>Or to put it another way, do you contend either that Prebisch-Singer
>were wrong, or that their findings for the period before 1950 have not
>in fact been even more true in the last half century?
To put what another way? Declining commodity prices could be caused by tecnical progress, not imperialism. Of course the reason declining commodity prices are important to some countries is that they've never really industrialized. That failure to industrialize is, among other things, caused by distorted social structures left over from colonialism (and reinforced by neocolonial arrangements), intellectual property restrictions by the rich countries, chronic c/a deficits and the drain of resources because of debt service, etc. But those explain their poverty more than our wealth. And it doesn't mean that SV is extracted from the neocolonies; it means more that there's little value production going on there at all.
By the way, I thought Marxists didn't believe that unequal exchange was the cause of unequal development.
Doug