Exploitation - North and South

"Today the concentration and centralization of capital is manifested in the growth of international monopoly capital. Capital is more and more mobile (along with technology), as the giant firms become increasingly globalized and financialized. Nevertheless, nation-state divisions remain intact with governments promoting the interests of “their” corporations over those of other countries, along with restrictions on the mobility of labor. The result is a system of unequal exchange, in which the difference in the wages between labor forces in different nations is greater than the difference between their productivities. This creates a system of “imperial rents” accruing to the global corporations in the center—referred to less directly in mainstream economic circles as the “global labor arbitrage.” (An analogous process affects natural resources, drawn from the global South.) All of this points to the superexploitation of labor in the periphery, which receives in wages less than the value of labor power—a situation made possible also by the existence of a massive global reserve army located primarily in the periphery. The fact that labor is rewarded differently in the center and the periphery, and that this is related to the globalization of monopoly capital, constitutes the essence of the imperialist world system today. The existence of a lower rate of exploitation of labor in the North and a higher rate of exploitation of labor in the South constitutes the main obstacle to the unity of the international working class."

Samir Amin (1931-2018)
(pronounced: Sameer Ameen)