Rev Left Radio - Unequal Exchange: The Engine of Modern Imperialism

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Torkil Lauesen joins us to discuss his book Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future and the hidden mechanics of modern imperialism. Lauesen returns to the tradition of Arghiri Emmanuel to argue that while the world market tends to equalize prices, wages remain radically unequal across borders -- driving a structural transfer of value from low-wage production zones to high-wage consumer economies. We walk through Lauesen's reconstruction of unequal exchange through Marx's value theory, the leading approaches to measuring global value transfer, and what contemporary estimates imply about the scale of the drain. From there, we explore the political consequences inside the Global North: why reformism and social democracy have often been stabilized by imperial arrangements, what that means for internationalism, and why the "imperial mode of living" is increasingly unstable. Finally, we turn to the shifting world order -- especially Lauesen's argument that a new mode of production may be emerging, best exemplified by China -- and what that implies for the future of capitalism, multipolarity, and socialist transition. We also discuss the ongoing war/conflict involving Iran and what it reveals about crisis, hegemony, and the changing methods of imperial power. Check out our other episodes with Torkil HERE outro Music: 'Antithesnails' by spinitch and Chaz Matador --------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody. Welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, I want to say some things up front for this episode because I think this episode is incredibly important. The reason why it might be dry at first is because we have to get some definitions out of the way. Like, what is unequal exchange? You know, what is the base work that Torkel is operating off of? We kind of got to set the table a little bit, and that can come across perhaps as sort of dry and jargony.

But I promise if you stick with it and you get those, sort of that table setting, you know, internalized. The middle and end of this conversation is invaluable from a Marxist perspective to understand what is happening in the world right now. What is the deepest possible Marxist analysis of the 21st century that you could possibly have in, you know, granted an hour and a half conversation? Starting with unequal exchange, which is the mechanism by which the imperial, core siphons wealth and resources out of the imperial periphery, the global south in particular,

and makes concessions to its working classes in the core through robust welfare states in the case of Europe, through mass consumerism in the case of the United States. This mechanism is essential to understand, to understand the global economy and to understand the mechanism of imperialism globally. Once you understand that, we get into this fascinating conversation about the next mode of production already manifesting itself, about what the actual material basis of the decline of the U.S. Empire is and why it is ultimately inevitable, the literal choice we often hear sloganeered, socialism or barbarism,

right, the common ruin of the contending classes. What is the material explanation of why that is actually the case? What are we actually facing, right? The ecological costs of imperialism and unequalification. exchange. It's not just a normal conversation about some of these topics that you're a long-time Rev Left listener, you'll have a pretty good grasp on, but it goes deep into the core nuances and foundational analytical pillars of what is happening in our world right now. It is perhaps one of the most broadly clarifying episodes that we've done with regards to the emerging mode of production

that is happening by material and ecological necessity, what the strategy has to be, the contradiction, one of the parts of the conversation, the sort of contradiction between nationalism and international socialism, which is latent in the new mode of production, particularly as seen in China. And what do I mean by the new mode of production?

We'll talk about it in more detail in the interview itself. But this rising realization, again, out of material and ecological necessity, that there has to be political command of the economy. And the first stage of that is a sort of mixed economy as seen in China, half central planning and half state-controlled market forces. This is emerging naturally in our world in the same way that mercantilism and eventually early forms of capitalism emerged naturally out of the failing feudal order in times past.

This is emerging naturally in our world out of, basic material necessity, and the U.S. and the West are still pushing what is increasingly becoming an outdated mode of production. This laissez-faire, extractive, exploitative, capitalist system that is actually faltering in large, in essence, because the material foundations for unequal exchange are faltering. So if you can grapple with some of these concepts up front, you can follow the arguments. Once we get into the meat of this episode, episode, I think for me at least just listening to it, fireworks are going off in my head of clarity and understanding. What Torquil does best is this effortless application of historical and dialectical materialism.

Right? Like one of the things we talk about. Why, for instance, in the wake of imperialism and the siphoning of, you know, a surplus wealth, which is in the trillions, by the way, siphoning to the Imperial Corps, why do robust welfare states manifest in Europe while in the United States we don't get robust welfare states? And Torkel goes into the settler colonial nature of the United States and talks about how settler colonialism itself as a product of Europe, right, was acted as a sort of release valve for a reserve army of labor to scatter out into the world, right? We know that Europe got rid of its religious fanatics and its political fanatics, its poor people in many instances, through this project of settler colony construction, Australia, Canada, the United States, etc., etc. And what that did in Europe was create tighter labor markets and conditions in which workers could form labor unions and eventually build welfare states in a way that didn't happen necessarily, certainly not as robust. in the United States, but perhaps more broadly, in the settler colonies, which in the U.S. was marked by genocide and slavery, which gave a racialized and settlerized sort of economic structure that had to be navigated and explained so much of our backwardness and cruelty and belligerence

in the United States and fundamentally our lack of a robust welfare status compared to Europe, despite the same fundamental mechanism of unequal exchange via imperialism, you know, being able to siphon resources and making the global imperial core, the global North, incredibly rich. I don't know. This is a fascinating and I think must listen to episode. To fully grapple with the content and to fully understand it, I think gives you a clarity on the global, economic, political, and social picture of the 21st century, then 99.9% of human beings living on Earth.

I truly believe that. I'm speaking as a Marxist. Non-Marxist won't agree. but I will die on that hill that this is the mechanism by which you can actually fucking understand the world. And it is made increasingly clear through this conversation. And I just want to urge people to listen to it even if you have no fucking clue what unequal exchange even is. Strap in, get challenged a little bit up front, you know, internalize some basic definitions and orient yourself a little bit. and then allow this conversation to unfold because I think it is crucially important.

And if every single Marxist on the planet understood with this level of clarity, our situation in the 21st century, I think we'd be much better position to fight for the world that we want to see. Because as I say at the end of this episode, the stakes of the 21st century is not just the fate of this country or this people or this tribe. It is the fate of the human species that is at stake here in the 21st century. And to understand the core material driving forces of that change and how to get on the right side and perpetuate and push forward and accelerate those positive changes while combating against the things holding it back, that is the essential calculus that we have to first be clear about and then go out in the world and actually implement. So I hope that plea convinces enough of you to really strap. in for this conversation and take it all the way to the end. And I promise you, you will walk out the other side of this conversation, a better thinker and certainly a better Marxist. All right,

without further ado, here's my conversation with Torco Lawson on his newest book out of the wonderful Iskra Books, who is publishing my own upcoming book, if I ever get around to fucking finishing it, Iskra Books, huge shout out. But we'll be talking about Torco Lawson's newest book, Unequal Exchange, Past, Present, and Future. Enjoy. Thank you, Brett, for inviting me to podcast about my book about On Equal Exchange. I have been interested in On Equal Exchange for many, many years. I think I wrote the first book about unequal exchange in the late 70s, after I came in contact with the Greek economic Aguirre Emmanuel,

which actually coined the concept. And I think it's a very, very important concept to understand if you want to know how imperialism works. Please stay tuned if you want to hear more about unequal exchange and its role in imperialism and the global economy. Yeah, absolutely. It's an honor to have you back on. this is, I just checked the fourth episode you've been on. We had you on for the long transition towards socialism, writing the wave about Sweden's integration into the imperialist system, world system, and the principal contradiction all the way back in 2020. So you're definitely

a fan favorite, and your work is like super critical for the Marxist left in general. I learned something from every single book and every single interview, and I know our audience really appreciates every time you come on. So it's an honor to have you on. And today, as you alluded to, we'll be talking about your newest book, Unequal Exchange, Past, Present, and Future, about a core concept within, you know, just basic political economy, really. And that's put out, I believe, by Iskra Books, which is a friend of the show, and I'm actually working with them right now to produce my first book through Iskra. So a huge shout out to them.

Let's go ahead and just kind of get into the details of the book itself. And I kind of want to start at the foundation, right? Right. When you use the term unequal exchange, what exactly do you mean, kind of in plain language, assuming some people aren't totally aware of what that concept means? And why do you think it remains kind of an important concept for understanding the global economy today? Sure. Unequal exchange is one of the most important concept, if you want to understand, impalist value transfer. There are also other ways of value transferers, super profits and rents and so on. But on legal exchange is the most important in terms of quantity.

So the concept is that when commodities are exchanged at the world market, they are exchanged at market prices. An important part of making up the prices are, of course, the wage level. And if we look at the world system, we find that there's a huge gap in words levels. So actually, you can explain the essence of unequal exchange by the dual expression of exchange value. exchange value can be expressed, as I mentioned, in the price, in dollars or in euros or whatever, but it can also be measured in labor time, in blood, sweat and tears, in hours and minutes of labor. So the exchange value of a pair of sneakers or a t-shirt or a cup of coffee or a chocolate bar or an iPhone

or on a banana can be expressed in the market price but also in the labor time it takes to produce it. For example, say an iPhone it costs maybe $1,000 and it takes maybe 50 hours

to produce it in labor time. And there is a tendency of globalization of the prices of commodities, but not on one prices and this is labor. The price of iPhone can vary a little from country to country in terms of tax and so on, but it doesn't vary in the scale of wages. The monthly average wage in

manufacturing in U.S. is maybe, I think, maybe $6,000. In China, it's around $1,000. In India, it's around $200. So when commodities are exchanged between U.S. and China or India at global market prices, there's an unequal exchange in terms of labor time. Basically, a U.S. worker can consume more value measured in labor time through the use of their wages to consume goods produced by low-wage workers. And they can consume more value than they deliver through being exploited by participating in the production system in the US. This is basically the essence of un-nequil exchange.

It is also very important because it became the historical solution to a major contradiction in maybe the, main contradiction in the capitalist mode of production between the need to expand the amount of production of goods put into the market on one side and on the other side the ability of the consuming power to buy the product and by this realizing the profit. This have always been a major contradiction in the capitalist mode of. of production. But the transfer of value in colonial times, in neo-colonial times,

and also in neoliberal globalization from the periphery in the world system into the imperial core was a transfer of the power to consume, and thereby it created a very dynamic capitalism in the imperial core. And on the other hand, a very blocked capitalism and underdevelopment in the periphery. So in this way, unequal exchange have also actually made capitalism work throughout the 20th century. Yeah, modern capitalism actually depends on this sort of unequal exchange,

where on the global market, commodity prices are like, you know, they globalize, but as you said, labor power does not. And so wages remain radically unequal across borders. And this is really important to understand that, you know, this is imperialism. This is the political economy in some sense of imperialism, particularly between the imperial core and the global south or the periphery, as that modern imperialism is not just about like bad trade deals or big country takeover, small country. It's this systemic transfer of value from the global south to the global north through this mechanism. Is that a correct way of thinking about it?

Sure, sure. That's very precise explanation here. So early in the book, and you mentioned Agiri Emanuel, and I hope I pronounced that name correctly, you mentioned that you're kind of taking this theory and then updating it in some sense for the present. So can you kind of talk us through that? What did Emmanuel get right? And what did you feel needed to be revised to explain today's globalized production system? Yes.

I think that what Emmanuel got right was that the driver of this development was actually the difference in wage, the wage level are the so-called independent viable in this theory. and this difference in wage levels was generated by class struggle. The laborers in the Imperial Corps first in England from the middle of the 19th century and onwards, this race in the wage level was not given to them by capital in. in some cunning plan, the rise of wages was generated by a very harsh and strong labor struggle by the trade unions. But nevertheless, it generated this unequal exchange. And also, it is important to understand that capital was, could give into these labor struggles because of the

because of colonialism, because they could super exploit labor in the periphery of the system. If we take wage levels, say in 1848 at the time of the communist manifest, they were more or less equal throughout the world system, and it was more or less what we could call substantial wages, wages just needed to get food and some basic shelter and so on. But from the late 19th century and onwards, we saw this raising wage level in the center, first in the UK, later in Germany and the Scandinavian countries,

and certainly by the turn of the century in the U.S. which have the, in 1900, the US have the highest wages. If we're talking about the Anglo-Saxon wide working class, they have the highest labor wages in the world system. They have more or less the double wages than in Europe at the same time. And this generated the unequal exchange, which grew and grew up to the, to 20 century.

And this created this dynamic center and also it created the block periphery. The center was dynamic because of two reasons, because of the expanded consumption power, but also because capital was interested in raising productivity by new technology because actually the labor was expensive, so they wanted to introduce new technology, new machinery, and so on.

So it was also, the high wage levels was also generating huge development of the productive forces in the periphery where they have super exploitation and very low wages. They would just add more labor power if they wanted to expand. their raw material mining or agricultural production, there was not the same interest in developing the productivity. So was very important in the 20th century was this geographical nearness between the center of production and the market. And what happened with neoliberalism,

globalization was that around the late 70s, 1970s, there was this development of the productive forces in terms of the cell phone, in terms of internet, in terms of computing, in terms of logistic, in terms of new management forms, the development of the standard container, which make transport very, very cheap and so on. So this development in the productive force made possible that suddenly you could outsource industrial production. Before that time, the international division have been basically between the periphery,

making raw materials and agricultural products, and very, very simple industrial products, and they were exchanged by industrial products from the core advanced industrial product. But at that time, this new technology made it possible from the late 70s and onwards to outsource industrial production to the low-wage countries. So the geographic link between size of production,

and size of consumption was not that important anymore. You could produce by low-wage workers in Asia, and you could sell the products, export the product, and sell it to high-wage workers in the global north. And this was a very dramatic change in how unequal exchange worked. Yeah, so you're basically saying that, you know, Emmanuel identified the basic underlying law, but your project overall is to show that that law now operates through the architecture of modern neoliberal globalization and that the mechanisms of

unequal exchange have become more visible, more central and under this globalized supply chain capitalism where to produce industrial products used to be almost it had to be done inside the imperial core. But in the late 70s, with technology and the open up of cheaper shipping across the planet. What we call neoliberal globalization to open up the possibility that you can move industrial production, at least large chunks of it, down the supply chain outside to the periphery and funnel the products into the imperial core. Is that correct? Yes, yes, yes, yes. And we discussed actually back in the beginning of the 70s, we discussed this

why with Emmanuel and ask him why do why do capital not move more industry out to low wage countries and he was of the opinion that

there were some barriers there was the technological barrier how to control production on huge geographic distance. There was also at that time

the strong trade unions in the global north, which was very much against their outsourcing. So there was a lot of barriers. But, you know, Thatcher and Reagan and their attack

on trade unions was the first step towards making this possible. And then after that, they could also try to dismantle what we call the social state, which tried to control trade and investments of transnational capital. But this was deregulated under a new globalization. And then suddenly, you saw millions of millions of industrial workplaces being transferred to low-wage countries.

And I think that's really important to linger on just for a second, which is you see this shift in the material base, this ability to basically outsource industrial production itself. and in the superstructure you get Reaganism and Thatcherism and, you know, there is no society. And the biggest threat is the government coming to your door and saying, I'm here to help. You get this superstructural justification for this underlying material shift that's happening. And if you're working in the Imperial Corps here in the United States, for example, that gives rise to the Rust Belt, to deindustrialization, to deunionization. So very few people that might understand that that's what happened to them, understand that it came about primarily and at the material base because of this shift of industrial production to this sort of globalized supply chain, this production chain that has now been

globalized because of new technologies and because of more efficient and cheaper shipping possibilities that hadn't existed hitherto. And I think that's really important for people to understand to connect those dots because people struggle with understanding, you know, some of the deeper aspects of why that happened. But back to the book and my questions for you, you spend a lot of time reconstructing this argument through Marx's value theory. So for listeners

who may not be steeped in Marxist economics, although hopefully many Revlev listeners will at least be pretty aware of it, what does Marxist framework help us see that mainstream economics usually misses about how wealth is created and distributed globally? Well,

the traditional capitalist mainstream economy says that this value is created by innovative entrepreneurs and capital but Marxism says that value is

created by labor and by nature. And what I try to do in the book is actually try to follow the value of theory of Marx as

he explained in capital and using international trade as the subject to follow this track. If you, what I do in chapter two is that I try to anchor unequal exchange in Marxist value theory. Unequal exchange, the theory of unequal exchange have been criticized of being in, an explanation of exploitation taking place in the circulation square and not in the production square. And I think this is very wrong. Unnecule exchange is solid anchored in Marxist value theory.

If we take Marxist value theory, the cell, the cell, the biological, The logical cell in capitalism is the commodity. And if the cell is the commodity, then the cell in capitalism is defined by the DNA in the commodity, and that is the contradiction between use value and exchange value. You know, on this side, the consumer, the buyer is interested in the use value of the iPhone. And the seller is interested in the exchange value of the iPhone. But not only does the commodity have a dual character in the form of use value and exchange value. Exchange value in itself has also a dual representation,

and its magnitude can be measured in two distinct ways. externally, it is the market exchange, the ratio between commodities, two codes is exchange for one chair, which is equivalent to, say, $100, and this is the market price. And as I mentioned, also, you can also see exchange value in an intraciality way. it is the value that can be measured by the quality of social necessary abstract labor in the number of hours at a certain scale level. And these two representations of exchange value expressed in money, the price of the commodity and the wage of labor time is needed to produce it.

So what I do in the book is that I follow the... these two representations of exchange value, the price and labor time, up through the complexity of capitalism. The exchange value of commodities as cost of production and then develop into production prices and market prices and then global prices. And on the other side, I discussed the different proportion of labor time in its different facets of intensity, skills and productivity and how it has been represented by very different wage level

in the world system. So in the history of capitalism from the end of the 19th century and up to the 20th century, we can see the development of these distinct differences between the two representations of exchange value.

The tendency of a globalization of prices of commodities, copper, corn, orange juice, all kinds of raw materials, coffee, cacao, have a world market price. And so also, there's a world market price of an iPhone or a Mercedes-Benz, a solar cell and so on. So we have this global prices of commodities on one side and on the other side has mentioned the huge difference in wage levels. Yeah, and I think when you hear the discussions of this sort of stuff, neoliberal globalization, in terms of mainstream economics, you'll hear things about prices, you know, trade statistics, the GDP,

but what Marx always allows us to do is to go beneath those sort of surface appearances, which often obscure the reality of extraction and exploitation and redistribution of, according to his labor theory of value, labor time itself, right? So Marx allows us to go to these deeper questions like, who is doing the labor, under what conditions? You know, what's the level of exploitation and robbery happening here? That I think those questions get completely wrinkled out of the equation when you have mainstream economics talking about macroeconomics and global trade, et cetera. And the job of Marxists is to always go beneath the surface, obliterate the obscurantism, and re-center. the human worker and the role of class war and exploitation that is the engine of all of this.

A major strength of your book, too, that I wanted to mention is that you don't just kind of make a theoretical claim or an abstract argument. You engage with the question of measurement. Like, how can unequal exchange actually be measured? Because it's one thing to say it's happening, to do some analysis, but to think about the unit of measurement to actually get an objective grasp on the thing is another step. And you do that. So how can unequal exchange actually be measured and what do the best contemporary estimates suggest about kind of the scale of this transfer? Because if we're talking about, you know, imperialist value transfer from the global periphery, the global south in particular to the imperial core, it behooves us to try to understand empirically what the scale of this transfer is. So can you talk about that?

Yes. back in the in the 70s we were very interested in trying to measure the size on equal exchange because we needed some kind of solid foundation of our political theory of the so-called parasite state which was the idea that the Scandinavian state was parasite states on the third world yeah but but we needed some kind of solid

political economy under this theory. We have actually tried for many years to just try to update Lenin's data in his book, Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism, in which the main way of the value transfer of imperialism is super profit. But, but, but But when we try to update it to the statistics of the 70s, the size of super profit could not explain the huge difference in a living standard. And that was actually why we became interested in unequal exchange. But then we also have to calculate the size of unequal exchange. And I explained the mathematics of how to do it in the book.

But basically, it is, of course, you need to know the different wage level in different countries, and you need to know the size of trade between the Imperial Corps and the third world, and you need to know about how big component is wages in the value of the commodities. and you need to know a lot about the productivity and intensity. And there's a lot of the facts that you need. And this was a huge work to round up all these statistics at the time because at the time you don't have the Internet and you don't have the big online database.

So you have to go to the United Nations and ELO and ONTAD and all kinds of organizations. statistics, but we made a rough calculation at the time, and we measured that the unequal exchange was around 300, 350 billion U.S. dollars per year at the time. And actually, Samir Amin also came to the same size. in his calculations. The latest, I think, calculation of unequal exchange

now based on much more, much more accurate statistics and much more huge, huge databases is made by Jason Hickle. And he published a famous paper in 2000 and 23. And what he writes is that We find that in 2021, the economies of the global north net appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labor from the global south across all skills levels and sectors. The wage value of this net appropriated labor was equivalent to 16.9.

trillion euros in northern prices accounting for skills levels. So what they basically do is that these 826 billions of hours, if they had to be paid with the average labor wages in the global north, it would be 16.9 trillion. And unequal exchange is then understood to be the driver in part of systemic wage and qualities. We find that southern wages are 87 to 95% lower than northern wages for work of equal skills. And while southern workers contribute to 90% of the labor that powers the world economy, they received only 21% of global income. This is based on a huge statistic material.

Wow. That is absolutely astounding. Trillions of dollars siphoned from the Global South and the imperial periphery into the core every year, persistently year in, year out. That is a massive structural feature of the global economy, of global capitalism, as you pointed out, which Lennon says monopoly capitalism, the highest stage of imperialism.

So to calculate that is such a wonderful, difficult, as you mentioned, tasks to accomplish, but to get at it in a real way in an empirical way and to just unveil to demystify the amount of money being siphoned into the imperial core is absolutely astounding. And, you know, shout out to Jason Hickle for his work and shout out to you for yours. And, of course, this has radical implications for among me. many, many, many other things, and we'll get to some of them in the rest of this conversation, but for politics, you know, in the global North in particular, you argue that unequal exchange helps explain why the global North has historically been able to sustain higher wages

and these ridiculous consumption levels. How does that shape politics inside rich countries, especially the relationship between, you know, working class reformism, social democracy, left-wing movements, etc. And imperialism more broadly. Well, you can start with Lenin and his book, again, imperialism at the highest stage of capitalism. He has a section in this book, which was actually also,

it was not just about imperialism. The book has also to be seen in the struggle in the second international between communist and social democrats. And he very much saw the development of the social democrat position as a product of imperialism. He also wrote a small pamphlet called imperialism and the split in socialism in which he said that the value transferred by imperialism made possible the development of social democracy because it developed a kind of what he called a labor aristocracy, a term which he borrowed from Engels,

which was the profit from colonialism made it possible to create a labor, aristocracy in the form of social democracy, which was then also a defender of imperialism and actually agreed with the capitalist class that the imperial core has the right and the need to exploit the so-called lower classes in the colonial countries. So in that way, this labor aristocracy was gaining more and more strengths because actually the social democratic policy was very successful. They got more and more parliamentary power, and they were able to get better and better wages

and better, better social security. and of course in different ways, I think it was most developed in Germany and the Scandinavian countries where we actually get this welfare capitalism and in our countries the social democracy have actually ruled the state and had administrated capitalism for generations.

and what developed in this kind of welfare capitalism was what we can call an imperial mode of living, a way of consumption that sustained this labor aristocracy. Yeah, so, I mean, right here we see that the rise of robust welfare states, particularly in Europe, but also consumption and the military empire, the United States is built off this imperial extraction via unequal exchange as the as the main mechanism of sucking wealth into the imperial core and then using that wealth to buy off right your your working class to some extent it's a little different between europe and the u.s and I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that the u.s certainly especially with you know dollar

hegemony as the as the world currency the u.s people enjoy obviously grotesque levels of unsustainable consumption, but we didn't quite get the welfare state like Europe got, right? We still don't have universal health care, but we also have the biggest, most expensive military and human history. I'm wondering if there's a connection there. How do you make sense of the differences between Europe and the U.S. with regards to how those super profits were used to satiate their working classes? Basically, I think that the difference is that the United States is kind of offspring from Europe. The United States is a settler state as Australia is a settler state, as New Zealand is a

settler state, and partly also Algeria became a settler state. But it's basically a settler state. And in that way, this settlerism in the late 19. century was kind of also helping out the huge social contradictions in Europe because there was this huge reserve army in Europe which was a genuine proletariat and with some kind of revolutionary aspiration. So actually it was it it it, it, uh, these settlerism solved helping to solved the internal contradictions in Europe and getting rid. I think there was around 70 million Europeans became settlers in the so-called new world.

And this also helped the workers which were back in Europe to wage a better trade union's struggle. They became much stronger. It is very, I have made a study in Sweden. maybe I mentioned it because around 25% of the Swedish workers actually went to the new world and this made social democracy much stronger in Sweden. And these people who went from Sweden to settled in, for instance, the United States was very, very poor people often coming from London,

the agricultural sector, but on their way through the Atlantic Ocean, they actually changed their position from being some kind of proletariat to become settlers, because they become included in economy which was based on slavery, which was based on super exploitation of labor from Asia and from Latin America. and an economy was already based on imperialism in South America and the Philippines. So these poor people from Europe became integrated in the upper layer of a new kind of labor, aristocracy of white male labor coming out of Europe. And this, the American labor market.

was very stratified between this upper layer of European immigrants and below them labor from other parts of the world and below them the black slaves and so on. So you have this very stratified labor market in the U.S. And I think also this also is the reason why the social struggle in the US have been much more based on racism and race struggle than on what you can call social struggle or social struggle as in Europe. And I think still, I think this settlementality in the U.S. is extremely important to understand

how the U.S. these days are working in the world, in the world. world system. It is basically the reason for their solidarity also with Israel. They are also, both of them are settler state and they share this settler mentality. Yeah. I think that is brilliant and fascinating analysis, this whole idea of this reserve army of labor and settler colonialism being this release valve that domestically within Europe creates sort of a tighter labor market for workers to gain leverage and then they have union movements and they build robust social democracies. But in the settler colonies that the Reserve Army fled into, they have these new settler hierarchies, these new racial hierarchies, and it creates just a very different social

context. That struggle plays out much more, as you said, along racial lines in the U.S. than along class solidarity lines. And in fact, that racial politics makes class solidarity more or less impossible in the sense that would be able to actually produce sort of robust welfare states in the way that Europe might have them. But that leads into another follow-up question, which I'm sorry to kind of throw these at you, but I'm just, you know, my thoughts are churning here. We're currently living in kind of a crisis in some sense of social democracy today, and it's not necessarily tied to just neoliberalism and the failures of that project,

but also I think it falls out rationally from your analysis. to the growing instability of like imperialism writ large, right? That the imperial arrangements of the last century, they're not going away, but they're certainly being challenged, the rise of multipolarity, national liberation movements, make imperialism more difficult. We're living right now in the wake of Israel and the U.S. belligerent, aggressive criminal attacks on Iran for just one small little flashpoint.

But the growing instability of the imperial range, makes those compromises less easy to sustain. And I think we're seeing reverberations of that back in the imperial core. And one of those reverberations is a sort of growing crisis of social democracy. Let me know if you think I'm off base there, what your thoughts are on that. Yes. I think that we are really in a period of crisis in imperialism. And one of the reasons for this crisis is actually the trading pattern of unequal exchange because

what is happening now is that the trade pattern for 200 years for 200 years actually the main trade pattern in international trade in terms of unequal exchange was between the global north and the global south but now we are seeing actually that the trade pattern is changing from north-south to south-south,

and that means a decline in unequal exchange for the first time. In 200 years, we have seen a polarization of the world system in a developed core and an underdeveloped periphery, a polarization in terms of living standard and wages and so on. But in the last 10 years, this spell is broken, actually, with the rise of China and other southern countries. We certainly see different trade patterns and therefore also a crisis in imperialism. It seems at the moment that the U.S. is very strong military and they can do what they want. But actually, if we go back to the economics, the U.S. and imperialism is in a huge crisis. And I think we have to talk about the economics as Marxist because economics is the base of what

happening in politics and in military. Of course, there's a feedback, but economy is the foundation. And what we are seeing for the time being is that. the U.S. or the Imperial Corps cannot, they are not longer superior in terms of economics and technology, and therefore they have changed strategy into politically struggle and geopolitical military struggle. It's because they try to protect their hegemony through military and political means because they cannot rule by economic means anymore. we can see that in quantitative terms now,

China and Southeast Asia are the factory of the world. They are producing the main part of what we can call the real economic. And they are not only in quantitative terms, but what is most important is that they also are in quality. turns. They are becoming the leaders of developments of new technologies in solar energy,

in electrical cars, in high-speed trains, in new kinds of computers, and they are also at the same level in artificial intelligence and a lot of other robots and in a lot of other technologies. And what is very, very interesting, thing is that for the first time, what I called a transitional mode of production is superior

to the classic capitalist mode of production in the Global Corps. They are the production and distribution, a transitional mode of production, which is under political command of a communist party is more effective than classical capitalist production. And this is completely new. The Soviet Union never reached that level, only in a few, maybe in the weapon industry and in space industry, but certainly not in general industry. they could only produce the latter and all kinds of inferior industrial product. But now, but now this is very, very different that a plan economy is more effective than a capitalist economy.

This is something new. Oh, man, I think that is so important for people to kind of digest that we're seeing the rise of the new mode of production. and China, by employing it, is showing the world that this is an obviously superior mode of production. And it's made possible the political command of the economy and also, to various degrees, central planning itself, made more possible than it was during the Soviet era by the technologies of the 21st century. That we can have instantaneous communication, instantaneous tracking of supply chains, and that makes political command over the economy feasible in a way that in prior decades, it simply wasn't. And I think that is one of the core developments of what we're seeing historically right now.

And I really hope people can kind of grapple with that and understand that at a high level. But I also wonder that the belligerence that the U.S. is showing, particularly as it lashes out around the world, but also particularly in its own hemisphere, is a sort of reaction to these, the rising, you know, the rise of China, the rise of Southeast Asia, you know, the difficulty of no longer being really an imperial hegemon, still having a massive economy and military, allowing it to do extreme damage, but it's hyper-focused on Venezuela, on Cuba, and farcically, on the surface, at least, Greenland, is that an attempt to try to recreate hemispherically a sort of, you know, imperialized value transfer chain that is becoming less and less possible to maintain globally?

It's a way political and military try to keep some kind of hegemony. But I don't think that it actually changes the economic trends. It doesn't change the economy of the world system. China is getting stronger and stronger. economically and Trump's policy is ruin the imperial cause economy he is disrupting this world market this huge neoliberal world market it's eroding and falling apart by the tariff and and the blockades and the weaponizing of the economy and and this is this is not only bad for for the

U.S., which have this world market have been the goose which have laid the gold neck. It is also a catastrophe for the U.S. Union, the European Union, that they are

derobting this world market, which the European Union are so dependent on. But it is a sign that the ruling class cannot rule in the old way anymore. They cannot rule the way they have ruled the world from

from 1945 up to the financial crisis and they are desperate in finding a new way of ruling the world but if you look at for example the military strengths of the US if you go back

to the economics of this strengths well who is paying for the weapons and who is paying for all the It is the state budget and the state budget have a very huge deficit each year and it's growing and growing to astronomic amounts. And how is it financed? It financed by printing dollars and issuing bonds. It's not based on a solid economic production and exchange of goods.

It's based on a financial scheme. and therefore, of course, the US is so, so afraid of losing the position of dollars as world money because this position is actually so important to pay for the military structure. So also in that way, we see this huge military structure, but its economic foundation is very vulnerable. Because what is happening on the basis, is that people are moving away from dollars and the bonds are losing the interest. China is selling out of its U.S. bonds and it's trying to trade goods in local currency and their own

currency. So in that way also, even the strong military base of the U.S. is not that sound as it seems. Yeah. Again, brilliant, brilliant insight. And people need to really metabolize those points because they are crucial defining features of the modern American economy and imperial apparatus. The way that I sum up the Trump administration is that under the banner of renewal, they are accelerating the decline. And I think this decline is inevitable. And we're seeing the stages of it unfold in front of our eyes. And the shaky economic foundation for the military. empire itself, I think is the thing to look at. And it's getting worse. And you know, the more the U.S. weaponizes the dollar, the more the world finds alternatives and moves away from the dollar. You know, and so the very mechanisms by which the U.S. tries to lash out and control are at the same time the mechanisms by which they further alienate themselves from being able to

actually solve those problems or get the control that they seek. So, fascinating stuff. One of the fallouts, perhaps, of this unequal exchange theory, going back to the theory itself, is that there's these material benefits that workers in the global north receive from imperialism. And there's a direct material benefit that workers get from imperialism, which makes it perhaps harder to imagine workers in the global north as reliable agents, perhaps of solidarity, proletarian consciousness, socialist vanguardism, however you want to put it. How do you respond to that concern? How do you think, perhaps socialist in the North should understand their responsibilities within a global system

structured by unequal exchange from which they themselves benefit in all these ways? Well, for me, this lack of solidarity is a historical fact. You can follow it up from the support of the social democracy to colonialism and through also the support to imperialism and neocolonialism after the second world war, there have been given many explanation of why this is so, and one of them is this theory of false consciousness, that the media can produce a false consciousness in the working class. But you cannot, I don't buy it because you cannot,

of course you can manufacturing consent and something like Chomsky talks about but you cannot if false consciousness can be manufactured for 200 years

or 100 years then I think it's go counter to historical materialism which says that it's the way that people live which are the basis

of how they think so I think it's important that we are facing reality because we need to understand what is going on here in the global north and facing reality if we shall make a strategy and a practice that work.

There has been, I think, in the past two, three years, partly generated by the Palestinian resistance movement, there have been created a new layer of anti-imperalists also in the global north. But we also have to acknowledge that this new anti-imperalist layer is not the majority of the population. The majority of the population actually, I think, is turning at this point to right-wing populism in an effort to try to defend their position in the world system. But of course, this layer of anti-imperialist is a minority, but it's a very important minority because they have to organize themselves

and they have to do what they can to secure that the imperial core is not a safe home base. But of course, as the struggle get harder and harder, I think this anti-imperalist layer will be met with tough measures. We can already see it now that, okay, we are allowed to cry and feel sorry for the victims of imperialism in Palestine. But if we support the struggle against the... imperialism, it is criminalized because then we are a terrorist. And if we go against our own military and all security forces at home,

it is national to reason now. So I think that it's important to prepare for these times in the future struggle. I agree with every word of that. I totally agree with your criticism of false consciousness as the main explanatory mechanism here. There's a deeper material explanation, as you articulated. And I think with this war in Iran, we've already seen stirrings of it. But you're absolutely right that with this war in Iran, they're going to increasingly crack down. Every time in American history there's been a war, they have used the extraordinary situation of the war to increase their powers to crack down on those who get in the way of the war effort.

or who speak out against imperialism as such. You know, workers who go on strike during wars are even more susceptible to being brutalized in their attempt to do so by the state itself, and certainly dissidents who speak out in the time of war. The time of war itself is used as justification for why the state needs to crack down on these, you know, foreign agents or traders within the country. And we've seen that during every single American war. And this one right now is no different. And so I think people really do need to wake up and become very alert of that.

Not that we should shut up or hide or go silent, but that we need to make ourselves more robust through organizing and community because things are only going to get darker. But I want to move forward and I also want to be respectful of your time here, but a crucial component of this and of the entire 21st century, the backdrop to everything we've been discussing is the climate change, the attack on the biosphere, mass extinction events. the threat to the foundation of complex life itself, which is also a result of hundreds of years of colonialism, ultimately capitalism and imperialism and hyperconsumption and all those things. And you connect unequal exchange explicitly to ecology, not just economics, although these really, in the final analysis, aren't separate things at all. How does the same global system that extracts labor value from the South also shift environmental costs and ecological. destruction onto poorer regions? Well, actually, there is a whole school which is called ecological unequal exchange, which are measuring the transfer, not of value in terms of hours and blood, sweat, of tears,

but measuring the quality and quantity of material. exchange. This could be of raw materials like copper or all kinds of minerals and metals. It could be consuming of power, fuels and energy and it could also be where waste are dumped and so on. And it's also very much linked to the consumption power and imperial mode of living. And actually, Emmanuel was also very interested in this subject. And he writes that we can only fly in aeroplanes and fill the sky because the rest of the world does not fly on the majority of the rest of the world does not fly in airplanes and we can only consume all the raw materials that we consume

because the rest of the world do not consume in the way we do. For instance here in Copenhagen, there is not speak that Denmark or Copenhagen should be carbon neutral in 2030 or 2035 and so on. But when we make this kind of calculation and this kind of statement, we don't measure the consumption power. We don't measure that we, most of the things that we are consumed are actually produced in the global south, are produced in China. We accuse China of being a huge polluter and have a huge consumption or also of CO2 and big footprint. But this is because China is producing products which are consumed. And actually, if you want to calculate the unequal exchange in terms of ecology, it's, of course, where the consumption takes place.

It's not where the production takes place. And so in that way, there is a huge on-equal exchange in terms of ecological means also. Yeah, you're outsourcing your carbon footprint. You're not eliminating it. No, yeah, sure. It's wild, yeah. And important to remember going forward as Western core states kind of present themselves as the cutting edge of carbon neutrality when so much of their production and the very existence

of the economies of those states are built through a supply chain where that carbon output is just down the stream a little bit or up the stream as it were. So let's go ahead and I'm going to shift into two more questions here as we wrap up. We mentioned imperialism earlier. You mentioned declining U.S. hegemony, the weakening of imperial structures. Do you see this as a fundamental weakening of imperial structures as such, everything that's happening in the world, multipolarity, the emergence of bricks, China, etc. Or as a reorganization of them, like, what is the future of imperialism and unequal exchange, at least in the next couple of decades, as far as you can tell?

Because your book says past, present and future, so I'm wondering about your thoughts on that. Well, as I mentioned that, that there's a change in the unequal exchange, the unequal exchange, the unequal exchange to the benefits from on equal exchange is declining and there's we have also mentioned

a lot of other economic trends which which I think is putting it's putting imperialism into a crisis and as imperialism is essential for capitalism

it is also putting capitalism into a serious structural crisis. On the other side, as I mentioned, we see the development of a new mode of production, which for the time being, I call the transitional mode of production, which is half market and half plan economy. But the crucial thing is to remember that the part which is market economy is not a free market economy. It's a market economy which are in a cage consisting of still of political decisions. So the overall pattern is that the economy is ruled by political.

decisions. And this is one step ahead to to a major transformation of the mode of production in the world system. I have written a lot of about this transition from capitalism. And we have to understand that the transition from capitalism to socialism, it is not going to happen in some clear nice way in which certainly a socialist mode of production is existing somewhere as some kind of Eden and some kind of beautiful but it is a muddy and it's a very complex transition process which we are facing in the coming period but the most important thing to make this transition happen is to support the continued decline of U.S. hegemony and the establishment of a multipolar world system. I think that this is the way ahead. And I think that

many countries, as we talked about, if they need to develop their economies, they will be looking more and more towards some kind of transitional mode of economy in which political decisions are playing a major role. The principal contradiction, if we got into this multipolar world system, and I think there's two dangers. There's the danger that we run into a major world war, including the use of nuclear arms, that would be a catastrophe for humanity. And the other very dangerous factor is that we don't make the transition within a century, because if we don't do it, we will have very, very serious ecological climate process. So we have to make this process within the next three, four centuries.

And I think that the main problem ahead in this multipolar system will be the contradictions between different transitional economies, nationalism on one side and the need to develop some kind of universal global socialism on the other side. Take, for instance, China. China wants to develop its socialism with national characteristics. But China has also to, China cannot pull the transformation of the world system alone. There need to be other transitional states with a socialist perspective. So China also have to have to keep in mind the development on a universal global, Socialism. So they have to balance between actually making their own socialism because they do it for

nationalistic region and they also have to protect their state. But on the other hand, they also need to develop some kind of universal socialism because it is the only way they can step on to a more advanced socialism which have to solve the problem of inequality in the world and also have to solve the problem of ecological and climate problems. These two issues can only be solved at the global level. They cannot be solved at the national level. So I think the main contradictions will be between the development of different kinds of national transitional states and on the other hand the need to develop a universal socialism or world revolution, if you want, to use the old language.

I think you're exactly right, and I wonder how clearly China sees that contradiction in those trajectories. I don't know. But I'm sure there's people in the Communist Party that do see that clearly. I certainly hope so. Your point about the possibility of this going astray, nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, not doing it fast enough. You know, Marx talks about this. It's the common ruin of the contending classes. Like socialism is not inevitable and going to hatch itself necessarily. It could very well end in barbarism, in nuclear war, in ruin, and knocking ourselves back hundreds or thousands of years. And so that's something we've got to keep in mind.

And I love how the mode of production here is evolving not out of ideological forcing of it to, although there are ideological states and China conceives itself as socialist, but really out of material and ecological necessity. that this new mode of production, which is the first primary stages, perhaps, of the socialist development of a more robust socialist mode of production, has to happen out of material and ecological necessity. And as you say, it's not going to be some Garden of Eden type situation or some perfect transition. We can look back at the transition from feudalism through mercantilism into market capitalism as a centuries-long process with fits and starts

and happening largely outside of the consciousness of any given leader or individual or group. And so, yeah, we have to think of it in a very similar way here. One more question here, and this has been a fascinating conversation and so much important stuff I think people really need to wrestle with. But by the end of the book, you move from diagnosis to strategy and you ask what a transition beyond this system might look like. And you certainly touched on it. But if unequal exchange is built so deeply into global capitalism, what would a realistic path toward breaking it actually involve? You gave us the system level approach to this new mode of production,

but on a smaller level for socialist movements, for ordinary people, what can we do to facilitate this evolution that is so deeply needed? What do you think the strategy is from here going forward? In the global north or in the global south? Either or both, whatever you want to, whatever you want to opine on. As I mentioned, the most important thing is the continued decline of U.S. hegemony. And I think this is actually going well in spite of we're seeing all this mighty military operation.

We can also see that actually this three-eight of U.S. with its junior partner of the European Union and NATO and Japan and so on. This structure is falling apart. And we see the possibility now that the Global South can actually develop their productive forces independent of the global north. They have access to technology from China. And we see the development also now on alternative financial structures

and banking structures to the bread and wood institutions. So actually now we can see the possibility of they are not necessary dependent on the global north anymore that the times of dependent theory is over the global

south can actually develop their productive forces without any connections to the global north some kind of delinking is possible now which was not possible in the

60s and the 70s and in that way they have a basis with delinking also to develop alternative markets, more south-south trade and so on. And then they can reduce the unequal exchange. So in that way, I think that if we can avoid these wars and if we can make the transitions within the coming years, the global south actually can move ahead.

Just making the rise of China and a multipolar system, it actually makes space for states to move in that direction, and it also makes space for movements and political parties to operate and to move. make a transfer within the capitalist countries in the global south. I think on part of the global north, we need to support that struggle as best we can in the global south. We need to support the states which are under attack from the U.S.

And we need to support the transitional state in develop their economy. but also we need to in each of these countries both the transitional countries but also the capitalist countries in the global south, we need to support the universal socialist component

more than the nationalist component because I think this balance is very important in the future and I think that of course we need to develop organizations which could be

which could prepare for future struggles in the global north. But we also need to try to... There are some areas where we can make, I think, more broad political movements. And this is movements against war and especially against the build-off of nuclear arms. 20 years ago or 30 years ago, many people was very concerned about nuclear arms.

Today they seem more and less like, okay, we need more nuclear arms. And this is a very dangerous fantasy and development because if it leads to the use of this nuclear arms, as we talked about, this is a major disaster, not only for, for socialism but for humanity. Yes. Incredibly well said. I agree with all of that. And for those of us in the imperial core, our politics,

if the primary contradiction globally right now is imperialism and U.S.-led insane fascist imperialism, our political project cannot be separated from dismantling, disrupting that empire from the inside of it as much as we can. And everything we do politically has to be geared towards that and be thinking about that. And, you know, any other project that we want, we want to build socialism, that comes on the other side of the defeat of the U.S. Empire. We want to save the planet from destruction.

That comes on the other side of the defeat, particularly the U.S. Empire, but as imperialism as such. And I think we always have to keep that front and center. And that has to be married to, as you said, proletarian internationalism. There's no way around that. Nationalism is not the solution. Internationalism is the only way that we can truly move forward in a way that is sustainable for our speech. And I think that is this that is actually the stakes of the 21st century is the the fate of our species Whereas in previous epochs it was the fate of our region or of our people of our tribe

It is the fate of our species in the 21st century and those are the highest stakes possible But luckily we have wonderful thinkers like Torco Lawson who puts out incredible work who effortlessly applies historical and dialectical materialism to bring extreme clarity to the the actual machinations of the global system. And this book is Unequal Exchange, Past, Present and Future. I'll link to that in the show notes, as well as every other time, Torkel has been on Revlev for people who want to learn more from him. But before I let you go, is there anything you'd like to plug?

Let people know where they can find you and your work online or any final word you'd like to say. No, I've just said that, as you, I'm very happy to publish on Iskra books because you can just download my books and other books on Iskra Books for free. Yes, absolutely. And that's a wonderful thing that Iskra does. All right, thank you so much, Torkel. It's been another fascinating episode. I really appreciate your time and all your work, and hopefully we'll talk again soon. Sure. Thank you. If you like what you just heard, remember that Rev Left Radio is 100% listener funded, 100% independent media.

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