Unequal Exchange Imperialism of Trade

Unequal Exchange: Imperialism of Trade V M Dandekar This article, and another to appear next week, are extracted by the author from his R C Dutt Lec- tures on Political Economy delivered recently at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In this article, after reviewing Emmanuel's thesis on unequal exchange in international trade, the author reformulates its main propositions by recasting them in the Sraffa system. In the article to follow, he applies these propositions to a domestic economy and elaborates on the form exploitation and class conflict as- sume under conditions of unequal wages between different sectors and industries. He concludes by bringing out the implications of this for the prospects of a peasant-worker alliance in the Indian economy.