[lbo-talk] Is India Exploited by imperialism?

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed Jan 21 09:21:58 PST 2004



> Hari Kumar wrote:
>
> >Doug: "Well, yeah. Here's a specific question: Ulhas says India is
> >not exploited by imperialism - do you agree?
> >REPLY: In a word "No". (<no wink>). Now Grand Inquisitor - You are
> >the expert economist - tell me what you think is the answer to that
> >question. H
>
> Not inquisitor, but interviewer: I'm asking because I can't really
> make up my mind on this question.
>
> Doug

It would make sense to first define the term "exploitation." The common meanings of the term are (i) use for profit (no pejorative connotation as it implies any commercial transaction) and (ii) use without just compensation (with a pejorative connotation).

Of course, th eproblem of the latter is what constitutes "just." Marx addressed that problem in his definion of value by arguing that under capitalism commodites are exchanged, on average, at their value, so form that point of view no unequal or "unjust" exchanges exist, at least in a long run. Exploitation obtains somewhere else, namely because labor under capitalism is treated as any other commodity, but in fact it is unlike any other commodity in the sense that it can produce suprlus value whereas other commodities cannot. So capitalists buy labor at their "market value" (defined by the cost of reproducing it) but in fact they get as a windfall more than that, namely the surplus produced by labor, which they keep to themsleves in the form of a profit.


>From that point of view, the question whether India is exploited is
impossible to meaningfully answer, if not totally meaningless, in the same way as the question whether, say, people are poor, good, tall or whatever - because the anaswer depeneds on whom under what condition. "India" or any other aggregate cannot be exploited, just as it cannot think, feel and do any other thing that humans do. The term exploitation can apply only to a part of the India's population, namely that part which sells its labor power to owners of means of production (domestic and foreign), but the same pertains to any other country. So the only meaningfula way of talking about "India's exploitation" is to compare it to other countries in terms of the share of its population selling their labour power or the exchange value of that labor power.

I think that adding "imperialism" to the mix, which was done mainly to serve the interests of Russian and affilated national elites competing against Western capitalists, destroyed the concept of economic class and replaced it with the notion of national identity - a clever device that fused the goals of the national elites with those of the working class and set them against a foreign bogey man.

Again, "exploitation," or privatization of the surplus produced by labor, is defined not by national identity, but by property relations. The proposition that "countries are exploited" is at best a shortcut for saying that "most peopl ein that country are exploited" - but otherwise devoid of empirical meaning.

Wojtek



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