Australia and the West have experienced, hand over fist, improvements in GDP and living standards since we moved our manufacturing and resource extraction overseas*.

Even as the working class got sold out**, living standards improved across the board. The rich got richer and so did the middle class - with most Australians joining the middle class, during and, since the post-war era.

We were getting a good deal on our imports, taking more from poorer countries (Global South) than we gave in return, but that has been coming to an end.

The Global North (the First World) has monopolised trade with the Global South, by Capital and demand but also coercion and regime change, which ensured a good deal. But with the rise of the BRIX and China’s Belt and Road initiative, the Global South has more opportunity for equal exchange of goods and services.

While the IMF used third world debt to influence policy change, allowing Western Capital to buy up and exploit industry, Chinese banks are forgiving debts and negotiating mutually beneficial agreements (to the benefit of China).

While Western Capital built limited infrastructure to extract a specific resource, China is investing in not just general infrastructure but education and the creation of a local workforce.

The Global South are trading with each other. They have more options, trade is more competitive - we get less of a deal.

Where previously Australia could afford to give Corporations absurd profits and still have money for the people, this will be less and less possible. Australia needs to re-embrace the policies of the post-war era, which ensured a dignified life, and roll back the last 50 years of neoliberal policy built for an age which no longer exists.

* Not just in the neoliberal era, but all the way back to the start of colonial expansion.

** With manufacturing moving overseas and the denationalisation by various Liberal -and some Labor- governments.

*** consent manufacturing became harder to enforce

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/trade-and-globalization

[3] https://www.bu.edu/gdp/2021/03/08/bailouts-from-beijing-how-china-functions-as-an-alternative-to-the-imf/

[4] https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S2377740023500173

CC SA NC

  • Kayel@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
    41·
    4 days ago

    I am referring to unequal trade, - us getting more in return from the Global South (Asia, south america, Africa, etc.) for what we’re giving them.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59881-1

    https://globalinequality.org/unequal-exchange/

    This is true for our trade with China, but I am specifically speaking generally.

    “China’s exchange ratio with the Global North has improved over time. During the 1990s, the exchange ratio was on average 34 to 1. In other words, for every unit of embodied labour, materials, land and energy that China imported from the Global North, they had to export 34 units to pay for it. As of 2015, the ratio had declined to 4 to 1.” https://progressive.international/wire/2025-04-18-china-unequal-exchange-and-the-present-world-historic-juncture/en

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

    Does that answer your question?

    • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      none of your links refer to Australia, they just seem to be a general vibe

      https://progressive.international/wire/2025-04-18-china-unequal-exchange-and-the-present-world-historic-juncture/en

      And if you intensify the exploitation of your domestic resources, you undermine the ecological basis of production. Capital, therefore, requires some kind of “outside”, an external frontier, where it can exploit labour and nature with impunity, and where it can externalize social and ecological costs.

      We live in Australia, we are the major exporter of resources?

      https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/australias-goods-and-services-by-top-25-exports-2024.pdf.pdf

      Not only that but I’m not sure how well we pay Afghanistan for its resources it’ll still be a corrupt islamic shithole.

      It feels real simple to be like, the south is poor because of the west, all you need to do to counter this is find a country that was poor and now isn’t anymore. Singapore, Israel, Qatar, etc

      Even eastern european countries as they shake off communism and socialism and embrace capitalism have had considerable improvement in quality of life

        • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          Yes, this is a Marxist analysis

          oh no wonder i was so confused, I’m like the economics of this are weirdly based on vibes, poor innocent third world countries exploited by the big bad west🥴

          Australia does not manufacture most of the goods we consume

          Right, if anything this puts us closer to the global south than other first world nations because the majority of our exports are commodities and resources instead of global north high value manufacturing and services

          I am arguing, in the medium term, we will not get as good of a deal as we have been historically

          With who? Our biggest partners are China, Japan, South Korea and United States, with the exception of China which still scrapes into global south because of its currency manipulations and deliberately keeps it’s workers poor (there’s that communism 😂) … who feels like they’re getting fucked over by our trade deals? The only one I can think of is Trump who we have a negative trade balance with so we’ve not really been a focus at all.

          We have a positive trade balance and mainly trade with the global north (outside of china and india), I think I’m focused on Australia because you posted in Australia, you’re focused on a grand marxist theory that explains everything and losing all the details in the picture and thinking maybe of continental europe ?

            • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
              2·
              4 days ago

              The USSR took a backwards country of starving peasants and turned it into the worlds greatest superpower while defeating the Nazi’s

              Worlds greatest superpower? This one?

              American “Lend-Lease” support sent to the USSR not only tipped the scales in Eastern Europe but enabled the victory on the Russian Front.

              Assisting the Soviet war effort American Lend-Lease eventually transferred over $11 billion dollars of goods to Soviet Russia—roughly the equivalent of $250 billion today. Those shipments included 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks, 8,000 tractors, 4.5 million tons of food, and 2.7 million tons of petroleum products, as well as millions of blankets, uniforms, and boots, and 107,000 tons of cotton

              https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/lend-lease-eastern-front

              I assume you’ll be the first in line to thank America :D

              You also forgot to mention this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930–1933

              Major factors included the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce.[11] It is estimated that 5.7[9] to 8.7[10][11] million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union.

              Oopsie woopsie 😂 bloody hell that’s so bad though, so glad communism died out

              I also have no idea why you’d use a failed state as an example of just how great marxism is, I guess it’s slim pickings when economic reality hits economic idealism, also funny how literally all the break away soviet states had popular revolutions away from communism and none of them have any intention of going back

              It’s for the return to Australian values, the socialist ones of the post war era. An era which the baby boomers grew up in and then preceded to gut for their profit

              Most Australians are doing pretty alright, in the context of the world we have a super high quality of living, we live like kings, unlimited food, entertainment, access to the worlds knowledge, we live a life unrivalled, the biggest protest we had recently was for… Palestine lol? a place a million miles away which has nothing to do with us

              The biggest problem is housing which is largely because again, we live like kings, more single people living in 2 and 3 bedroom houses/apartments than ever before, many elderly and simply holed up in massive 4-5+ bedroom houses by themselves due to stamp duty making it uneconomical to downsize

              You seem to be solving a problem that largely isn’t there

                • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
                  3·
                  4 days ago

                  not saying we should elect a dictator

                  You’ve just found the problem with communism ;) when you centralise all resources under one man, it turns out people can be real power hungry dicks

                  So your argument is we let things get worse, and be thankful of what we have.

                  I don’t really see things getting worse, with immigration rates going down and labor spending a ton of money on building houses and streamlining approvals I expect over the next 5 years house prices to cool, inflation has been going down as well, by all measures our economy is in pretty good shape

                  Cool, chill, you do that buddy.

                  tbh i can’t ask for much more? I have pretty much everything anyone could want and I’m just a regular joe :S

                  Is there something I should want? 2 overseas holidays a year?

                  Australians travelling overseas again in record numbers despite the cost-of-living crisis

                  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-16/travel-tourism-australia-holiday-cost-of-living/104337072

                  • Kayel@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
                    11·
                    4 days ago

                    Agreed, still off topic. This really was meant to be a global economics piece, not a politics piece.

                    Obviously I think more needs to be done on housing - end capt. gains discount for property, neg. gearing. But agreed.

                    What do you is going to happen when the Americans wake up? I think both of us are going to get some replies.

                    I might delete my comments. This was off topic

                    Edit: My off topic comments have been removed.

                    They were off topic and not conducive to the conversation. I regret getting off topic.

                    Notifying you they have changed since your response.

    • Kayel@aussie.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Trade with China is essential to Australia, don’t get me wrong, the profit of the trade has, and will, change.