It's been easily the hardest academic year of my life but things are drawing to a close. I have already stated some of my misgivings about what I submitted in my dissertation, (namely misrepresenting the position of Rob Steven, whom I now greatly admire), but in the interceding days I haven't developed many new regrets, other than quibbles about grammar. There are now only a couple more things to do before the break, like finishing this website.
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It's been a long road to finishing my 489 but it's finally done. I've had a few people ask if they could read it, which is nice, especially since it's for such a dry subject matter. I've written a summary below.
Recently I've been doing a lot of reading on issues related to the "aristocracy of labour." Back in June I wrote a very long series of articles for the US magazine Cosmonaut on the issue (Note from 29/10/22: the first in the series is now uploaded), and more recently I've been working on something for HIST431 about debates around the British labour aristocracy. For those not aware, "labour aristocracy" is a term historically used to describe high-waged, politically moderate, privileged workers (often in craft unions and other exclusionist formations). It is naturally related to my 489 since both UE and the labour aristocracy have something to do with wage disparities, and Emmanuel was quite clear that he thought well-paid workers benefited from the terms of trade.
It is surprising to many people, especially those from overseas, to learn that during the flourishing of theories of underdevelopment during the 1950s and 1960s, which Gunnar Myrdal called a "great awakening", and which gave us the main theories of dependency, declining terms of trade, and unequal exchange, found a home in New Zealand. However, this was not out of sympathy for the poorer countries, but rather out of a mistaken identification of New Zealand with their lot. New Zealand had "such specific colonial economic characteristics as to group it with Sierra Leone, Ghana, Malaya, Cuba, Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela and some others," according to W B Sutch, the most famous proponent of this view.
Over the last few weeks I've been taking a more intensive dive into the various kinds of unequal exchange theories. Broadly they can be split three ways between "OCC nonequivalence" (nonequivalence "in the broad sense"), "wage nonequivalence" (nonequivalence "in the narrow sense") and "heterodox" theories, that are a mix of different ideas of varying coherence. In putting together my thoughts on these different schools, I've been greatly aided by reading Emmanuel's 1975 conference paper "Unequal Exchange Revisited", which I recently helped turn into a more reader-friendly LaTeX document together with Rob Ashlar and Sebastian Hilgers, available here. I've also put together these thoughts in a longer version, originally to send to Jim McAloon as a progress report on my reading, but now also available as an article here. Both of these projects are hosted courtesy of the Anti-Imperialist Network, which has done great work compiling Emmanuel's lesser-known articles and papers.
As part of some background reading for a HIST419 (historiography) assignment, I recently started getting interested in what actually constitutes "truth" in political economy. This is important since economics as a whole is often little more than a massive collection of very logically rigorous arguments built on some of the dumbest assumptions known to man (humans are rational actors that seek to maximise rewards, you say?). Our criteria for truth impact the kind of questions we ask and the answers we expect to get.
In HIST431 (Jim McAloon's class) one of the assignments tasked students with completing an academic review of a work related to their dissertation. I took the opportunity to write mine on a book that had (and I make no exaggeration), entirely changed my worldview when I read it in mid 2020. Zak Cope's The Wealth of (Some) Nations, was released in 2019, something of a rewrite of his earlier book Divided World, Divided Class. In the intervening couple of years my opinions on the book have changed, though I still acknowledge the role it played in my life.
When he first put forward his theorisation of Unequal Exchange in 1969, Arghiri Emmanuel stated his argument in what are effectively two different economic "languages:" that of Marx and that of Pierro Sraffa. Sraffa (the man with an intensely interesting face depicted above) was an Italian economist, extremely skilled in the use of formal logic to such a degree that Wittgenstein himself felt "like a tree stripped of its branches" after Sraffa pointed out the logical flaws in his arguments. In addition to Wittgenstein Sraffa was also friends with the Marxist politician and theorist of hegemony Antonio Gramsci. Sraffa's logical rigor resulted in a reputation for writings that were incredibly dense, incredibly precise, and damn near impenetrable. It says a lot that Woods' The Production of Commodities: An Introduction to Piero Sraffa is much longer than Sraffa's own Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. If Marx's thousand page tomes spawned a million three page summaries (one effort at which you can find on this site), then Sraffa wrote three page summaries that require a thousand pages to explain from the ground up.
Kia ora, I'm Amal Samaha, a HIST423 (digital history) student at Victoria University of Wellington. This site was made as part of that course in order to encourage research in political economy, and to provide tools and resources to better carry out that research.
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About this site.This site was set up as part of the HIST423 course at Victoria University of Wellington. Please do not quote the site without permission. Archives
October 2022
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