This episode of The Dig, like every episode of The Dig, is produced in partnership with Jacobin magazine.

Jacobin is an incredible publication and you've probably seen a lot of what they've published online, but they also have a really beautiful print magazine.

It comes out quarterly and has well over 100 pages packed with illustrations,

infographics, and some of the best graphic design in the country.

Dig listeners can join 50,000 Jacobin subscribers

developing socialist political thought and debate for just

$15 a year. $15 gets you an entire year of Jacobin in print and access to the magazine's entire back catalog. If you've never

subscribed to Jacobin before you can access this deal by going to BIT dot LY slash Dig Jacobin all lower case that's bitly

slash dig Jacobin, B-I-T-L-Y, from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island.

It is no simple task for a poor country to escape its place in the world's system.

Global South countries like Ecuador, once known as

third world countries, have been consigned since colonial times to

exporting primary commodities from sugar and silver and bananas to oil and copper and

low-wage manufactured goods, while capitalists in wealthy countries like the

U.S. control the most profitable top of the value chain.

Not that First World capitalists share their spoils with First World workers,

at least not since the neoliberal turn. Just as the capitalist system relies on a domestic

order of class domination within which capitalists exploit workers, it also fixes different

countries in particular places in the global economic order.

Ecuador, exporting goods like bananas and oil,

is near the bottom.

Those unequal domestic class and also racial orders are fundamentally linked to the unequal world system.

...