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Concept
Arghiri Emmanuel
Summary
Arghiri Emmanuel (Αργύρης Εμμανουήλ; June 7, 1911 – December 14, 2001) was a Greek-French Marxian economist who became known in the 1960s and 1970s for his theory of 'unequal exchange'.
Not much is known about Emmanuel's whereabouts in the years before moving to France. He was born in Patras, Greece, the son of Charalambos Emmanuel and Katina (born Menounou). Studied at the High School of Economics and Commerce from 1927 to 1932 and then at the Faculty of Law until 1934, from where he went on to work in commerce in Athens until 1937.
While his later works clearly identify him as a Marxist or communist of sorts, it is still uncertain when and under which circumstances he began considering himself as such. Publishing articles at least from 1928, an interest in Marxist theory is evidenced in a 1937 article on 'psychoanalysis as a global theory and dialectical materialism', and yet another on gold as an 'unwelcome immigrant' perhaps links to a long-standing concern with gold and the special economic role of the money commodity. No published record of membership in a communist party is familiar, and it was uncommon in Greece until the Resistance years of World War II, but his later works identified him as a 'paleo-Marxist', both in the historical materialist sense and as a supporter of centralised economic planning, even on a global scale.
Changes in the American immigration policies closed the traditional Greek safety vault, and under the yoke of depression and General Metaxas's dictatorship (1936–1941), Emmanuel, in 1937, went to work in commerce in the Belgian Congo. In 1942, Emmanuel volunteered for the Greek Liberation Forces in the Middle East, and was active in the April 1944 left-wing uprising of the Middle Eastern forces against the government-in-exile in Cairo. In fact, the uprising was not supported by EAM (National Liberation Front) (nor by Stalin), to whom it came rather inconveniently, and it was soon put down by British troops and Emmanuel sentenced to death by a Greek court-martial in Alexandria.
Official source
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