>Anyhow, you can only see low *prices* put on the Third World products, if
>you insist on being an *empiricist* and forget to consider how wages are
>determined (think about how imperialism has kept *the cost of existence and
>reproduction of the worker* very low outside the capitalist core).
My reply:
I think this is the pivotal issue in this discussion. The point is not how much value is contemporarily transferred from South to North (via uneven exchange, repatriated profits, labor migration, transfer pricing, etc.); the point is why is it that the current division of labor on a world scale is set up as it is, given roughly equal levels of "development" in the world's advanced civilizations prior to the emergence of industrial capitalism (if you believe the non-Eurocentric historians). The fact that such a tiny flow of TNC FDI goes to sub-Saharan Africa has something if not everything to with the fact that most of its land mass was overrun by European colonialism in the era of machinofacture, the Gatling gun, railroad, the steamship, etc. It's not so much that you can't tell the story of European development w/o telling the story of African underdevelopment, as it is that you can't tell the story of African underdevelopment w/o telling the story of European imperialism (the same would go for other examples of uneven development in other places and on other scales) ...
John Gulick