The critique of the capitalist international division of labour

The Marxist–Leninist analysis of international trade is analogous to the Marxist–Leninist analysis of the labour market. Where liberal economists see fair exchange and mutual benefit, Marxist–Leninists see unequal exchange and exploitation. Standard expositions of the traditional Marxist–Leninist perspective can be found in Lenin’s Imperialism, Sau (1978) and Carchedi (1986). From an analytical point of view, it is clear that each school focusses on a different aspect of reality. The former concentrates on allocative efficiency and the latter on the dynamics of inequality. From an empirical point of view, the real issue is what proportion of actual historical experience is explained by each of the models. A neat illustration of the view of capitalist international trade which underlies anti-globalist thinking was provided by Hymer and Resnick (1971), and is reproduced below.

Consider the standard problem of the gains from trade. To make the question more specific, we analyse the Mercantilist era (c. fifteenth–nineteenth centuries). The situation in the pre-capitalist countries with which Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England and France traded is assumed to be as depicted in Figure 9.1.