Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The causes are the "ongoing plunder of poor countries by rich countries, banks, multinational corporations, and global elites in the North and South." Again, this approach ignores the class structure in the poor and middle income countries, the socio-economic policies of the ruling elites (only mentioned in passing) and the role of the dominant classes in perpetuating the plunder, the lack of the political will to embark on economic and technological development, etc. Such an approach treats relations between states as separate from the sociology of the countries in question. The author of the article has a PhD in sociology! One or two more paragraphs would enlarge the picture and provide a better expalnation.  "The Global South" must be freed of its debt servitude

The Science of (Not) Ending Global Poverty

"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 th...

The unsevered umbilical cord that leaves large swathes of the Global South economically reliant on their old colonial powers, even after formally attaining national independence, is the  structural dependence  of these peripheral states on foreign credit and investment, which has long been provided to them by private banks, international investors and financial institutions in the advanced capitalist countries. Subjecting the nature of this structural dependence to closer theoretical and empirical scrutiny may therefore allow us to approach the problems faced by “the new debt colonies” from a somewhat different angle, enabling us to better understand the more subtle contemporary forms of financial subjugation operating at the structural and institutional level that serve to reproduce these deeply entrenched international power asymmetries over time, even in the absence of territorial control or outright military intervention. The New Debt Colonies should be read along with...