professor at ICTA-UAB: "These countries are not randomly distributed across the globe; they are located almost exclusively in Southern Europe, East Asia and on the eastern border of the EU, forming a cordon sanitaire around the former socialist bloc. Their integration into the core served US geopolitical strategy during the Cold War and after." The study documents how the United States provided massive economic and military aid to these strategic allies—with South Korea receiving more US aid between 1953 and 1961 than the World Bank lent to all independent Third World countries combined. Israel has received approximately $310 billion (constant 2022 dollars) in US economic and military aid since 1946, around double the amount given to any other country. Dylan Sullivan, PhD candidate at ICTA-UAB and Macquarie University, commented: "The conventional narrative tells us that poor countries are simply 'behind' and will eventually catch up by following the same path as rich countries. Our research shows this is fundamentally wrong. The core-periphery divide isn't a development gap—it's a structural feature of the capitalist world economy.”

“Sweet berries on the vine, a meat pile so Divine…”

The first important thing to note is that most marxists (even smart, capable and insightful ones) have literally no idea what the dialectic even is, and I don't even mean that in a bad way, in fact, what is usually called 'dialectics' or even 'dialectical materialism' is so far removed from 'actual' dialectics that it doesn't even register as possibly the same thing.

First things first: forget thesis-antithesis-sinthesis it's bullshit, not even an oversimplification, it's just wrong.

With that out of the way, Hegel was part of a philosophical movement called German Idealism, for that reason he was worried about a thing called Geist (Spirit, mind or idea). Essentially the Geist is the je ne sais quois that makes humans human and Hegel believed that Geist was a progressive pull towards a certain state of knowledge.

So Hegel starts out by trying to understand how is it that people come about understanding themselves as people, which is the 'master-slave' dialectics: for you to acknowledge yourself as a self, you also need a negation in the form of an Other that drives you to it. For Hegel, the freedom of the 'slave' the knowledge that they even can exist independently, while the 'master's' existence is dependent on having the 'slave' to do the acknowledging -- because a 'master' cannot be a 'master' without 'mastering' a 'slave'.

Dialectics came about as an way of understand phenomena and ideas as they changed and progressed, and it describes how every possible concept contains it's own negation: I had a professor who explained it in terms of building a canoe, the more you are a log, the less you are a canoe (and vice-versa) and yet you need the log you be the canoe.

In the 'master-slave' dialectic you can see that to be 'master', you have to give power (mastery) of your self over to someone else, while the 'slave' while supposedly not being free, has reign over their own destiny, their own self.

That is the reason why thesis-antithesis-synthesis is wrong, it implies a discreet change in states and it describes three different thing which interact. That is also the reason most marxists can't quite grasp dialectics: when you put capitalism in terms of class struggle, you are talking about two discreet entities which are the negations of each other, while 'actual' dialectics aren't about that.

The whole class thing was Marx trying to explain a contradiction that was at the core of the idea of capitalism, but by autonomizing the terms of the contradiction what remains isnt a dialectic.

In that sense the dialectic can never 'truly' be material, not even in terms of new-materialism, because dialectics is about a kind of internal negation that simply does not belong to materiality and in trying to fit 'actual' events into it you always have to split the different moments of an idea into different entities and, therefore, are not doing dialectics. Remember canoe and the log are the same thing, just in different moments of it.

Ultimately, Hegel believed that history was built on the progressive march of Spirit towards Absolute Spirit which would be the final form of society and that every single time something 'took us away' from that directionality that was only a necessary moment of negation within the dialectic of Absolute Spirit which merely confirmed it's directionality (goes without saying that he believed that Europe was closer to Absolute Spirit than anyone else), which in itself is very reminiscent of Marx's whole historical teleology bit.