Only People Make Their Own History. Samir Amin
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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 20th 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