Michael Roberts — The economics of modern imperialism

G Carchedi and I have been working on some new empirical work, trying to gauge which countries are the imperialist ones and how much value they are able to extract from the dominated or periphery (we prefer those names rather than ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’, which is too geographical). We emphasise that we are looking at the economic foundations of imperialism, not the political aspects or the superstructure if you like, ie the political control by imperialist countries over the periphery, or military might or interventions etc. Direct political control through colonies has mostly disappeared (although not completely); so imperialism operates mainly through economic control now (while throwing in the occasional coup or proxy war). After all, that is the aim of the imperialist powers: to appropriate as much value and resources from the dominated as possible. In that sense, the economic determines the political.

If we focus on the transfer of value from the periphery to the imperialist economies, there are several ways that this is achieved. There is value transfer through unequal exchange in international trade; through global value chain flows (transfer pricing) within multi-nationals; through factor income flows (debt interest, equity profits and property rents); through seignorage (ie control of the money supply: dollar is king) and through capital flows (foreign direct investment inflows and portfolio flows. ie buying and selling financial assets).

So which are the imperialist countries? Carchedi and I define them as those countries which get a long-term appropriation of value from subaltern countries. And this is achieved by the appropriation of surplus value by high technology companies (and countries) from low technology companies (countries). So imperialist countries can be defined as those with a persistently large number of companies as measured by their high national average organic composition of capital (OCC) and whose average technological development is higher than the national average of other countries....

Imperialism has always been about imperialist countries having high-value technology exploiting countries with low-value technology, first, as sources for resources and secondly as markets for commodities produced by high-value technology. This was the model of the British Empire, for example. Along with that, the imperial core prevented the colonial periphery from developing  and deploying high-value technology to compete with the core.

The question before us is to what degree this model persists after the transition from the colonial period to the neoliberal period. That is to say, to what degree does neoliberalism imply neo-imperialism and neocolonialism. How would that be measured?

Now in the 21st century, the US is worried that its technology ‘monopoly’ may be threatened by China’s move up the value-added ladder. This is the real reason for the current trade war....

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
The economics of modern imperialism
Michael Roberts