1) Emmanuel's theory of unequal exchange argues that differences in wage levels between core and peripheral countries leads to an unequal transfer of value through international trade, in which the core country extracts surplus value from the peripheral country. 2) Unequal exchange occurs when lower wages in peripheral countries result in higher rates of surplus value production, meaning more value is extracted from workers there compared to core countries. This imbalance is reflected in international prices and terms of trade that systemically favor the core. 3) Emmanuel uses a hypothetical model with two countries, one core and one peripheral, to illustrate how unequal wages between the countries leads to an unequal exchange of value of 60 units flowing from the peripheral to the core country through

1. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
World Systems Theory Capitalism= a global division of production on the basis of profit.
Unlike Marx, wage-labor not required to count as capitalist Wallerstein (2005) defines
capitalism as a system that “gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital” (24).
Capitalism is incompatible with a totally Free Market: Why? (see readings)
World Systems Theory Capitalism has a triadic structure: 1) Core 2) Semi-periphery* 3)
Periphery Refer not to geographical ares, but to types of production processes (usually
correlated with geographical ares). Core production processes have the least international
competition; Peripheral production processes have the most competition Competition and
Profits are inversely related

3. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Few mainstream economists today would recognize the notion of ‘unequal exchange’ as an acceptable
category of economics, but tend to deal with the problem of global inequalities by referring to monopolies
and ‘imperfect information’. The economists’ solution is to try to envisage conditions for completely ‘free’
trade and more perfect competition and information flows, but if after two centuries the supposedly
equalizing doctrines of free market economics continue to remain a distant mirage, it should be incumbent
on economists to devise more realistic strategies to achieve equality. Suffice it to say here that as long as
exchange is conducted in terms of monetary exchange values, and prices are understood to reflect the
rational or even benevolent logic of market forces, there is no way – other than under conditions of
monopoly – that a market transaction can be classified as ‘unequal’. A million dollars’ worth of Swedish
Volvos exchanged for a million dollars’ worth of Venezuelan oil is by definition perfectly ‘equal’ in terms of
exchange value, which is the only gauge that neoclassical economic theory is capable of applying

4. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
1. However profoundly we manage to deconstruct the phenomenon of money as a
vacuous, semiotic delusion, aptly classified by Marx as a species of ‘fetishism’, the
ideological and practical hegemony of exchange value, gauged in terms of market
prices, remains more intact than ever.
2. The foundations of modern economics were devised by and for British
bankers and stock traders in the early 19th century, yet continue
globally to pervade the lives and thoughts of dominator and
dominated alike.

5. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
1. 5. Five illusions
2. 1. ’Technology’/’Economy’/’Ecology’ as unreflected, bounded
categories 2. Market prices as reciprocity 3. Machine
fetishism 4. Inequalities in space as stages in time 5.
’Sustainable development’ through consensus

6. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
1. 2. Market prices as reciprocity <ul><li>Are voluntary market
transactions by definition equal and fair? </li></ul><ul><li>M.
Godelier: unequal exchange tends to be represented as a
reciprocal exchange </li></ul><ul><li>Measurable material
asymmetries in net flows of biophysical resources
</li></ul><ul><li>Alternative metrics, e.g. energy, matter,
embodied land, embodied labor, etc. </li></ul>

7. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
1. Fetishism: <ul><li>The mystification of unequal relations of
social exchange through the attribution of autonomous
agency or productivity to certain kinds of material objects, for
instance money . </li></ul>
2. 9. 3. Machine fetishism <ul><li>The notion that (unequal)
structures of exchange (the ”economy”) are external to the
constitution and operation of machines (”technology”), i.e.
that the technological capacity of a given population is
independent of that population’s position in a global system of
resource flows . </li></ul>

8. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
1. 12. 5. Sustainable development through consensus?
<ul><li>To be acceptable, pathways to sustainability should
not seem too uncomfortable or provocative…?
</li></ul><ul><li>Power, conflicts of interest, and unequal
distribution rarely identified as scientific problems in need of
analysis and research </li></ul>

10. What is dependency theory?
Often associated with a body of theories prominent in the 60s and
70s (Amin 1970 , dos Santos 1970, Furtado 1977, Frank 1966)
Dos Santos (1970: 231): ‘a situation in which the economy of certain
countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of
another’.
Disagreement among dependency theorists and lots of debate
Main camps: Latin American structuralists, Neo-Marxists. But similar
ideas to be found in colonial drain theory & elsewhere

11. Redefining dependency theory
Dependency theory as a Lakatosian research
program
Research programmes are collections of
interrelated theories that have common
hypotheses that form a ‘hard core’.
New research programs do not necessarily
explain the same questions better, but
rather explain different things from the ones
previously considered

12. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Key insights from more recent dependency theory work
● Falling terms of trade for exports from the periphery (Ocampo and Parra-Lancourt 2009, UNCTAD
2016)
● Inability of peripheral countries to borrow in their own currency on international markets
● Fall in share of domestic value added associated with many developing economies’ integration into
global value chains (Caraballo and Jiang 2016)
● Unequal exchange (Higginbottom 2014, Patnaik and Patnaik 2016, Ricci 2018)

13. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Emmanuel fue un intelectual pero también un hombre de acción, como hubo muchos casos
durante el siglo XX. Nacido en Grecia en 1911, una vez recibido en la Universidad de Atenas
decidió radicarse en el Congo. Cuando las tropas del Eje ocuparon el territorio griego, volvió
como voluntario para integrar las fuerzas de liberación griega; terminada la guerra y, en
consecuencia, su experiencia como partisano, volvió al Congo hasta 1957 cuando se radicó en
Francia. Se doctoró en La Sorbona y luego fue profesor de economía en la Universidad París VII.
Alcanzó renombre mundial en 1969, cuando publicó "El intercambio desigual", que fue traducido
al castellano por la editorial Siglo XXI en 1972.

14. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
● Las teorías del intercambio desigual se basan en la teoría del valor ricardiana o marxista.
Estas demuestran que las condiciones sociales de producción del capitalismo Periférico
son las que provocan un trasvase del valor producido en la Periferia hacia el Centro a
través de la estructura de precios internacionales.

15. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Teoría del intercambio desigual Conceptos previos Valor de las mercancías: V = c + v + pl
c : capital constante (máquinas, herramientas, materia prima, etc.) v : capital variable (valor de
la fuerza de trabajo: salario)
El valor está determinado por el tiempo de trabajo socialmente necesario para la producción de
una mercancía. pl : plusvalía (nuevo valor del que se apropian los capitalistas) Plusvalía
absoluta: Aumento de la jornada de trabajo sin aumentar el salario

16. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Supuestos de la teoría del intercambio desigual Economía mundial en la que la libertad
relativa de movimientos del capital supone una tendencia a la formación de una tasa media de
ganancia a nivel mundial. TeoríasdelSubdesarrollo Conceptosprevios
La inmovilidad relativa de la fuerza de trabajo supone diferencias salariales muy grandes a nivel
internacional y, consiguientemente, tasas de plusvalía también diferentes. Supóngase dos
países: A (país desarrollado) y B (país subdesarrollado), en los que se produce un determinado
valor para ser comercializado internacionalmente

17. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Standard neoclassical international trade teaches that trade benefits all participants.
Emmanuel (1972 [1969]) explained exploitative relations may result just from commodity trade
and not necessarily from extra economic forces.
Emmanuel in his analysis hypothesized mobility of capital a uniform international rate of profit and
the formation of international prices of production.
Emmanuel, however, does not escape from the standard neoclassical theory since he assumed
the same technology between the trading partners.
Firms producing at (direct) prices lower (higher) than the international prices of production make
excess profits (losses).The lower wages in LDC result in the production of more surplus value.

18. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
La diferente tasa de plusvalía debida a los diferentes niveles salariales implica un agravamiento
del intercambio desigual, que ahora supone un trasvase de 60 unidades de valor desde el país B
al país A. B 170 > 150 > 110 A 170 190 230 TeoríasdelSubdesarrollo

19. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
Según este modelo, independientemente del tipo de producto exportado por la Periferia, existirá
intercambio desigual si se remunera de forma diferencial al trabajo.

20. Unfashionable, okay, but not outdated...
I should emphasize again that I have been using the notion of ‘unequal exchange’ not in the moral sense of
not getting one’s money’s worth, but in the naturalistic or realist sense of an objectively asymmetric
transfer of some biophysical quantity or metric (not usefully referred to as ‘value’) by which the productive
capacity of one social group is augmented at the expense of that of another. My argument is that
industrial capitalism is founded and dependent on such objective, net transfers of productive potential. It
is thus not a moral argument at the level of analysis, but can of course issue in a moral argument when
articulated with the observation that an asymmetric transfer (net import) of energy or embodied land to
one region or social group is the basis of a self-reinforcing accumulation of technological superiority and
power vis-á-vis other regions or social groups.