"Unequal Exchange Revisited" added
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Click here to read an excerpt from "Unequal Exchange Revisited" on amerikan workers as exploiters.
Note:
Arghiri Emmanuel
Arghiri Emmanuel is the author of Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade, which is a key text in the development of Marx's theory of capital in the context of international economic relations, in the development of Lenin's theory of imperialism in the context of international trade, and in the history of theory concerned with the concrete investigation of productive relations and surplus value in the world economy. Arghiri Emmanuel is known for demolishing the notion that price in terms of money, hiding transfers of labor value, could be reliable measure of value in comparing First World and Third World commodities, and for his theory of Unequal Exchange, which gives primacy to wage differences between countries in explaining price differences and subsequent transfers of value. Wage increases in the First World are to the detriment of Third World and the wage bargaining opportunities of the Third World proletariat. Emmanuel is also known for his views on contradictions between imperialists and settlers, and for his views (potentially contentious even among Marxists upholding the labor aristocracy thesis) considering terms of trade as a more important category than foreign investment in the economic parasitism of imperialism.
Arghiri Emmanuel passed away several years ago with little acknowledgment by the English-speaking so-called communist movement or even academia as far as MIWS can tell. To the extent that progress can be made in English, this is unacceptable and something MIWS intends on rectifying for the sake of the proletariat's success in the long-term struggle for correct economic ideas and concepts. That struggle, in which the masses must be intimately involved, is necessary to prevent the restoration of capitalism. MIWS also brings up Emmanuel's biography because MIWS would like to make a hypothetical point about Emmanuel as an individual. Charles Bettelheim once criticized Emmanuel's unequal exchange theory as bourgeois because it seemed, to Bettelheim, to favor the Third World bourgeoisie over the First World working class in economic struggles. Emmanuel was involved in commerce as a bourgeois. So, for all MIWS knows about Emmanuel biographically, which is virtually nothing, that may have been an inspiration, even though implementing a Marxist theory of trade and the labor theory of value in business will be difficult for individual capitalists. But the First World working class is a bourgeois class anyway, and the majority of those supporting the labor aristocracy have bourgeois goals, whether they know it or not. But even supposing for the sake of argument that Emmanuel's goals were bourgeois, if not his theory, MIWS would ten times rather be surrounded by bourgeois nationalists such as Emmanuel supposedly was than First World left-wing parasites. In some respects theoretically, Emmanuel continues to be unsurpassed in 2007. Emmanuel's ideas are more materialist and scientific than those of the vast majority of so-called communists in the First World. Emmanuel shed light on reality where others weren't shedding light. Contrary to myths spread about Trotskyists about unequal exchange theorists, Emmanuel's theory actually is not non-Marxist or bourgeois, but MIWS would favor bourgeois-thinking exploiters with science to bourgeois-thinking exploiters without science in situations where there is a need to make a scientific advance. Critics of Emmanuel don't even know that they are comparing an exploiter to other exploiters. The people to whom Emmanuel and others would be sympathetic to the labor aristocracy are compared often have no theory of their own to begin with, just poetry and empty rhetoric taking advantage of amerikan and petty-bourgeois prejudices.
Social origins of advances in economic theory
Writers thinking about the same topics as Emmanuel -- comparative advantage, development, productivity, and terms of trade -- weren't just writing academically. They were involved in making policy or saw revolution near on the horizon, and had a pressing need to solve problems that they were confronting or that were imminent. Bourgeois anti-imperialists trying to maneuver between the imperialists and the proletariat have a knotty task. Economic reformist intellectuals in particular of a bourgeois nationalist or internationalist sort, in trying to solve technical kinds of problems, may make observations that help elucidate some important quantitative aspects of reality. Because Marxism corresponds to reality, they may even find Marxism useful for clarification purposes and makes advances in Marxism in spite of their bourgeois selves. Theoretical work on international trade and transfers of value has appeared in Japan in the context of trade between imperialist countries. The impetus may be inter-imperialist contradiction, but the thinking is scientific. So, even imperialists, not just anti-imperialist capitalists, using Marxism to studying their disadvantages in trade with other capitalists may end up making useful observations.
Mathematically oriented people might also write a book like Emmanuel's one on unequal exchange. Unlike fantasies about industrial First World workers being more advanced than Third World people, it's real an example of how revolutionary theory could arise from productive forces, because of the relationship between mathematics and production. Furthermore, advanced math skills and reasoning are concentrated among scientific intellectuals. Add to that the fact that First Worlders have more time to spend on using math for politics, philosophy, and intellectual pursuits not directly connected to production, and one gets a better sense of the contradictions involved in where advances in economic theory appear. The germs may have been in Emmanuel's international experiences and experiences with armed struggle against imperialism, but Emmanuel's ideas also were developed in France and were discussed there, and France didn't have a socialist revolution. Theories of parasitism developed in the bellies of parasitism, which actually is not that paradoxical.
In the Third World, too, advanced math abilities are concentrated in the bourgeoisie. So, it is natural that advances in economic theory or precursors to those advances will come from there, too. Being part of Third World nations, those bourgeois intellectuals have additional motivations for focusing on economic theory in an international context.
Having a truly scientific understanding of why the labor theory of value is superior to competing ideas, and why theories of trade supporting the imperialist model are wrong, is challenging, which would explain why that understanding is concentrated among intellectuals, who are concentrated in the bourgeoisie. It is more challenging than one might think, if one is used to politics as being sound bites, poetry, or emotional rhetoric, or have a view of politics as accepting or rejecting someone else's program. Marxism isn't liberalism. It is a scientific revolutionary practice and involves science. It is not possible to believe in some slogans, to have glanced at Capital and know something about labor making commodities commensurable, or to even have read all of Marx's and Lenin's writings, and then be done with economic theory today, because unevenness in the world economy has become more important since Marx, and the labor aristocracy is no longer a minority of the imperialist country working class that Lenin said it was (as H. W. Edwards pointed out in Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy amd The Anatomy of Revisionism), and, as Emmanuel pointed out, Marx's thinking on theory pertaining to international matters was incomplete at the time he died. Since there is no national proletariat in the First World nations today and exploitation has become more international, it is even more important that people confront the rationalizations for imperialist international economic relations.
Distributing Arghiri Emmanuel's work
This is perhaps the first time Arghiri Emmanuel's writing has been on the Internet and widely accessible. Other Web sites claiming to be socialist or communist have texts, albeit of shorter length, of similar mathematical or formal sophistication. MIWS's distributing Emmanuel's work should not be surprising. MIWS is geared toward intellectuals and proto-intellectuals, including some but not all students. There are intellectuals who are pseudo-Maoists, but MIWS isn't trying to cultivate philistines and zombies claiming to be Maoist. So, if non-intellectual types are repulsed by MIWS's content, MIWS could be indifferent.
It is possible to have relatively scientific or materialist thinking and not be an intellectual. This is the case particularly in oppressed nations. However, in the First World, it is generally not possible at this time for a communist to not be scientific. To be a communist in the First World in any real, practical sense -- in other words, in a way that is distinctively communist and distinguishable from other practices -- requires much farsightedness. There is no significant revolutionary movement in the First World arising out of First World economic conditions, social-democratic and social-fascist movements claiming to be socialist and communist notwithstanding. The new-democratic stage of struggle has yet to be completed even for oppressed nations within First World borders. And then there is the whole parasitism and settlerism situation requiring a sharp stand and clarity against chauvinism and white nationalism. In the long run, it is not possible to follow the leader and stay communist in the First World, without a cult that would come with additional problems.
Whether there can be non-scientific communists or not, there is no real Maoist leader anywhere who is not a scientist. Maoism is a revolutionary ideology and practice; at the same time, it is a science, a scientific revolutionary practice. Like other sciences, Maoism has to be learned, practiced and mastered. Naturally, people will be at different points in that process. At the same time, if MIWS at a distance can only work with some people halfway to become Maoists, then choices may have to be made between different groups of people, and efforts may have to be concentrated to maximize positive outcomes. MIWS isn't going to do things halfway just to see a bunch of philistines and immature types pop up claiming to be Maoists inspired by MIWS. In terms of what different people's strengths are in learning Maoism, non-intellectuals may have advantages in practice and experience that intellectuals don't have, but intellectuals also have their advantages as far as what they already have that would be useful in developing as scientists. Even if there were many non-intellectuals who could be scientific communists in the First World, MIWS as a Web site is not set up to take individual non-intellectuals through the steps needed to become scientific communists. MIWS is better oriented to give intellectuals some of what they need to take steps toward scientific communism independently. Confined to the Internet, it is more difficult for MIWS to help non-intellectuals reach the next level they need to get to. Another way of putting this is that MIWS taps into intellectuals' existing knowledge and abilities more than non-intellectuals'. In connection to this, people also need to understand the reasons why intellectuals acting independently are more likely to end up as scientific communists by reading something like the Maoist Internationalist Movement's Imperialism and Its Class Structure in 1997 than by reading agitation articles written simultaneously for college students, middle-class people, prisoners, etc. Imperialism and Its Class Structure in 1997 is challenging to intellectual types without giving them all the answers. MIWS believes Emmanuel's writing is also challenging, and while it provides many answers theoretically, intellectuals will need to digest the writing and ideas, and thus they may learn something.
If people are looking for something specific, Google and other databases can point them in the direction they need to go. However, how knowledge spreads via the Internet is highly structured, and this poses a problem for MIWS in reaching people who are studying politics. MIWS thought critics of Google Book Search, allowing users to search and read some text in a collection of mainly English books, had interesting comments about how non-English books were excluded from the database, resulting in a disproportionately large sample of English books compared to all the books in the world. At issue is the exclusion of not just other languages, but other nations' ideas. Obviously, much of the criticism is inter-imperialist, with people complaining about the exclusion of French books, for example. It's an interesting point, though, because "Unequal Exchange Revisited" is probably a low-priority item for Google and may never be included in its database even though it is in English and Google may have powerful scanners. The same is true for H. W. Edwards' books, which are rare. So, it's up to sites like MIWS to make these texts available. Otherwise, they may not be found.
For that matter, it isn't adequate to have an archive of just M-L-M classics and related materials. MIWS has recently been distributing "On Contradiction" and other documents in French that are related to the principal contradiction or united front, and, if MIWS imagines that it actually has an audience after only a few months, that has some usefulness where people are openly rejecting those concepts. But in the latest development of revisionism, revisionism now falsely operates under the banner of Maoism, and M-L-M classics are used for twisted purposes. The impact of this would be less if people actually comprehended, and not just read, the classics. There are also important contemporary struggles over issues not dealt with specifically in the classics.
Marxists Internet Archive is openly Trotskyist, and includes Stalin's and Mao's works just as reference material, but one major archive, often referenced uncritically, purporting to be Maoist and containing M-L-M classics among other texts actually contains a document attacking the idea that the Black nation exists and is slanted toward false consciousness explanations for the lack of revolution in the First World. That archive probably would not in a million years put up H. W. Edwards' books even if it doing so required no effort, and there is a reason why that is. Archives of M-L-M classics and material aren't neutral. They represent a line.
Even people who are distributing just M-L-M classics in English without accompanying material are distributing them to be corrupted by English speakers who are in the First World. To make headway with intellectuals and proto-intellectual youth studying old texts, MIWS has to distribute controversial, mostly correct texts despite MIWS's disagreement with some aspects of those texts.
The kind of problem associated with Google Book Search is why Maoists on the Internet, it appears, sometimes settled for distributing texts that were already on the Internet. It's also why, besides the racism or chauvinism of favoring European ideas because they are European, youth sometimes get swept up in crackpot, Brezhnevist and other anti-Maoist tendencies. What they come into contact with is what is available on the Internet. Youth will often not be able to go to college libraries to broaden their reading until they get to college, by which time they may already be stuck in a Trotskyist or revisionist rut.
The argument against what MIWS is doing is that if MIWS has to make books available on the Internet before intellectuals will read them, those intellectuals may not be vanguard material anyway. Also, perhaps by making these texts available, MIWS makes it easier for people to appear advanced without actually having absorbed to ideas. There is no short-term solution to these problems. The habit of ending a search or exploration of a topic when Google can't locate something isn't going to go away soon. Actually, to struggle against that habit of depending on Google, MIWS has to point to material that exists that may not be on the Internet. Regardless of the drawbacks in targeting any group versus another, MIWS has to concentrate its efforts and provide certain materials to be most effective.
"Unequal Exchange Revisited"
In "Unequal Exchange Revisited," Arghiri Emmanuel reiterates some of the ideas he presented in his book on unequal exchange and raises additional ones. Emmanuel is known for his views on the lack of solidarity between First World and Third World workers. But before reading about this paper in a doctoral thesis dealing with ecological unequal exchange and the history of unequal exchange theories, MIWS had not known Emmanuel to have actually supported the idea that First World workers are net exploiters, meaning that they obtain more value than they create and live off of the labor of other workers. The pages of interest are pages 62-67. Emmanuel shows that if all the workers in the world in 1969 had amerikan wages, the rate of surplus value would be negative. Amerikan workers get back the value they produce and more, making them exploiters. Emmanuel makes a similar argument in his 1973 response to Eugenio Somaini in a collection of writings debating unequal exchange. In "Unequal Exchange Revisited," Emmanuel presents additional observations about amerikans' consumption of raw materials and ecological resources, suggesting that amerikans are exploiters in terms not just of value, but of material resources.
While agreeing with some of Emmanuel's conclusions, MIWS has several disagreements with Emmanuel's arguments. For example, Emmanuel suggests in this paper of his that First World workers have to be net exploiters before there can be an antagonistic relationship between them and Third World workers, whereas Lenin said the labor aristocracy was enemy. Even H. W. Edwards (who does not go as far as saying in her/his books that First World workers are net exploiters) would have disagreed with Emmanuel. Edwards said that there could be an antagonistic relationship between First and Third World workers on the basis of First World workers' relative privilege. MIWS will leave it up to readers to figure out for themselves what's wrong with some of Emmanuel's other statements and reasoning. Emmanuel was on the right track, even if additional things have to be taken into account.
One thing MIWS will point out now is that Emmanuel's goals theoretically are different than MIWS's. Emmanuel wanted to find one single mechanism, which would not be counteracted by other things, that would account for the majority of international exploitation. This is one of the reasons why, in Emmanuel's writing, including "Unequal Exchange Revisited," and in discussion of Emmanuel's ideas, there is a focus on the status of wages as an independent variable. Emmanuel's concern with defending a particular model influences other things in his writing. MIWS would prefer to think of what Emmanuel considers unequal exchange proper to be one of a variety of mechanisms by which surplus value is extracted from the Third World. One of the important ideas that appears in "Unequal Exchange Revisited" (and in Emmanuel's response to Eugenio Somaini) is that surplus value/exploitation can be calculated independently of individual components of extraction belonging to different mechanisms. In other words, it isn't necessary to figure out the amount of value corresponding to unequal exchange, as defined by Emmanuel, to know whether First World workers are net exploiters. So, Emmanuel's theory of unequal exchange could be wrong, but his conclusion about net exploitation could still be correct. The reason why that is has to do with the fact that Emmanuel didn't just develop a theory of one mechanism of value transfer. He contributed to extending the labor theory of value to the international setting, enabling him to make global calculations using commensurate data from different countries.
MIWS has some concerns about people writing about unequal exchange who misrepresent or undermine Emmanuel's ideas. Not everyone talking about Arghiri Emmanuel today is contributing to communism or anti-imperialism directly or indirectly. But MIWS is intrigued by recent interest in Arghiri Emmanuel. It seems that mathematically oriented or analytical kinds of people studying ecology have some connection to understanding that the average amerikan is a parasite. While not specifically Marxist, the idea that amerikans are ecological parasites is much closer to reality than the notion that the bourgeois people commonly called "workers" or "middle class" in the oppressor nations are exploited. Also, the idea is timely because the environmental movement imperialists and labor aristocrats are supporting has a chauvinist element and feeds militarist and economic nationalist sentiments against the Third World.
Reading "Unequal Exchange Revisited," one will get a sense of the kinds of concepts that students of scientific communism should be making progress understanding. The questions Arghiri Emmanuel raises cannot be left up to some departmentalized economics ministry in the socialist future or economic experts that will hopefully arise from progressive bourgeois intellectuals. People need to be making progress understanding them now. If there is any question about that, it is with people in the Third World who are in the midst of armed struggle against imperialism. MIWS is not saying most people in that situation urgently need to additionally have understanding of the labor theory of value and theories of parasitism. People can strike blows against imperialism without being Marxist, and people are striking blows against imperialism who are not responsible for establishing economic policy. But communist leaders everywhere need be familiar with or be making progress understanding those theories. They are relevant to practice in the future and today. As the struggle over economic questions intensifies, people will capitulate if they don't have the proper scientific understanding. Already, supposed Maoist leaders in the Third World who have not seized power have made irresponsible statements internationally conveying incorrect ideas about economic development. It is not enough to have a general idea that imperialist policies are bad for Third World workers or even a general idea that First World people are decadent or parasitic. Those things will not suffice in the face of complex rationalizations for imperialist development and trade and pragmatist pressures. There needs to be an understanding of the dynamic aspects of imperialism and the full extent to which unequal conditions between nations are due to imperialism -- this involves quantification. An up-to-date theoretical and concrete understanding of imperialism is also relevant to practice today, because of the need to have an accurate understanding of crises and changes in the economy and class structure to develop correct strategy.
It is arguable whether the majority of the masses will need to have the level of understanding represented in Emmanuel's writing. But to oppose capitalist restoration successfully, the masses will need to have some basic concepts to judge economic arguments for themselves. If leaders pursue an in-depth understanding of the labor theory of value and derivative and opposing theories today, they will be in a better position and have more solid footing to disseminate those ideas that need to be disseminated when it is necessary to do so.
At this time, there is no social basis for a large scientific communist movement in the First World, and no amount of creativity in teaching people Maoist theory will change that. MIWS's distributing "Unequal Exchange Revisited" does not mean a large number of people will be able to understand it or use it even in an indirect way. In First World countries with internal colonies, the oppressed of those colonies do have a motivation to have some knowledge about parasitism, an important aspect of imperialism; the internal colonies, to struggle against imperialism effectively, must struggle against the parasitism and parasitic thinking that swamp those countries. In that context, mass organizations will benefit from having accurate knowledge, of a factual but not necessarily Marxist nature, about parasitism. MIWS's distribution of "Unequal Exchange Revisited" is mainly for the intellectuals and proto-intellectuals who will become scientific communists and be able to use economic theory in a variety of contexts.
2007 October