Only People Make Their Own History. Samir Amin
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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