Féliz - Notes For A Discussion On Unequal Exchange and The Marxist Theory of Dependency

Féliz, Mariano
Notes For a Discussion on Unequal

Exchange and the Marxist Theory of
Dependency
Historical Materialism
2021, vol. 29, nro. 4
Féliz, M. (2021). Notes For a Discussion on Unequal Exchange and the Marxist Theory of
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Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39
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Notes For a Discussion on Unequal Exchange

and the Marxist Theory of Dependency
Mariano Féliz
Researcher, Centro de Investigaciones Geográficas – Instituto de
Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (CIG-IdIHCS),
Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Universidad
Nacional de La Plata (conicet-unlp), La Plata, Argentina
marianfeliz@gmail.com
Abstract
The debate on the decline of the terms of trade in dependent countries was never fully
integrated into the Marxist theory of dependency. The attempt to articulate it through
the category of unequal exchange was not particularly systematic. This paper seeks to
recover those debates and will attempt to account for the relevant articulations in the
light of a present revitalisation of studies in the field of Marxist dependency theory. To
this end, we will recover the classical discussions around unequal exchange in order to
discuss their points of contact with the Marxist theory of dependency and some con-
temporary debates around the transfer of value and the super-exploitation of labour
and nature.
Keywords
dependency – unequal exchange – Marxism – value-theory
1 Introduction
The decline in the terms of trade in peripheral or dependent countries is a fact

that has been widely studied and verified in historical and logical perspective.1
Latin American structuralism has made this phenomenon one of the primary
1 Ocampo and Parra 2003; Prebisch 2012; Bacha 1978.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-12341897

2 Féliz
factors behind the difficulties in achieving successful capitalist development

processes in the region.2 From a critical position, Marxist dependency theory
(mdt), particularly in the work of Ruy Mauro Marini, has sought to construct
an interpretation of this tendency articulated with the theory of value and the
sui generis form of capitalist development found in Latin America.3
The discussions around so-called unequal exchange4 and the theory of
imperialism5 in the 1960s and 1970s further nourished mdt analysis. Framed in
terms of the debates within Marxism at the peripheries of capitalism, the artic-
ulation with mdt would allow us to give an integral and consistent account
of the problem mentioned earlier of capitalist development in conditions of
dependency.
After a significant impasse in the 1980s and 1990s, mdt re-emerged as a
theoretical option in the region, facing the resurgence of forms of Cepaline
structuralism.6 In the early 2000s, the same Marxist dependency theory
began a process of critical revitalisation.7 Smith points out that the concept
of dependence:
… can be and is being filled with new revolutionary content, especially in

the lively and fast-expanding renaissance of Marxism and dependency
theory in Latin America.8
In this context, the debate over unequal exchange and its practical implica-
tions for the limits to capitalist development in the region is again gaining
prominence, especially in light of recent structural transformations in global
capitalism. The contemporary debate in mdt has begun to condense around
the recovery of the categories contributed by Marini (and also by Bambirra,
Dos Santos and others). However, regarding the thesis of unequal exchange
and the super-exploitation of the labour force, among others, those reflections
have not generally been taken up systematically and critically.9 This process
of theoretical ‘rediscovery’ has tended to suffer from two significant deficits.
2 Prebisch 1986b.
3 Marini 2015.
4 Emmanuel 1971b; Emmanuel 1972.
5 Braun 1973; Smith 2020.
6 Bresser‐Pereira 2010.
7 Lastra 2018; Osorio 2016; Silva Amaral and Dias Carcanholo 2009; Sotelo Valencia 2018; Luce
2015; Katz 2018; Martins 2018; Antunes de Oliveira 2018; Antunes de Oliveira 2020.
8 Smith 2019; Smith 2020, p. 45.
9 The significant exception has been Claudio Katz, who recently engaged in a critical debate
with Marxist dependency theory (Katz 2018), sparking a heated discussion (Osorio Urbina
2018; Smith 2020).
10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

Notes For a Discussion on Unequal Exchange 3
On the one hand, it has largely ignored the discussions since the 1980s on the
theory of value in Marxism. Persisting in a classical interpretation of value it
has not incorporated the key debates contributed by Open and Autonomist
Marxism,10 as well as other traditions.11 On the other hand, mdt has not organ-
ically and systematically recovered arguments from environmentalism and
feminism, especially from their Marxist strands.12 In such a sense, the discus-
sion on unequal exchange also needs to be open to substantive contributions
from these analytical fields.
In this framework, our paper aims to make a critical reconstruction of
the problem of unequal exchange, especially within the field of mdt. To this
end, we will start with Prebisch’s original proposition regarding the decline
in the terms of trade and Marini’s critique, trying to make explicit the links
between his arguments and the historical debate on unequal exchange in the
field of Marxism. Then, we will develop the discussion around the articulation
between unequal exchange and the consolidation of capitalism in the impe-
rialist era. Later, we will propose a clarification of what can be called unequal
exchange, its link with the law of value, and wages determination. Then, we
will recover the contemporary debate in mdt around this issue and formulate
some critical propositions. Later, we will present some reflections on the cate-
gory of super-exploitation of the labour force and its links with contributions
from Marxist feminism and the debates around extractivism and the theory
of land rent. Finally, we will present some relevant questions and conclusions:
through the article we are able to show how new debates in Marxian theory
can be incorporated into mdt’s debates on unequal exchange to strengthen it
as a theoretical tool.
2 Terms of Trade, the International Division of Labour,

and Unequal Exchange
In Latin America, the debate on unequal exchange as a general phenomenon

arose from Prebisch’s proposals at eclac (Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean) in 1950. Such was its significance that in 1972, in
his classic work Dialectics of Dependence, Ruy Mauro Marini pointed out that:
10 Cleaver 2000; Caffentzis 2013.

11 Astarita 2004; Iñigo Carrera 2018.
12 Federici 2012; Federici 2018; O’Connor 1997; Caffentzis 2017; Bellamy Foster 2000; Moore
2015; Arruzza and Bhattacharya 2020.
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4 Féliz
It is a well-known fact that the increase in the world supply of food and
raw materials has been accompanied by the decline in the prices of these
products, relative to the price achieved by manufactures.13
This sentence expresses the consensus around declining terms of trade as a

phenomenon. However, Marini proposed an alternative explanation to the
classical explanation given in Latin America by Raúl Prebisch in 1950.14 But
before we get to Marini, let us first analyse Prebisch’s approach.
Prebisch’s argument hinges on the supposed capacity of large capitals in the
centre to appropriate to a greater extent the benefits of technical progress.15
The monopoly power of these capitals, Prebisch reasoned, offsets the relative
fall in the prices of the manufactured products they produce16 and gives the
working class at the centre the ability to resist wage depression in the down-
ward phase of the economic cycle.17 In this phase, the working class in the
centre can sustain their real wages at levels close to the previous peak, but in
the periphery, workers cannot:
Therein lies the key to the phenomenon, according to which the great
industrial centres not only retain for themselves the fruit of the applica-
tion of technical innovations to their economy but are also in a favourable
position to capture a part of that which arises in the technical progress
of the periphery.18
Superimposed on this argument is another, which indicates that even if work-

ers in the periphery were able to resist wage decreases with the same strength
as industrial workers, the adjustment to wages would still occur, only by a
different means. Reading the development of the centre and the periphery
through economic cycles, it follows that high prices of primary products would
force a contraction of industrial production, which in turn would reduce the
demand for primary products.19 In the same vein, FitzGerald notes that
13 Marini 2015, p. 119.

14 Prebisch 1986a. Singer proposed a similar hypothesis (Singer 1950), so the proposition
became known internationally as the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis (Toye and Toye 2003).
15 Ocampo and Parra 2003.
16 Prebisch 2012, p. 18.
17 Prebisch 2012, pp. 19–20; Toye and Toye 2003, p. 459.
18 Prebisch 2012, p. 20.
19 Toye and Toye 2003, p. 460; Prebisch 1986a, p. 485.

the key assumption for this perverse outcome is the elasticity of demand
for exports – both the low-income elasticity and the slope of the price
curve – and the technological import-dependence of industry.20
And he notes:
in this sort of ‘unequal exchange’ the level of national income is less than
what it would be under either a collectively negotiated primary export
price or a deliberate process of industrialisation.21
In our view, the explanation provided by Prebisch’s hypothesis has a num-

ber of analytical difficulties. On the one hand, his interpretation is based on
an apparent assumption that wages and profits can rise steadily in line with
labour productivity growth in the centre.22 In the periphery, on the contrary,
the tendency would be for wages to stagnate – if not deteriorate – while prof-
its would remain indeterminate.23 As Ocampo and Parra point out, Prebisch
understood that:
[On the one hand,] workers in the countries of the centre were not only
able to raise their incomes during booms, but also to defend them dur-
ing cyclical downturns in the world economy. On the other hand, faced
with surpluses and, therefore, with the sharp cyclical deterioration of
commodity prices, workers in the periphery were unable to prevent their
incomes from falling during crises.24
In other words, Prebisch ignores the determination of the value of commod-

ities in the social labour process, which establishes the distribution of value
(i.e., determination of wages and profits) as a subsidiary process of (but dia-
lectically articulated by) its formation/creation. Thus, rigid wages and profits
20 FitzGerald 2000, p. 63.

21 Later, Prebisch would complement these arguments with others, pointing out that agri-
cultural products and, in general, primary products do not allow significant diversifica-
tion and are therefore subject to the risk of market saturation and, consequently, a fall
in their prices. In Prebisch’s own words, in agriculture, ‘… technical progress tends to
increase productivity rapidly without the necessary increase in demand to avoid a fall in
prices’ (Prebisch 1986b, p. 199).
22 Prebisch 1986a, p. 485.
23 This logic would imply that in dependent countries, Lewis’s proposition regarding the
existence of an ‘infinitely’ elastic supply of labour would apply (Bacha 1978, p. 320; Ricci
2018, p. 3; FitzGerald 2000, p. 62).
24 Ocampo and Parra 2003, p. 9.

6 Féliz
would prevent the fall in the relative prices of commodities produced in the
central countries despite technical progress and the consequent increase in
labour productivity.25
On the other hand, on a more general level, it seems to us that Prebisch’s
hypothesis is not sufficient to explain the problem. He maintains that the
causes of the decline in the terms of trade lie in the dynamics of supply and
demand, as phenomena independent of each other, not linked to the law of
value. On the contrary, we agree with Marini, who explains that
while it is evident that concurrency plays a decisive role in price setting,

it does not explain why, on the supply side, an accelerated expansion
occurs even when terms of trade are deteriorating. 26
Following on from this, Marini proposes analysing the problem identified

by Prebisch in a specific framework: the operation of the law of value on an
international scale in the era of imperialism and its consequence, unequal
exchange.27 In this reading, this phenomenon – the decline in the terms of
trade – reveals another profound process. Such a process became known in the
1960s as the problem of ‘unequal exchange’.28
In line with the classical hypotheses regarding the nature of imperialism,
Marini argues that an unequal and asymmetrical international division of
labour is the basis of the relations of unequal exchange. This division places
the dependent countries in the position of suppliers of raw materials and food,
denying them the dynamic possibility of consolidating processes of capitalist
development centred on the organic expansion of the production of relative
surplus-value and increases in labour productivity.29 The latter tends to occur
in the central imperialist countries where the organic development of strate-
gies of surplus-value creation are based on relative surplus-value.
25 In terms of the neoclassical debate, this situation would result from (a) the lower
income-elasticity and price-elasticity of demand for primary products and (b) monopo-
listic conditions in industrial markets that would allow higher profits there than in com-
petitive primary markets (Ricci 2018, p. 3).
26 Marini 2015, p. 119.
27 Katz 2018, p. 348.
28 Emmanuel 1971a; Emmanuel 1972. According to Braun, ‘Emmanuel … is the creator of the
concept of unequal exchange’ (Braun 1973, p. 27).
29 According to Marini, the process of unequal exchange occurs upon the expansion of
the world market: it ‘is the basis on which the international division of labour between
industrial and non-industrial nations operates, but the counterpart of that division is the
expansion of the world market’ (Marini 2015, pp. 120–1).

In the same sense, Samir Amin points out that
the result of imperialism, that is to say of the international emission of

monopoly capital, is unequal exchange, one of whose conditions … was
precisely the international mobility of capital.30
That is to say, imperialism as the export of capital becomes an operational

form of the law of value, not its negation, as Prebisch seems to assume in his
interpretation.31
For completeness, Amin points out that
Imperialism, in Lenin’s sense of the word, made its appearance as soon

as the possibilities for capitalist development through the completion of
the first Industrial Revolution … had been exhausted. A fresh geographi-
cal extension of capitalism’s domain then became necessary. The periph-
ery … was then established, by way of colonial conquest. This conquest
brought different social formations again into mutual contact…. The
mechanism of primitive accumulation … is unequal exchange, that is, the
exchange of products of unequal value (or, more precisely, whose prices
of production are, in the Marxist sense, unequal). This means that from
this time onward the reward will become unequal…. This new interna-
tional specialization was to provide the basis for both the exchange of
commodities … and the movement of capital (for exhaustion of the pos-
sibilities of the first Industrial Revolution coincides with the formation
of monopolies, emphasized by Lenin, which made this export of capital
possible). To Rosa Luxemburg belongs the credit of having pointed out
these present-day mechanisms of primitive accumulation – in the strict
sense, plundering of the Third World.32
Amin establishes a pivotal point in the debate that was opening up at that
time: unequal exchange supported by the development of the law of value on
an international scale leads to wage inequality, not the other way around (as
proposed by Prebisch, for example).
30 Emmanuel 1971a; Emmanuel 1972. In the same vein, Mandel points out that ‘unequal
exchange, … became the general rule after the beginning of the imperialist phase’ (Mandel
1979, p. 338; Mandel 1998).
31 ‘The development of mercantile relations lays the foundations for a better application of
the law of value to take place, but simultaneously creates all the conditions for the various
levers by means of which capital tries to circumvent it’ (Marini 2015, pp. 120–1).
32 Amin 1971, pp. 96–7; Amin 1974b, pp. 87–8.

8 Féliz
In a similar vein, Arghiri Emmanuel states that this unequal relationship

is ‘like a cause-and-effect link between the high level [of development] of
advanced countries and the low level of backward countries’.33 Likewise, the
Argentine economist Oscar Braun argues that
The analysis of this tendency, the study of how the more advanced coun-
tries influence the development of the backward countries, and to what
extent the dependent countries are necessary for the development of the
productive forces in the imperialist countries, constitute the object of
what can be called the ‘theory of imperialism’.34
In synthesis, the historical constitution of capitalism and thus the interna-

tional division of labour establishes the parameters of the unequal – and
dependent – exchange relations of the national value spaces.35
3 The Classic Debate on Unequal Exchange
3.1 The Global Shaping of Value and Prices of Production

The hypothesis of unequal exchange gains strength with the contributions of
Emmanuel in 1962. His conceptual approach is based on the assumption of
world prices of production for internationally exchanged goods.36 His main
contribution to the debate is to place at the centre of the problem the world
conformation of value and – therefore – of prices of production.37
According to Amin, ‘[t]he preeminence of world values constitutes the
essential; the content of the affirmation of the unity of the world system, the
33 Emmanuel 1971a, p. 7; Emmanuel 1972. In the same vein, Bukharin ‘regards capital exports
as one component in a broader process of “capitalist expansion” in search of a higher
profit rate’ (Milios and Sotiropoulos 2009, p. 29). Following Marx, he argued that ‘external
trade between two countries, each with different average productivity of labour, enables
the more advanced country to derive extra profit. The extra profit is made possible by the
commodity in question being produced in a country with higher productivity of labour
than the corresponding international average.’
34 Braun 1973, p. 13.
35 Capitalism must be conceived ‘as a world totality … a concrete totality, full of determi-
nations. A totality in which the laws of value and the accumulation of capital govern,
but always through national spaces of value that are mediated by exchange rates, and
subsumed in the world space of value.’ (Astarita 2010, p. 83.)
36 Emmanuel 1972.
37 Amin 1974a. Shaikh explains in detail and precisely the nature of the problem of forming
the international price of production (Shaikh 2016, pp. 510–15).

condition of this unity’.38 In this respect, Katz pretends to deny this unity by
pointing out that the free mobility of capital, the formation of an average profit
[rate], and common prices of production that distinguish internal trade do not
govern values at a global scale.39 However, in our opinion, Katz is mistaken. He
confuses the level of analytical abstraction of the tendencies of valorisation
and accumulation of capital on a global scale and the formation of prices of
production on a worldwide scale with the more concrete level of the formation
of international market prices. The unrestricted mobility of capital in the neo-
classical sense (without restrictions, with an indefinitely large number of small
capitals) does not define the possibility of configuring international prices of
production and the process of equalisation of the rate of profit. On the con-
trary, this results from the existence of a process of real competition that does
occur on a global scale between large capitals.40 After all,
[U]nder capitalist production, the general law acts as the prevailing ten-
dency only in a very complicated and approximate manner, as a never
ascertainable average of ceaseless fluctuations.41
Although the analytic proposition of Amin can be debated,42 it seems clear to

us that his proposal points out that in the framework of capitalist relations of
production on a global scale, the law of value operates through the unequal
development of the productive forces. Different social formations in the var-
ious value spaces do not imply the denial of the predominance of tendencies
towards the constitution of global prices of production for the primary com-
modities produced.
Despite the existence of diverse levels of productivity, the mobility of cap-
ital and the generalisation of abstract labour as the dominant form of labour
38 Amin 1975, p. 22.

39 Katz 1989, p. 75. He follows Mandel, who points out that ‘The hypothesis of the interna-
tional levelling of profit rates is neither theoretically nor empirically tenable. From the
theoretical point of view, it presupposes a perfect international mobility of capital, in
effect the levelling out of all the economic, social and political conditions conducive to
the development of modern capitalism on a world scale. Such levelling, however, is in
complete contradiction with the law of uneven and combined development which dom-
inates this development.’ (Mandel 1979, p. 346; Mandel 1998.)
40 Shaikh 2016. Different average profit rates do not indicate the non-existence of competi-
tion but the existence of real competition between capitals in dispute for exploiting the
labour force on a global scale (Shaikh 2016).
41 Marx 2005, p. 203; Marx 1999, p. 123.
42 Weeks and Dore 1979, pp. 71–7.

10 Féliz
establishes the basis for the constitution of value (and therefore, prices of pro-
duction) worldwide.43 In the same vein, Cleaver contends:
the value of a commodity produced in one place, because it is deter-

mined by the socially necessary labour time, will be the same as those
produced elsewhere even if it contains more/less useful labour time
because the labourers producing it have a lower/higher productivity than
the average.44
The transition to the era of the internationalisation of capital (known as ‘glo-

balisation’) confirms the validity of the law of value, now through the opera-
tion of large transnational corporations and their global chains of value and
surplus-value.45 Through transnational integration of productive capital, the
global movement of capital imposes the formation of values and prices of pro-
duction (which are not simply ‘prices’ or ‘market prices’) on a world scale with
renewed force.
In this sense, we believe that it is wrong to point out that
[i]n the present stage [since the 1970s] the generation of surplus-value
diverges significantly from its geographical distribution. The process of
transformation of values into prices is consummated on an international
scale, accompanying the divorce between commodities produced in one
country and consumed in another.46
This explanation suggests that they were not an integral phenomenon in cap-
italism since the beginning of the imperialist era,47 when the birth of capital-
ism starts precisely from that very divergence.48 In the same vein, Katz notes
that since now the pre-eminence of the global segment of capital is ‘notorious’,
there has been a weakening of ‘the obstruction interposed by the multiplicity
of exchange rates to international patterns of prices and profits’. The media-
tion of the exchange rate (mediation, not obstruction) in articulating national
spaces of value to the world market has become more complex and financial-
ised, certainly, but it is by no means weakened.
43 Marini 2015, p. 266.

44 Cleaver 2000, p. 119.
45 Ceceña 2000; Marini 2000.
46 Katz 2018, p. 342.
47 Smith 2016, p. 77.
48 Marini 2015.

3.2 The Broad and the Narrow Sense of Unequal Exchange

In a debate with Emmanuel, Bettelheim established that – in principle – there
would be two forms of unequal exchange.49 On the one hand, in a broad sense,
there would be unequal exchange
at the moment when a country is obliged to supply, through the commod-

ities it sells, more labour than it obtains through the commodities it buys,
even if the labour time employed by it is the socially necessary and prices
are established under conditions of competition and equal profit rates.50
Bettelheim continues:
Since products are exchanged at their price of production, the countries

in which the organic composition is lower do not obtain in exchange for
the product of one hour of national labour (labour whose productivity is
assumed to be equal to the world average) anything more than the prod-
ucts which have cost less than one hour of socially necessary labour in
the countries in which the organic composition of capital is higher.51
This type of unequal exchange is not admitted by Emmanuel. If wages were

equal,
according to Emmanuel, there would be no reason, in this case, to speak

of ‘unequal exchange’ because the terms of exchange are then deter-
mined by the law of value such as that which acts in the framework of
capitalism when there is no differential surplus-value.52
The question is, in this case, if such a thing is possible (capitalism without dif-
ferential surplus-value) – it is our understanding that it is not – and if, for that
reason, it would not be necessary to account for the law of value in the really
existing conditions (that is, where the prices of production operate as a form
of value).
49 Bettelheim 1971.
50 Bettelheim 1971, p. 39.
51 Bettelheim 1971, pp. 39–40. The organic composition of capital (occ) is a ‘technological
composition’ that synthesises the technical relations of productive processes in terms of
value. In other words, occ relates the total value of constant capital (beyond the distinc-
tion between its constant and circulating parts) to the whole labour time required (paid
and unpaid) to transform inputs into value (Saad-Filho 1993, pp. 131–2).
52 Bettelheim 1971, pp. 38–39.

12 Féliz
What Emmanuel proposes is that:
the relation of prices established by virtue of the law of equalisation of

the profit rate between regions of institutionally different surplus-value
rate is called ‘unequal exchange’, the term ‘institutionally’ meaning that
these surplus-value rates are, for some reason, subtracted from competi-
tive equalisation.53
This proposition defines a second type of (restricted) unequal exchange

and ‘constitutes in a certain way a particular category within the general
category…’.54
In short, Emmanuel proposes that unequal exchange strictu sensu would
occur only when the movement of capital is free. Therefore, the conditions of
production (i.e. the organic composition of capital) are similar between coun-
tries, but the movement of labour-power is limited and therefore not possible:
the equalisation of wages in the international framework … is a condition

[that] cannot be satisfied in any form. From the point of view of wages,
frontiers constitute thresholds of absolute discontinuity.55
In sum, for Emmanuel, unequal exchange is based on wage differentials.56
4 Prices of Production, Wages, and Unequal Exchange
As Enrique Dussel points out, ‘Emmanuel, by basing himself on the wage dif-
ferential, has had to take national boundaries seriously’.57 But while he takes
them seriously, he reverses the determination.58 Whereas the first form of une-
qual exchange (suggested by Bettelheim) relies on the Marxian proposition
53 Emmanuel 1971a, p. 24; Emmanuel 1972.

54 Bettelheim 1971, p. 39.
56 Itoh 2009, pp. 206–7; Weeks and Dore 1979, pp. 70–1; Ricci 2018, p. 3. Prebisch – in another
theoretical key, of course – bases his explanation of the decline of the terms of trade on a
similar assessment: wages have pre-eminence above prices (and therefore, above values).
However, what needs to be shown is why the terms of trade can decline within the frame-
work of the law of value, not through its absolute negation.
57 Dussel 1988, p. 318.
58 Holloway 1992.

that is supported by the formulation of prices of production, Emmanuel’s pro-

posal leads to an ‘inverted’ version of the law of value.
Marx relies on a view of the law of value wherein prices of production are
a form of value and therefore are linked to the formation of value by socially
necessary labour time. Thus, unequal exchange in Marx results from the very
process of shaping prices of production and the ‘reduction’ of a diverse mix
of concrete labour to socially abstract labour. Thus, as we indicated above,
Amin points out that unequal exchange leads to the remuneration of labour
becoming unequal.59 Unequal exchange is – as we have already pointed out –
caused by the particular articulation of imperialist countries and peripheral
countries.60
On the contrary, Emmanuel’s view is that wages can by themselves determine
prices of production and thus alter the value of commodities internationally:
any increase in wages in one of the two countries aggravates the terms of
trade to the detriment of the other, and any decrease aggravates them to
its own detriment.61
This proposition is very similar to Prebisch’s. In a mathematical model, under

the assumption of equalisation of profit rates between countries, Bacha shows
that this is, to put it mildly, an excessive statement.62
From Emmanuel’s perspective, unequal exchange does not express the
exchange of unequally produced values (i.e., the unequal organic composi-
tions of capital, and hence, unequal productivities of labour). On the contrary,
it expresses their production through unequally paid and exploited workers
(i.e., varying rates of surplus-value).63
From this vantage point, wages are seen as an ‘independent variable’, as
Braun explains:
Emmanuel … shows how the low wages prevailing in the dependent

countries imply relatively low prices of production compared to those
prevailing in the imperialist countries, and therefore unequal exchange
in the strict sense.64
59 Amin 1971, pp. 96–7; Amin 1974a, pp. 597–8.

60 Milios and Sotiropoulos 2009, p. 40; Smith 2016, p. 82.
62 Bacha 1978, p. 327.
63 Weeks and Dore 1979.
64 Braun 1973, p. 28.

14 Féliz
On the contrary, Braun – from a Sraffian approach – argues that in reality,

‘the independent variable is the price and not the wage’.65 In this sense, he
agrees with Amin, who
… finds the origin of the low level of wages in the structure of the social
formation of dependent countries: a structure in which the capitalist
mode of production is dominant but not unique.66
while rejecting the hypothesis of Emmanuel who ‘dismisses as ridiculous that

prices [any price] are the determinants of wages’.
Braun explains that
It is perfectly plausible to think that imperialist countries, without deter-

mining any particular price, can influence the average export prices of
the dependent countries…. through downward pressure on the average
export price (vector of export prices), the imperialist countries are able
to achieve an increase in wages in the imperialist country at the cost of a
decrease in wages in the dependent country. Or, in dynamic terms, that
as the world economy expands by increasing the productivity of labour,
the imperialist countries, either by reducing the level or preventing the
increase in export prices of the dependent country, are able to achieve
rapid wage growth in the imperialist country while maintaining constant
or slowly growing wages in the dependent country.67
Braun’s confusion is that in assuming that price is the independent variable, he

forgets that in reality – following the mechanistic metaphor – the independent
variable is value (and the price of production). The imperialist countries can-
not alter the prices of production of the exports of the dependent countries.
However, this does not mean that they cannot, under certain circumstances,
change market prices. 68
On the contrary, if, as we understand, unequal exchange operates at the
level of values and prices of production and not at the level of market prices,
65 Braun 1973, p. 28.

66 Braun 1973, p. 57.
67 Braun 1973, p. 58.
68 Market prices are altered by the relations between supply and demand, the conscious
actions of manipulation by capital based on its monopoly power, and state interventions
of various kinds, among other forms. These mechanisms operate as more concrete ways
of producing transfer of value which, however, act via the central process supported by
prices of production.

as Emmanuel or Braun seem to assume, wage differentials are the result and
not the cause of unequal exchange in the strict sense.
5 Dependence and Unequal Exchange
Marini, referring to Marx, points out that
theoretically, the exchange of commodities expresses the exchange of

equivalents, whose value is determined by the amount of socially neces-
sary labour embodied in the commodities.69
That is, in principle, he assumes that on an international scale, there is a link

between prices of production and value:
Capitals invested in foreign trade can yield a higher rate of profit,

because, in the first place, there is competition with commodities pro-
duced in other countries with inferior production facilities, so that the
more advanced country sells its goods above their value even though they
are cheaper than those of competing countries. In so far as the labour of
the more advanced country is here realised as labour of a higher specific
weight, the rate of profit rises because labour which has not been paid as
being of higher quality is sold as such.70
However, Marini – in our opinion, mistakenly – then states that
in practice, different mechanisms are observed that allow for transfers

of value, bypassing the laws of exchange, and which are expressed in the
way market prices and commodity prices of production are set.71
As Jaime Osorio points out, the laws of exchange (the law of value) are not
‘passed over’ but, on the contrary, are dialectically denied, that is to say,
violently:
In the treatment of value, this conflict could not be absent, and can be
expressed as follows: because there is a law of value it is possible and nec-
essary to deny it, violating it. The very logic of capital, regardless of where
69 Marini 2015, p. 121.

70 Marx 2005, p. 304; Marx 1999, p. 168.
71 Marini 2015, p. 121.

16 Féliz
in the capitalist world system it acts, generates the mechanisms that

threaten value. This occurs insofar as it is not a simple relation operating in
the exchange of commodities, but a relation that defines production and
exchanges in a world in which maximising profit is the central objective.72
In line with the preceding discussion (although without referring explicitly to

it), Marini distinguishes between mechanisms of unequal exchange that oper-
ate ‘within the same sphere of production (whether manufactured products
or raw materials)’ from those mechanisms that ‘act within the framework of
different spheres that interrelate’.73
In the first case, in line with what Bettelheim and Amin suggest, value trans-
fers ‘correspond to specific applications of the laws of exchange’.74 The higher
productivity of labour allows capitals in a nation to present individual prices
lower than those of their competitors, without affecting the market price that
the conditions of production (and therefore the prices of production) contrib-
ute to setting. The favoured nation will receive, in this case, an extraordinary
gain, ‘similar to the one we found when examining in what way individual cap-
itals appropriate the fruit of the [higher] productivity of labour’.75 In this case,
unequal exchange operates at the level of inter-capitalist competition in the
same way as it does within the same national value space.76
According to Dussel, this is ‘the fundamental phenomenon’ behind depend-
ency, while wage differentials – emphasised by Emmanuel – are ‘a derivative
moment’.77
In the second case, Marini argues that the mechanisms that operate ‘adopt
more openly the character of transgression’ of the laws of exchange.78 When
nations exchange different kinds of goods, such as manufactures and raw mate-
rials, monopoly power (‘the mere fact that some produce goods that the others
do not, or cannot, produce with the same ease’) allows them to ‘circumvent’
72 Osorio 2017, p. 224.

73 Marini 2015, p. 121.
74 Ibid.
75 Marini 2015, p. 122.
76 In the same vein, Shaikh explains (albeit within a quasi-neo-Ricardian analytical frame-
work) that inter-capitalist competition between countries operates in a similar way to
inter-capitalist competition within countries. International terms of trade (i.e. the real
exchange rate) will adjust to the evolution of absolute costs or relative real unit prices,
just as relative prices within a national space are determined (Shaikh 2016, pp. 491–535).
77 Dussel 1988, p. 318.
78 Marini 2015, p. 121.

the law of value.79 Those countries will be able to sell their products at prices
higher than their value, configuring an unequal exchange.
However, we will see later that monopoly power is not a violation of the law
of value but part of its funding process. Marini forgets his assertion that it is
the structural condition (the imperialist division of labour) that creates possi-
bilities that favour the monopoly power of imperialist national value spaces.
This process occurs as part of the dynamic of operation of the law of value, as
a dialectical, not absolute negation (‘elusion’).
At some points, Marini seems to be analysing the transfer of value (and
therefore exploitation) between countries (in the style of Emmanuel):80
this implies that the disadvantaged nations must cede for free part of
the value they produce and that this cession or transfer is accentuated in
favour of that country that sells them goods at a lower price of produc-
tion, by virtue of its higher productivity.
However, he clarifies that, in this case:
the appropriation of the value realised masks the appropriation of surplus-

value generated by the exploitation of labour in each nation. From this
angle, the transfer of value is a transfer of surplus-value that appears,
from the point of view of the capitalist operating in the disadvantaged
nation, as a lowering of the rate of surplus-value, and therefore of the
rate of profit.81
In the same vein, Marx points out that:
The favoured country recovers more labour in exchange for less labour,
although this difference, this excess is pocketed, as in any exchange
between labour and capital, by a certain class.82
In this way, unequal exchange implies a sort of transfer of surplus-value from

the capitals in the dependent national value spaces to the whole of the imperi-
alist (central) spaces through the formation of prices of production.
79 Marini 2015, p. 122.

80 Ibid. This confusion is common in the debates surrounding imperialism and unequal
exchange (Weeks and Dore 1979). Like us, Weeks and Dore take care to discuss the limits
of Marini’s position.
81 Marini 2015, p. 122.
82 Marx 2005, p. 305; Marx 1999, p. 168.

18 Féliz
6 The Basis of Dependence
In turn, contrary to Emmanuel’s assertion regarding the pre-eminence of low

wages to ‘explain’ unequal exchange, Marini indicates that it is the latter that
will lead to low wages in the form of super-exploitation of the labour force as a
‘compensation mechanism’.83
The super-exploitation of labour-power involves a combination of:
the intensification of work, the prolongation of the working day and the
expropriation of part of the work necessary for the worker to replenish
his labour-power.84
The essential element of this mechanism is that
[she] is denied the conditions necessary to replenish the wear and tear
of [her] labour-power: in the first two cases, because [she] is forced to a
higher expenditure of labour-power than [she] should normally provide,
thus causing [her] premature exhaustion; in the latter because [she] is
even deprived of the possibility of consuming what is strictly indispensa-
ble to preserve [her] labour-power in a normal state. In capitalist terms,
these mechanisms (which, moreover, can occur, and usually do occur, in
combination) mean that labour is remunerated below its value.85
Even so, Dussel believes he finds a certain degree of contradiction in Marini’s

approach, which places the super-exploitation of labour-power as the ‘founda-
tion of dependency’.86 According to him:
The question is exactly the other way around. Because there is a trans-
fer of surplus-value from a less developed national global capital to
that which is more developed, and this is the essence or foundation of
dependence (Marx would say), it is necessary to compensate this loss by
extracting more surplus-value from peripheral living labour.87
Besides,
83 Marini 2015, pp. 122–3.

84 Marini 2015, p. 126.
85 Marini 2015, pp. 126–7.
86 Dussel 1988, p. 312.
87 Dussel 1988, p. 327.

the counterpart of the process by which Latin America contributed to

increasing the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit in the industrial
countries implied for it rigorously opposite effects; what appeared as a
compensation mechanism at the level of the market is a mechanism that
operates at the level of domestic production.88
The compensation mechanism is as follows:
It is the recourse to the increase of exchanged value, on the part of the

disadvantaged nation: without preventing the transfer operated by the
mechanisms already described, this makes it possible to neutralise it
totally or partially by means of the increase of the realised value. Such
a compensation mechanism can be verified both at the level of the
exchange of similar products and of products originating from different
spheres of production.89
Smith puts it bluntly:
Every capitalist dreams of becoming a monopolist, but for capitalists in

Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico and other southern nations their dreams
remain just that, dreams; they have no choice but to rely exclusively on the
extraction of surplus-value from their own workers by super-exploiting
them up to and beyond their limits – or rather, to sate themselves on what’s
left after monopolists and imperialists have taken their share.90
Whatever the use-value produced by capital in the dependent country, the

mechanism operates similarly.91
7 Unequal Exchange and Its Secret: Revisiting the Debate
Dependency presupposes unequal exchange as it is the flip side of imperialism

and, therefore, of a particular international division of labour and exploita-
tion. Marini’s classic plan continues to be the basis of current developments in
88 Marini 2015, p. 124.

89 Marini 2015, p. 123.
90 Smith 2019, p. 14; our emphasis.
91 This situation also implies that the process of industrialisation of many dependent
national value spaces does not alter the essential nature of this phenomenon (Marini
2015; Marini 1994).

20 Féliz
the Marxist theory of dependency. However, several points need to be revised,

completed or complemented to make mdt an analytically proper approach to
understanding the dynamics of capitalism.
7.1 Unequal Exchange Is Not the Exchange of Value

On the one hand, when we speak of unequal exchange, we do not always talk
about a transfer of value, even if we usually express it in such terms.
To say, as is often done, that workers ‘produce’ value is misleading. It

makes value sound like some metaphysical substance – a phlogiston of
some sort. … work under capital is the substance of value. The more work
that is performed in a given time, the more value there is…. The same lin-
guistical problem exists where we speak of constant capital ‘transferring’
its value to the product.92
For example:
theoretically, the exchange of commodities expresses the exchange of

equivalents, the value of which is determined by the amount of socially
necessary labour embodied in the commodities. In practice, different
mechanisms are observed that allow for transfers of value, bypassing the
laws of exchange.93
In principle, value exchange operates in capitalism through prices of

production.94 The exchange of equivalents does not occur in the reality of cap-
italist competition but expresses the law of value on a higher plane of abstrac-
tion. It does not, as Marini suggests, contradict the laws of exchange but rather
‘transfers’ the account for the actual operation of the law of value onto a more
concrete plane.
Value as such is not a thing and therefore cannot be transferred. Value is a
social relation of the imposition of labour,95 but not of any labour. The produc-
tion of value
92 Cleaver 2000, p. 120.

93 Marini 2015, p. 121.
94 Seretis and Tsaliki 2012, p. 970.
95 Cleaver 2000.

is an actual social process in the sense that capital has a tendency to

redistribute itself from areas of low productivity to areas of high produc-
tivity (when this differential leads to a difference in profits).96
Value is created through the imposition of socially necessary (abstract) labour,

through the imposition of the commodity-form. ‘The measure of capital’s
imposition of work is value, and the index of its control is surplus-value’.97
Thus, in the so-called unequal exchange, labour performed (in its concrete
dimension) within the framework of a capitalist cycle – historically and spa-
tially situated – fails to be valorised in its totality in its dimension as abstract
labour (i.e., as socially necessary labour time). Therefore, it fails to express
itself in surplus-value. This ‘lost’ surplus-value is not transferred anywhere but
is an index of the (relative) failure of capital to impose itself on dependent ter-
ritories. ‘Surplus-value is not only surplus labour but also the aim of capitalist
production and an index of its success in imposing itself as a social system’.98
In the competition between capitals on a global scale, value, whose content is
the socially necessary time invested in the production of commodities glob-
ally, appears unequally produced/appropriated under the form of differential
rates of exploitation of labour. Super-exploitation occurs whenever the appro-
priation of surplus-value of one capital by another cannot be compensated
beforehand by expanding that surplus-value through the endogenous genera-
tion of technology by the expropriated capital.99
As we pointed out earlier, the typical image refers to the case of countries
producing the same commodities.100 Capital in core countries operates under
conditions of higher levels of development of productive forces, not only
labour productivity, due to the historical accumulation of absolute advantages
(scale, technology, labour-force profile, etc.).
The labour applied in these imperialist territories manifests itself enhanced
as an extraordinary surplus-value.101
96 Cleaver 2000, p. 119.

97 Cleaver 2000, p. 91.
98 Cleaver 2000, p. 100.
99 Martins 2011, p. 287.
100 Marini 2015, pp. 121–2; Dias Carcanholo 2013, p. 106; Silva Amaral and Dias Carcanholo
2009, pp. 218–19.
101 Astarita 2013.

22 Féliz
The exceptionally productive labour operates as intensified labour; it cre-

ates in equal periods of time greater values than average social labour of
the same kind.102
On the other hand, in less productive countries, applied labour is devalued:

part of the surplus-value ‘disappears’.
The more developed capital shows a greater capacity to impose socially nec-
essary labour time through fixed constant capital (machines). While machines
do not create value,103 they play a crucial role in ensuring control of the labour
process and the valorisation process.104
This process expresses the contradictory unity between concrete and
abstract labour, between that materialised in commodities as use-values, and
that expressed in (exchange) value.105 In dependent countries, a fraction of
the work performed by local capitals does not translate into socially necessary
labour time, i.e., it does not produce value. Given the low levels of the rela-
tive productivity of labour, labour is performed in excess and not expressed in
the value of the commodities. Above all, such labour does not appear as the
surplus-value produced/appropriated by dependent capitals.
As Katz explains:
… in the epoch of imperialism unequal exchange … constitutes one of

the mechanisms for the transfer of surplus-value to the advanced nations
that function habitually in the world market. Imperialism assumes that
the core of developed countries can unload on weaker economies the
devastating effects of their own contradictions and imbalances.106
The critical contradiction here is that more (concrete) labour does not translate
into more abstract labour in the dependent space. Paradoxically, the inability
of capital to price labour at the socially necessary labour time in the depend-
ent territories renders useless part of the labour performed. On the contrary, in
the central countries, labour performed at above-average conditions appears
as more (extraordinary) value. There is another apparent paradox: although
producing the commodities takes less (concrete) time, with lower production
costs, they appropriate more value, and therefore more (surplus) labour time.
102 Marx 1994, pp. 386–7 (italics in the original); Marx 2015, p. 223.
103 Caffentzis 2013.
104 Cleaver 1992.
105 Féliz and Haro Sly 2019.
106 Katz 1989, p. 73.

Inter-capitalist competition in the same production branch articulates the

double process of production and appropriation of value without the need for
‘transfers’. Unequal exchange expresses the differential exchange of concrete
labour times that manifests itself in the production/appropriation of different
abstract labour times (value). Hence the erroneous assessment of Emmanuel.
He assumes that there would be a tendency for capital in imperialist coun-
tries to migrate en masse as Foreign Direct Investment (fdi) to dependent
countries.107 This is something that manifestly does not occur; most capital
flows occur globally between imperialist value spaces.
7.2 Transfer of Values with Different Production Branches?

If one country produces means of production (typically, the ‘developed’ coun-
tries) and the other does not, something different happens. Historical develop-
ment has concentrated its production in the valorisation spaces of the centre
in capitals with relatively high organic composition.108
In the centre, the composition of capital has concentrated the production
of surplus-value in relative forms and therefore in modes of production and
appropriation intensive in constant capital. For this reason, the process of ten-
dential inter-branch equalisation of rates of profit leads to prices of production
of capital produced there (fundamentally, in the form of means of production)
being further away from (above) their values.
The flip side occurs in dependent countries which tend to have a lower
average organic composition of capital: here, local prices of production, which
establish the value of commodities in the production/realisation pair, tend to
be below their values. Again, much concrete labour time applied to production
in the dependent country appears as little abstract labour time at the moment
of exchanges, although not because there is a transfer of value. In this case, as
in the previous one, the social power of capital in the centre manifests itself as
unequal exchange, expressing the capacity of that capital to produce/appro-
priate more world labour. Again: there is nothing transferred. What happens
is that the imperialist countries can valorise their exploited labour as enjoying
more value, as ‘empowered’ labour.
On the other hand, it is our understanding that these processes have nothing
to do with intersectoral productivity dynamics, as suggested by Silva Amaral
and Dias Carcanholo.109 There is nothing intrinsic that implies that any par-
ticular sector (i.e., the production of any specific use-value) must a priori have
107 Weeks and Dore 1979, p. 71.

108 Marini 2015, pp. 122–3; Silva Amaral and Dias Carcanholo 2009, p. 219.
109 Silva Amaral and Dias Carcanholo 2009, p. 220.

24 Féliz
higher or lower rates of labour productivity growth. In the same way, Osorio’s
proposition that
the production of agrarian or mining goods, in general, requires low

organic compositions of capital in relation to that prevailing in the aver-
age industrial sectors and much more if we talk about the top production
of developed economies.110
seems to us erroneous. Associating the former with dependent countries and

the latter with imperialist countries is an unjustified generalisation: extrac-
tivist production is highly intensive in circulating constant capital (energy,
inputs) and therefore its organic composition is not a priori low.
We can only agree here with Katz, who points out that
in the world market prices do not sanction advantages and disadvantages

according to the type of goods traded, but in relation to the productive
structure of the intervening nations.111
In short, unequal exchange does not imply – at its foundation – transfer of

value, even if it has real effects in the dependent economy. There, diverse
compensation mechanisms operate to create and recreate forms of the super-
exploitation of labour and nature.112 In this sense, we agree with Katz when he
points out (in a polemic with Astarita) that
transfers of value provide the theoretical underpinning to evaluate how

surplus-value is channelled between the different bourgeois fractions of
the periphery. If this dimension is unknown, it is impossible to under-
stand the form that distributive conflicts assume.113
However, it seems to us that in the framework of the debate around unequal

exchange, it is critical to overcome the ‘phlogistic’ view of value.114 Denying
that the process of ‘value transfer’ implies a transfer in the sense of a flow does
not prevent us from understanding how the imperialist loop reproduces global
110 Osorio 2017, p. 228.

111 Katz 1989, p. 83.
112 Féliz and Migliaro 2018.
113 Katz 2018, p. 347.
114 ‘Such a theory of value is akin to the old chemical theory of phlogiston in which the
principle of fire was conceived as a material substance incorporated into inflammable
objects’ (Cleaver 2000, p. 118).

stratification.115 Instead, it allows us to understand that loop due to the capital

as a social relation and its contradictions (including the elementary contradic-
tion, use-value/value).
7.3 Monopoly and Transfers of Value

A different but parallel and complementary case to unequal exchange strictu
sensu is the relative and temporary monopoly of capital in the central coun-
tries. Monopoly allows these countries to appropriate an extraordinary rent in
its exchanges with dependent economies,116 as can be the case of the monop-
oly power that the capitals of the centre have in the production of certain
goods (for example, means of production with state-of-the-art technology).
The social value of their capital on the world market incorporates an extraor-
dinary surplus-value in the form of a monopoly price, which raises the market
price above the price of production (which contains the average rate of profit),
i.e., the product of a ‘monopoly price proper’.117 This price increase generates
a loss of surplus-value in the peripheral country, insofar as the higher costs
in means of production (produced in the central countries) do not alter the
world determination of the value of the commodities it exports. The monopoly
price results from the extraordinary capacity for innovation of capital in the
centre and is temporary: it persists as long as no alternatives compete with
the innovation. In this case, there is a transfer of value through prices, mani-
fested in the capacity of capital to fix unilaterally (although not without limits)
a price above its price of production. This price ‘is determined neither by price
of production nor by value of commodities, but by the buyers’ needs and abil-
ity to pay.’118
On the other hand, the innovation capacity of capital concentrated in the
centre is expressed as the systematic moral devaluation of fixed constant cap-
ital in the dependent territories. Each innovation in the centre devalues the
constant capital invested in the dependent regions, putting additional pres-
sures on the valorisation capacity of local capitals. Innovations affect constant
capital as a whole, both in the centre and in the dependent territory; in the lat-
ter, their effects appear outside the control of local capitals. In contrast, in the
former, they appear as an organic part of the process of capital valorisation.
115 Katz 2018.

116 Dias Carcanholo 2013, pp. 107–8.
117 Marx 1997, p. 971.
118 Marx 1995, p. 971; Marx 1999, p. 559.

26 Féliz
8 The Super-exploitation of Labour and Unequal Exchange
The process of unequal exchange leads to the ‘disappearance of surplus-value’ –

in the sense discussed above – and leads capitals in dependent economies to
seek compensatory mechanisms.119 The point of this is not so much that capi-
tals in nations disadvantaged by unequal exchange seek
to correct the imbalance between prices and the value of their exported
commodities (which would imply a redoubled effort to increase the
productive capacity of labour), but rather to compensate for the loss of
income generated by international trade, by resorting to further exploita-
tion of the worker.120
To compensate for the loss of surplus-value, capital in the dependent economy

favours strategies of absolute surplus-value generation, especially the payment
of labour-power below its value.121
The super-exploitation of labour-power operates in value production, even
if it also has an expression in circulation. At the level of production, super-
exploitation is expressed in the possibility of dependent capital to valorise
itself at average rates for those regulatory capitals.122 For its part, at the level
of circulation, super-exploitation is expressed in the form of more precarious
working conditions that favour forms of remuneration below the value of
labour-power for a significant fraction of the labour force.
In the sphere of commodity production, super-exploitation involves modal-
ities of hiring and use of labour-power that enable the payment of labour-
power below its value: for example, in the contemporary neoliberal phase of
capitalism, the outsourcing, peripheralisation, and subcontracting of signifi-
cant fractions of the processes of labour and valorisation;123 more recently still,
primarily through forms of exploitation of what has been called platform
119 Higginbottom 2014.

120 Marini 2015, p. 123.
121 Marini 2015; Osorio 2017. Again, as we pointed out, rather than loss of surplus-value, what
occurs is the non-production of sufficient surplus-value, insofar as the labour applied is
not socially necessary or operates as ‘disempowered’.
122 According to Marx, the tendency to equalise rates of profit between industries is part of
the conditions of production on which accumulation develops and whose expansion or
contraction regulates the process of accumulation. The method of production accessible
to the new capitals is the regulating capital. This notion summarises the dominant tech-
nique, which does not necessarily correspond to the most efficient technique in the sec-
tor but the ‘best practice’ available to new capitals (Seretis and Tsaliki 2012; Shaikh 2016).
123 Antunes 2018.

capitalism.124 On the other hand, the process of super-exploitation of the

labour force is racialised and differentiated by gender.125 In branches such
as textiles and paid domestic service, where employment is more feminised
and racialised, super-exploitation operates as a general phenomenon in the
dependent economy.
Simultaneously, the articulation of reproductive and (generally unpaid)
care work allows women’s super-exploitation in an expanded form.126 Marini
analysed the super-exploitation of labour-power as a process rooted in the
methods of direct value production (say, ‘in the factory’). However, in real-
ity, the same phenomenon operates in an extended way to the entire social
factory, including social reproduction.127 As Smith points out, the value of
labour-power is determined in part by the proportion of use-values required
to reproduce labour-power freely provided by domestic labour and the
non-capitalist economy, among other social spaces.128 In dependent territories,
unpaid reproductive and care work is also super-exploited,129 contributing to
the mechanism of compensation for the losses produced by unequal exchange.
In these territories, family and community configurations burden women and
feminised bodies with the task of compensating for the pressure exerted on
working and popular households by the mechanisms of super-exploitation in
the direct production process. These configurations express various forms of
wage patriarchy.130 These processes allow configuring forms of reproduction of
working families in material conditions based on the expansion of the appro-
priation of vital time and the suction of every atom of free time available in
favour of capital in peripheral territories.
In short, low wages (or, to be more precise, wages below the value of labour-
power) are a consequence of unequal exchange and not its cause, as Emmanuel
assumes.131 For this reason, transnational capital does not flood the dependent
economies: low wages are not simply a condition of the exploitation of labour
but rather a consequence of it within the international division of labour
under capitalism. On the contrary, the super-exploitation of labour-power is
the condition of such exploitation under dependent capitalism.132
124 Srnicek 2018.

125 Féliz and Díaz Lozano 2020.
127 Fraser 2017; Arruzza and Bhattacharya 2020.
128 Smith 2020, p. 64.
130 Federici 2018.
132 Bellamy Foster and McChesney 2012, pp. 371–2.

28 Féliz
In this sense, we share Osorio’s criticism of Astarita. In dependent econo-

mies, foreign capital often operates with state-of-the-art technology, as Marini
had already pointed out.133 That situation allows workers in those capitals to
produce enhanced value expressed in the context of super-exploitation of
the labour force in extraordinary rates of surplus-value (and profits).134 The
value created by workers in the dependent economy under these particular
conditions allows capital to appropriate extraordinary profits that combine
the generalised super-exploitation of labour in that territory with the excep-
tional labour productivity in those capitals. The extra value produced in the
dependent economy may be realised in the capitalist world market or the local
market. Astarita proposes that ‘the high rate of exploitation is guaranteed by
the fact that surplus-value is being realised in an empowered value space’.135 This
suggestion seems to be in line with David Harvey, who indicates that value
is created and realised only in exchange and not in the process of exploiting
labour.136 The problem here is not so much that Astarita suggests there is no
unequal exchange,137 which there is in the sense we have been discussing. The
fundamental issue is that he confuses the absence of unequal exchange in the
sense of a flow with the very absence of the category as an actual social process.
The production of extraordinary surplus-value is not the consequence of
the lower remuneration to labour, as (following Emmanuel) Astarita sug-
gests, but is the outcome of higher levels of labour productivity.138 The extra
surplus-value will then, eventually, be remitted to the imperialist centres by
mechanisms different from (even if complementary to) unequal exchange.139
The super-exploitation of the labour force as an essential category of
dependent capitalism has been a source of harsh polemics in recent times.140
Without pretending to resolve the issue, we will point out that it is our under-
standing that the super-exploitation of the labour force as a real abstraction
operates in dependent countries. However, it may appear as a secondary
empirical process in imperialist countries (for example, in the form of differ-
ent modalities of labour precarisation). In the former economies, they have a
133 Marini 2015.

134 Martins 2011, pp. 283–4.
135 Astarita 2009, p. 134.
136 Roberts 2018.
137 Osorio 2017, p. 233.
138 Ibid.
139 See, for example, the interesting analysis of Ricci in this regard, although in our view
it somewhat confuses the debate by developing an analytical framework of transfers of
value as different forms of differential and absolute rent (Ricci 2018, pp. 6–10).
140 Katz 2019; Osorio Urbina 2018; Katz 2018.

centrality as a mechanism of compensation for the loss of surplus-value in the

unequal exchange between national spaces of value, which is not present in
the latter.
The historical cases of capitalist development that detach certain countries
from the stereotypical image of dependent countries (such as the territorial
space of South Korea or India) do not contradict the validity of the category:
the increase in wage levels in terms of purchasing power does not imply a
reduction in the tendency to super-exploitation of labour.141 Such increases
occur within the framework of profound processes of intensification and pre-
carisation of labour.142 The super-exploitation of the labour force is not syn-
onymous with precariousness and low wages, although these may be forms of
expression of the former.
9 Dependence, Unequal Exchange, and Plundering of Natural

Resources
In parallel with and as a counterpart to unequal exchange, capital in dependent

countries multiplies the plundering of natural wealth. As we have discussed,
the dependent countries occupy a position in the international division of
labour that places them as suppliers of raw materials and food. Either directly
or via transnational capital, these countries provide the material means for
developing strategies to produce relative surplus-value in the centre. This is
the basis of ‘extractivism’ that has been recovered as a foundation of contem-
porary capitalism143 but refers back to its origins.144
141 Although it is not appropriate to go into depth here, we can point out that, in principle,
the case of China is an example of a dependent country that overcame the barrier of
sub-imperialist power (Bond and García (eds.) 2015; Bond 2018; Féliz and Melón 2018;
Féliz and Melón 2020) – which applies, for example, to Brazil or India. It seems to be on
its way to becoming a new hegemonic imperialist power. In this sense, Smith indicates
that ‘China is an extremely important but as yet partial exception to this, which is why it is
on collision course with incumbent imperialist powers, principally Japan and the United
States’ (Smith 2019, p. 14).
142 On the other hand, affirming the prevalence of the super-exploitation of labour as the
foundation of dependency does not deny the particular historical processes that have
influenced the development of underdevelopment in each of these countries; for exam-
ple, the geopolitics of North American imperialist capital. This implies, to the contrary,
incorporating more determinations to understand the precise place of each category and
not the disappearance of categories that operate at higher levels of abstraction.
143 Katz 2018, p. 352.
144 Fraser 2014; Federici 2018.

30 Féliz
In the dependent national value spaces, local capitals must expand the pro-
duction of international value through the super-exploitation of the labour
force. Applying such a strategy in the extractivist branches in these territories
leads to expanding production of such commodities for the world market. In
this way, the pressure to compensate for the loss of surplus-value in the une-
qual exchange of value translates into overexpansion of the supply of these
goods – commodities – on the world market.145 This process builds up a rela-
tive downward pressure on their prices; this is the basis for the decline in the
terms of trade.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that in general terms, dependent coun-
tries concentrate a significant part of their production on commodities that
‘contain’ ground rent,146 adding a new dimension to the problem of unequal
exchange. Do these commodities allow dependent countries to compensate
for part of the lost surplus-value? Does ground rent become a sort of unequal
exchange in favour of dependent countries and their capitals? Marxist depend-
ency theory tended to obviate the systematic analysis of this dimension of the
problem of unequal exchange.147
Ground rent results from the extraordinary appropriation of value by the
owners of territories abundant in natural wealth exportable by the dependent
countries. In this case, the production of commodities ‘filled with rent’ obeys
the imperialist imperative, which positions the dependent countries as pro-
ducers of basic use-values for production at the centre. In this sense, it is cru-
cial to understand this form of rent as imperialist rent, directly associated with
the reproduction on an expanded scale of the dependency relation.148
Rent comes from the combination of differential conditions of produc-
tion of natural wealth with conditions of surplus demand in the framework
of forms of private land ownership and capitalist relations of production.149
Private ownership of land does not create the social value appropriated as
ground rent but creates the conditions for its appropriation as such.150
Landed property does not create the portion of value which is transformed
into surplus-profit, but merely enables the landowner … to coax this
surplus-profit out of the pocket of the manufacturer and into his own.151
145 Marini 2015, p. 123.

146 Féliz and Haro Sly 2019.
147 Katz 2018, p. 350.
148 Katz 2018, p. 352.
149 Osorio 2017.
150 Marx 2009, pp. 804, 816; Marx 1999, p. 466.
151 Marx 2009, p. 832; Marx 1999, p. 482.

In such a way, labour in extractivist productions of high productivity allows

dependent capital to compensate, partially or totally, from the production of
more valuable commodities in conditions of appropriating rent.
In the dependent countries, land rent is the counterpart of extra surplus-
value quotas produced by the particular production conditions of certain
use-values destined for the world market. The production of this form of
surplus-value supposes the production of increased masses of value in these
branches in the dependent countries. That is to say, contrary to what Iñigo
Carrera proposes,152 ground rent does not imply the transfer of value from the
consumer countries to the producers. The value of rent-laden commodities
is determined – as in all commodities – by the labour socially necessary for
their production. Therefore, it depends on the social conditions of production
and the requirements of demand. In the case of commodities resulting from
the exploitation of non-reproducible (i.e., monopolisable) natural wealth, the
social costs of extraction linked to the worst land determine the value and
price of production. It is clear, then, that ‘this rent is always a differential rent,
for it does not enter as a determining factor into the general price of produc-
tion of commodities, but rather is based on it’.153 On the other hand, differen-
tial rent (rd-i and rd-ii) coexists with absolute rent.154 The latter is the very
result of the private ownership of land,155 in a way ‘independent of differences
in fertility of various soil types and in successive investments of capital on the
same land’.156
The concentration of rentier productions in dependent countries is a product
of the historical construction of their insertion into global capitalism as suppli-
ers of food and inputs. In the current form of transnationalised capital, invest-
ment in fixed constant capital in extractivist productions is considerable.157
This creates enormous pressures on the peripheral economy as a whole, par-
ticularly when extraordinary rent collapses in crises. The need to valorise those
masses of dead labour increases the pressures for super-exploitation in the
other branches of the economy.158 To the extent that the general demand for
152 Iñigo Carrera 2007, p. 15.

153 Marx 1995, p. 830; Marx 1999, p. 481.
154 Marx 1995, pp. 951–81; Marx 1999, pp. 550–64.
155 Marx 1995, p. 960; Marx 1999, p. 554.
156 Marx 1995, pp. 966–7; Marx 1999, p. 557.
157 The national or foreign ownership of extractivist capital does not alter the logic and
mechanisms of production and appropriation of land rent. It only partially modifies the
use of this appropriated rent since transnational capital can seek to circulate the appro-
priated surplus-value to other moments of its global cycle of valorisation.
158 Caffentzis 2017.

32 Féliz
commodities that allow the appropriation of rent falls, absolute rent as well as
differential rent collapses.
Likewise, and simultaneously, extractivist pressure creates a tendency towards
the production of ecological surplus-value.159 The production of land rent is
associated with the generation of leakage of ecological use-values whose pro-
duction implies the destruction of common goods, including social relations.160
The modality of plundering natural wealth implicit in the relations of unequal
exchange represents another facet of imperialism.161
10 Preliminary Conclusions
The debate on unequal exchange has been a fundamental key behind the theo-
retical articulation of what is known as the Marxist theory of dependency. This
phenomenon, an objective process behind the international division of labour
and the production of value, operates as a critical mechanism for understand-
ing some of the theoretical categories that organise the dynamics and under-
standing of dependent capitalism.
We have put into perspective the theoretical tradition behind the concept
of unequal exchange, trying to clarify how it plays a central role in the config-
uration of capitalism in dependent national spaces. Starting from Prebisch’s
proposition regarding the decline in the terms of trade, we have recovered the
historical debate on unequal exchange and its vital role in the Marxist the-
ory of dependency, particularly in the writings of Ruy Mauro Marini. We have
attempted to recover his contributions and compose an interpretation that
incorporates part of the current debates on the theory of value.
This discussion has enabled us to propose an interpretation that allows us
to understand how it operates and is articulated with the so-called basis of
dependency: the super-exploitation of the labour force, including the super-
exploitation of productive, reproductive and care work. In addition, we have
tried to provide some elements to understand better the linkage between une-
qual exchange and how dependent capitalism articulates itself in the interna-
tional division of labour, super-exploiting nature itself.
It remains for researchers to deepen the characterisation of this double
modality of super-exploitation. On the one hand, how does value (and surplus-
value) production articulate with the super-exploitation of reproductive and
care work? On the other hand, how do the forms of plunder of natural wealth
159 Bellamy Foster and Clark 2004; Foster and Holleman 2014; Moore 2011.
160 Machado Aráoz 2015.
161 Vega Cantor 2006.

become means that configure particular forms of capitalist development in

the dependent economy? These debates have not yet been fully resolved.
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Féliz, Mariano

Notes For a Discussion on Unequal

2021, vol. 29, nro. 4

Información adicional en www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons

Notes For a Discussion on Unequal Exchange

dependency – unequal exchange – Marxism – value-theory

The decline in the terms of trade in peripheral or dependent countries is a fact

1 Ocampo and Parra 2003; Prebisch 2012; Bacha 1978.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/1569206X-12341897

factors behind the difficulties in achieving successful capitalist development

… can be and is being filled with new revolutionary content, especially in

10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

2 Terms of Trade, the International Division of Labour,

In Latin America, the debate on unequal exchange as a general phenomenon

10 Cleaver 2000; Caffentzis 2013.

Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39 | 10.1163/1569206X-12341897

This sentence expresses the consensus around declining terms of trade as a

Superimposed on this argument is another, which indicates that even if work-

13 Marini 2015, p. 119.

10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

In our view, the explanation provided by Prebisch’s hypothesis has a num-

In other words, Prebisch ignores the determination of the value of commod-

20 FitzGerald 2000, p. 63.

Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39 | 10.1163/1569206X-12341897

while it is evident that concurrency plays a decisive role in price setting,

Following on from this, Marini proposes analysing the problem identified

10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

In the same sense, Samir Amin points out that

the result of imperialism, that is to say of the international emission of

That is to say, imperialism as the export of capital becomes an operational

Imperialism, in Lenin’s sense of the word, made its appearance as soon

Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39 | 10.1163/1569206X-12341897

In a similar vein, Arghiri Emmanuel states that this unequal relationship

In synthesis, the historical constitution of capitalism and thus the interna-

3 The Classic Debate on Unequal Exchange

3.1 The Global Shaping of Value and Prices of Production

10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

Although the analytic proposition of Amin can be debated,42 it seems clear to

38 Amin 1975, p. 22.

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the value of a commodity produced in one place, because it is deter-

The transition to the era of the internationalisation of capital (known as ‘glo-

43 Marini 2015, p. 266.

10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

3.2 The Broad and the Narrow Sense of Unequal Exchange

at the moment when a country is obliged to supply, through the commod-

Since products are exchanged at their price of production, the countries

This type of unequal exchange is not admitted by Emmanuel. If wages were

according to Emmanuel, there would be no reason, in this case, to speak

Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39 | 10.1163/1569206X-12341897

What Emmanuel proposes is that:

the relation of prices established by virtue of the law of equalisation of

This proposition defines a second type of (restricted) unequal exchange

the equalisation of wages in the international framework … is a condition

In sum, for Emmanuel, unequal exchange is based on wage differentials.56

4 Prices of Production, Wages, and Unequal Exchange

53 Emmanuel 1971a, p. 24; Emmanuel 1972.

10.1163/1569206X-12341897 | Historical Materialism (2021) 1–39

that is supported by the formulation of prices of production, Emmanuel’s pro-

This proposition is very similar to Prebisch’s. In a mathematical model, under

Emmanuel … shows how the low wages prevailing in the dependent