Suwandi et al. review the rape of the global south: the new imperialism is based on labor arbitrage
"commodity chains can be seen as fastened at the center of the world economy, connecting production, located primarily in the global South, to final consumption and the financial coffers of monopolistic multinational firms, located primarily in the global North."
"At issue is the way in which today’s global monopolies in the center of the world economy have captured value generated by labor in the periphery within a process of unequal exchange, thus getting “more labour in exchange for less.” "
"value added, associated with such commodity chains, as we shall see, is disproportionately attributed to economic activities in the wealthier countries at the center of the system, although the bulk of the labor occurs in the poorer nations of the periphery or the global South."
"much of the immense value capture associated with the global labor arbitrage circumvents production in the center economies, at the expense of workers there who have seen their jobs offshored. This has contributed to the amassing of vast pyramids of wealth disconnected from economic growth in the center economies themselves"
"net resource transfers from developing and emerging economies to rich countries were estimated at $2 trillion in 2012 alone"
"the globalization of production is built around a vast chasm in unit labor costs between center and periphery economies, reflecting much higher rates of exploitation in the periphery. This reflects the fact that the difference in wages is greater than the difference in productivity between the global North and the global South"
"This enormous gulf between global North and global South arises from a system that allows for the free international mobility of capital, while tightly restricting the international mobility of labor."
"Although labor is still largely constrained within national borders due to immigration policies, global capital and commodities have far more freedom to move around, further heightened in recent years due to trade liberalization."
"The global labor arbitrage is made possible in part by what Marx refers to as the industrial reserve army of the unemployed—which in this case is on a global scale, thus a global reserve army of labor ... the integration of the workforce of former socialist countries (including China) and formerly heavily protectionist countries (such as India) into the global economy, with the resulting expansion of the size of both the global labor force and its reserve army.[Ref 54] Also central to the creation of this reserve army is the depeasantization of a large portion of the global periphery through the spread of agribusiness.[Ref 55] This forced movement of peasants from the land has resulted in the growth of urban slum populations"
"While competition among corporations is limited to oligopolistic rivalry, competition among workers of the world (especially those in the global South) is greatly intensified by increasing the relative surplus population. This divide-and-rule strategy serves to integrate “disparate labor surpluses, ensuring a constant and growing supply of recruits to the global reserve army” who are “made less recalcitrant by insecure employment and the continual threat of unemployment."
"labor values generated by production are “captured” and not registered as arising in the peripheral countries due to asymmetries in power relations, in which multinational corporations are the key conduits"
"an enormous gross markup on labor costs (rate of surplus value) amounting to superexploitation, both in the relative sense of above-average rates of exploitation and also, frequently, in the absolute sense of workers paid less than the cost of the reproduction of their labor power. "
Long, but worth reading:
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/03/01/global-commodity-chains-and-the-new-imperialism/sidd