Samir Amin
Bio
Political bio, by Colin Foster:
"Samir Amin, who died this year at the age of 87, was one of the foremost writers of the “dependency theory” which, in the 1960s and 70s came, many left-wing activists came to think was “the Marxist theory of imperialism”.
Many even thought it was “Lenin’s theory”, although the whole structure of the theory was different.
Amin, of Egyptian-French background, lived most of his life in France, and was in the French Communist Party then associated with Maoists. The basic idea of “dependency theory” was that ex-colonial countries were underdeveloped because of a drain of surplus to the richer countries.
The answer — often implicitly, and although many of the “dependency theorists” were or came to be critical of the USSR — was the model provided by the Stalin’s USSR: expropriate the parasitic old property-owning classes, centralise resources in the hands of the state, cut down economic relations with the rest of the world to a minimum.
Amin wrote of “autocentric” development (and he also coined the term “Eurocentrism”). So for example, he wrote a detailed study on the Ivory Coast in the mid-1960s: in which he concluded that industrial development there was possibly only through an “autocentric” version of what he thought to be socialism. In the early 1980s, the Marxist writers Marcussen and Torp showed in detail that the vocally pro-capitalist regime in Ivory Coast had actually achieved what Amin said could only be done through socialism.
The Ivorian capitalists had exploited the workers — and built industry, capitalist industry. Amin continued to write prolifically, adjusting as he went. In later years he looked to the creation of a “multipolar” world as the progressive alternative to US domination. Again, we may get his “progressive” vision realised... by the activities of Trump.
Amin, however, did separate from many of those who have sunk their socialism into a negativistic, “enemy’s enemy is my friend”, “anti-imperialism”.
“Political Islam”, he wrote, “is... fundamentally reactionary and therefore obviously cannot participate in the progress of peoples’ liberation...
[Some say] “that political Islam, even if it is reactionary in terms of social proposals, is ‘anti-imperialist’...
“What I contend is that political Islam as a whole is quite simply not anti-imperialist but is altogether lined up behind the dominant powers on the world scale”."
(https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2018-10-30/samir-amin-1931-2018)
Publications
"Samir Amin The Law of Worldwide Value Translated by Brian Pearce and Shane Mage, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2nd edition 2010. 144pp., $15.95 / £12.95 pb ISBN 9781583672341
Samir Amin
Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy. A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism
Translated by Russell Moore and James Membrez, Pambazuka Press, Oxford, and Monthly Review Press, New York, 2nd edition 2009. 290pp, $17.95 / £12.95 pb
ISBN 9781583672075
Samir Amin Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure Pambazuka Press, Oxford, 2nd edition 2011. 343 pp, £16.95 pb ISBN 9781906387792
Samir Amin
Global History: A View from the South
Pambazuka Press, Oxford, 2011. 191pp., £14.95 pb
ISBN 9781906387969
Samir Amin
Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism?
Translated by Victoria Bawtree , Pambazuka Press, Oxford, 2010. 208pp, £16.95 pb
ISBN 9781906387785 "
(http://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2012/03/pambazuka-published-five-samir-amin.html)
Review
Bill Bowring (?) in the Frantz Fanon blog:
"The first book under review, The Law of Worldwide Value, was first published in 1978 as The Law of Value and Historical Materialism, and Amin has revised and expanded the text in response to the financial crises which began in 2008. As he explains in the Introduction to the new edition (10), his central question, already explored in his thesis, was “that of the ‘underdevelopment’ of contemporary Asian and African societies”, a problem which has arisen in stark form since Marx’s time. His major contribution, in his view, is the passage from Marx’s law of value to his own “law of globalized value”, based on the hierarchical structuring of the prices of labour power on a global scale around the value of labour-power. The globalization of value constitutes the basis for “imperialist rent”. The enemy, for him, is “the later capitalism of the generalized, financialized, and globalized oligopolies.” His optimism is based on his judgment that “since the invention of capitalism stumbled for centuries before finding the particular form that assured its triumph” then the revolutions of the 20th century in Russia and China and what he terms the Southern awakening in the new nations of Africa and Asia should be seen as “a first wave of the affirmation of the objective necessity of socialism.” (127)
When Eurocentrism first appeared in 1988, it was warmly welcomed by Martin Bernal, author of the three volume work of which the first volume, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, was published in 1987 to acclaim from Perry Anderson and many others, and to heated controversy. Both referred, Amin critically, to Edward Said’s Orientalism; and Amin has much in common with Immanuel Wallerstein, the first volume of whose The Modern World-System appeared in 1974, and Amin draws from world-system theory. Both Bernal and Amin have rather disappeared from view since then; it could be said that their critique is no longer in fashion. This new edition of Eurocentrism is therefore particularly welcome. In his Preface to the new edition, Amin summarises his work as “a systematic critique of the Eurocentric deformation in the dominant worldview” (9). He is an unrepentant supporter of modernity, which he takes to be “constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively (i.e. societies) make their own history.” (7) He is therefore clear that modernity is now in crisis because of the crisis of globalized capitalism. “Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the post-modernist discourse of irreducible ‘cultural specificities’” (7). For Amin, modernity is a still incomplete process.
The third book under review is the new edition of Maldevelopment, first published in French in 1989 and in English in 1990; its republication is also an event. The first edition was a synthesis of Amin’s research during the 1980s, that is, “the first decade of the rising new neo-liberal globalization” (1). The new edition benefits from Amin’s appreciation of David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital, and Amin writes that his reading of the history of really existing capitalism is characterised by “accumulation by dispossession”, Harvey’s “powerful expression” (2). Amin proposes a “long history” of capitalism in three distinct phases: a lengthy preparation lasting 8 centuries from 1000 to 1800; a short period of maturity in the 19th century in which the West assumed domination; and a long “decline” caused by the “awakening of the South” in the 20th century, with signs of a second wave of independent initiatives in the 21st century by peoples and states of the South (3). This text has a particular focus on Africa, and the need to explain why development broke down in Africa. Amin achieves a clear-sighted critique of the movement which started in Bandung in 1955 and culminated in the Non-Aligned Movement, with the roles in the 1960s of the Third World radical leaders – Nasser, Sokarno, Nkrumah, Modibo Keita… This is a key text in the Pan-African project. The Introduction to the essays collected in Global History clarifies Amin’s relationship to Marx and to the various schools of Marxism. It also recounts how towards the end of the 1960s André Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein and Amin met together in view of the general viewpoint they shared: globalist and radically critical of Eurocentrism. They shared an analysis of “the long crisis which began in the 1970s (and from which the world has not yet extricated itself!), seen as a crisis of capitalist globalisation.” (10).
The final essay in the collection, “Russia in the world system: geography or history?”, first published in 1998, is of particular interest to me. Amin starts with characteristic clarity: “The double collapse of Sovietism as a social project distinct from capitalism and of the USSR (now Russia) as a state calls into question all the theories that have been put forward both regarding the capitalism/socialism conflict and the analysis of the positions and functions of the different countries and regions in the world system.” (176) Amin is (correctly, in my view) adamant that the Russian Empire is not to be confused with the Western imperial project. The Russians did not exploit the work of the Turko-Mongol peoples of the steppe whose conquest began in the 16th century; “it was a political power (Russian) that controlled the spaces occupied by both peoples.” This continued in the USSR, where Russians dominated in politics and culture, but did not exploit the others. Indeed, wealth flowed from Russia to Central Asia and the Caucasus (181). Amin declares himself to be “completely Marxist” in the sense that capital poses a challenge to the whole of humanity: permanent accumulation can only end in certain death for humanity. Therefore, the question posed by the Bolsheviks in 1917 was no form of “Messianism”, but is the “question now posed to the whole of humankind” (183). Amin’s provisional answer draws from a key component of his theoretical outlook, namely that the polarisation of the centres and peripheries is the “immanent result” of capitalist expansion. Capital requires the “tributary” nature of peripheral regions. Therefore, “the revolt of the peoples who are victims of this development (which is necessarily unequal) has to continue as long as capitalism exists.” (184). Russia for Amin is still confronted by the question how to get out of capitalism: “… the immediate step is to deal with the challenge which confronts us all: building up a multipolar world that makes possible, in the different regions that compose it, the maximum development of anti-systemic forces.”(185)
Finally, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? is a completely new text, published in French in 2009 by Le Temps des Cerises. Fittingly, it is published jointly by Pambazuka Press; by the long-established Pan-African publisher CODESRIA in Dakar, Senegal; and by Books for Change, based in Bangalore, India. Chapter 7, “Being Marxist, being communist, being internationalist” will be of particular interest to readers of this Review. Once again, Amin declares “I am a Marxist”, meaning that Marx is his point of departure; and he insists that to be Marxist necessarily means being a communist (146), because theory must always be linked to practice. And to be a communist means also being an internationalist, since the onus is now on the immense majority of peoples, people of the peripheries, to take responsibility for their future.
There is another section of great interest to me, in Chapter 5, “Peasant and Modern Family Agriculture”. Amin has always strongly advocated the need for “food sovereignty” as against the capitalist seizure of agriculture in the West, and therefore insists on a programme of renewing peasant societies. Land tenure reform is the key. Here Amin returns to Marx’s highly suggestive late correspondence with the Russian Narodniks, including Vera Zasulich (in his letter of March 1881), in which he took very seriously the role of the Russian peasant and the “rural commune”. Marx wrote: "Theoretically speaking, then, the Russian “rural commune” can preserve itself by developing its basis, the common ownership of land, and by eliminating the principle of private property which it also implies; it can become a direct point of departure for the economic system towards which modern society tends; it can turn over a new leaf without beginning by committing suicide; it can gain possession of the fruits with which capitalist production has enriched mankind, without passing through the capitalist regime, a regime which, considered solely from the point of view of its possible duration hardly counts in the life of society.” Amin writes that the developments in Russia following the abolition of serfdom in 1861 were accelerated by the 1905 revolution because Stolypin’s reforms had produced a “claim for ownership” which was finally fulfilled in the radical agrarian reform after the 1917 revolution, producing a great mass of small owners (118). It was no surprise that the peasants fiercely resisted Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation from 1928; and that what then took place was nothing short of genocide. Soviet agriculture never recovered; and the new Russia’s agriculture is a disaster. Amin analyses the various experiments in land reform in Mali, Sudan, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso, and outlines a programme for the global South, for Africa, Asia and Latin America.
What is splendid in Amin’s writing in all the works under review, and his many other publications, is his lucidity of expression, his clear consistency of approach, and, above all his absolutely unwavering condemnation of the ravages of capital and of bourgeois ideology in all its forms. He is a true internationalist, and an inspiration for that reason. In his own discipline, IPE, he aligns himself intellectually with the late Peter Gowan, as well as with François Morin, Frédéric Lordon, and Elmar Altvater. He can rightly take credit for the fact that in 1974 he and André Gunder Frank, alone, predicted that the logic of capital, “based on a massive delocalisation of ordinary industrial production activities towards the countries of the periphery and the recentralisation of activities in the centres around the monopolies that guaranteed them the control of the delocalised production and enabled them to levy rent on it.” (23) They were absolutely right. A note of criticism is however in order. Amin for the most part does not reference his writing, which cannot be regarded as scholarly in the usual sense; and it will be recalled that Marx had a wealth of reference, footnotes included. Amin does however reference his own works, often repetitively. Most disappointing, he hardly engages with his intellectual contemporaries, much less with his critics. He mentions Trotskyism, but only to dismiss it; and despite his clear fascination with China’s agrarian policy, he does not really engage with Maoism. The contrast with Badiou’s intense evaluation of his own Maoist past is striking. For this reason Amin’s style, while clear and persuasive, is assertoric in tone and seems at time to reflect a certain intellectual isolation.
These criticisms notwithstanding, Amin remains an essential point of reference, and an inspiration. Republication of his key works is to be welcomed without reservation."
(http://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2012/03/pambazuka-published-five-samir-amin.html)
Discussion
Loren Goldner:
"Who is Samir Amin? He is perhaps best remembered as the author of the two-volume Accumulation on a World Scale, which, like Eurocentrism and most of his other books, have been translated and published, not accidentally, by Monthly Review Press. He might be less charitably remembered as one of the more outspoken apologists of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the years 1975-1978, persisting even when it became known that the Khmer Rouge's near- genocidal policy had killed 1 million of Cambodia's 8 million people. Cambodia is in fact an example of Amin's strategy of "de-linking", which repeated unhappy experience has taught him to call a "national popular democratic" strategy, since neither the Soviet Union nor China nor Pol Pot's Cambodia can be plausibly characterized as "socialist". (Cambodia, significantly, is not mentioned once in Eurocentrism.)
Amin belongs to a constellation of thinkers, including Bettelheim, Pailloix, Immanuel and Andre Gunder Frank, who worked off the ideas of Baran and Sweezy and who became known, in the post-World War II period as the partisans (not of course uniformly agreeing among themselves) of the "monopoly capital" school of Marxism. The "Monthly Review" school, which had its forum in the publishing house and journal of the same name, evolved from the 1940's to the 1980's, liked "anti-imperialist" movements and regimes, and believed that "de-linking" (to use Amin's term) was the only road by which such movements and regimes (which they then tended to call socialist) could develop backward countries. This inclination led them from Stalin's Russia to Mao's China, by way of Sukharno's Indonesia, Nkrumah's Ghana, Ben Bella's Algeria to Castro's Cuba. Most of the time, they came away disappointed. They went with China in the Sino-Soviet split. The post-Mao evolution cooled them on China, but this disappointment was quickly followed by Pol Pot's Cambodia, the expulsion of the (ethnic Chinese) boat people from Vietnam, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Sino- Vietnamese border war of 1979, and China's virtual alliance with the U.S., It was hard, in those years, to be "anti-imperialist" forces were all at war with each other, and when China was being armed by the biggest imperialist of them all. With the fundamentalist turn of the Iranian revolution for good measure, by 1980 a lot of people, including people in the Third World, were coming to the conclusion that that "anti-imperialism" by itself was not enough, and some were even coming to think that there was such a thing as a REACTIONARY anti-imperialism. Finally, around the same time, countries like South Korea and Taiwan emerged as industrial powers, not by autarchy, but by using the world market and the international division of labor, which Amin and his friends had always said was impossible.
De-linking is a fancy name for an idea first developed by Joseph Stalin called "socialism in one country". (Amin thinks that Stalin was too hard on the peasants, but he has never said what he thought about the millions who died during Mao's "Great Leap Forward".) Amin and the school he comes out of base their world strategy on a theory of "uneven development" which they see as a permanent by-product of capitalism. This in itself is fine, and was worked out in more sophisticated fashion by Trotsky 80 years ago. For Amin and his co-thinkers, de-linking is a strategy to break the "weak links" in the chain of international capitalism. Karl Marx also had a theory of "weak links", which he called "permanent revolution", a term significantly never used by Amin, probably, again, because of its Trotskyist connotations. Marx applied it to Germany in 1848, where it explained the ability of the German workers, because of the weakness of the German bourgeoisie, to go beyond bourgeois liberalism to socialism in the struggle for democracy, hence giving the revolution a "permanent" character. Leon Trotsky applied same theory in Russia after 1905, and was alone, prior to 1917, in forseeing the possibility of a working-class led revolution in backward Russia.
But Marx and Trotsky, unlike Amin, did not propose that the workers in "weak link" countries "de-link" from the rest of the world. They saw the working class as an international class, and saw German and then Russian workers as potential leaders in a world revolutionary process. Following this logic, the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy of 1917 was entirely predicated on a successful revolution in Germany for its survival. When the German revolution failed, the Russian revolution was isolated and besieged. Only when Stalin proposed the previous unheard-of grotesquery of "socialism in one country", and the draconian autarchy it implied, did "de-linking" first enter the arsenal of "socialism".
Although Amin and his Monthly Review colleagues rarely spell out their origins so clearly, their theory rests on the defeat, not on the victory, of the world revolutionary wave of 1917-1921. Amin's theory takes from Marx's notion of permanent revolution only the "weak link" aspect. Amin thinks that "de-linking" saves the workers and peasants of the de-linked country from the bloody process of primitive accumulation imposed by Western capitalism, but it only legitimates that same process, now carried out by the local "anti-imperialist" elite. The workers and peasants of Cambodia, for example, learned this lesson the hard way. Amin's theory also "de-links" the workers and peasants of the Third World from the one force whose intervention (as the early Bolsheviks understood) could spare them that ordeal: the international working-class movement. (Amin thinks socialist revolution by working people in the West is essentially a pipedream; he at least has the honesty to say so. Amin's theory, finally, links the workers and peasants in the "de-linked" countries, under the auspices of "national popular democracy" (he does not dare call it socialism, as he and others used to) to Mao, Pol Pot and their possible future progeny, who substitute themselves for Western capitalists and carry out that accumulation under the rhetoric of "building socialism". That is why it is appropriate to call Amin's theory that of a Third World bureaucratic elite, and his universalism a univeralism of the state.
All of this is stated only allusively in Eurocentrism; Amin's book De-Linking (which appeared in French in 1985, and which will soon appear in English) is more explicit. In the latter book at least, Amin gingerly raises the question of Cambodia, where he speaks (as such people always do) of "errors", but nowhere does he say why "de-linking" will work any better the next time.
One can therefore only regret that Samir Amin's spirited defense of some of the most important aspects of Marx, so maligned in the current climate of post-modern culturalism, as well as his much-needed attempt to go beyond Eurocentric Marxism, conjugates so poorly with his "national popular democratic" strategy of de-linking. "National" and "popular" were also words central to the language of fascism, and none of the regimes Amin has praised over the years for "de-linking" have a trace of democracy about them. The next breakthrough in world history has to go BEYOND the exploitation which characterizes world capitalism, in the "periphery" AND in the "core". Recent history has seen enough cases where "de-linking" has led to autarchic meltdowns that have tragically led millions of people in places like Poland, the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia to think that Western capitalism has something positive to offer them. It doesn't. But neither does Samir Amin."