Commodifying Plunder

Is 'economic co-operation' between rich and poor countries truly mutually beneficial, or does it mainly widen the inequalities? How does the expansion of global trade and commerce fuel violence, pillage, and deeper exploitation in less wealthy countries?

Contemporary corporations and their owners - equipped with wealth, influence, and empowered by dominant states and global institutions - embody old-style colonial ruthlessness in new forms. Violence riddles global production, through routinised sweatshop labour, environmental degradation, resource grabs, lost livelihoods - behind a veil of 'development' and 'civilised' progress.

Strip away overt violence, and contemporary trade is still plunder, just neatly commodified and concealed - a phenomenon we call 'unequal exchange'. Lengthy and complex supply chains obscure the conditions in which products are made. Few of us would steal food from a starving three-year-old or abduct a mother to exploit her, and yet our everyday participation in the economy has the same effect.

This books explains unequal exchange through basic Marxist concepts and concrete attempts to measure the phenomenon. It seeks to be a resource for scholars and activists - accessible while preserving depth, serious but not opaque. It has a simple message: This system does not end well unless we end it.

'Among the numerous works written on this subject in recent years, very few are at once theoretically comprehensive, empirically sophisticated, and widely accessible. Among these Crelis Rammelt's Commodifying Plunder: Unequal Exchange and the Hidden Logic of Imperialism is quite possibly the best.' John Bellamy Foster