The Wealth of (Some) Nations

Zak Cope

Description

In this provocative new study, Zak Cope makes the case that capitalism is empirically inseparable from imperialism, historically and today. Using a rigourous political economic framework, he lays bare the vast ongoing transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest countries through the mechanisms of monopoly rent, unequal exchange and colonial tribute. The result is a polarised international class structure with a relatively rich Global North and an impoverished, exploited Global South.



Cope makes the controversial claim that it is because of these conditions that workers in rich countries benefit from higher incomes and welfare systems with public health, education, pensions and social security. As a result, the internationalism of populations in the Global North is weakened and transnational solidarity is compromised.



The only way forward, Cope argues, is through a renewed anti-imperialist politics rooted in a firm commitment to a radical labour internationalism.

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I - The Mechanics of Imperialism

1. Value Transfer

2. Colonial Tribute

3. Monopoly Rent

4. Unequal Exchange

Part II - The Econometrics of Imperialism

5. Imperialism and Its Denial

6. Measuring Imperialist Value Transfer

7. Measuring Colonial Value Transfer

8. Comparing Value Transfer to Profits, Wages and Capital

Part III - Foundations of the Labour Aristocracy

9. Anti-Imperialist Marxism and the Wages of Imperialism

10. The Metropolitan Labour Aristocracy

11. The Native Labour Aristocracy

Part IV - Social Imperialism Past and Present

12. Social Imperialism before the First World War

13. Social Imperialism after the First World War

14. Social-Imperialist Marxism

15. Conclusion: Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today

Appendix: Physical Quality of Life in Capitalist and Socialist Countries

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Public Policy
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Marxism
• Welfare economics
• General officer
• Political economy
• Theory
• Leninism
• Imperialism
• Economics
• Capitalism
• Bolshevik
• Business
• Impérialisme (jeu vidéo)
• General
• Karl Marx

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786804181
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Wealth of (Some) Nations
The Wealth of (Some) Nations
Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer
Zak Cope
First published 2019 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Zak Cope 2019
The right of Zak Cope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3886 6 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3885 9 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0417 4 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0419 8 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0418 1 EPUB eBook



This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I The Mechanics of Imperialism
1. Value Transfer
2. Colonial Tribute
3. Monopoly Rent
4. Unequal Exchange
Part II The Econometrics of Imperialism
5. Imperialism and Its Denial
6. Measuring Imperialist Value Transfer
7. Measuring Colonial Value Transfer
8. Comparing Value Transfer to Profits, Wages and Capital
Part III Foundations of the Labour Aristocracy
9. Anti-Imperialist Marxism and the Wages of Imperialism
10. The Metropolitan Labour Aristocracy
11. The Native Labour Aristocracy
Part IV Social Imperialism Past and Present
12. Social Imperialism before the First World War
13. Social Imperialism after the First World War
14. Social-Imperialist Marxism
15. Conclusion: Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Today
Appendix: Physical Quality of Life in Capitalist and Socialist Countries
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures and Tables
FIGURES
6.1 Average pension coverage rates by region
8.1 Share of compensation of employees in national income, selected country groups, 1980-2008 (per cent)
8.2 Global production versus global consumption
TABLES
3.1 Industrial concentration among systems integrator firms, 2006-09
4.1 Hypothetical distribution of net product before international wage equalisation
4.2 Transformation of value and price
4.3 Value and price as wages rise in Country A and fall in Country B
5.1 Employment by skill level, 2015
5.2 Mean monthly earnings by occupation and income type, various countries
6.1 Value of regional trade flows in each region s total merchandise exports (billions of US dollars)
6.2 GDP per person employed (constant 2011 PPP ) by country type, 2011-17
6.3 Data for unequal exchange calculation
7.1 India s annual balance of payments of current account, 1869-70 to 1894-98 ( millions, quinquennial average)
7.2 Selected data on the British economy, 1830-1920
8.1 Total male and female employment by sector, world and regions (millions)
8.2 Gross fixed capital formation, 2012 (current US dollars)
8.3 Developing and transition countries industrial workforce in foreign enterprises compared with industrial workforce of developed countries, 2009
8.4 Gross savings as a percentage of GDP, 2008-15
8.5 Comparing value transfer to economic resources in developed and developing countries
8.6 Data for global rate of exploitation calculation
10.1 Trade union membership in Britain, 1882 and 1892
A.1 Physical quality of life comparison, socialist and capitalist countries at similar level of development
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the late Malcolm Caldwell as the author of a brilliant 1977 book with (almost) the same title as the present work. I would like to thank Immanuel Ness of City University New York for his personal and professional support, and Timothy Kerswell of the University of Macau and Gerry McAleavy of the University of Ulster for the opportunities and encouragement they have given me. I would also like to thank David Shulman of Pluto Press for his insights and his constructive comments on the draft manuscript of the present work, and Elaine Ross of Pluto Press for her careful work on the manuscript. Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife Brona, and my young daughter, Aoibhe, for always being there for me. This book is dedicated to them with love.
Introduction
The Wealth of (Some) Nations builds on the analysis presented in my earlier work examining the segmentation and stratification of the labour market in the capitalist world system and its effects on the dynamics of the global class structure. It explains the hierarchical division of labour internationally as the product of imperialism and relates this to the present crisis of capitalism. The book argues that for a century at least the Western left has largely repudiated labour internationalism in favour of struggles to procure for itself a larger share of value extracted from oppressed nations. The book aims to establish a durable strategic orientation for the labour movement in the contemporary era as based on consistent anti-imperialism and opposition to the sectional privileges enjoyed by metropolitan, settler and native labour aristocratic workers over their counterparts in and from oppressed nations. The book develops a clear and detailed theoretical account of the mechanics of value transfer from the global South to the global North, and presents recent data providing empirical evidence to support its theoretical claims.
The book presents a taxonomy of the labour aristocracy raising the concept to new prominence by documenting in detail the ways in which a bourgeois section of the working class is established in and through imperialism. Hitherto, there has been a variety of theories of the labour aristocracy . 1 Thus Chartist leader Ernest Jones (1819-1869) considered that skilled artisans earning relatively high wages and organised in trades unions constituted the core of the labour aristocracy, and postulated that their activities had weakened the democratic movement by placing barriers in the way of working class unity. 2 Jones contemporary, and Marx s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) had argued that the labour aristocracy in England consisted of the entire national working class which relied on colonialism and industrial monopoly for its livelihood. 3 Later, Russian Marxist and Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin built upon Engels insights to argue that imperialism was the underlying basis for the social democratic reformism advanced by the mainstream of the working class movement in the industrial countries. British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm developed Lenin s views by arguing that the influx of imperialist superprofits and technological dynamism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had reshaped Europe s occupational structures so as to ensure that the labour aristocracy possessing skills in short supply, occupying strategic positions in the economy, earning higher wages, and having considerable organisational strength was a much broader social layer than it had been in the earlier colonial period. 4 English historian John Foster stressed workplace authority and supervisory employment as the key determinant of labour aristocratic status. 5 He emphasised the bribery aspect of labour aristocratic privilege which saw the elite stratum of the working class in the United Kingdom as the more or less conscious creation of the establishment in its attempt to defuse and divaricate workers struggles along a conservative path. British historian Robert Gray, meanwhile, has examined how the labour aristocracy as distinct from the mass of the working class came to define the political outlook of the labour movement in the Victorian era. 6
Considering these views, and especially those of writers such as H. W. Edwards, Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin, Hosea Jaffe, Torkil Lauesen and Henry Park, the present work defines the labour aristocracy as that section of the international working class whose relatively high incomes, more comfortable occupations and greater social security are dependent upon the expropriation of value from the exploited nations. Even within the imperialist countries, the lower wages, job opportunities, housing conditions, health care provision and labour market precarity of the poorest sections of the metropolitan working class cannot be properly understood without acknowledgement of the legacy and ongoing reality of imperialism and labour aristocratic privilege.
The book argues that capitalism is inherently a system of imperialist international political economy. Imperialism is conceived as a historical and ongoing transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest countries in the world economy through the mechanisms of colonial tribute, monopoly rent and unequal exchange. Imperialism produces an international class structure characterised by the unequal occupational division of labour and the unequal remuneration of labour internationally such that mass embourgeoisement may be observed in the leading imperialist countries. As such, The Wealth of (Some) Nations examines a subject that is virtually taboo on the left, namely, the connection between imperialism and the massive disparity in living standards between workers in the First World and workers in the Third World. It thereby fills a necessary gap in the established fields of dependency theory, world systems theory and imperialism theory. While these schools of thought tend to concentrate on the impoverishment of the global South and the enrichment of the global North, they do not usually examine how the attendant processes transfigure the class structure internationally. In particular, the extent to which ever larger transfers of value from abroad produce processes of de-proletarianisation and embourg