Underdevelopment by Design: The Metrics of Unequal Exchange

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Having covered unequal exchange before, we consider in this video whether the phenomenon can be measured using real data. Following the seminal work of Andrea Ricci, it is clear that a substantial amount of value leaves the developing world every year.
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Narration, script, and editing by M.
Animated intro by Jack, co-host of the Auxiliary Statements podcast @AuxStatements on Twitter.
Intro music by Charles Tristan:
/ charles-tristan
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Patreon:
/ themarxistpro. .
Twitter:
/ marxistproject
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Reference:
Andrea Ricci's "Value and Unequal Exchange in International Trade" (2019).
00:00 - 01:23 Background
01:24 - 01:37 Intro
01:38 - 04:11 Unequal Exchange Recap
04:12 - 06:24 Value as a Social Algorithm
06:25 - 08:36 The Model in Brief
08:37 - 10:57 Highlights of the Findings
10:58 - 12:27 Conclusion

Опубликовано:

31 май 2024

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Комментарии : 69

@VolokArtyom 9 месяцев назад

i'm Brazilian and the unequal exchange question hurts, especially when including interest payments, it's crazy how much of our budget goes to paying interests on loans we've paid several times over at this point, not to mention how the capitalist core countries use the instability they create to try to push things such as "internationalizing" the amazon so they can exploit it more directly, and if we vote for a left-winger or even just a centrist who's ok with the left we might just get couped, happened as recently as 2016, and went on with operation carwash and the political arrest of lula.

@natemarx4999 9 месяцев назад

This channel makes my notifications smile. Long live the revolution, brothers!

@KGBSpyGeorgeCostanza 9 месяцев назад

I seen you aroumd like everywhere, I thought you were a conservative with a funny name

@natemarx4999 9 месяцев назад

@@KGBSpyGeorgeCostanza Its complicated. I certainly am not liberal, but I despise imperialism, capitalism and neoliberalism with a passion. Karl Marx was right about a lot of things.

@KGBSpyGeorgeCostanza 9 месяцев назад

@@natemarx4999 lol no it's fine my friend, this is exactly how I feel, I'm not a liberal, back around 2016-2017, I was called liberal by alot of conservatives mostly for my socialist ideals and agreeing with Marxism which makes no sense because I hate liberals, I do not align myself as one, liberalism especially neo liberalism is a huge mistake to this world, I despise capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and Marx pretty much is looking more and more right, this world is becoming a cyber bourgeois dystopia, quite frankly I am not happy about it

@Socialist1919 9 месяцев назад

The Marxist Project channel is pure science

@amrastrasartir8079 9 месяцев назад

@@Socialist1919😂whole marxism is not a science, but religion like belief. With Marx & Engels as a first prophets.

@John-wl9pg 9 месяцев назад

I'm literally doing a PhD thesis where there's a section I use this as a theoretical tool but information is skant and confusing to say the least. You've done a terrific job.

@homemdasneves 8 месяцев назад

if you're doing a phd thesis you shouldn't be getting your info from a fucking youtube video

@kozara8202 8 месяцев назад

what is terrific mean

@munaali840 7 месяцев назад

@@kozara8202 very good

@antoinebenobre2552 Месяц назад

@@kozara8202Depends on the context. It can mean horrible, awful, but here it means fantastic

@skapunkkid17 9 месяцев назад

I HAVE TO WAIT FOR SO LONG I LOVE IT WHEN YOU POST A NEW VIDEO!!!!!!!!!

@themarxistproject 9 месяцев назад

I wish I could upload more often! Thanks for your support 🙂

@di-li 9 месяцев назад

Продолжайте! Теоретическая работа должна идти вперёд.

@crazymarxistguy 9 месяцев назад

Amazing content honestly! I was doing a reading list for a class conscious friend and I recommended him to consult your channel in parallel for clarity. This is just how good you are! Thanks for your work! Long live the revolution, comrades!

@thoughtraindrops 9 месяцев назад

Wow that's scarier than I thought...

@antoinebenobre2552 Месяц назад

Marxism shows us the horrors of the world. But it also shows how all these contradictions are not only inevitably growing worse, but growing more and more untenable, and therefore change is inevitable... The change towards socialism !

@PC42190 9 месяцев назад

Have you ever read Cockshott’s counterpoints to unequeal exchange? I don’t agree with him but I would like to see a response to his opinions on this specific topic

@___c5645 9 месяцев назад

Cockshott is a pseudo-intellectual who has a history of using fascist talking points to discuss immigrants and LGBT people. I don't think anybody should take him seriously

@distortiontildeafness 9 месяцев назад

How would you frame and summarize the disagreement or cockshotts .. I think I watched one of his videos nots long ago reviewing unequal exchange but it's fuzzy.. will have to rewatch

@JosephJohnston94 9 месяцев назад

Great video! This is a fascinating and under discussed topic. And rarer still is the overwhelming good-faith critique in the comments! I keep circling back to idea that unequal exchange is a “feature, not a bug.” I question how intentional this feature is. Before neo-colonialism (or whatever, I’m not much of a scholar) made everything impossible to discern, it’s easy to imagine that a system of wealth transfer was an active decision made by a small group. However, nowadays, willful ignorance seems to have taken over. Sure, the ruling class is going to rig things to benefit themselves, but I’ve talked to these people. And, lord forgive them, for they know not what they do. (They also don’t care. But they really don’t know. [I also don't know these things, which is why I appreciate videos like this so much!]) And with how abstract this all is, and with how bad economics/business education is, I also question the level to which their ignorance is willful. If, in spite of the decentralized, scrambled, and private (privatized) nature of the plunder, there were any specific schools of thought or historical decision points which set the stage for this setup, I’d love to hear that story. I’d also very much appreciate being pointed in the right direction! Thanks! EDIT: changed wording to no longer imply that I might be involved in orchestrating systems of unequal exchange

@n1kryb_914 9 месяцев назад

Very good and interesting video. Easy to listen and understand, thank you!

@JustJanitor 9 месяцев назад

Thank you for making these videos

@MastroTizio 9 месяцев назад

I really appreciate your content, and it helps me understand better what i believe in. But i have a suggestion: put subtitles. My first languange is not english, and even if i can understand you pretty well, you use terms wich are very sofisticated or just complex. So for someone that doesn't know english well, subtitles would be extremely good. Keep it up.

@shushunk00 9 месяцев назад

Hakim made a video on it few months back

@KenH60109 Месяц назад

His video was very 101, wouldn’t suggest it when making an argument.

@kylezo 9 месяцев назад

Awesome work. i mean it's dry but that's just how it be.

@sebastianpeady5850 9 месяцев назад

They're back!

@injusticeanywherethreatens4810 Месяц назад

Thanks for this.

@Anita.Cox. 9 месяцев назад

Hi, is it ok for you to make a video abt ppl like Henry George, as marx and him have always caught my eye with their theory's on economics.

@crelisr 4 месяца назад

Excellent job! Thank you.

@elianes5505 9 месяцев назад

Very good video as always.

@icantaimpg3d776 9 месяцев назад

Hello ! Nice video ! How are you doing ? Summer is ending now 🙁 so I won’t have as much time to watch leftist contents. Your upload schedule is basically 1 video/3 - 4 months ? It would also be nice to see would it be catastrophic for the imperial core/first world countries if they lose their benefits from unequal exchange, I assume it would hurt but not much.

@AtlantaBill 9 месяцев назад

More productive = more capital-intensive

@carsonhair3788 9 месяцев назад

love it!

@JustJanitor 9 месяцев назад

Maybe in a few years I'll understand all this

@OPOS-el7tj 9 месяцев назад

These videos are always interesting (especially when you disagree)

@taknoef9195 9 месяцев назад

your theory assumes that labor time is the only factor of production, and that differences in wages are due to differences in exploitation rates. However, this neglects the fact that countries and sectors may have different levels of capital intensity, skill intensity, research and development, quality, and efficiency, which affect their costs and revenues. Therefore, the notion that higher wages imply higher exploitation is not valid, as wages may reflect different returns to capital, skill, and innovation

@Jack-tg9qm 9 месяцев назад

Sure, but only if you’re not a Marxist. You do have to take the LTV seriously if you want this to make sense. For Marx, all non-labor inputs are considered “dead labor,” or accumulations of past instances of labor. Actual labor, or what he calls “living labor,” is the only production factor that produces “new” value (which for Marx is not the same as price). R&D, training, capital intensity, etc., only contribute insofar as they enable the laborer to be more or less efficient. In the country a and b example all other factors are implied in relative efficiencies when looking at the production times of certain commodities.

@tenhayz1889 6 месяцев назад

@@Jack-tg9qm Agreed. I always found very weird that people generally assume that it is normal to be paid more for someone who did years of studies. Especially since when you have done a lot of studies you tend to work in office, which does not reduce life expectancy quite like mining coal

@orsonsteel128 9 месяцев назад

im by no means a marxist but this channels presentation and graphics are second to none when it comes to the political side of youtube...excellent video

@dionysianapollomarx 9 месяцев назад

Yes more unequal exchange theory

@peternyc 9 месяцев назад

The math of Marxist economics and really all economics is hard for me. One thing I am thinking about is the difference between the term involving wages vs. the term involving profits. I've heard Marxists say that given the choice between producing something using a lot of labor and producing the same thing with less labor and more machines, the capitalist will choose to produce with more labor and less machines because it is in the exploitation of labor that profits are. This is a little counter intuitive, because the more machines involved in production, the higher the output capacity. I don't have a way to finish this thought. Just wanted to put it up here and hopefully someone can nudge me in the right direction.

@jackri7676 8 месяцев назад

Peter, I think you already have it more right than you know! Marxists say that a company prefers labor to machines in order to secure greater profits. I would add though, this is not independent of productivity. If a capitalist can achieve greater margins of profits by selling more commodities at a higher production cost (because more machines), they will prefer that. It is about surplus value at the end of the day. What follows is the argument for keeping laborers. Surplus value (or profit in some sense) is taken to come from variable capital (wages and human expenses), wherein workers transfer more value to commodities than is needed to purchase their labor power. Granted, machines could hypothetically produce commodities sold at a higher cost than is required for the machines' purchase and maintenance. However, because machines are purchased from other capitalists, they tend to cost more relative to their output than humans do. Workers can produce a greater degree of surplus if they are cheaper to maintain and still productive (and productivity from humans can be increased by the introduction of these machines or by lengthening the work day amongst other methods). If we completely eliminate variable capital, we take away our opportunity for profit because our machines will produce profit at much lower rates, if at all. So, in order to counteract this tendency, we need our increases in productivity to outweigh our losses in the rate of surplus value. This is to say, you're correct that capitalists introduce machinery with a goal in mind of selling more commodities, but they would still prefer labor (insofar as it is productive enough to keep up with market competition) because it holds more potential to extract surplus value.

@NathanWHill 9 месяцев назад

This Richi's analysis seems perfectly sensible, but i think on some points it is not in keeping with Marx's value theory. Marx in those first few pages of volume 1 makes clear that socially necessary abstract labor is set by the most productive generally reproducible technique. Thus, it is not value transfer per se when country B spends three hours making a widget that in country A takes an hour to make. This is just country B being backward in its productive techniques. (Marx's example is the hand loom weavers and the power loom.) There is value transfer in the equalization of profit rates, but the presentation you gave mixes these two points up and treats socially necessary labor time as average in the sense of the arithmetic mean. Also, the theory of wages needs to flow from value theory rather than be an input into it. (I discuss this point about 'average' in some detail here -- ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-EF8ltTR-6QM.html but otherwise it is a terribly naive video from way too early in my studies of Marxism. I also treat my perspective on wage determination in value theory, which Marx of course never go to, here -- ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RRDcCH_YiQQ.html)

@_gio___ 9 месяцев назад

Marx's Ch.1 example of power-looms and hand-looms is not sufficient for portraying his developed theory of value. When he says "The introduction of power-looms into England" he does not specify how dominant the new technique is. If you take this "introduction" to mean that the majority of commodities are supplied by hand-looms while there is the introduction of a small minority of power-looms, then you could conclude from the passage that the value is set by the most productive technique. But this interpretation contradicts his more developed theory of market value. See for example Ch.12 of vol.1: "Suppose, that with the prevailing productiveness of labour, 12 articles are produced in these 12 hours. Let the value of the means of production used up in each article be sixpence. Under these circumstances, each article costs one shilling: sixpence for the value of the means of production, and sixpence for the value newly added in working with those means. [...] the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value of one shilling" the introduction of a more productive technique here does not determine the market-value. and this is in line with his most developed exposition of market-value in ch.10 of Vol.3 in which he says that it is the most dominant productivity in the market, not the most productive, which determines the market-value. the only case in which the highest productivity determines the market-value (in his example of 3 productivities, 1 low, 1 medium, 1 high), is if most of the commodities supplied on the market are produced by firms with the highest productivity. but this is not because it is the highest productivity which intrinsically determines value, but only due to the distribution of the market-share. so going back to the above proposed reading of the Ch.1, i think the only way to make it consistent with Marx's more developed presentation of quantitative determination of value is if we assume that by "introduction of power-looms" he means that the power-loom is now the generally dominant average productivity, not a sporadic introduction. i'm still unsure on the question of SNLT as an arithmetic mean, but on the other hand I think Marx definitely didn't see it as being determined by the highest productivity in any scenario.

@NathanWHill 9 месяцев назад

@@_gio___ I don't think we actually disagree here. I said 'highest productivity generally reproducible' technique. If the most productive technique set the SNLT, then the theory of diferential rent would be impossible. When a new technique is introduced it gets surplus profits for a while because is firm specific labor is lower than the SNLT, during this period it is not 'generally reproducible'. I am getting this all from Anwar Shaik, and on this point I think he is singing off the same page as Marx, as he himself certainly thinks. Empirically speaking what one should probably do is look at those firms in each industry that get the general rate of profit and take their firm specific labor time as a proxy for SNLT.

@_gio___ 9 месяцев назад

@@NathanWHill i see, it seems we do agree my apologies! only because i’ve seen people claim that is is literally the highest productivity in any scenario which sets the value so so I assumed too quickly.

@bot-ni8us 9 месяцев назад

leftist mic

@icantaimpg3d776 9 месяцев назад

My mom is literally the top 1% in Vietnam with her net worth (total fortune minus debt and stuff) being like 400k$ or something, all of them coming from of course, estate :v So sad that I can’t donate thousands, if not ten thousands of dollars to leftist RU-vidr every month 😂

@taknoef9195 9 месяцев назад

I've seen three issues so far with Social Algorithm. The concept of value as a social algorithm assumes that there is a universal and objective measure of value that is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity. However, this assumption is problematic, as different societies may have different definitions and standards of what constitutes socially necessary labor, and different commodities may have different degrees of complexity, quality, and usefulness that affect their value. Moreover, the value of a commodity may change over time and space, depending on the supply and demand conditions, the preferences and expectations of the consumers and producers, and the historical and cultural context. Therefore, the concept of value as a social algorithm may not capture the dynamic and subjective nature of value in reality. also the idea of value as a social algorithm implies that there is a direct and proportional relationship between labor time and exchange value, such that commodities with equal labor time have equal exchange value, and commodities with more labor time have more exchange value. However, this implication is contradicted by empirical evidence, as there are many cases where commodities with less labor time have higher exchange value than commodities with more labor time, or where commodities with equal labor time have different exchange values. For example, a painting by a famous artist may have much higher exchange value than a painting by an unknown artist, even if they both took the same amount of labor time to produce. Or a diamond may have much higher exchange value than a piece of coal, even if they both took the same amount of labor time to extract. These examples show that there are other factors besides labor time that affect the exchange value of commodities, such as scarcity, utility, quality, reputation, and so on. Therefore, the concept of value as a social algorithm may not reflect the actual determinants of exchange value in the market . lastly, This concept of value as a social algorithm suggests that there is a systematic and consistent way to calculate the equivalence relation between different commodities based on their labor time. However, this suggestion is unrealistic, as there is no reliable and accurate way to measure the labor time embodied in each commodity, or to compare the labor time across different commodities. For instance, how can we measure the labor time involved in producing a commodity that requires various inputs from different sources, such as raw materials, machinery, energy, transportation, etc.? How can we compare the labor time between commodities that require different skills, techniques, tools, and conditions to produce? How can we account for the differences in productivity, efficiency, quality, and intensity of labor among different workers? These questions show that there are many difficulties and uncertainties in applying the concept of value as a social algorithm to real-world situations .

@NathanWHill 9 месяцев назад

Calculating integrated labor times ("how can we measure the labor time involved in producing a commodity that requires various inputs from different sources") can be done using the input output tables that are published as part of national income accounts. The best RU-vidr on this is Victor Magariño, but Paul Cockshott and Anwar Shaikh cover it. Some would say however that this is Ricardian value theory and not Marxist value theory (Fred Moseley would definitely say that), but in any event as a technical problem it is certainly solved.

@Daniel-xx1dy 9 месяцев назад

The diamond example is such an extreme example, not to mention the prices are overinflated due to the monopoly over diamonds. There are more than enough diamonds for everyone to have a diamond ring, but the marketing has made it appear as a "scarce" item

@NathanWHill 9 месяцев назад

@@Daniel-xx1dy I don't think you need to cede this ground to @taknoef9195. By weight diamonds take a lot more man-hours to mine than coal does. DIamonds are after all Adam Smith's example in favor of the LTV.

@NathanWHill 9 месяцев назад

@taknoef9195 "a painting by a famous artist may have much higher exchange value than a painting by an unknown artist" -- this is where the theory of rent comes in, which by the way Marx wrote very extensively about in both Capital III and Theories of Surplus Value. Already Ricardo restricted the LTV (as a theory of price formation) to generally reproducible commodities.

@thiagovidal8972 5 месяцев назад

Hail to the best of german philosophy and jewish personality... Karl Marx, Carlos Marques, Carlos Márquez, Charles Marks, santa klaus, papai noel, krampus, or communist jesus christ+buda of historical materialism.

@manuellanthaler2001 9 месяцев назад

make more concrete examples pls so i dont have to turn on my brain to understand this. (turning on brain hurts). But no otherwise very important information. Very good insights on neoimperialism and neocolonialism I think.

@manuellanthaler2001 9 месяцев назад

like I mean concrete examples on how this would look like in real world. Im gonna have to watch this again after sleeping brain tired.