André Mueller

Social democracy is not a viable alternative to capitalism. It is a tempting prospect, but ultimately suffers from violent contradictions that cannot be sustained. Social democracy tries to establish a compromise between (a) capitalism, and (b) socialist demands for fair wages, good public services, and environmental protections. But the latter represents a real problem for capital. It increases input prices, and increases workers’ bargaining power, and makes capital accumulation very difficult to achieve. One way to resolve this tension is to abandon capital accumulation and transition to a post-capitalist economy where production is democratically organized around human well-being and ecology (in other words, socialism). But social democracy, which is ultimately committed to capitalism, takes a different approach. It resolves the tension through imperialism. Social democratic states appropriate cheap labour and nature from the global South, from an external “outside”, thus allowing them to offer good wages and public services at home while also maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation. Even states that may seem neutral or benevolent, like some of the Scandinavian countries, benefit from a massive net-appropriation of labour and resources from the global South through dynamics of unequal exchange, which enables them to sustain the social democratic compromise. Crucially, while this option is available to states in the imperial core, it is generally not available to states in the periphery. In the periphery, when capitalists face progressive demands from unions and environmental defenders, they don’t have the option of conceding and then relying on imperialist appropriation to maintain accumulation. There is no “outside” for them. Their only option is to crush the progressive demands. Indeed they often do this with the direct support of the core states. This is why so many capitalist states in the South are characterized by violence and repression. It is not because they are somehow intrinsically given to violence… it is because capitalism *requires* violence. By contrast, the core states can have nice human rights at home because they externalize the violence that capitalism requires. Social democracy offers only the illusion of a solution. An illusion for some, that is. The Congolese coltan miners and Bangladeshi sweatshop workers that supply Western multinational firms are of course under no such illusion. The only real solution is to overcome capitalism and achieve a post-capitalist economy. It is 100% possible to have a functioning economy that ensures human well-being and ecological stability *without* needing imperialism. But it requires abandoning capital accumulation.

In this new paper we calculate the unequal exchange of labour between the global North and global South. The results are quite staggering. You'll want to look at this... 🧵 nature.com/articles/s41467-0…