What do you think?
Rate this book
The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer
In this provocative new study, Zak Cope makes the case that capitalism is empirically inseparable from imperialism, historically and today. Using a rigorous political economic framework, he lays bare the vast ongoing transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest countries through the mechanisms of monopoly rent, unequal exchange, and colonial tribute. The result is a polarized international class structure with a relatively rich Global North and an impoverished, exploited Global South.
Cope makes the controversial claim that it is because of these conditions that workers in rich countries benefit from higher incomes and welfare systems with public health, education, pensions, and social security. As a result, the internationalism of populations in the Global North is weakened and transnational solidarity is compromised. The only way forward, Cope argues is through a renewed anti-imperialist politics rooted in a firm commitment to a radical labor internationalism.
Cope makes the controversial claim that it is because of these conditions that workers in rich countries benefit from higher incomes and welfare systems with public health, education, pensions, and social security. As a result, the internationalism of populations in the Global North is weakened and transnational solidarity is compromised. The only way forward, Cope argues is through a renewed anti-imperialist politics rooted in a firm commitment to a radical labor internationalism.
240 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 2019
20 people are currently reading
1756 people want to read
About the author
Zak Cope
8 books34 followersZak Cope is the author of The Wealth of (Some) Nations (Pluto, 2019) Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism (Kersplebedeb, 2015), He is co-editor of the Journal of Labor and Society and the Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 8, 2019
This book has left me a little shattered. Which is a good thing, I suppose. As is usually the case with Marxist economic analyses, the shattering part is not the economic stuff but their political implications.
The core argument of the book ‘The wealth of nations. The mechanics of value transfer’ (Pluto Books, March 2019) is not new at all. It’s an updated version of the 1960s and 70s dependency theory which argues, in a nutshell, that in global capitalism and international division of labour, resources flow from poor counties (periphery) to the rich core (‘centre’), i.e. Africa is poor because Europe is rich and vice versa. This is not a process of ‘Africa slowly catching up’ with the west but a global system of monopoly capital in which every dollar ‘invested’ in Africa brings back much more to the mostly multinational corporations in the West, thus explaining abundant misery despite decades of ‘double digit GDP growth’. Technocrats, trained in neo-classical economics, will make this an issue of population growth outpacing economic growth and very, very low productivity, of course. But more on the ‘low productivity myth’ later.
Capital export, such as FDI, is essentially a one-way street in which generates a net outflow of capital from developing countries to the West in the form of repatriated profits, royalties, services and repayment of debt and interest. This is not to say that there aren’t domestic elites in the ‘periphery’ who plunder their own country and exploit their own people, but thanks to the structural persistence of pre-capitalist relations of productions in the south, the largest share of value created in the periphery flows to the centre in one way for another.
The book zeroes in on some of the mechanics and costing of how imperialist states ‘import more value than they create nationally’ (net transfer of value from exploited countries) through the exploitation of developing states that are forced to export their value, labor and resources. This process involves numerous schemes that are often hidden or overlooked. Debt is among those value transfer mechanics. Fun fact: since the 1980s, developing countries have paid USD 4.2 trillion in interest rates to the global north. Fun fact two: illicit financial flows from developing countries to the north amount to USD 875 billion a year. Then there’s the issue of transfer pricing (50 per cent of global trade is within multi-national corporations), trade barriers in the north, northern dumping, payments on intellectual property rights (97 percent of patents are hold by nationals of OECD countries, 90 percent by global corporations) of approximately USD 60 billion in royalties annually from the developing world. The top four livestock breeding companies in the world have a market share of 99 percent; the top ten seeds corporations 75 percent. Then there is the value transfer associated with the brain drain – the shamelessness of ‘skilled migration’ from the global south to the north while militarizing the borders to keep cheap labour locked in low-wage countries is a whole new story.
But every UN report and international development studies 101 will tell you as much and in more detail and better data and reduce this issue to ‘technical solutions’ and ‘policy fixes’, good governance and deregulation and liberalization economies being an all-time favourites. Lol.
This book wouldn’t’ be a Marxist, anti-imperialist book if it didn’t tell you the stuff that your neo-classical economics SOAS development course forgets to mention, starting with an analysis of the imperialist mode of production based on ‘unequal exchange’. Unequal exchange occurs where there is a discrepancy between the value of a country’s exports and that of its imports measured in terms of labour, world market prices or ecological footprints. I am afraid though, this whole chapter on unequal exchange requires a fair bit of understanding of Marx’s labour theory of value but it shows how trade between developed and developing economies (with lower and higher organic compositions of capital in Marx’s terms) systematically leads to the structural underdevelopment of the periphery. This is not an issue of wrong policy, population growth or ‘lack of skills development’ (lol, give me a break!) in the developing world, this is the outcome of our structurally unequal exchange in the capitalist world system.
Structural poverty, unemployment, underemployment and exploitation are the price the periphery pays for our high living standard and high wages in the ‘West’. The point about the higher wages in the west is a key part of the argument of imperialist value transfer. The book argues that the ‘super-exploitation’ in the global south (wages below subsistence level, like those of USD 30 per month currently being paid in Ethiopia) allows ‘super-wages’ for the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the north. The high wages in the north and related high consumption is made possible because of the higher levels of profits due to higher levels of exploitation in the south. This leads to the issue of workers and consumers exploiting workers. Or in other words, if it wasn’t for the ‘cheap’ (cheap for the north) shit produced in the south (most of ‘our’ basic consumption items are in one wat or another produced in the global south) we would not be able to maintain our lifestyle. So the value transfer does not apply to capitalists from the north but also, politically crucially, to the workers and consumers in the north. In fact, the book argues that workers and consumers collectively gain more from the value transfer than the capitalist class.
The books argues that this is why ‘then and now’ even the political left in the centre does not get serious about imperialism because its constituency, the workers in the north, have a stake in maintaining imperialism. It also argues that the focus on the ‘1%’ versus the 99% and advocacy for better distribution within the national economies of the north is reactionary. This is a little hard to admit as a Bernie bro, but it’s actually true. The Western left, including myself I suppose, left has largely repudiated labour internationalism in favour of struggles to procure for itself a larger share of value extracted from oppressed nations. What exactly is the interest of the working class in the centre to change this system of exploitation if their welfare and living standards depend on it.
The book makes an interesting point, which is also important to understand the rise of xenophobia and militarization of northern borders. If we opened the border for labour as much as for capital, wages would converge and the ‘greater productivity’ of northern economies would be revealed for what it is – a by-product of militarized borders. Wage and lifestyle differentials between the west and developing world do not exist because of productivity, but because of a historical system of political oppression and keeping cheap labour trapped in shit holes while capital can move borderless.
Essentially, the book shows, the low selling of African products has behind it 500 years of European undervaluing of African lives, African lands and African labour and wealth. Racism has always been a critical structural feature of the capitalist system. It’s like when I talk to some well-off white people and they justify wages of 18 cents for Ethiopian workers with some low levels of productivity or over-supply of labour vis-à-vis demand for labour, I am thinking, like, if these workers were white, you’d be appalled by the misery and exploitation. But because they are brown and African that this is acceptable.
The core argument of the book ‘The wealth of nations. The mechanics of value transfer’ (Pluto Books, March 2019) is not new at all. It’s an updated version of the 1960s and 70s dependency theory which argues, in a nutshell, that in global capitalism and international division of labour, resources flow from poor counties (periphery) to the rich core (‘centre’), i.e. Africa is poor because Europe is rich and vice versa. This is not a process of ‘Africa slowly catching up’ with the west but a global system of monopoly capital in which every dollar ‘invested’ in Africa brings back much more to the mostly multinational corporations in the West, thus explaining abundant misery despite decades of ‘double digit GDP growth’. Technocrats, trained in neo-classical economics, will make this an issue of population growth outpacing economic growth and very, very low productivity, of course. But more on the ‘low productivity myth’ later.
Capital export, such as FDI, is essentially a one-way street in which generates a net outflow of capital from developing countries to the West in the form of repatriated profits, royalties, services and repayment of debt and interest. This is not to say that there aren’t domestic elites in the ‘periphery’ who plunder their own country and exploit their own people, but thanks to the structural persistence of pre-capitalist relations of productions in the south, the largest share of value created in the periphery flows to the centre in one way for another.
The book zeroes in on some of the mechanics and costing of how imperialist states ‘import more value than they create nationally’ (net transfer of value from exploited countries) through the exploitation of developing states that are forced to export their value, labor and resources. This process involves numerous schemes that are often hidden or overlooked. Debt is among those value transfer mechanics. Fun fact: since the 1980s, developing countries have paid USD 4.2 trillion in interest rates to the global north. Fun fact two: illicit financial flows from developing countries to the north amount to USD 875 billion a year. Then there’s the issue of transfer pricing (50 per cent of global trade is within multi-national corporations), trade barriers in the north, northern dumping, payments on intellectual property rights (97 percent of patents are hold by nationals of OECD countries, 90 percent by global corporations) of approximately USD 60 billion in royalties annually from the developing world. The top four livestock breeding companies in the world have a market share of 99 percent; the top ten seeds corporations 75 percent. Then there is the value transfer associated with the brain drain – the shamelessness of ‘skilled migration’ from the global south to the north while militarizing the borders to keep cheap labour locked in low-wage countries is a whole new story.
But every UN report and international development studies 101 will tell you as much and in more detail and better data and reduce this issue to ‘technical solutions’ and ‘policy fixes’, good governance and deregulation and liberalization economies being an all-time favourites. Lol.
This book wouldn’t’ be a Marxist, anti-imperialist book if it didn’t tell you the stuff that your neo-classical economics SOAS development course forgets to mention, starting with an analysis of the imperialist mode of production based on ‘unequal exchange’. Unequal exchange occurs where there is a discrepancy between the value of a country’s exports and that of its imports measured in terms of labour, world market prices or ecological footprints. I am afraid though, this whole chapter on unequal exchange requires a fair bit of understanding of Marx’s labour theory of value but it shows how trade between developed and developing economies (with lower and higher organic compositions of capital in Marx’s terms) systematically leads to the structural underdevelopment of the periphery. This is not an issue of wrong policy, population growth or ‘lack of skills development’ (lol, give me a break!) in the developing world, this is the outcome of our structurally unequal exchange in the capitalist world system.
Structural poverty, unemployment, underemployment and exploitation are the price the periphery pays for our high living standard and high wages in the ‘West’. The point about the higher wages in the west is a key part of the argument of imperialist value transfer. The book argues that the ‘super-exploitation’ in the global south (wages below subsistence level, like those of USD 30 per month currently being paid in Ethiopia) allows ‘super-wages’ for the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the north. The high wages in the north and related high consumption is made possible because of the higher levels of profits due to higher levels of exploitation in the south. This leads to the issue of workers and consumers exploiting workers. Or in other words, if it wasn’t for the ‘cheap’ (cheap for the north) shit produced in the south (most of ‘our’ basic consumption items are in one wat or another produced in the global south) we would not be able to maintain our lifestyle. So the value transfer does not apply to capitalists from the north but also, politically crucially, to the workers and consumers in the north. In fact, the book argues that workers and consumers collectively gain more from the value transfer than the capitalist class.
The books argues that this is why ‘then and now’ even the political left in the centre does not get serious about imperialism because its constituency, the workers in the north, have a stake in maintaining imperialism. It also argues that the focus on the ‘1%’ versus the 99% and advocacy for better distribution within the national economies of the north is reactionary. This is a little hard to admit as a Bernie bro, but it’s actually true. The Western left, including myself I suppose, left has largely repudiated labour internationalism in favour of struggles to procure for itself a larger share of value extracted from oppressed nations. What exactly is the interest of the working class in the centre to change this system of exploitation if their welfare and living standards depend on it.
The book makes an interesting point, which is also important to understand the rise of xenophobia and militarization of northern borders. If we opened the border for labour as much as for capital, wages would converge and the ‘greater productivity’ of northern economies would be revealed for what it is – a by-product of militarized borders. Wage and lifestyle differentials between the west and developing world do not exist because of productivity, but because of a historical system of political oppression and keeping cheap labour trapped in shit holes while capital can move borderless.
Essentially, the book shows, the low selling of African products has behind it 500 years of European undervaluing of African lives, African lands and African labour and wealth. Racism has always been a critical structural feature of the capitalist system. It’s like when I talk to some well-off white people and they justify wages of 18 cents for Ethiopian workers with some low levels of productivity or over-supply of labour vis-à-vis demand for labour, I am thinking, like, if these workers were white, you’d be appalled by the misery and exploitation. But because they are brown and African that this is acceptable.
October 21, 2019
A must read for all anti-imperialists and genuine partisans for human liberation!
August 16, 2020
Cope’s argument is that the global North is too embedded in the riches of imperialist plunder to embrace anti-imperialism. The revolution is not, by and large, in the hands of the workers of those countries who reap the benefits of imperialism. In essence, this sounds right. Aside from the criticisms within the left—Cope takes on Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky, to varying degrees, accusing them of Eurocentrism and of essentially misguided (at best) pro-imperialist perspectives—there is something in his arguments that I’ve seen in other books criticizing the Left and its ineffectual revolutionary spirit in modern society. Pinpointing the times before and after World War 1, it is clear that embourgeoisment (Cope’s term) infected the working class (the labor aristocracy, as Cope also calls it) and made it near impossible to embrace true internationalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary politics—there was an opportunity missed in the early 20th century to stand fully upright against the raging machine of capitalist enterprise and all its social functions (racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc). It is imperative to understand the Left today, how capitalism continues to function, and to understand the global struggle outside of a nationalist point of view. Cope’s book is making an important case. Cope verges on fatalism in his fervent argumentation and insistence on his point, but the idea is very interesting and applicable.
June 19, 2019
something that perplexes me about this book is that cope is totally contemptuous of euromarxist elision of national oppression & racism , but like, spends maybe a couple of sketchy paragraphs on the subject himself.
November 17, 2023
This book offers a pretty comprehensive summary of the main theories behind imperialist transfer, namely Dependency theory and Unequal exchange, and how it has benefitted not just the capitalists of the global north, but the overall population. This is because skewed trade relations and value drain from the south allows for there to be increased wage rates in the north without sharpening the contradictions of capitalism. Capital export to the global south can overexploit labor there, so to underexploit in the north. These relationships are defined as “hidden surplus value” in the south, where labor is drastically underpaid and the final commodity is sold at an up charge in northern consumer markets, and “negative surplus value” in the north, where labor (mostly unproductive labor) is paid at a higher rate than the actual value contributed to the system.
This aids capital in 2 ways: it allows for profitability to stay steady even in the event of union gains in the north by keeping South production as cheap as possible, and it allows for a mass consumer market in the north where the surplus value taken from the workers in the south can be realized.
Due to these arrangements, true Justice needs to have an international perspective and not focus solely on national wealth distribution, because national redistribution does nothing to fix the imperial relations that continue to extract value from the underdeveloped countries.
This aids capital in 2 ways: it allows for profitability to stay steady even in the event of union gains in the north by keeping South production as cheap as possible, and it allows for a mass consumer market in the north where the surplus value taken from the workers in the south can be realized.
Due to these arrangements, true Justice needs to have an international perspective and not focus solely on national wealth distribution, because national redistribution does nothing to fix the imperial relations that continue to extract value from the underdeveloped countries.
November 18, 2022
Interesting and eye opening, but has nothing to offer in the way of how to practically affect change.
February 17, 2024
While many of the broad strokes of this are good (and based off of other people’s works) it is only really the first two sections that are valuable.
The latter two present a static view of the imperialist system lacking internal contradiction at home and abroad. Marx and Engels wrote that the history of society was the history of class struggle, for Cope it seems it’s the history of international relations. At one point he characterises nations as proletarian and bourgeois, at another he quotes Mussolini as doing so. It lacks an emphasis of imperialism’s crisis, inter-imperialism and its relation to crisis, and most importantly the tendency of the rate of profit to decline - because these things challenge the idealised metropolitan economy Cope depicts.
He presents classical Marxism as eurocentric for recognising the development of productive forces as the basis for historical progression, seeing this as a moral endorsement of colonialism. You could apply the same logic to the development of the steam engine to portray Marx as prometheanist - it doesn’t make you correct. His attacks on the Paris Commune for what it didn’t do are meaningless and bizarre.
There are a lot of good things to this book (which I’ve not really mentioned, to be fair) but there is also a lot of crap and naturally that stands out more.
The latter two present a static view of the imperialist system lacking internal contradiction at home and abroad. Marx and Engels wrote that the history of society was the history of class struggle, for Cope it seems it’s the history of international relations. At one point he characterises nations as proletarian and bourgeois, at another he quotes Mussolini as doing so. It lacks an emphasis of imperialism’s crisis, inter-imperialism and its relation to crisis, and most importantly the tendency of the rate of profit to decline - because these things challenge the idealised metropolitan economy Cope depicts.
He presents classical Marxism as eurocentric for recognising the development of productive forces as the basis for historical progression, seeing this as a moral endorsement of colonialism. You could apply the same logic to the development of the steam engine to portray Marx as prometheanist - it doesn’t make you correct. His attacks on the Paris Commune for what it didn’t do are meaningless and bizarre.
There are a lot of good things to this book (which I’ve not really mentioned, to be fair) but there is also a lot of crap and naturally that stands out more.
June 4, 2024
A fresh and critical angle to international political economy from an anti-imperialist lens - and some questioning of the usual Eurocentric/western centric assumptions in the field.
December 3, 2025
EXCELLENT.
Review to follow!
Review to follow!
December 8, 2024
Interesting enough to be worth reading but ultimately a self-defeating book; this form of third worldism is the anti-natalism of the left. Perhaps more aptly this is White Fragility for people who have read Lenin. Can't help but feel as though an attitude that the proletariat of the imperial core somehow constitutes an effective global bourgeoisie is a notion which largely aids and abets the actual and literal bourgeoisie. Material relations remain. Some own capital, some do not.
July 11, 2022
we are all capitalists now
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews