For the past several years, Cosmonaut magazine has hosted a most stimulating debate on the question of unequal exchange and its consequences, more particularly regarding those perspectives that place wage differentials between nations at the center of the mechanism of exploitation of some countries by others. In this regard, Rob Ashlar's 2023 contribution in response to Paul Cockshott and the subsequent debate, especially when it comes to the intervention of Salmin Biao, both constitute a clear exercise of what could be understood as the Emmanuelian or Third Worldist perspective, which I will try to criticize here.

This is a rather convoluted topic, and one that presents to us through arid, tiresome, and already quite old academic debates among a series of specialists (which I am not, so no original contribution to these matters should be expected from this text). Therefore, first of all, it would be important to underscore the political relevance of this issue, and consequently the reason why it would be worth devoting the very limited time available to discussing this matter once again: it concerns nothing less than the material basis of the international working class as a revolutionary subject, precisely because "Third Worldist" interpretations imply the denial of this subject's centrality in favor of uncertain interclassist nationalist processes on the global periphery that are understood as enemies of imperialism. In this interpretation, in "core" countries the revolutionary class party, especially if it is understood as a party primarily rooted in workplaces and their struggles, doesn’t make any sense. The Western working class, whether branded with the stigma of "labour aristocracy" or not, is reduced to a parasitic caste that feeds on bread stolen from others, and whose demands would be nothing more than the miserable claim for larger crumbs from that very loaf plundered from the African, Asian, or Latin American proletariat. Consequently, given that all strata of society would ultimately share the same objective interest in preserving global capitalism given the benefits it brings them, the profile of the revolutionary in Europe or North America would necessarily be the declassed activist who, for some unknown reason, altruistically adheres to the cause of oppressed peoples in a merely subaltern position, as a supporter from the outside of the true anti-imperialist processes of the Global South.

I will not hide that, in writing this, I start from a position opposed to that of the "Third Worldists" in this regard, and that as a Spanish communist I put my stake in the revolutionary potential of "my" working class and that of the other "northern" countries as part, on equal terms, of the world proletariat. Consequently, to give an example, I find it rather disagreeable to read Arghiri Emmanuel saying, in the context of the Salvadoran Revolution (the text dates from 1986), that the true allies of the Salvadoran capitalists and landowners in that revolutionary civil war were not the American capitalists, but above all, the American working class itself.^[1] Of course, what I feel, or the consequences something might have for a particular political stance, are irrelevant when it comes to determining whether that something is true or not. Therefore, we will have to see whether we workers of the capitalist center are a global "white trash" destined to be swept away by the interclassist uprising of the oppressed peoples of the South, or whether, on the contrary, the international working class still exists as the paradigmatic revolutionary subject.

Today, the main theoretical inspiration of most consequence for serious Third Worldists inside the global communist movement isn’t Lenin or Mao, but Arghiri Emmanuel.

As is already well known, Marx explains in Capital that workers' wages are determined by the value of their labour power, which in turn corresponds to the value of the means of subsistence required to restore the labour power expended during the working day. This value comprises both a natural or physiological component (what workers need in order to survive) and a historical or moral component, derived from the customs and culture of a given historical context.^[2] So, according to Emmanuel, since the XIXth century a situation would have arisen in the countries that would constitute the center of world capitalism in which the economic demands of the working class had progressively raised wages to the point that the physiological component of wages would have lost relevance in favor of the historical-moral element which, determined by "institutional" reasons (politics, trade union struggle, etc.), would become the "independent variable" in the formation of commodity prices in a way that the law of value disappears when it comes to the price of labour power. In this way, goods produced in core countries would be sold at a very high price on the world market as a consequence of the high wages their workers earn. The problem would arise at the point where, in peripheral countries, also for "institutional" reasons, wages would have remained very low at all times, still close to the physiological limit. In this way, due to the relative immobility of labour on a global scale, there would be no tendency towards the equalization of the rate of exploitation on an international level, detaching the fixation of wages from the value of labour power. Then, since wages are the independent variable in price formation, the commodities produced by peripheral countries would be sold very cheaply on the world market. This would give rise, in international trade, to the core countries benefiting from terms of international trade characterized by an unequal exchange that allows them to buy commodities from the peripheral countries containing far more hours of labour than the commodities these core countries export to them in return, thus giving rise to a massive transfer of value.

The consequences Emmanuel draws from these developments are spectacular. The socialist revolution in the West would have failed precisely because workers in rich countries, benefiting from that bleeding of wealth through unequal exchange, would have a direct interest in preserving their position as members of privileged and oppressor nations. Trade union struggle in developed countries wouldn’t then be an antagonistic clash between oppressed proletarians and oppressor bourgeois, but a mere dispute between two partners over the division of the same loot. Thanks to unequal exchange, the working class of the core countries would consume far more value than it could ever produce through its labour in its industries, making the whole of it "by definition" a labour aristocracy. The matter becomes tremendous to the point where Emmanuel considers that, in fact, unequal exchange does not especially benefit the bourgeoisies of the core countries, and the possible economic liberation of the periphery would be indifferent to them. On the contrary, it is precisely the mass of wage-earners in the rich countries who have the most to lose from a possible liberation of the oppressed countries, the relative material well-being of the northern workers being radically inseparable from the misery of their brothers in the Global South. Therefore, reformist or social-chauvinist political expressions would not be, as Lenin claimed, the result of the corrupting action of a caste of sycophants and bureaucrats on the bourgeoisie's payroll within the class, but rather the Western working class would be defending its true and genuine class interests, as the parasitic class that it is, in supporting nationalist and militarist policies aimed at keeping the Third World under the boot of imperialism.^[3]

So, is Emmanuel right? Are the high wages of German, Danish, or Canadian workers purely the result of "institutional" matters and inseparable from the misery of Vietnamese, Peruvian, or Congolese proletarians? Most of the criticisms leveled at this perspective rest on the argument of productivity differences, in line with Emmanuel's original controversy with Bettelheim and Palloix. The problem, as Rob Ashlar already rightly pointed out in this magazine^[4], is that productivity differentials actually hardly explain wage differences between nations, as there is no reason why a worker’s labour power would become more expensive the moment they operate more advanced machinery that produces more commodities more quickly. On the contrary, technological progress tends to simplify productive processes and thus disqualify labour, making it cheaper and more replaceable.

The crux of the matter, then, is that the average value of labour power is itself different between countries as a consequence of the national differences in the development of the productive forces that substantiate the international division of labour in our time, not because of the effects of external “institutional” factors. That is, the production and reproduction of labour power requires different amounts of value depending on the type of labour to be performed, which brings us to the question of the divide between simple labour and complex labour, simple labour being that which any person in full "natural" faculties can perform, and complex labour being that which requires some particular kind of training, expertise, skill, etc.

How is it possible for the law of value to function if different types of labour exist? The law of value remains true because complex labour represents nothing more than a concentration of simple labour, such that, in abstract terms, one hour of complex labour contains within itself the many hours of simple labour previously spent in educating and developing the productive subjectivity of the worker in question. Workers' wages, therefore, must be higher if they are to produce and reproduce a more complex labour power. This is not limited to education. Health systems would be a way of preventing that expensive and prized qualified labour power from being easily wasted in the face of any eventual illness. Access to a relatively wider variety of food, the availability of housing with minimum standards, the existence of public assistance systems for the unemployed, shorter working days and less harmful working conditions, the possibility of enjoying richer forms of leisure — in short, what the wage differences between workers with relatively high salaries and workers with relatively low salaries materially translate into, reflect different forms of reproduction of labour power according to the level of complexity required for the productive processes in which this or that worker will perform. The matter goes so far that a wage that allows purely for the reproduction of the physical and intellectual capacities the worker needs to perform their work is not enough. It is also necessary for the worker to be able to consume "moral" or "ideological" goods that allow for the reproduction of a certain type of consciousness that perpetuates the subsumption of the worker into capital according to the ever-changing demands of the productive process.

This has to do with the international division of labour and wage differences between countries because, precisely since the 1980s, the world economy has been characterised by a sort of process of "national specialisation" according to the types of predominant labour power in each part of the world, within the framework of global value chains, through great movements of capital and industrial relocations that brought so much pain and desperation to the working class of the once mighty industrial bastions of Detroit or Manchester. For capital, it is not enough to look for workers willing to work for the lowest wages imaginable (if this was possible, Sub-Saharan Africa would have industrialized many decades ago). It is also necessary for the available labour power to have the productive subjectivity appropriate to the productive process one intends to set in motion, that subjectivity including both the level of qualification and other matters such as the disposition towards different types of industrial discipline, the extent of "universal" skills such as literacy or familiarity with computers, etc.

In this sense, an interesting example would be the South Korean steel industry, which from the 1980s onwards achieved enormous development and competitiveness to the point of causing the ruin of large European and North American companies thanks to its terrible working conditions and the low wages of its workers: the point is that, in any case, this transfer of industrial production to that country with lower wages was only possible, in the first instance, thanks to the development of a series of technical advances in that branch that notably lowered the level of qualification the worker in that industry had to have, and only then could capital take advantage of the availability of very cheap and very disciplined labour in that country.

Simplifying enormously, what has happened from the 80s to today with this "New International Division of Labour" is that the productive processes linked to a simpler and therefore much cheaper labour power have moved to those parts of the world in Asia where peasant, and therefore non-proletarian, populations had previously still predominated, but which, owing to their geographic concentration, their iron-fisted subjection to the state, their accustoming to the most draconian systems of labour discipline, etc., would form, once proletarianised, a productive subjectivity especially suited to that simple labour in large-scale industry (although, over time, countries such as South Korea or Taiwan, which in the 80s received the relocation of that part of Western industry, have developed their own complex labour industries and seen how those simple labour industries relocated once again to countries such as China, with yet another cycle of this kind of process taking place today as simple labour moves once more, passing from China to places such as Vietnam or the Philippines).

By contrast, in the richer or more developed countries, aside from the important expulsion of the population from the productive process that took place, the industries requiring the most complex labour, and therefore demanding higher wages, have tended to remain. In this way, the greater complexity of labour in the Global North counteracts the difference in hours of labour contained in international trade between rich and poor countries that some Third Worldist researchers have tried to calculate, since, so to speak, those few Northern hours of labour contain within themselves more hours of labour devoted to the production of that type of labour power, while the many hours of labour contained in Southern goods, for which Northern products are exchanged, are notably cheaper in their production and reproduction.^[5]

Emmanuel and his contemporary followers do not see this issue. For them, hours of labour are all equal, it apparently being just as easy to produce and reproduce the labour power of a manual agricultural labourer as that of a pharmaceutical industry chemist. Therefore, any wage difference that takes a worker away from the strictest limit of physiological subsistence is nothing more than a "superwage" completely detached from production and derived from an autonomous sphere of politics and trade union struggle. And it is precisely here that the moralism characteristic of Third-Worldism is revealed, for one gets the impression, reading some people, that workers in developed countries spend their exorbitant wages mainly on useless gadgets, trinkets, hugely expensive trips abroad, or video games. The truth is that, without ever denying that the quality of life in rich countries is enormously higher, the "consumption patterns" of the Northern working classes still basically correspond to the purchase of goods necessary for the reproduction of labour power (housing, transport, food, health, etc.).^[6]

Nevertheless, the question of simple labour in rich countries remains open. Indeed, it may perhaps seem perfectly logical that the value of the labour power of a German industrial technician should be noticeably higher than the value of the labour power of a Bangladeshi textile worker or a Brazilian agricultural labourer, but the question remains as to why, in developed countries, hairdressers, waiters, warehouse workers or construction labourers still have considerably higher wages than their counterparts in less developed countries. To my understanding, the main reason is that national spaces retain a certain tendency towards the homogenization of the conditions of reproduction of labour power through the survival of rudiments of the "welfare state", of legislation on minimum wages and basic working conditions, of collective bargaining agreements, etc. So, capitalists would surely love to be able to pay the labour power of unskilled workers in developed countries the absolute minimum necessary for its reproduction, but the persistence of national frameworks that ensure the production of a labour power with a relatively developed productive subjectivity, so as to satisfy the demand for workers for advanced industries, means that a sort of overproduction of high value labour power takes place, which is then wasted performing simple labour. This can be seen with relative ease in the case of Southern Europe, with the so-called "overqualification" of labour power being so common there: the waste involved in the production and reproduction of an army of waiters and telemarketing operators with university degrees and European wages is a lesser evil that capital in those countries assumes in order to be able to count on a steady supply of labour power suited to its more complex and important industries. So while the “institutional” factor is very important, it certainly isn’t independent from the needs and characteristics of the realm of production.

When it comes to the political consequences of the perspectives I have criticized here, after a couple of decades of these positions being relatively marginal, there has lately been a certain revival of Third Worldist stances, albeit adapted to markedly different political strategies. With the great guerrillas and mass mobilizations of the anti-imperialist processes of the second half of the last century having faded away, some Third Worldists today have now come to consider that the liberation of the countries oppressed by imperialism and plundered by unequal exchange depends above all on their economic development within capitalism, with China playing a central role in this matter. Any prospect of socialism in the developed countries is postponed to a future in which, unequal exchange having been eliminated, the equality thereby achieved between nations would bring about a "reproletarianisation" of the Northern working class, which would then go on to recover its revolutionary potential. This way, every economic advance of the nations of the Global South, and every step forward in their supposed unity against the North, is to be welcomed, it being proposed that North-South unequal exchange could be evaded by substitutively fostering trade exchanges among different countries of the South, a perspective more or less in line with the "delinking" tactic formulated once by Samir Amin.^[7]

The problem, of course, arises when capitalist development in the Global South reproduces, as it could hardly be otherwise, the very same laws of capital that have characterized the once seemingly unshakeable Western domination of the world. For instance, if we were to adopt the Emmanuelian-Third Worldist view of international trade, China would be a full participant in the value extraction mechanisms that Emmanuel's followers associate with Northern countries, and this would be so, given how the theory is constructed, irrespective of whether China's economic presence in certain regions may rest on political and diplomatic methods far more peaceful and considerate towards other states than what is usually the case with the United States. Thus, if we examine the trade relations between China and the Democratic Republic of Congo from Emmanuel's perspective, we would have to understand that a significant transfer of value takes place from the DRC (which exports to China large quantities of raw materials extracted from mines whose workers earn approximately 100 to 200 dollars a month^[8]) towards China, which exports to the DRC industrial goods manufactured by workers whose monthly wages are around 1000 dollars.^[9] One could argue that the volume of this unequal exchange would in any case be smaller than that which takes place between the Global North and South, but, in any case, the supposed existence of unequal exchange relations within that Global South itself denotes how little substance there is to perspectives based on a global confrontation between North and South.

Finally, I would like to stress, in case it should be necessary, that the aim of this text has in no way been to naturalize, minimize or make apology for the existing inequalities between the different parts of the world. I do not deny, far from it, that an oppressive hierarchy exists between the different nations under capitalism, nor do I deny that there is a key component of coercion and violence in the origins and perpetuation of that hierarchy. My point, basically, is that international differences in wages are not the result of political developments completely detached from the course of the development of productive forces, that uneven development is inherent to the capitalist mode of production (with no need for strange mechanisms such as unequal exchange to intervene here) and that perspectives which suppose the possibility of economic equality between nations under this mode of production are illusory, while those who place these differences between countries above class struggle are, whether they like it or not, reactionary. For the nation, the "national" form of organizing humanity, is inherently bourgeois and corresponds to the way capital has of organizing society. Therefore, to privilege the possibility of an improvement in the global position of this or that nation or group of nations over the fate of class struggle implies giving priority to the achievement of a series of changes within capitalism ahead of a revolutionary process that would abolish it, which must irremediably be found in class struggle.

1. Arghiri Emmanuel, “Introduction to the First Edition”, in Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism, Communist Working Group, (Iskra Books, 2025), xiv.

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2. Karl Marx, El Capital. Crítica de la Economía Política. Libro Primero, (Siglo XXI, 2017), 225-236.

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3. Arghiri Emmanuel, El intercambio desigual. Ensayo sobre los antagonismos en las relaciones económicas internacionales, (Siglo XXI, 1972), 152-154, 156-158, 162-165, 171, 188, 205, 209, 215-231.

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4. Rob Ashlar, “In Defense of Unequal Exchange: Critique of Paul Cockshott’s First Worldist Ignorance”, Cosmonaut, July 19, 2023, https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/07/in-defense-of-unequal-exchange-critique-of-paul-cockshotts-first-worldist-ignorance/

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5. Guido Starosta and Gastón Caligaris, Trabajo, valor y capital. De la crítica marxiana de la economía política al capitalismo contemporáneo, (Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2017), 111-139; Nicolás Grinberg, Transformations in the Brazilian and Korean Processes of Capitalist Development between the Early 1950s and the Mid-2010s. From Global Capital Accumulation to Late Industrialisation, (Brill, 2024), 123-127, 136-147; Guido Starosta, “Revisiting the New International Division of Labour Thesis”, in The New International Division of Labour. Global Transformation and Uneven Development, ed. Graig Chernock y Guido Starosta, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 79-103.

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6. USA data: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/housing-and-transportation-accounted-for-50-percent-of-household-spending-in-2024.htm

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7. Torkil Lauesen, “Epilogue: The Task of the New Stage”, in Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism, Communist Working Group, (Iskra Books, 2025), 145-178; Samir Amin, Delinking. Towards a Polycentric World, (Zed Books, 1990).

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8. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7687087/pdf/DECH-51-1555.pdf

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9. https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-manufacturing-industry-tracker

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