Los Raw material producing countries in the global unity of capital accumulation: an alternative approach

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the fundamentals of an alternative approach on the nature of national economies historically specialised in the production of raw materials for the world market, recently appeared in the academic literature. In order to do so, the article discusses the relevance of recognising capital as a social relation, which is global in content and national only in form for the understanding of the way these type of economies develops. Moreover, it emphasises the importance of analysing the realization of the “law of value” in the world market when ground rent bearing commodities are exchanged. Finally, the article considers the specificity that, given these fundamentals, characterizes the raw material producing countries based on recent researches on the Argentine case. In the course of the presentation, the article highlights the substantive differences between this approach and the dominant explanations in the academic literature.

Keywords: world market, law of value, underdevelopment, Latin American economies.