Samir Amin
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."