The Marxism of Samir Amin

A meeting with the Egyptian economist whose latest book reasserts his quest for alternatives to overcome capitalism, which he describes as “a brief digression in history”. At the same time, migratory processes are leading us into a future of worldwide shanty towns.
By Giuliano Battiston, translation by Sarah Potter.

‘Memoirs of an independent Marxist’ is the subtitle to ‘A Life Looking Forward’ (Zed Books, 2006), the most recent autobiography by the Egyptian economist, Samir Amin, who has dedicated a large part of his life as a scholar and militant to seeking alternatives to replace the brief historical digression that is capitalism. In his most recent book to be translated into Italian, ‘La crisi. Uscire dalla crisi del capitalismo o uscire dal capitalismo in crisi?’ (Punto Rosso, pp. 208, €13) (The crisis: Emerging from the crisis of capitalism or emerging from capitalism in crisis?), he continues to stress the necessity to resort to a critical utopia and “to begin with Marx without limiting oneself to him” in order to understand and transform the world. Notwithstanding the obsolescence of capitalism and the failure of the neoliberal model – “apartheid on a global scale” – Samir Amin is nevertheless aware of the obstacles in the path on the “long road towards the transition to global socialism” that he proposes. After all, as he wrote in his last book, the financial crisis “was not the product of a blaze of social struggles”, but was caused by internal contradictions in the system for the accumulation of capital. And “the initiative still remains in the hands of that capital”. Which is also why, as he explains in his manifesto, ten years after the first World Social Forum “[socialist] movements are still terribly fragmented and weak: they defend themselves against the attacks of well-financed oligopolistic capitalism, but do not elaborate effective political strategies for action.

The naïve illusion that it is possible to change the world without taking power is still widely assumed.” However, for Samir Amin it is only by recognising “the inescapability of the question of the relation between power and change” that it will be possible to create a “convergence of the different struggles” for the emancipation of the individual.

The global economic crisis has once again made people question the limitations of neoliberal globalisation and, more generally, the limitations of capitalism. Can you explain to us how, as you write in ‘The World we Wish to See’, “global development of capitalism has always had a polarising effect” and imperialism does not constitute “a phase of capitalism, but is the permanent nature of its global expansion”?

In the beginning, I adopted Lenin’s theory, according to which monopoly capitalism constituted a new phase in the history of capitalism – reached at the end of the nineteenth century, and capitalism became a form of imperialism only after this date. Subsequently, however, I eventually began to develop the idea of the originally polarising nature – hence with some imperialist qualities– that lie at the very origins of capitalism. Actually, I think that accumulation on a global scale has always been, in a non-exclusive but prevalent way, accumulation by dispossession. A dispossession that not only concerns the “primitive accumulation” discussed by Marx and referred to as the origins of capitalism, but which is a permanent feature in the story of historically “really existing” capitalism, from the period of merchant capital. A long period of transition in which the central role in globalisation, organised around the conquest of the Americas and the slave trade, is clearly and indisputably revealed to be the process of accumulation by dispossession. This kind of accumulation can then be seen throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century and becomes radicalised with the formation of monopolies, which encourage the exportation of capital on a much larger scale, “installing” segments of the globalised capitalist system in “overseas” colonies, in semi-colonies and in the colonies of Latin America. On the other hand, the fact that polarisation is an inherent aspect of capitalism’s globalised development, accompanying it from the outset, is shown by a simple fact: until about 1820, China’s gross domestic product per capita was higher than the average figure for industrialised Europe. Between 1820 and 1900, however, it fell from a ratio of 1:1 to a ratio of 1:20, and from 1900 to 2000 from 1:20 to 1:50.

In “Beyond Senile Capitalism” you wrote that, precisely because of its “Achilles heel” – its financialisation – the capitalist system itself was preparing for “an imminent financial catastrophe”. Now what was imminent has become a reality: what do you mean when you insist that the current situation is “the crisis of the imperialist capitalism of oligopolies”, intrinsically linked to the finanicialisation of the system?

Continuing in a research direction launched by Sweezy and Baran’s 1966 book ‘Monopoly Capital’ – the first coherent formulation of qualitative transformation of capitalism occurred at the end of the nineteenth century with the institution of monopolies – I identified the impact of two great waves in the monopolisation process: the first beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing until 1945 and the second beginning in the 1970s and, hence, does not coincide at all with the 2008 financial crisis. In this second wave the degree of monopolisation reaches an unparalleled level. All of which leads me to think that modern capitalism is a product of generalised, globalised and finanicialised oligopolies. Generalised oligopolies because they control the whole economy (with the exception of the political and cultural spheres), even the sectors that are not directly monopolised. And globalised, also, as a result of the liberal and neoliberal policies of the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties. Now, as for finacialization, a significant number of financial systems analysts, even those from the ‘left’, tend to separate finanicialisation, classed as artificial and negative, from good productive capitalism. This is not the case: these two aspects go hand in hand with each other. Oligopolies are finanicialised in themselves, in the sense that there is not on one side a finanicialised sector, with banks, insurance brokers and pension funds, and on the other side a healthy production sector. Rather, it is the same oligopolies who own large-scale production companies and, at the same time, major financial institutions. And, in turn, these oligopolies need to expand financially to ensure their dominance over the economy and society as a whole. Their “superimposition”, as Baran states, is total. And it has its roots in a system that in itself leads to relative stagnation, which has been particularly notable in the years since 1970, which have seen a drastic reduction in profit, growth and investment taxes in the countries of the imperialist Triad (USA, Europe and Japan). It is this stagnation – an excess of surplus compared with capital expansion possibilities to enlarge and promote product investments – that increases financial deficits, which are not the result of derivatives or deregulation, but stem from an inherent demand on the contemporary capitalist system: finanicialisation is the only tool available to the capitalists in generalised and globalised oligopolies to overcome their deep-set, intrinsic tendency to stagnate. I am convinced that we have no alternatives to this inevitable outcome, unless we emerge from this capitalism in crisis. Or, more conservatively, unless we begin on the road to emergence, heading towards a different development model, the exact features of which are not yet clear, which will take around fifty to a hundred years to properly define.

 In your recent essay ‘A Critique of the Stiglitz Report’, you state that negotiated globalisation must pass through a “decoupling” phase in order to construct a nationally economy that is auto-centred but not autarkic. This economy – as you write in ‘A Life Looking Forward’ – “would encounter serious obstacles if it was not reinforced by forms of regional integration capable of enhancing its positive effects.” How can we combine strategies to decouple the global system with the construction of regional blocs?

There are no practicable alternatives to auto-centred development that subordinate external relations to the demands of an internal transformation that is as progressive as possible. This is not simply autarky, but a complete reversal of current thought; rather than adapting or yielding to the worldwide dominant trends, we need to work in such a way that it is these trends that bend and adapt to internal demands. I see this being realised in the independent initiatives Southern nations are adopting, the motivation behind which is clear in the majority of cases. Perhaps not for the three new economic giants: China, India and Brazil, each of whom in their own right carries the same weight as a large regional group, and who, for this reason, do not appear to need to rely on sub- and inter-regional agreements. And yet, even these countries are experiencing deficits – you only have to consider the scarcity of the natural resources, especially energy sources, they require. And this is true on a greater scale for other regions: the countries of South-East Asia; the Arab world; sub-Saharan Africa and Spanish-speaking Latin America. In each of these cases sub-regional agreements serve to establish, in a negotiated way, complementarities that operate on several levels. For example, on a technological level: today Southern countries are able (not all in the same way) to develop technological capabilities without necessarily having to submit to the protectionism of industrial law as promoted by the World Trade Organisation. The same should also happen with infrastructure, with the identification of industrial strategies and complementarities, obviously beginning with basic industries, but also with large-consumption industries and with access to natural resources.

On the subject of natural resources: you stated that “far from being resolved, the ‘agrarian question’ lies now more than ever at the heart of the challenges that humanity must face in the twentieth century”. Why do you maintain that capitalism, “by its very nature, is incapable of resolving this problem”, and why do you believe that it can only offer us the prospective of a planet of slums?

The accumulation by dispossession which characterises historical capitalism – crystallized around the London-Amsterdam-Paris triangle at the beginning of the nineteenth century – did not only concern the peoples of the Americas, but also European peasantry. This model is based on the enclosures in Great Britain, in which the British and Irish peasantry were the first in Europe to be dispossessed by private appropriation of land; a phenomenon which later spread to the continent. This historical model would have had disastrous consequences had it not been accompanied by such an enormous “security apparatus” and “pressure-release valves” consisting of the system of migration to the Americas. Migratory processes allowed Europe to build a new Europe elsewhere, that was as large in terms of population, if not more so, as the original continent. But, if we consider the other continents: Asia, Africa and Latin America, where today seventy-five percent of the Earth’s population lives (of which half are farmers) we realise that this system is both unacceptable and ineffective. As shown by the recent birth of a planet of slums, farmers driven from their land cannot be “absorbed” by the mechanisms of modern industrialisation and they cannot resort to mass migration any more. The solution to the agrarian question as proposed by the capitalist model requires Asia, Africa and Latin America to find at least four more Americas to which their inhabitants can migrate.