Only People Make Their Own History. Samir Amin
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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 20th 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