Are First-Worlders really "complicit" in Imperialism?

The Vietnamese or Indian factory cannot be viewed in isolation even if this is where the product is ’made’. The description is false and hourly wages are not equivalent. The ‘made in’ place is the final assembly point, usually where the head-company finds the lowest unit labour costs. Intan Suwandi summarises why unit labour costs are more important than base hourly wages or similar metrics. She writes in Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (a recommended book, less than 180 pages excluding endnotes) (p. 56):

Unit labor cost is a composite measure, combining data on labor productivity and compensation to assess the price competitiveness of a given set of countries. It is typically presented as the average cost of labor per unit of real output, or the ratio of total hourly compensation to output per hour worked (labor productivity).

There's a chart on p. 59, which:

reports average hourly labor compensation in manufacturing industries in 2017 U.S. dollars, illustrates a massive discrepancy in wage levels that exists between economies of the Global North and Global South. Here, hourly compensation is converted into actual dollars—representing the hegemonic foreign exchange/reserve currency determining the purchase price of labor, profit margins, and international financial flows—rather than applying a purchasing power parity conversion

The chart shows that isolated hourly wages are meaningless. Unit labour costs by state in 2000–14 USD were (approx.):

• Germany $46
• UK $42
• US $38
• Japan $33
• Mexico $7
• Indonesia $4
• China $2
• India $1

The data is not the most recent but here are some other details (endnotes omitted):

In 1996 … a single Nike shoe consisting of fifty-two components was manufactured in five different countries. The entire direct labor cost for the production of a pair of Nike basketball shoes in Vietnam in the late 1990s, retailing for $149.50 in the United States, was $1.50, or 1 percent. Unit labor costs for [PUMA] sneakers … in China in the early 2000s were so low that the hourly profit on each pair of sneakers was more than twenty-eight times greater than the hourly wages workers in China received to make the sneakers.

A 2019 study … interviewed 1,452 Indian women and girls, including children 17 years old or younger—85 percent of whom did home-based work “bound for export to major brands in the United States and the European Union”—[and found] that these workers earn as little as fifteen cents per hour. They “consist almost entirely” of female workers from “historically oppressed ethnic communities” in India, and their work typically involves “finishing touches” like embroidery and beadwork.

These … exploitative economic relations help us understand the reality of labor-value commodity chains and how they relate to global labor arbitrage. In essence, each node or link within a labor-value chain represents a point of profitability. Each central node, and … link in the chain, constitutes a transfer of value (or labor values). This is partially disguised by conventions with respect to GDP accounting and hence ways of computing value added. In effect, as numerous analysts have now shown, labor values generated by production are … not registered as arising in the peripheral countries due to asymmetries in power relations, in which multinational corporations are the key conduits.

Hidden in … pricing and international exchange … is an enormous gross markup on labor costs (rate of surplus value) amounting to super-exploitation, both in the relative sense of above-average rates of exploitation and also, frequently, in the absolute sense of workers paid less than the cost of the reproduction of their labor power.

Suwandi then mentions that much of this wealth goes to 26 billionaires. You might retort that poor Joe does not benefit in the same way as them. He doesn’t. He benefits when those 28 use their wealth to keep the US on top and keep the cheap goods flowing. Are the Nikes and iPhone ‘cheap’ to Joe? Maybe not; but they’re a lot cheaper than they are to Joe’s Indian counterpart, Jewana.

Another way of viewing the same equation is considering (i) purchasing power and (ii) the source of wages. (i) I’ll quote myself summarising Zac Cope’s Wealth of (Some) Nations (pp. 34–7):

… keeping the numbers simple.

• Take two workers, one in the global north (A), the other in the south (B)
• A is paid $10/hour to make ’widgets’
• B is paid $1/hour to make widgets
• A and B both make 1 widget an hour and they want to buy each other’s widgets
• B must work 10 hours: 10 x 1$ = $10 = one of A’s widgets @ $10/each
• In the same hours of work, A can buy: 10 x $10 = $100 = one hundred of B’s widgets @ $1/each
• The ratio of purchasing power is 1:100.

(ii) The second example looks at a value chain where one worker is e.g. in India and the other in Minnesota:

How does A [functionally] exploit B? …

• Multinational Company (MNC) makes pens and sells them for $40
• Materials, use of tools, rent, and energy, etc, cost $2
• It takes two hours of labour to produce each pen, one hour each from A and B
• MNC pays A for part of the job and pays B for the other part of the job
• MNC pays A $10 for their hour of work, and pays B $2 for their hour of work: $12 total for labour Production costs are $14 in total, leaving MNC with $26 profit per pen. Forget … for a moment [that the MNC steals] $26 [value] produced by the labour of workers … we are interested in the relationship between A and B (… mediated by MNC)
• If the total cost of labour is $12 and two labour hours are needed to produce each pen, each labour hour costs $6
• If A is paid $10 but only produced $6 worth of value, then A was paid $4 more for their hour of work than they produced
• If B is paid $2 but produced $6 worth of value, then B was paid $4 less for their hour of work than they produced
• The extra $4 given to A comes directly from the value produced by B, meaning A functionally exploits B [even if the MNC exploits both].

A does not wake up and think ‘I’m going to exploit B today’. But it doesn’t matter. By they time they both go to bed, that is what [they did].

Then there is the environmental damage caused by living in the US. The global south will disproportionately pay for the decadence of late stage capitalism but the emissions are overwhelmingly produced in or for the north—a hidden benefit of being poor in the US (not to say that many will not suffer from climate change). Andrew L Fanning and Jason Hickel:

There are 129 countries from the global South in our analysis, which are home to more than 80% of the total population, but their aggregate cumulative emissions surpassed fair shares of the 350 ppm carbon budget only in 2012—more than two decades after the world as a whole[.] … The remaining 39 countries in our analysis are from the global North, and we find this group of high-emitting countries used up its collective fair share of the 350 ppm carbon budget by 1969, then overshot its 1.5 °C fair share by 1986 and then surpassed its 2 °C fair share by 1995 (Fig. 1c). As of 2019, this group of countries has already exceeded its collective fair share of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by more than 2.5 times, with cumulative emissions measured from 1960.