ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the causes and consequences of globalisation of production, its shift to low-wage countries and how Karl Marx's Capital may help to explain this phenomenon. It presents the results of empirical analysis of the global shift of production to low-wage nations and identifies its key feature: imperialist super-exploitation. The chapter examines terms of Marx's theory of value, by visiting the debate in the 1960s and 1970s between dependency theory and its 'orthodox' Marxist critics, concluding with some critical reflections on Marx's Capital and V. I. Lenin's theory of imperialism. Marxists in imperialist countries have often ignored Lenin's insistence on the economic and political centrality of the division of the world into oppressed and oppressor nations, dwelling instead on his arguments on inter-imperialist rivalry and 'in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism'. Marx's Capital investigated the capitalist form of the value relation, in order to discover how capitalist profit could arise if every commodity sold at its value.
