Unequal North-South exchange has drained trillions from the Global South

Evidence

Capitalism is not a dispassionate system of exchange. It is premised on cruel, racialized, long-term asymmetries of power, such as the aggressive, escalating exploitation of the Global South by the Global North. “Drain,” or the unequal exchange of resources that is compelled by the Global North via geopolitical pressure and financial engineering, has totaled 62 trillion from 1960 to 2018, or 152 trillion if lost growth is included, an unimaginable scale of deprivation and violence. The climate crisis is largely the Global North’s doing, but the Global South bears the brunt of the suffering. … For Fernand Braudel, the market economy of supply, demand, and prices is merely the middle layer of our hierarchical society, above the material life of the non-economy, but below the anti-market, the top layer and the real home of capitalism, where “the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘drain’ as unequal exchange compelled by geopolitical pressure and financial engineering.
• SEED: The $62 trillion drain figure could anchor an essay quantifying global North-South exploitation beyond the usual debt and aid metrics.
• XREF: connects to: Finance colonizes global South elites and American urban poor via intermediaries — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 153; Dollar-denominated debt is bankrupting the Global South during the Great Inflation — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 626; OPEC’s 1973 embargo inspired the Global South’s New International Economic Order. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 413