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INTRODUCTION

Aijaz Ahmad

To be a ‘Marxist’ is to continue the work that Marx merely began, even though that beginning was of unequalled power. It is not to stop at Marx, but to start from him … Marx is boundless, because the radical critique that he initiates is itself boundless, always incomplete, and must always be the object of its own critique (‘Marxism as formulated at a particular moment has to undergo a Marxist critique.’).

– Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value

Samir Amin (1931–2018) was one of the grand intellectuals of our time.¹ A distinguished theoretician, his life of political activism spanned well over six decades. A socialist from an early age and trained as an economist, he insisted that laws of the economic science, including the law of value, were operationally subject to the laws of historical materialism. Trained also as a mathematician, he avoided too great a mathematization of his concepts and kept algebraic formulae to a minimum in even the most technical of his writings. The ambition always was to retain theoretical rigour while also communicating with the largest possible number of readers—and activists in particular—through exposition in relatively direct prose. His readership, like his own political activism, was spread across countries and continents.

Amin came of age in the 1950s, when the wave of socialist revolutions seemed to be very much on the ascendant and the old colonial empires were being dismantled across Asia and Africa. Communist parties and socialist movements had emerged in these continents, more in Asia than in Africa, even before the Second World War. Onset of the postwar period witnessed immense expansion of revolutionary activity—the Chinese revolution, Korea, the onset of revolutionary liberation movements in Indochina and so on. With the notable exception of China, however, most countries in these continents had produced relatively little original work in the field of Marxist theoretical knowledge. Study of any sort of Marxism largely meant explication and/or translation of texts produced elsewhere, and that too was confined to the very brief texts or extracts from the Marxist classics or exegeses done in Britain, France or the Soviet Union. This now began to change, in several notable ways. First, we witness the rise of a new generation of Marxist scholar-activists across Asia and Africa over the very years when the colonial empires were getting dismantled. Second, a number of these new intellectuals, often associated with communist parties or national liberation movements, bring into their work increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the more fundamental of the classics: the major works of Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Kautsky and others. Third, attention shifts to extended, rigorous analyses of (1) the historical development, modes of production and class structures not so much of Europe as of Asian and African countries, and (2) the very elaborate mechanisms involved in the exploitation of the imperialized countries, i.e., the process whereby values produced in the colonies were appropriated for accumulation in imperialist centres.

Mention of a few dates should clarify this. Thus, for example, Amin submitted his 629-page doctoral dissertation to the University of Paris in 1957 and published it much later as the two-volume Accumulation on a World Scale (French edition 1970; English translation 1974). In the course of roughly those same years, India witnessed the publication of three books that were foundational in the making of Indian Marxist historiography: D.D. Kosambi’s An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963) and R.S. Sharma’s Indian Feudalism (1965). Across the oceans, in Latin America, all the founding texts of Dependency theorists—Theotonio Dos Santos, Celso Furtado, Ruy Mauro Marini, Andre Gunder Frank, and others—also appeared in the 1960s and early ’70s.² Theoretically, Amin was much closer to Paul Baran who published The Political Economy of Growth in 1957, the year Amin submitted his mammoth dissertation. The great classic of Marxist political economy that Baran co-authored with Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, followed soon thereafter, in 1966. Anatomies of imperialism had thus arrived at the very centre of new Marxist thinking across the world, and Marxism itself had become a powerful tool for independent thought and research across the Tricontinent. On both these counts, Amin’s dissertation would appear to be among the first texts re-fashioning the contours of postwar Marxism in a very particular way, as we shall argue below.

Amin was proficient in several languages but wrote primarily in French. He was a stunningly prolific writer, producing books and articles with great speed until death itself silenced that fertile mind. Not all his work is available in English. Some of the translations have appeared elsewhere but, on the whole, Monthly Review Press has been by far the most devoted publisher of his work in English translation. This collection brings together eleven of Amin’s essays that the magazine has published since 2000. There are others that appeared in MR during this period.³ The objective here is to assemble a not too cumbersome a collection of his essays that would elucidate some of the most fundamental coordinates of Amin’s thought in the closing years of his life. The introduction here is designed not to explicate those texts but to situate them in the larger fabric of his life in which the personal, the political and the theoretical were meshed together in a tight weave.

I

Samir Amin published two books of reflections on his own life. In Re-Reading the Postwar Period, he offers his own reconstruction of his political views and theoretical positions as they evolved from one decade to the next, up to the beginning of the 1990s.⁴ The fact that he arrived in Paris to start college in 1947, the year India got its independence, reminds us that his adult life coincided with exactly the period he reviews in that book. He was a young communist and a student activist in France during the great, bitter wars of liberation in the French colonies of Vietnam and Algeria. Dismantling of the British and French colonial empires were the epochal events of his youth. The overlap between colonialism, postcolonial imperialism and capitalist accumulation logically became the central occupation in his intellectual life as well as in his political activism for the rest of his life. In Capital and related works, Marx had shaped the science of the capitalist mode of production as it had evolved in Europe, Britain in particular, up to his own time. In other texts, such as the Grundrisse and the much later Ethnographic Notebooks, Marx said much about the world outside Europe but mostly about precapitalist formations. He wrote extensively and often very perceptively about colonialism but mostly at the level of factual description and political denunciation, with only a few scattered remarks of lasting theoretical import. For Marx, a compulsive globalizing tendency was inherent in the very mode of functioning of capital itself. However, aside from this repeated prediction, the actual corpus of his work did not encompass, nor was the third quarter of the 19^th century a propitious time to produce, a theory of a the capitalism that was to become a fully globalized mode of production—not only of appropriation, extraction and circulation—in the form, first, of colonizing imperialism and, then, even more strongly after the dissolution of the old colonial empires. Amin’s distinctive undertaking in his doctoral dissertation that was later published as Accumulation on a World Scale was to apply the theoretical categories of Capital to the study of the capitalist mode as it unfolds globally through the agency of colonialism, putting in place structures of exploitation and accumulation that were to greatly outlast the colonial era per se.⁵ For him, as for very few other Marxists, the end of the colonial period marked a decisive turning point in the history of human freedom that opened up new avenues for liberation struggles for peoples of the Tricontinent—but not a fundamental break in histories either of capitalism or of imperialism per se. This historical ambiguity of that conjuncture is best witnessed in the fact that the quarter century, 1945 to 1970, in which those colonial empires were largely dissolved, has also gone down in history as the Golden Age of Capital.⁶ This intent to read Marx rigorously but creatively in light of the later evolution of the capitalist mode remained a major thread in Amin’s work all his life, up to The Law of Worldwide Value (2010) and beyond.⁷ We shall return to this presently.

Re-Reading the Postwar Period recounts the stages of his own intellectual development in relation to the main features and events of that period. The latter portions of the other memoir, A Life Looking Forward, reconstruct that same politico-intellectual itinerary in more personal terms but it is in the earlier sections of the book that we get a vivid narrative of his growing up in a rather unique family and his early orientation toward revolutionary politics, so that all of his life, beginning to end, seems to cohere into an integral whole.⁸ This more personal memoir opens with a simple sentence: ‘Ancestors do matter.’ This then is followed in the same opening paragraph with: ‘Certainly my own family, on both my mother’s and father’s side, reminded me from time to time that the education they were giving me was a ‘legacy’ to which they were firmly attached.’ With an Egyptian father and a French mother, this ‘legacy’ had two sides to it: ‘… my parents had actually met in Strasbourg as medical students in the 1920s. It was a happy meeting between the line of French Jacobinism and Egyptian national democracy—in my view, the best traditions of the two countries.’⁹

The father’s side was Coptic upper class, part of a cosmopolitan mini-world of Christian and Muslim Egyptians, Greeks, Armenians, Maltese as well as French and British émigré residents sprinkled all over Cairo but spread more widely over Alexandria, Port Said and more generally across the region where the fertile Nile delta of Lower Egypt meets the country’s Mediterranean coast. The family, which included well-known publishers and writers of the 19^th century, was part of a larger milieu that valued secular democratic convictions, higher learning, professional standing, and a sort of liberal bourgeois enlightenment that looked down on all sorts of feudalism and conservatism. His father, a doctor by profession and a bourgeois with social conscience, was opposed both to British colonialism and to monarchy, and he preferred communists to demagogic nationalists, including Nasser. On the other side of the family, Amin quotes his maternal grandfather, a freemason and a socialist, as once explaining to him, ‘we Alsatians helped to make the [French] Revolution and we know the meaning and price of liberty’. As for the maternal grandmother, she, ‘born soon after the Paris Commune in 1874 … was one of the descendants of the French revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Drouet, who played a role in the arrest of Louis XVI at Varennes in 1791 … My grandmother was quite proud of this ancestor, who was also active in the Babeuf movement…. As for my grandmother’s name, Zelie, this was quite fashionable in the 19^th century, but she told me she had been given it in homage to the Communard Zelie Camelinat’. This grandmother disliked religion and preferred to revive the Enlightenment slogan ‘No God, no masters’, which 19^th century Anarchists like Bakunin shared at the time with Marx.

Democratic Wafdism, left-oriented anti-colonialism, and anti-monarchism on one side; family memory of Republican and revolutionary regicide, Babeuf-style communism and the Paris Commune on the other side: a pleasing and formidable ‘legacy’ indeed! Amin grew up in this loving, happy, sprawling and well-integrated family with clear-cut political views and historical moorings, and he went to school during the Second World War when Britain was still a colonial presence and a master of the Egyptian monarchy while a German advance through the whole region was at one point a distinct possibility. His secondary school, a French Lycée, was not immune to various political currents in Egyptian society: monarchists and anti-monarchists, nationalists of various stripes, and of course communists. Amin writes of being firmly in the communist group of students. Upon finishing secondary education he officially joined the Egyptian communist party. When Andre Gunder Frank asked Amin’s mother as to when in her opinion her son had become a communist, the mother good-humouredly recounted a childhood anecdote and conjectured that it was perhaps at the age of six.

The ten years that elapsed between 1947 when Amin first arrived in Paris for post-secondary education—joining the French Communist Party quite swiftly, having joined the Egyptian communist party upon finishing secondary education—and 1957 when he submitted his doctoral dissertation were of course the years of the great wars of liberation in the French colonies of Indochina and Algeria, as mentioned earlier, leading to bitter polarizations within French society between pro-war and antiwar segments of activists, intellectuals, university faculties and students, and the general population itself. That was also the last decade of the French Communist Party’s (PSF) very formidable role in French politics, before the decline began, and of Marxism as the central issue in French intellectual life (indicated, for instance, by Sartre making his passage from Existentialism to Marxism¹⁰ and Merleau-Ponty’s contrasting renunciation of Marxism in favour of a left-liberal position). France was also home to substantial enclaves of immigrant working class drawn from its North African colonies, Algeria in particular. Paris itself had been a major intellectual centre for anti-colonial students, activists, writers and intellectuals from the African and Caribbean colonies since the 1930s, when luminaries such as Senghor and the two Césaires (Aimé and Suzanne) were among the group that invented Negritude, a literary movement deeply marked by political and philosophical positions of the left and often combining a Pan-African ideology with Surrealist poetics.¹¹ Fanon (a student of Aimé Césaire) arrived in 1946 from yet another French colony, Martinique, to study psychiatry in Lyon, in an institution where Merleau-Ponty, a key influence on Fanon, was teaching philosophy. Amin arrived in Paris a year later, in 1947, and Alioune Diop founded the legendary journal Présence Africaine that same year, going on then to establish the equally legendary publishing house, Editions Présence Africaine, two years later in 1949. In 1956, the year before Amin completed his doctorate, the publishing house—by then the world’s foremost publisher of writers of African origin (writers of the Black Atlantic, we might now say)—organized the first International Congress of Black Writers and Artists (for which Picasso designed the poster). That ten-year period witnessed the publication of four classics of anti-colonial literature that were centred very largely on the broader African experience: Fanon’s two texts, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1961) and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957).¹² Those are not books of political economy but what they shared with Amin’s dissertation which he submitted right in the middle of that anti-colonial intellectual ferment was the shared conviction, stated and documented at great length, that colonialism had produced a binary world—literally a world—that just could not be rectified through any kind of reform or reconciliation but had to be destroyed and then rebuilt on altogether different, revolutionary foundations. Amin and Césaire were of course communists at that point in their lives. Fanon had moved in communist circles in his student days, had studied Marxism as assiduously as he read existentialism and Nietzsche, was brought into the Algerian liberation movement by the leader of its left wing, Abane Ramdane, and toward the end of his life he would lecture to select groups of that movement on Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, virtually the last great (and unfinished) philosophical work in Western Marxism. Samir Amin was very much product and part of that ferment. His difference and distinctive achievement, however, was that unlike others who did such distinguished work in literature and aesthetics, political theory, psycho-sexual anthropology or philosophical dialectics of a materialist kind, he was to strive for a rigorous Marxist theory of the political economy of this fundamental division between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of a structure of global capitalism resting on a Centre-Periphery relation that could not be rectified except through complete overturning of capitalism itself.

These few details are offered here to indicate the textures and dispositions of the social world in which Amin’s intellectual and political formation was grounded. In his personal life, he was possibly even more attached to his mother’s family than to his father’s, and he thought of the French Revolution as the singularly seminal event in modern world history. Yet his identification with Egypt and more generally with Africa was strong. After submitting his dissertation he left for Egypt at a time when Nasser was at the apex of his popularity after nationalizing the Suez Canal in July 1956 and steering Egypt safely through the Tripartite invasion later that year (mounted jointly by the U.K., Israel and France).¹³ Amin took up a position in Nasser’s Economic Development Administration which he resigned three years later in 1960 thanks partly to the frustrations he encountered at work and partly because of Nasser’s accelerated persecution of communists. He then moved to the newly independent Mali where he worked in the Ministry of Planning for the next three years. After receiving appointment as professor of Economics in France he chose to teach at the universities of Poitiers, Vincennes and Dakar. From 1970 onwards he served as Director of the UN’s African Institute of Economic Planning in Senegal. Later, he was to occupy a host of other positions including those of the director in the Africa office of the Third World Forum and president of the World Forum for Alternatives, while Dakar remained a major base for his work even as he travelled the world and maintained a residence in Paris. Between submitting his dissertation in 1957 and re-writing it for publication in book form as the two-volume Accumulation on a World Scale in 1970, he published seven books, all, significantly, on various countries and regions of Africa: Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Senegal, two on the Maghreb and one—Class Struggle in Africa (1969)—with reference points across the continent.¹⁴ That was all in addition to his practical participation in a number of political movements in various African countries. No wonder that in Africa Amin was always seen as much more of an African intellectual than an Arab one.

II

The great colonial empires of the past were dismantled during the thirty years after the Second World War, with the process reaching its grand closure with the liberation of Vietnam in 1975 and the 470-year old Portuguese rule over its African colonies ending the same year. That, alas, was only one side in the historical constitution of that period. For, those same years witnessed the making of a far more powerful and historically unprecedented empire of worldwide proportions. I have written elsewhere that two world wars were fought to determine whether Germany or the United States would inherit the earth if and when the older colonial empires were to expire. In the event, the United States achieved swiftly what the Nazis had only dreamed of: world domination, economically, militarily, politically, even culturally. Only the socialist countries remained outside this dominion for some time but in a state of permanent siege, until those state systems too disintegrated at the end of what Eric Hobsbawm was to call the Short Twentieth Century (1914–1991). Liberalism thus succeeded where fascism had failed; by the 1980s, when the term ‘neoliberalism’ had not yet become common currency, some scholars were describing the U.S. variety of the liberal system itself as a ‘friendly fascism’.¹⁵

The American project of a global empire that got going immediately after the Second World War had four major components. First, it was deemed supremely important that U.S. take economic and military command of the former centres of world capital in Western Europe and Japan: the Marshall Plan (1947), NATO (1949), the Treaty of San Francisco (1951). This also meant, quite centrally, that all the dominant political forces of Europe and Japan—from the Social Democrats to the Fascists—become part of a worldwide anti-communist crusade led by the U.S.¹⁶ Second, there was a concerted effort to put in place an elaborate set of what in today’s parlance might be called ‘global governance’. Central to it were institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF for economic and financial management and the United Nations for political management. Literature on the World Bank, IMF, etc. and on the controlling power of the U.S. in such institutions in voluminous.¹⁷ The bicameral institutional architecture of the United Nations was significant. All the nation-states, large and small, that were considered sovereign in their own territories were given membership of the General Assembly which nevertheless had rather restricted decision-making powers. Real decisionmaking powers were basically reserved for the Security Council in which only the U.S. and its allies had permanent membership, plus the lone Soviet Union; Taiwan held the Chinese seat until 1971. Third, the whole of the Tricontinent was to be locked into a system of overlapping alliances headed by the United States, exemplified by the founding of the Organization of American States (OAS) in April 1948, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954 and the Middle East Treaty Organization (later to be renamed Central Treaty Organization—CENTO) in 1955. When a large number of countries declined to join such organizations they were declared ‘immoral’.¹⁸ Finally, a permanent worldwide war (hot as well as cold) was to be waged against communism as well as Third World economic nationalism. Any government anywhere in the Tricontinent that tried to pursue what Amin was to later call a ‘sovereign project’ was to be overthrown by whatever means necessary, from Lumumba and Nkrumah in Africa to Goulart to Allende in Latin America.

Samir Amin’s work on imperialism can be divided roughly into two phases. There is the short early phase, 1957–1970, when he is preoccupied with the general theory of capitalist accumulation through both the long colonial period and the emerging neocolonial one, and with the effect of those processes in individual African countries. That kind of theoretical work continued in subsequent years as well, culminating in the short book of 2010 on the law of worldwide value, cited above.¹⁹ After the early 1970s, though, he begins to write much more extensively on the political history of imperialism, communism and national liberation movements in his own time, and on the structural changes that the contemporary capitalist system has undergone at various points since the onset of what he came to conceptualize as an unending long-term crisis of capitalism that began around 1971 and has since been leading the system in more recent years to the brink of an ‘implosion’. A robust stream of books and articles followed, some of which covering roughly the same territory but with the difference that the latter would always drop some of the earlier conceptual apparatus and analytic positions that were replaced by other concepts or insights that had been re-thought, refined, made new, either because he had changed his mind or, more often, because the object of thought had got transformed in some fundamental way. He also pursued other, related but somewhat distinct, trajectories of research and conceptualization, and two of his books may be mentioned here in this regard.

In Class and Nation,²⁰ Amin presented within the broadly Marxist methodological matrix novel propositions regarding both the transition from feudalism to capitalism as well as the formation of nations. Contrary to a general consensus, Amin proposed that the precapitalist world of the Eurasian landmass was comprised of a variety of tributary modes of production in which feudalism with its fragmented sovereignties was one, existing primarily at the peripheries of the entire system, at its West European and Japanese extremities, while the central formations such as those of China and India were far more prosperous and comparatively more advanced in various technologies, with complex systems of commercialization and centralization of the surplus and stabilization of sovereignties. He rejected the conception common among Marxists that the nation arose only after the rise and consolidation of capitalism. And he rejected even more vigorously the rather metaphysical conception, first given great currency by the European opponents of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, that each nation is a primordial collectivity rooted in unique histories of ethnic origin, linguistic formation and religio-cultural disposition.²¹ For Amin, centralization of the surplus and stable sovereign rule over extensive territory, which necessarily led to linguistic and cultural consolidations, were the preconditions for the emergence of national entities which, he argued, arose in a variety of premodern tributary systems—e.g., China, India, Persia, the Arab world—well before the national consolidations of the capitalist era.²²

Almost a decade after the publication of Class and Nation, Amin returned in Eurocentrism²³ to this very conception of the multiplicity of tributary modes of production in the precapitalist world, in which the central and advanced positions were held by formations outside Europe, to address a very different kind of question: what accounts for the emergence and very effective worldwide dissemination of the idea of an intrinsic European superiority which was supposed to have twin origins: the rise of Reason in Hellenic and Roman classical cultures, and the rise of Rome as the fountain of a trans-European Christian civilization? In an argument converging with that of Martin Bernal, Amin proposed that throughout the history of precapitalist civilizations Europe and Asia were both divided and linked by a distinct cultural unit encompassing regions bordering the Mediterranean on all sides, which included Hellenic and Egyptian classicisms as well as the primary homes of the Abrahamic religions (even Islam which was born in the Arabian peninsula comes into its own only after it arrives in Egypt, the Levant and Turkey on the one side, Persia on the other).²⁴ In that world, there could neither be an ideology of Europe’s intrinsic superiority nor the idea of the Hellenic world being a part of Europe whose unity and distinct identity, with Greece and Rome assimilated to it, was fabricated largely during the Renaissance. This ideology of an intrinsic European superiority—intellectual, religious, cultural, technological, even racial superiority—first emerged only when the capitalist system arising on the westernmost periphery of that time’s world system acquired a technology that was able to bypass the central zones of the Mediterranean altogether by embarking on a project of world conquest across oceans and continents. In short, as Amin puts it in the Introduction to his book, Eurocentrism ‘constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the capitalist mode of production’. Asserting a certain correspondence between the ideological and the material, this concise and narrowly focused text thus locates what he calls ‘the construction of Eurocentric culture’ squarely in histories of commerce, colony and capital, in sharp contrast, for instance, to Edward Said’s more capacious and elegantly composed Orientalism, a largely literary-critical and culturalist construction of a history in which what he describes as ‘inferiorization’ of the Orient appears to have been something constitutive and immanent in the very making of a European consciousness already present in Greek tragic drama.

III

Amin worked across a dozen fields of inquiry; his ouvre is by any measure magisterial, even though somewhat repetitious in the closing years. A bare skeletal sketch of this work is now in place, even though we have taken no note of some of his most important work, such as the thoughtful and provocative book on Russia, original in its conception, that he published toward the very end of his life.²⁵ What remains to be done now is to focus on some of the thematics that are the indispensable conceptual ground for the essays collected in this book.

For Amin, the foundational moment for the postwar world order was the making of what he called ‘imperialism of the triad’ (the United States, Western Europe and Japan). As he wrote punctually of U.S. hegemony and often exhorted Europe to define a ‘sovereign project for itself’, he clearly implied that relations among the three components of this triad were unequal. In relation to the rest of the world, though, what mattered was not the mutual inequality of the protagonists but their unity. Even in mutual relations, however, it was not always clear from Amin’s formulations just what the extant or possible future consequences of this inequality might be. Were these relations unequal enough to possibly become truly antagonistic at some future point, leading to an ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ of the kind that Lenin formulated on the eve of the First World War, leading not necessarily to military conflagration but to economic warfare so intractable as to possibly lead to worldwide systemic crack-up? This becomes a significant issue in light of the fact that he rejected the quite popular idea of an integrated worldwide capitalist class that was the ruling class of global capitalism as a whole.²⁶ He further argued that individual transnational corporations may obtain their capital from any number of countries but each is always rooted in particular nations, i.e., we have TNCs that are in the last instance American, German, Japanese, etc. If that indeed is the case, might there not develop an eventuality when deep fissures and competing tendencies appear inside the architecture of the triad’s collective imperialism? Amin’s analyses are not entirely clear on this. We are living in a historical moment when the Chinese, for instance, are beginning to work toward a financial architecture increasingly independent of the U.S. dollar domination while Germans are evidently not doing anything practical in that direction but are now beginning to at least talk of the need for precisely that kind of independent financial institutional structure for the European Union; many other countries may respond positively to such projects. Might such trends not become stronger and irreversible in case of a secular decline in the hegemonic global power of the U.S.? There is much talk of ‘multipolarity’ as the desirable goal for global order in the emerging epoch, and Amin undoubtedly approved of that. Might this multipolarity not become the harbinger of diminution in the ‘collective’ nature of contemporary imperialism and, on the contrary, emergence of some variant of an inter-imperialist rivalry?

Lacking adequate space for exposition, we shall leave aside Amin’s analysis of the communist state systems in the 20^th century. If anything, he has written even more extensively on the national liberation movements, the compradorization of Tricontinental bourgeoisies, and on the possible avenues and strategies for struggle against imperialism and eventual transition to communism. Much of that writing assumes a fundamental contradiction besetting the imperialist system: whereas the U.S. was extraordinarily successful in imposing a structural unity among all the states and populations in the imperial centre, no such stable system of governance or social integration could be devised for the Tricontinent (what he continues to designate as ‘the periphery’). ‘Up to this day,’ he writes, ‘imperialism has never found the terms of social and political compromise that could allow a system of rule to stabilize in its favour in the countries of the capitalist periphery. I interpret this failure as proof … [of] an objective situation in the periphery that is potentially revolutionary and always explosive and unstable.’²⁷

Who, then, will make the revolution? And what will be the nature of that revolution?²⁸ In response to these dilemmas, Amin offered many an element of a theory that does not amount to a straight line of march any more than Marx and Engels were ever inclined to offer a blueprint for executing a communist revolution. At the broadest conceptual level, Amin offered two propositions: that the revolution would be both national and socialist, or it shall not be, the bourgeoisie having become altogether compradorized and reactionary; and that the onset of the process would need an initial phase preceding what in classical Marxism is understood as the pre-communist phase of ‘socialism’. The idea of a necessary pre-socialist phase would seem to have had three origins. First, the idea seems to be inspired by Mao’s original conception of the New Democracy that was expected to be ushered in by a broad front of classes minus the comprador sections of the bourgeoisie. It can be plausibly argued that Mao abandoned that conception and speeded up the transition to socialism as a result of the lessons he learned from the experience of the Korean War in which U.S. imperialism was undoubtedly bent on destroying the People’s Republic as such; Gen. MacArthur, at the helm of the U.S. forces in Korea, did propose the use of atomic bombs to defeat China, on the model of the Japanese surrender. Even so, Mao never risked breaking the worker-peasant alliance as it had been effectively broken during the collectivization drive in the Soviet Union. But, more problematically, for Amin’s invocation of that model, Mao always thought of the compradors as a fraction that could be isolated while the bulk of the class, the national bourgeoisie, would be part of the multi-class alliance.²⁹

The idea of a pre-socialist phase seems to have been premised, moreover, on the perception that the forces of production in the periphery were too undeveloped to be fruitfully socialized as a prelude to building the advanced communist society. That backwardness of the available productive forces was after all a significant element in the distortions that inevitably ensued in all the socialist experiments in the course of the 20^th century. Thirdly, however, what seems also to have propelled this idea of a pre-socialist transitional phase in Amin’s repertoire of conceptions is the ongoing process in China itself. In his view, China was the only country in the Tricontinent—indeed, in the world—that had defined for itself a sovereign project against U.S. hegemony which it was pursuing in an entirely novel historical form. He also believed that China could not be viewed as a country where capitalism had been fully restored, so long as land was not legally privatized. Fully committed to a sovereign project opposed to U.S. hegemony, still undecided between capitalism and socialism in its mode of production, rapidly advancing in its development of the productive forces, China, he thought, still had a chance to return from the precipice to take a renewed socialist direction. It could thus serve as a model for other countries in the peripheries. At his most optimistic, Amin saw possibilities of such sovereign projects also emerging in some of the other larger economies of the periphery, i.e., Russia, Brazil and, surprisingly enough, even India. Conceptually, this possibility seemed to be immanent in the very process of the development of the productive forces; the more powerful a peripheral economy grew the more it would want to be free of externally imposed hegemonies. This optimism was of course contradicted by some other convictions that were more central in Amin’s thinking. He was convinced that the bourgeoisies of the periphery were so thoroughly compradorized that they no longer had a place in the bloc of forces likely to confront imperialism. If that is so, would it then not follow that regardless of how powerful a peripheral economy became the emergence of a sovereign project would require a prior transformation of state power away from comprador-imperialist domination? Short of that revolutionary change, it seems unlikely that, say, India would follow in China’s footsteps and pursue a sovereign project opposed to U.S. imperialism. For one thing, other states cannot really follow the Chinese example precisely because the contemporary Chinese state is not a normal bourgeois state but one formed by a historic compromise between its original Maoist formation and its ultra-Dengist present. Whatever the potentialities of China’s ‘sovereign project’ may be, the fortunes of Latin America’s recent ‘pink tide’ should serve to remind us of the risks any genuinely socialist-oriented project would face that leaves the compradorized bourgeoisie, its political parties and media empires intact.

But then there is the even more vexed and exacting question of revolutionary agency: who makes the revolution in this age of ‘generalized capitalist monopolies’ (Amin’s term), when the slum is the most widespread and expanding form of urban habitation, while a host of technologies such as cybernetic automation are intent, at the other end, on minimizing even the presence of any direct human labour in large-scale capitalist production.³⁰ Amin’s thought on this score proceeds along two different lines that tend to converge only at particular nodal points. On the one hand, there is continued commitment to think of novel strategies for our time that in essence observe some degree of fidelity to the general Leninist scheme of the proletarian party, workers’ mass organizations, worker-peasant alliance, the broad united front of popular masses. Thus, for instance, contrary to Hobsbawm who posited ‘death of the peasantry’ as an accomplished fact,³¹ Amin insisted that peasants comprised roughly half of the world’s population and would be the indispensable social base for revolution in a variety of countries in Asia and Africa—even pockets of Latin America. In keeping with this line of thought, and partly reacting to the collapse of other enthusiasms such as the World Social Forum, he insisted in the last years of his life on the feasibility of a revolutionary agency in the form of what he described as a worldwide alliance of proletariats and peoples of the world under the leadership of their own (presumably national) parties.

Alongside this particular logic was a different line of thought that began to be crystallized in his writing with an essay, ‘The Social Movements in the Periphery: An End to National Liberation?’, that he contributed to a book he co-authored with his cohort in Dependency and World System theories.³² The essay appeared in 1990, as the communist state system was unravelling across the Soviet Union and Southeastern Europe; the illusion that the national bourgeoisies of the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa would mount a challenge to imperialism had collapsed already, even though Amin remained attached to some variant of the Bandung project. It was quite possibly this conjunctural moment that accounts for Amin’s shift of emphasis from class politics to ‘peoples of the periphery’ as the collective agent for revolution in our time and for his surprising and somewhat uncritical acceptance of the term ‘social movement’ as the imperative mobilizing form. For, the ideology of ‘social movement’ had arisen precisely in opposition to ‘political party’; the focus on ‘the social’ as a turning away from ‘the political’; with the attendant premise that the molecular, multiple, mostly local movements for social and cultural change (‘a network of networks’, as the highest organizational form) needed to replace a politics, essentially Marxist politics, that fought for state power so as to undo the political economy of capitalism per se. Amin was to spend many years, together with many others, in seeking to build global networks of such movements but, given his lasting Marxist and even Maoist predilections, he also strove to pull the social movements deeper into the orbit of more familiar kinds of left politics. Much of his thinking as well as practical activity in the closing decades of his life went into trying to formulate a proper mode of articulation between class and mass, social movement and class politics, the national and the transcontinental as two equally key sights for political mobilization. Yet, through all those experimentations in thought and practice, he never got quite unmoored from his communist origins. As late as the time of the Tahrir Square Uprising of 2011 in Egypt he was again found in the ranks of yet another communist organization.

Antonio Gramsci wrote that even though the basic ingredients of a socialist revolutionary practice had been discovered in the Paris Commune it was only after a long interregnum of almost half a century that a fully adequate revolutionary form came fully into view in all the minutiae of very elaborate and complex Bolshevik practice. It has seemed to me for some years now that we in our time are also going through precisely that kind of interregnum and the aftermath, after the Russian and Chinese Revolutions reached their limits and were unable to move further forward. A rich revolutionary tradition of thought and practice is there to draw upon but we are yet unable to perceive new forms of revolutionary practice that are adequate enough for the entirely changed historical conditions of the present to take the spirit of October forward to its next logical stage, as the Bolshevik Revolution itself was the determinate form for carrying forward as well as transcending the logics of the French Revolution. Samir Amin was a key intellectual of this interregnum, solving many riddles, speculating in various directions and always asking the right and difficult questions where he did not have the answers.

IV

Spending any time at all in Samir Amin’s company was very much like sharing a patch of sunshine in the midst of the grey and the dark. His physical frame was rather small and began giving away whiffs of frailty in the last years, and yet his movements remained agile, exuding enthusiasm, as if the body was forever electrified by reservoirs of political and intellectual energy. He was unfailingly warm, polite, courteous, extraordinarily receptive in his connection with others, with a demeanour brimming with old-world charm that seemed to belie the granite hardness of his convictions. The combined qualities of his personal culture were rather unique and he had a very distinctive personality, unlike anyone else’s that I have known, but he was by life-long habit basically a man in a group that served as both his social habitat and his political home. He was active and comfortable in many, many corners of the world, and political homes were thus variable, but there was always and everywhere a group for him to act and communicate with. Political belonging and a life of solidarities was something of an internalized second nature, though by no means free of conflicts large and small, as life neither of politics nor of the intellect can ever be free of dissentions or alignments. His mind was sharp and combative, and he had come to believe, with almost a child-like confidence, that he had managed to solve some of the great riddles of our time. Yet, in his dealings with others, he was genuinely and punctually humble.

Samir Amin was, in short, one of the rare diamond cutters of the age.

* * *

Footnotes by the editors of Monthly Review have been marked as such (—Ed.). The rest of the notes are Samir Amin’s own.

¹ I have tried to keep the main text of this Introduction smooth and free of digressions as much as possible. Some of the substantive points have been jettisoned therefore to the footnotes. Hence the number of footnotes as well as the fact that quite a few of them are quite lengthy.

² Dependency theorists were of course more marxisant than Marxist. Like Amin, they too had borrowed Raúl Prebisch’s conception of the world system as a bipolar structure of unequal exchange between the centre (‘developed’) and periphery (‘underdeveloped’). For Prebisch, though, this was a distortion that could be corrected through fairer terms of trade, supplemented with protectionism and import substitution industrialization in the peripheries. For the dependentistas, as for Amin, this ‘underdevelopment’ was, however, not an inheritance from the precolonial past but a product of imperialism itself. The sharing of this premise would later bring Amin closer to them, particularly to Frank, and to the World System theorists, Wallerstein and Arrighi.

³ For instance, ‘Africa: Living on the Fringe’, Monthly Review, March 2002; ‘India: A Great Power?’, February 2005; ‘“Market Economy” or Oligopoly-Finance Capital’, April 2008; ‘The Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism & the Imperialist Rent’, July–August 2012; ‘The Kurdish Question Then & Now’, October 2016.

⁴ Samir Amin, Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary, Monthly Review Press, 1994.

⁵ This was somewhat analogous to Harry Magdoff’s undertaking in his Age of Imperialism (1969) to elucidate the functioning of imperialism in his own time in terms of the basic categories that Lenin had established in his famous pamphlet. Amin, however, was more interested in comprehending the structural changes that the capitalist mode itself undergoes in the age of empire and monopoly capital, as it expands out of its initial European enclaves to become a world system of exploitative inequality between classes as well as nations of the world.

⁶ Among countless studies of the phenomenon, one might just look at Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor (eds), The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, Clarendon, 1990.

⁷ This is a revised and expanded version of his book of 1978, The Law of Value and Historical Materialism.

⁸ Samir Amin, A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist, Zed Books, 2006.

⁹ A Life Looking Forward, p. 5 (henceforth A Life).

¹⁰ From Being and Nothingness to Critique of Dialectical Reason, so to speak.

¹¹ On the Arab side of these émigré equations in Paris, the rather maverick career of the illustrious Messali Hadj, the many turns in his convictions from the Marxist to the Arabo-Islamist, and the various organizations he spawned, is a good illustration of the complex connections between the migrant workers and political currents in their home countries.

¹² Sartre wrote introductions to two of those books: Memmi’s, and Fanon’s later (last) book. In this trio of authors, Albert Memmi was different both in origin and later orientation. He was the son of Tunisian Jews, spoke a variant of Sephardic Arabic and French, became a well-known novelist in French who then left Tunisia after Independence and settled in France, eventually drifting into Zionism. In the book, though, Memmi’s positions are closer to the other two, especially to Fanonian positions, but he also reflects on his own contradictory position as a Jew of North African origin whose milieu in its culture and economic status was closer to that of Muslim North Africans but who had been taught by the colonizer to identify with the French and was given some privileges denied to the Muslim. ‘I was a half-breed of colonization,’ Memmi says in the Preface, as he identified with each side of this unbridgeable Colonizer-Colonized divide with different parts of his consciousness; the ‘double consciousness’ that Du Bois speaks of in his The Souls of Black Folk.

¹³ The invasion began at the end of October. A rare joint Soviet-American resolution at the Security Council halted the war, with the Soviet Union threatening use of nuclear weapons to protect Egypt and the U.S. President threatening to impose economic sanctions on his allies if they did not end the invasion and withdrew from Egypt. France and the U.K. complied faster, withdrawing in December that year but Israel held on until March 1957. Amin arrived in Cairo later that year.

¹⁴ The list of seven books during that short period includes L’Egypte Nasseriene (1964) which Amin wrote under the pseudonym Hassan Riad. Inexplicably, this book has never been translated into English—at least to my knowledge—even though Amin himself kept referring to it in his later writings. For my generation of the left outside the Arab world this book, alongside Anouar Abdel-Malek’s Egypt: Military Society: the Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser (French original 1962; expanded English version 1968, New York: Random House), and (to a considerably lesser extent) the shoddily translated and edited book of Mahmoud Hussein Class Conflict in Egypt, 1945–1970 (French edition 1971; English translation 1973, New York: Monthly Review Press) were the most significant book-length analyses of Nasserism. Interestingly, ‘Mahmoud Hussein’ was also a pseudonym—for the two Egyptian co-authors, Bahgat El-Nadi and Adel Rifaat.

¹⁵ Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, Boston: South End Press, 1980.

¹⁶ Among the founding members of NATO were the famous social democracies of Norway and Denmark as well as Salazar’s fascist Portugal. It remained somewhat dormant for two years, then came into its own in 1951 for executing a war not in the North Atlantic, its supposed security zone and area of operation, but in Korea.

¹⁷ Amin started his systematic analyses of U.S. imperialism per se well after giving final shape to his general theory of accumulation on the global scale which he published in 1970. One of the best books to appear at that point, though neglected at the time, was Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (New York, 1972), which gives a detailed account of the institutional structure erected for that strategy.

¹⁸ The historic Bandung Conference was held in April 1955 and became the foundational moment for the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Two months later, in June, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, declared that ‘neutrality has increasingly become obsolete and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception’.

¹⁹ Two other books of the 1970s that extend the arguments first presented in his original dissertation can be cited here. His Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (French original 1973; English translation 1976) shifts the focus of analysis from how values produced all over the world are utilized for accumulation in the imperial centres to the consequences of those processes for social formations of the peripheralized tricontinent. This was followed by Imperialism and Unequal Development (French edition 1976; English translation 1977), comprised of essays on related topics which address the debates that ensued around Unequal Development.

²⁰ Samir Amin, Class and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis, French original 1979; English translation 1980.

²¹ Fichte was by no means a right-wing romantic of that kind. Even so, his Addresses to the German Nation (1808) is the classic statement of that position on the idea of the nation. No wonder Fichte is often cited on the more ideologically oriented websites of the self-styled American alt-right of today.

²² For the Arab world in particular, Amin analysed the transition from precapitalist tributary mode to the modern bourgeois nationhood (with all its failures) that emerged in the course of the 20^th century in his short book, The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggle (French original 1976; English translation 1978, Zed Books). Here, as in so much of his other writing, Amin explores the relationship, possibly an overlap, between the national (anti-imperialist) revolution and the struggle for socialism.

²³ Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, French original 1988; English translation 1989.

²⁴ Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (three volumes: 1987, 1991, 2006), New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. The basic argument in favour of a distinct civilizational unity of the Mediterranean world was laid out in great detail in Volume 1, published the year before Eurocentrism.

²⁵ Samir Amin, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, 2016.

²⁶ Significantly, Amin wrote a critical but enthusiastic review of William K. Carroll’s The Making of an International Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century, London and New York: Zed Books, 2010. See his ‘Transnational Capitalism or Collective Imperialism’, Pambazuka News, May 23, 2011.

²⁷ A Life, p. 48.

²⁸ The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty-First Century (2008) is a good place to start for following Amin’s thinking on these issues. My own exegesis in the following paragraphs is culled, however, from a broader range of his writings.

²⁹ Mao’s conception of a multi-class revolutionary alliance for the transitional period, which includes the national bourgeoisie, is sometimes invoked by the Chinese authorities these days not only in defining the specifically Chinese form of socialism but also to justify admitting a wide range of capitalists into the communist party, some of them reaching into the party’s highest organs.

³⁰ Foxconn isn’t satisfied with employing the ill-paid, super-exploited Chinese workers. It wants to replace them with thousands of robots.

³¹ ‘The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half this century, and the one that cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry,’ says Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. This is an inexplicably exaggerated claim. Even so, it is not clear just what proportion of the agrarian population can still be counted as ‘peasants’; nor is it clear from the rapid rate of outward migration into urban slums just how long the countryside in the various Asian zones will remain so very densely populated.

³² See Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System, Monthly Review Press, 1990, a collection of separate essays by Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein.