Michael Roberts provides an overview of various topics discussed at this years AHE conference, bringing together heterodox (non-mainstream, critical of neoclassical econ) economists from a variety of backgrounds (marxist, keynesian, MMT, etc.).
The conference paper sessions were divided into various streams, one of which was entitled Imperialism and Dependency in the 21st century. I made a presentation in one of these session, called Catching up of falling behind? in which I tried to answer the question: were the poor peripheral countries of the Global South catching up and closing the gap in living standards with the rich imperialist countries of the Global North? I tried to answer that question using three different measures: per capita incomes; levels of labour productivity; and indexes of ‘human development’. On all three measures, I show that the Global South is not closing the gap, with the possible exception of China.
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My main conclusion was that the countries of the Global South (6bn people) are not ‘catching up’ with the Global North (2bn people) because wealth (value) is being persistently transferred from the South to the North AND falling profitability in the Global South is reducing labour productivity growth. China may be the exception because its investment growth is less determined by profitability than in any other major Global South economy.
Conrad Herold from Hofstra University, Long Island presented an insightful summary of Marxist approaches to explaining imperialist exploitation over the last 100 years since Lenin, starting with Henryk Grossman in 1929 and then Bettelheim and Emmanuel, going onto so-called dependency theory mainly coming from Ruy Marini in South America. Conrad rejected the structuralist theories of such as Pereira that the Global South did not develop because of ‘premature industrialisation’, thus turning the Global South into commodity producers under a regime of currency exchange rates that benefited the North. In summary, Herold said, there is more work to be done on developing a robust Marxist theory of imperialist exploitation.
In that session, there was some debate about whether the transfer of profit, rent and income through international trade and capital proceeds was mainly the result of higher rates of surplus value (due to lower wages) in the Global South or mainly due to higher rates of technological superiority in the companies of the Global North. Previous Marxist theorists like Emmanuel looked to higher rates of surplus value; while Bettelheim looked to higher levels of capital composition. For me, both are relevant and in work done jointly with Guglielmo Carchedi, we found that differing rates of organic composition of capital and surplus value both contributed to the transfer of value from South to North.
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That brings me to the panel session on the new book, Radical Political Economy: Principles, Perspectives and Postcapitalist Futures edited by Mona Ali and Ann Davis, to which I and many others contributed chapters.
One of the authors in that book was Ramaa Vasudevan in which she makes it clear that “financialization is not simply the expansion of finance but the generalized subordination of economic interactions and inter- relations to the abstract logic of interest- bearing capital that has fundamentally restructured the way economic activities are organized “ quoting Professor Ben Fine from 2013. According to Vasudevan, the dominance of finance is seen to have engineered “a fundamental transformation of the economy – marking an epochal shift”. My reply to that can be summed by the critiques of the financialisation hypothesis, both theoretically (Mavroudeas and Papadatos 2018) and empirically (Turan Subasat and Stavros Mavroudeas 2023).
Also in the book is a chapter by Paolo dos Santos who attended the panel that I missed. In the book, Dos Santos emphasises that political economy can only be effective in explaining the world if it rests on historical materialism. Economic analysis is a lynchpin of social and historical inquiry because it can cast light on how relations of production and distribution shape the social, political, institutional, and cultural realities that condition the nature and historical development of human groups. “Stubborn patterns of underdevelopment and differences in labor productivity, living standards, and political power across national economies, have persisted across the history of capitalist development. For radical political economy, those differences are a feature of global capitalism, not a “bug” due to the idiosyncrasies of developing economies.”
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The struggle against the ideology and theories of the mainstream continues and the AHE makes an important contribution. Let me quote Ann Davis, the co-editor of Radical Political Economy book. “Radical Political Economy will make clear the political choices, while mainstream economics will claim that there are none. Whatever the outcome, proponents of both sides will defend their respective positions and seek to attract adherents to their views.”