#dependency theory

"The creation of large-scale modern industry would have been severely hampered had it not relied upon dependent countries, and had instead been built on a strictly national basis. Indeed, industrial development implies a great availability of agricultural goods, which allows part of society to specialize in specifically industrial activity.

In the case of European industrialization, recourse to merely domestic agricultural production would have curbed the maximized productive specialization made possible by large-scale industry. The rapid growth of the industrial working class and, in general, of the urban population employed in industry and services, which took place in the industrial countries in the last century, could not have taken place without relying on means of subsistence of farm origin that were provided in large measure by Latin American countries. This was what made possible a deepening of the division of labor and, for industrial countries, specialization as world producers of manufactured goods."

From today’s Book of the Day, I have selected one sentence for a multidisciplinary analysis. “The question as to who and what is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels: first, the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation.” — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) Walter Rodney’s observation in…

Degrowth is sometimes criticized as a “softer” left-wing proposal, an unattainable goal for the unserious and non-politically minded. However, it is an absolutely crucial tool in not just politically opposing economic imperialism, but in reversing its real-world effects. Imperialism is a causative factor for climate change. Through the exploitation of resources from a range of sources, imperialist economic development has accelerated the extraction and use of fossil fuels and encouraged ecological destruction at larger scales. Low cost consumer goods in the United States exist by virtue of a base of exploited industrial and agricultural producers in underdeveloped nations, and the ability of American producers to rearrange labour costs internationally with sophistication that exceeded the ability of the USSR to arrange labor in Warsaw Pact states (which caused enormous political stresses between the USSR and its satellites). These arrangements and rearrangements moved, for example, production of consumer goods from post-War Japan to Korea to Taiwan to China to the Philippines in sequence, as these countries developed. One after another, each experienced rising labour costs as a result of American investment, eventually reaching a point at which savings of labour in these countries was no longer higher than the cost of the construction and integration with infrastructure of a country at a slightly lower level of development, thus ensuring low manufacturing costs on a continuous basis for American producers.

Without the ability to offshore production costs in this way, it is not really feasible to domestically produce low-cost consumer goods at the quantities and at the quality expected by American consumers. Low international labour costs are necessary to the lifestyle of the American consumer, even though the majority of this cost is hidden or considered just a mundane fact of life; images of dreary, deadly sweatshops in Southeast Asia that may have once given pause to the decision to consume one brand over another now fail barely raise the blood pressure of American consumers as they go about their purchases. The networks of trade infrastructure facilitate these low costs by exploiting underpaid drivers, truckers, distributors, and delivery workers.

Degrowth targets these economic agents within the core and, rather than negotiating them to a lowered degree of exploitative practices, destroys their entire business model. This is a decisive and very positive direction to head in. We do not need the ever-inflating market of consumer goods to grow more and more bloated in years to come. We do not need to maintain a market for consumer goods dependant on dangerous and ecologically unsound supply chains. What we must avoid is the uncontrolled collapse of recession. Degrowth provides a structured manner to selectively remove power and economic agency from sectors of the economy deemed unnecessary in order to bring down the overall ecological impact of the economy as a whole.

“Beyond the Stereotype: Restating the Relevance of the Dependency Research Program” by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven

"The effect of unequal exchange is to exacerbate the desire for profit—to the extent that it places obstacles in the way of its full satisfaction—and thus to intensify the methods of extracting surplus labor.Having said that, the three mechanisms identified—the intensification of work, the extension of the working day, and the expropriation of part of the labor necessary for the worker to replenish his labor power—give rise to a mode of production based exclusively on the greater exploitation of the worker, and not on the development of his productive capacity. This is consistent with the low level of development of the productive forces in the Latin American economy, but also with the kinds of activities that are carried out there.

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It is also important to note that, in the three mechanisms considered, the essential feature is that the worker is denied the conditions necessary to replenish his labor power that has been worn away: in the first two cases, this is because the worker is forced to expend more labor power than he would normally provide, leading to his premature exhaustion; in the last case, it is because even the possibility of consuming what is strictly necessary to maintain his labor power in a normal state is taken away. In capitalist terms, these mechanisms (which, moreover, can and usually do occur in combination) mean that labor [power] is remunerated below its value, and thus amount to a super-exploitation of labor."