Ashik Kabir

While the rest of Asia disappointed in terms of export revenue in 2015, Bangladesh surprisingly dazed world economy. Bangladeshi export earnings rose to $3.2bn in the last December, setting a new record for the South Asian countries. The success of the export goes to the apparel industry, which contributed 83% of the export revenue. The demand for the cheaper clothes are rising globally and it is making Bangladesh’s position strong as the second largest exporting country in the world. It’s mainly due to the large population and cheap labor of the country.
The export of the country accounts for 20% of the total GDP of the country and where the textile sector contribute 80% of the total export. According to the World Bank the country’s GDP is to grow 6.7% this year which will be one of the fastest in today’s world. The growth road for this industry in Bangladesh is clear for the coming days. As EU is accounted for most amount of export partner to Bangladesh which is 61%, the demand for Bangladesh garments is increasing day by day.
Bangladesh is having a good competition from Vietnam and when the Trans pacific partnership is ratified sometime this year, the competition is to grow hard. So, as we assuming much challenges ahead, we are opting for more growth from these developing states.
But as we are observing the growth of these industries in these developing countries, we are totally ignoring the exploitation that we are receiving from the advance countries. As there are huge amount of debates among the Marxist economists from long time about the impact of imperialism on the developing nations. As Marx had emphasized that when the capitalists will be facing rise in wage and price, they will be bring in the’ reserve army’ who are ready to work for cheaper wage. That explains the colonial expansions of last centuries.
Karl Kaustsky emphasized the commercial reasons for imperialist expansion. According to him , industrial capital cannot sell the whole of its production within an industrialized country. In order to realize surplus value , it must provide itself with markets made up of non-industrial countries, essentially agricultural countries. This was the purpose of the colonial wars of expansion and the reason for the colonial empires. It was Rosa Luxemberg who drew together in a complete theory all these concepts of an imperialism expanding to compensate for inadequate markets for products of the biggest capitalist industries. Lenin drew substantially on Hilferding’s work as well as on the works of some liberal economists like Hobson to produce his works on imperialism at the beginning of the first world war. Like Hilferding, he started from capitalist concentration – the establishment of trusts, cartels, holding companies etc- banking concentration and the appearance of finance capital to characterized what is structurally new in this stage of capitalism.
On the other hand Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, has given a very realistic explanation of imperialism in the modern world system. To him the modern world system started in the 16th century. It was mostly in some parts of Europe and America. The expansion of the world economy happened only because of the capitalist expansion in search of endless accumulation of capital. The capitalist prefer a monopoly market, because that will help them to extract more profit out of it. For having a monopoly, there has to be a very special relationship between the capitalist and the political parties. The political parties will use their power for helping capitalists to retain the monopoly. The state will use its political power to create protectionist measure to stop the small firms to compete in the market and create an oligopoly for accumulation of more profits for the capitalist world. There will be emergence of Core-like economy and the peripheral economy. The semi-peripheral economies will be the middle ground or the developing countries. On the other hand, the core-like economies are the advanced country and the peripheral are the underdeveloped economies. When the core-like economies will be producing a leading product for a long period of time and have overaccumlation, they will start investing in the new leading products and let the semi-peripheral countries produce the previous leading industries. The semi-peripheral countries will be having most amount of competition among themselves, they will try to promote themselves in the core-like status or avoiding to fall under peripheral status. In the 18th century, it was England which was leading the textile industries. In 2000, it was South-Korea, controlling the leading position in textiles. Now, it’s Bangladesh, Vietnam, Pakistan , Srilanka and India who are indulged in the garments production. Even though these countries are achieving unprecedented success in exports of garments, their laborers are the one who are suffering from the consequences. The labors are being suppressed and exploited in every way. A meager amount of wage and poor condition of work is not reflecting the growth the countries are achieving through the past years.
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