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The Economics of Modern Imperialism

According to Michael Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi, 

  • imperialism is “a persistent and long-term net appropriation of surplus value by the high-technology imperialist countries from the low-technology dominated countries.”
  • there are “four channels through which surplus value flows to the imperialist countries: currency seigniorage; income flows from capital investments; unequal exchange through trade; and changes in exchange rates.”
  • “modern imperialism does not deny the persistent existence of colonialism. Colonialism and modern imperialism do not exclude each other… Colonialism contains in itself the germs of modern imperialism.”
  • “the trade of the commodities with high technological content produced in the imperialist countries for the capitalistically produced raw materials or industrial goods produced with lower technological content in the dominated countries” results in “unequal exchange.”
  • “under modern imperialism, technology has become the new battlefield.”
  • “military and ideological supremacy is not simply an appendage of economic power. Rather, economic power is determinant because it is the condition of existence of the military and ideological power and the latter is determined because it is the condition of reproduction (or supersession) of the former.”
  • “the inflow of surplus value into the imperialist countries from the rest of the world has helped to slow down the deterioration in output growth and profitability, but has not reversed it.”
  • “the downward movement in profitability is due to the fact that (a) both blocs’ rates of profit fall; (b) the dominated countries’ profitability is persistently above that of the imperialist ones because of their lower OCC; and (c) the dominated countries’ profitability, while persistently higher than in the imperialist countries, falls more than in the imperialist bloc.”
  • “the imperialist bloc has a consistently much higher productivity than the dominated bloc and the gap has tendentially widened from 1950 up to the 2007–8 crisis.”
  • “economic imperialism is a system of international social relations basically founded on long-term technological differentials in which the high technology, high productivity imperialist countries (and thus with higher OCCs [organic composition of capitals]) persistently capture in a variety of ways the surplus value generated in the low-technology and low-OCC dominated countries. Persistent unequal levels of technology are the necessary condition for the persistent appropriation of surplus value.”
  • “due to their technological superiority, some countries are hegemonic or leading in the sense that they impose their policies (economic or otherwise) both on other imperialist countries and on countries of the dominated bloc in order to pursue their own interests.”
  • “the G7 imperialist countries’ stock of investment abroad has persistently outstripped such investment by the larger dominated economies. If China were excluded, the gap would be even larger.”
  • “more recently, Shaikh and Antonopoulos have submitted that ‘the sustainable real exchange rate is that which corresponds to the relative competitive position of a nation, as measured by its relative real unit labor costs’… Broadly speaking, the authors reckon that the DC improve their profitability (competitive position) by lowering their labour costs while the IC do that by raising their productivity.“
  • “is China an imperialist nation? To answer this question, we consider the transfer of surplus value from China to the IC [imperialist countries]. We find that there is a clear transfer of surplus value from China to the IC bloc, averaging 5–10% of China’s GDP since the 1990s. The IC has gained an average of 1% of IC GDP from trade with China… China is not an imperialist country; on the contrary, it clearly fits into the dominated bloc.”
  • “if China increases its capital accumulation more than the US and increases its exports to the US, its balance of trade improves ceteris paribus, but its UE [unequal exchange] worsens because China still has a lower level of productivity. China has increased its capital accumulation more than the US, but it has still not reached the US level of technology… China’s average productivity level is still less than 25% of that of the US.”
  • “for an emerging capitalist nation there is no other way to ‘development’ than by raising productivity through more efficient technologies.”

The Economics of Modern Imperialism

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