Dependency theory

Of course, but they still mostly export raw materials afaik, which will net less total export value compared to manufactured goods.

are you still in elementary school by any chance?

Yes they do they just don't want to pay for it. More labourers is more value generated. But to mobilize African labour reserves would first require large infrastructure, educational and frankly state-building investment. It is already happening to some degree in countries like Ethiopia developing light industry. The most valuable thing on earth is human labour.

Africa is the only continent on the planet that provides more resources than it consumes.

Don't know why i saged, but want to add that they also export resources at a much lower cost than other less imperialized countries.

again, served with zero condiments.

What you are missing here and what makes this seem to me to be a really hard thing to demonstrate concretely is that the monetary value of trade doesn't actually say much if it represents an extended supply chain that may cross in and out of developing countries with the majority of the value being appropriated by the developed countries. What we would predict in that case is that the developed countries would have the larger "value-added", or in money terms the larger output, and this is basically what we see. That doesn't mean that it is true they DEPEND on the developing world for their higher standard of living, I'm sure America would still have a higher average standard of living than Africa or China if it stopped most of its trade, but it would definitely decrease and more dangerous forms of work would likely come back. But, neither does demonstrating that they have larger money exports in money terms demonstrate that they are largely independent of the labor and material provided by the developing world.

In Marxist terms you might say that the total amount of labor hours required to produce some commodity in a global supply chain is I don't know, 20. However, because of different bargaining positions and other geopolitical factors the first world workers are being remunerated at a ratio of 2:1 ratio per hour worked, profit takes its cut and then the worker of the developing country gets a fraction of the value that they produce less than that of the first world worker. The way this works out is that every time the supply chain crosses into a developed country, suddenly the value added is much much more than it is when it crosses through a developing country. However, all this may reflect is that every time it passes through China or whatever, people are getting paid smaller fractions of their time.

So just like the OP's premise. Sorry faggot but people don't keep an archive of shit to pander to retards as gotchas.

Sorry, I meant to the third world worker* not in absolute terms.

Its not that first would countries are gaining their living standards by exploiting third world countries, its that the elite exploit everyone, but exploit first world less because thats where they live and they dont want first world to cut their heads off.

Everyone gets screwed, but by being screwed less you are profiting from the perspective of 'porky rightfully owns everything'.

Most raw materials do not come from sub-Saharan Africa though. Only exception I can think of is cocoa beans.

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OH NO NO NO NO

Sub-saharan africa isn't the only impoverished region in the world with cheap labor. Even with its advancements, China still occupies that role in the sense that it has cheaper labor than the developed countries, but also had enough development that it has higher capacity than many sub-saharan African nations to supply a diverse range of goods and services as intermediates to final production. Or outright, not every final commodity has globalized production chains of course.

But the point is still not to say that the west would be sub-saharan africa tier if they suddenly stopped exploiting global trade. It is just that they do exploit global trade to a certain degree that is hard to calculate, especially just based on export figures since again, if you're just comparing exports between countries you aren't taking into account the differences between the countries. If you look at exports from Canada vs. exports from Indonesia and just take the monetary value of trade as totally equivalent, you're neglecting the fundamental point that people in indonesia could be paid 1/10th or 1/15th of even the lowest paid Canadian worker. So imagine the same global commodity trade, but suddenly multiply the labor costs of Indonesia by 10 and then adjust the value of their exports by that. Suddenly the value of Indonesia's exports explode because you're paying them as much as a first world worker, and they have commensurate buying power on the world market. Of course it wouldn't just happen this way, and I don't think anybody is suggesting that a country like this under current conditions should receive that kind of price because it would just inflate the prices in their domestic economy. They don't have the ability domestically to support a sudden 10-fold increase in purchasing power because they don't produce or import enough stuff for people to buy. But you see how this is kind of going in circles now? We do have that capability because we are already rich, and we pay those poor countries commensurate to their poor wages to remain largely poor because that is what their value is to the global economy. There is a certain margin of exported poverty, that is absolutely certain, but I don't pretend to know its precise scale because that seems like a complicated question to me. It is only when those states aren't playing by the developed world's rules and directing their economies consciously towards certain planned development, like China did, that they can even begin to overcome that predicament. But now that China's utility as a great example of capitalism's success is mostly spent they're increasingly construed as an enemy to western global hegemony, which reveals another kind of hurdle to being accepted into the capitalist consumer economy club. Will you swear fealty to the United States and assist it to continue to be the shepherd of global capitalism? If not, you're running the risk of at best a cold war, at worst getting your shit kicked in.

Additionally, in the case of China's rise in incomes which everybody here knows makes up the majority of recent increases in global wages, it's also known that the absolute number of people in poverty has rose. Why that is just as important as the ratio of the global population that gets some arbitrary wage is because capitalism is a growth fueled system, and labor is a scarce resource. If the proportion of the population defined as "in poverty" because they make less than $2/day or something goes from 80% to 75%, that is all well and good, but to the global economy if the amount of people working for less than $2/day suddenly goes up by an absolute number of 300 million, that is 300 million more workers working for absolute shit. That is real growth in the scarce resource of cheap as fuck labor.

You have to differentiate between raw commodities like metals etc and engineered goods. That is the essence of dependency theory.

The third world is dependent on the first world because the first world extracts raw materials from them, and sells them back more expensive goods made out of the same raw materials. The third world fails to develop more comprehensive industry while the first world is extracting resources (both financial and material) from them.

Good posts.

The global economy is a value chain. There is a cycle in which stuff comes out of the ground and is turned – through a complicated process – into goods that are bought and sold. During this process, all this raw stuff becomes more valuable as it passes through each chain of activities into a marketable commodity. This process includes everything from the logistics of moving things from A to B, to marketing and sales and services after the product is sold – along with an array of support activities from technology to finance, accounting, public relations, and human resources management. Mastering the value chain is how firms achieve a competitive advantage over their competitors.

Now go back to the Third World where the stuff is getting extracted: remember that capitalism grows through injections of primitive accumulation. This means driving people off their land into cities, where they enter the labor market and start consuming commodities. In most of the Third World, people live in sprawling, congested cities. These urban spaces are where workers enter the value chain of exploitation. One way this happens is that cheap, subsidized First World goods (such as food) undercut the cash-crop markets of Third World countries, forcing subsistence farmers into the cities.

The governments in a country such as Sri Lanka or Nigeria can't do anything to stop this because of free trade agreements, but they can offer jobs to these migrants because of foreign investments arranged under the same free-trade agreements (which are designed by the investors). This ensures that the investors see a return on their investment with the money cycling back to them with a profit, tax free.

I don't really understand it all that well myself, but one way I think of this is the photo of Sri Lankan apparel factory. Brands that source from Sri Lanka including Victoria’s Secret, Gap, H&M, Liz Claiborne, Calvin Klein, Nike and Tommy Hilfiger among others. There are around 350,000 women employed in the country’s 891 apparel factories, making up 85% of the industry’s workforce. But the most important things in the photo are the sewing machines, which are Juki-brand machines from Japan. The raw materials which went into the machines did not source from Japan (I'm guessing, for the sake of this experiment). The materials were turned into machined parts and electronics and assembled in Japan, which created something more valuable – in the form of a commodity – which is then exported back to the Third World at a mark-up.

Or something.

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I see these comrades have read their fucking Smith

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We have some gas in the ground and that's it. This country just piggybacks off german industry, which is based on cheap labor of eastern europe and resources from the third world.

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user you have it slightly wrong, it's more that how these nations interact with the global economy during their industrialisation is utterly incomparable without Europe industrialised. I would recommend Ha Joon Chang's "Kicking away the ladder": it explains how modern trade policy dampens industrialisation of third world states.

that Netherland-thing is unsuprising, cause they import oil from Russia and export it to most of the EU. That is why the Netherlands are quite a strong export-country, the only one where Germany really imports from in Europe