Data which contradicts classical imperialism/dependentism

It’s not only real GDP growth rates as described by Miroux and Casanova, nor the rankings at Forbes. The peripheral countries of the world, are challenging the Triad, because of their integration and participation on multinational production. Dumenil and Levy describe how 80% of profits from multinational companies, are owned mainly by the US and England (measured by the amount of stocks, not the amount of dividends and profits those stocks entail). But at the same time, the foreign affiliates of US parent multinationals own more assets than their parent multinational from the US, as we can see here:

 

That means the US, Germany or Japan are countries with the highest component of national investors and capitals within their multinationals, for example, but that doesn’t mean outsourcing and offshoring are not benefiting mainly the foreign affiliates instead of the parent company. Roberts and Carchedi use intra-firm value added to defend the classical position, but intra-firm value added is not at all appropriated by the parent firm in the US, but by the parent and their affiliates. Also, they use primary income on FDI only in absolute terms. A better measure would be Gross National Income, which measures income from investments abroad (primary income on FDI), plus internal/local value-added. As we can see, the growth rates are dominated by middle and low income countries, but the mass of profits and value are dominated by high income countries.

 

Although we need to point out the following: if we group the variables according to regions, we can see the effect of growth rates and mass: the bigger rates have allowed for East Asia and the Pacific to surpass Europe and North America in terms of the mass of GNI, approximately since 2012/13 onwards. That means the region which creates and also absorbs more value from abroad, has ceased to be the Triad, all of this since 10 years ago, and the distance keeps widening.

 

The same happens with productivity: if we measure value-added per worker growth rates, middle and low income countries are dominating high income ones, just like Husson pointed out productivity was bigger in emergent countries since the late 90’s. But if we take a look at the absolute mass of value-added each growth rate represents, we can see high income countries still take a bigger share of the cake.

 

Finally, terms of trade. Terms of trade cannot evaluate surplus value appropriation or flows. This is a chauvinistic reading: exports realize the surplus value from wholesale retailers and local capitalists against their workers, and imports realize not only the surplus value from the foreign merchant and capitalist industries against their own workers, but it is turned into a profit by peripheral importers against their local commercial workers and consumers. There’s no transfer of surplus value between countries, just because they exchange stocks or interest payments: it just adds up to each businessman profits in each nation as surplus labour against the necessary labour of their own workers. Plus it doesn’t contemplate GNI, as if imports and exports where the only way in which low income countries relate to the world market, and as if this exchanges were always detrimental for the low income country. None of the data presented here would be possible to exist if dependentism were right: the internationalization of the world market is enriching low and middle income countries at bigger rates of growth, and productivity growth is also rising for low and middle strata instead of higher.

Even the industrial sector itself, has bigger growth rates on low and middle income countries, than on higher income ones, while the share of agriculture on GDP is surpassed by the share of industry on GDP for low income countries since the beginning of the early XXI century’s first decade. 

All peripheral countries produce more industrial value than agricultural, and even more merchant and services value-added, etc. The data showed here, contradicts dependentism and classical imperialism: underdevelopment is not ingrained nor mechanical, and richer countries and superpowers oppress the little ones, not because they extract a surplus, but because they all do: it’s a mutual enriching relationship, as bigger and smaller partners. Neocolonialism is the period of colonialism, in which the means through which colonialism was enforced, are now socialized to the “Third World” countries were it was first applied. If extracting surplus value from abroad is colonial, then all the poorest nation-states in Africa or Central America, are investing multinationally, and the amount of mergers&acquisitions on behalf of their business layers have increased, as also their returns on investments abroad and through portfolio stock, bond and funds investment. Everybody extracts rents and profits from others, and all neocolonial local and national bourgoises, are augmenting their power and enriching themselves, while making their bigger Triad partners enrich themselves as well. This takes us to the relationships between rate and mass: the Triad is superior in terms of volume, and so the law of accumulation of Capital Vol 1 applies.

The mass of accumulation exceeds the growth in organic composition, mobilizing a bigger amount of labour and raising productivity to produce more units and have the possibility to lower unitary prices while creating more profit, etc. Even if there’s a fall in the profit rate, the growth of multinationals, and their concentration and centralizations dynamics, produce an offset or countertendency to the fall in the profit rate: in absolute, current or constant prices, the volume or mass or absolute amount of revenues and profits augments so much, even if with lower growth rates, that the diminishing and lower growth rate ends up turning into a kind of constant flow of dividends of such enormous magnitude and volume, that it makes the smaller but continuous growth rate preposterous: remember that if a rate goes from 2 to 1, it doesn’t mean it “lowers down”, it means it grows less, but it doesn’t stop growing. Since the Triad’s growth starts from a superior point, it doesn’t matter that is a smaller growth, since it just makes profits grow nonetheless. The only way for the rate to stop increasing profits and value, would be negatively (that is, just with repositions costs covered).

With that said, all of this also means the Global South is fully industrial now, just like Marxists themselves comment on the fact that 70% of industrial and manufacture workers are not in the Triad, but in the “Third World”. Marxists have renounced to face the peasant and agrarian question, focused only on industrial workers from advanced countries, forgetting about colonialism in the “Third world”, and they haven’t been tracking the development of the capitalist world market which have finished the transition from formal to real subsumption in the “Third World” as part of colonialism going into neocolonialism, turning agricultural societies in fully industrial societies, and now enjoying the riches of being part of multinational investment and production.