RuthlessCriticism [comrade/them]
A huge section of the working class in the global South has been “rendered superfluous” by the inability of modern production methods to soak up enough labor to prevent rising unemployment, and this alone, even before we take into account the much harsher labor regimes prevalent in low-wage countries, exerts a powerful force that makes “the price of their labour-power fall below its value.”
This is totally incoherent. I doubt this author has ever read Marx, they certainly haven’t grasped the thrust of his argument.
Slightly more systematic analysis:
Part1 is an unremarkable and outdated if largely correct collection of empirical points. Fine.
Part 2 rests largely on incorrect empirical claims.
Companies like Apple and H&M export no capital to Bangladesh and China—their iPhones and garments are produced by arm’s-length production processes. Untrue. Also if some Taiwanese company is doing the capital export, that is still imperialism as Lenin defined. This resonates powerfully with contemporary global capitalism, where imperialist transnational corporations share the spoils of super-exploitation with myriad service-providers and their own employees, and where the biggest cut of all is taken by the state.
Apple famously a highly taxed company. Also there is no evidence that Apples shares spoils with its employees, moreover there is no reason to believe they would do so and every reason to believe they wouldn’t.
In general this article seems to be laundering a non-materialist argument and world model via a smattering Marx and Lenin quotes, largely without making any attempt to understanding the quotes themselves. Laundering the total rejection of Marx and Lenin via their own words by totally misunderstanding them. It really isn’t worth my time to fully dissect this article, so I leave it here.****
The wages are often too low to make it cost effective to mechanize. Also, you have to keep in mind that India is not a rationally planned economy. India as a whole would enormously benefit from mechanization of agriculture, but capitalists and landowners have different interests.
I agree that intellectual property law is creating unequal exchanges, but I suspect that this is still quite a small effect relative to the total global economy. I welcome an investigation into that.
People cling to pre-Marxist unequal exchange theories because they are reassuring, they are, however not true. Where is the unequal exchange happening? When India exports rice, which stage is unequal exchange? Why do those people sell the rice for less than its value? Marx explains quite clearly why surplus value extraction happens. The unequal exchange believers totally fail to do the same.
Honestly, this is a terrible paper. Unequal exchange is not a good way of understanding the world as it is. The only real unequal exchange under Capitalism is the payment of wages for labor. (Yes, there is rent of various kinds and some other things maybe, but they are very small compared to surplus value extraction). To make it more concrete, US farmers selling corn to Mexico is not unequal exchange, even though it may take 1 hour of labor to make corn equivalent to 10 hours of labor of avocados that exchange for the same value. On the other hand if a US company employs workers in Mexico, it is exploiting them to make profit which filters back to the US without equivalent. There is of course a legitimate point to make that if the world economy were truly as open and integrated as the Neoliberals sometimes claim, these production differences should equalize. One of the big reasons production methods don’t equalize is that wages are artificially suppressed in ‘global south’ countries. There are lots of other reasons though which would be interesting to investigate more, rather than clinging to unequal exchange theories.
edit: In fairness they do kind of acknowledge this. I think they underestimate the differences in physical production. Take India, a large part of the agriculture is not mechanized to this day, so of course it is 10-100x less productive.
It is important to note that, in cases where physical productivity differences do exist, this is often because it is more profitable for capital to use cheaper, more labour-intensive methods than to invest in modern equipment—especially in cases where state investment in technological development has been curtailed by structural adjustment programmes, or where patents prevent affordable access to necessary technologies—precisely because Southern wages are maintained at artificially low levels34,35. This arrangement benefits Northern consumers with cheaper goods and benefits Northern capital with an increased surplus. In such cases, the use of labour-intensive methods facilitates value transfer and should be understood as constituting unequal exchange. Under these conditions, the South is compelled to allocate more labour to production for international trade than would be required if technology was deployed more rationally and fairly, thus draining—and wasting—a crucial productive capacity that could otherwise be allocated toward producing goods and services necessary for local well-being and development (see Supplementary Discussion 2).
It is fascinating how liberal media are all collectively deluding themselves into believing any of these court cases are going to stop these AI companies in any way.
Firstly, on the pure merits ML training is obviously transformative. A LLM is just obviously a completely different thing from an internet article. They are just completely different classes of things, whatever you might think of their respective values. Granted, copyright has been in past decades massively overused and applied to totally ludicrous things so it isn’t impossible that courts make an idiotic decision.
That won’t actually matter though because congress will instantly “solve” the problem. There are many reasons for that chiefly; Tech companies have a lot of power, and CHYNA.
