Introduction to the Updated Edition of Arghiri Emmanuel's ‘Unequal Exchange’

 

Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster

Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade was an explosive work when it was first published in French in 1969, not simply due to the depth of its critique of neoclassical economics, but even more because of the enormous challenge that it presented for Marxist economic theory itself.1 This incendiary reception was immediately evident in that the book incorporated an extensive debate between Emmanuel, a Greek economist, who became director of economic studies at the University of Paris-VII, and the French Marxist economist Charles Bettelheim, under whom Emmanuel had written his doctoral thesis on unequal exchange, and whose views departed sharply from those of Emmanuel. Thus, Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange erupted on the public scene in a storm of controversy, which was already embedded in the book and quickly extended to a wider debate that continued for years, raising the issue of the relation of the working class in the advanced capitalist economies to imperialism. The impact of Unequal Exchange was startling at the time, but it then declined as interest in imperialist theory ebbed in the Western left and as the reality that Emmanuel had pointed to was frequently denied. Meanwhile, the inquiry that he had initiated was taken up by others, such as the Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin, and transformed in other directions. In the twenty-first century, however, the reality of both unequal economic and unequal ecological exchange has come to be regarded as the very crux of the anti-imperialist world struggle, and interest in Emmanuel’s classic work has once again skyrocketed.

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