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From Capitalism to Civilization: Reconstructing the Socialist Perspective

By Amin Samir

	11.00 E

Foreword For more than half a century now, Samir Amin has been at the forefront of globally prominent public intellectuals, fighting the continued devastation caused by capitalism and formulating the objectives of a socialist project, as history has been evolving. Born in 1931 of an Egyptian father and a French mother, both doctors by profession, Amin grew up in Port Said and then went to Paris for his secondary and postgraduate education. He imbibed the principles of anti-imperialism, anti-fascism and the idea of national liberation from his parents and from his grandparents on both sides. He joined the Communist movement at the age of sixteen, even while he was studying for his baccalauréat (school-leaving certificate) at Lycee Henri IV in Paris. He became an activist from his student days in the movements for national liberation and for socialism. Although his teachers, who were impressed by his mathematical abilities, would have liked to see him emerge as a physicist, he had other ideas: he took up economics and political science as his subjects in order to pursue his objective of understanding how to change society, and joined the SciencesPo in Paris for his university education. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and when he moved to Cairo after getting his doctorate in 1957, he became a member of the Egyptian Communist Party. However, his independent spirit did not allow him to remain tied to any dogmatic political organization. Whether formally a member of an organized communist party or not, he remained committed to the use of Marxism as a method of political and economic analysis, and to the fight for socialism as the only way out of the barbarities of capitalism and its Siamese twin, imperialism.

Samir was obviously a prodigy and his activism did not hinder his producing a thesis that was brilliant by any standard. Although Marx had provided the method by which it is possible to analyse the interaction between different modes of production and what I have called ‘modes ofexploitation', many avowed Marxists still remain imprisoned in the idea that the ex-colonial and coercively retarded societies can end their state of underdevelopment by simply emulating the strategies of the advanced capitalist economies. Paul Baran, in his seminal paper of 1952, ‘On the Political Economy of Backwardness',1 later developed fully in his Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), points out that imperialism influences the social formations of the colonial and neo-colonial countries in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for a bourgeois democratic revolution, led by an autonomous capitalist class, to occur in those lands. Following his own trajectory, Samir Amin came to very similar conclusions in his doctoral thesis submitted in the same year of 1957.2 The thesis was elaborated in his Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, Volumes 1 and 2 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). In this book he shows how, among other things, the continual extraction of the investible surplus from the so-called underdeveloped countries by the imperialist bloc (the ‘centre') thwarts any internal dynamics of the colonial and ex-colonial nations (the ‘periphery'). So he should be regarded as pioneer of the Marxian theory of world systems, along with other more heterodox formulators of the world systems theory such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank.

It is impossible in the narrow compass of this foreword to even attempt to give a sketch of the enormous corpus of Samir Amin's work. At the last count, the number of his books, not counting the translations, exceeded 56 (a few of which are jointly authored). What is impressive is that he informs his theoretical formulations with deep empirical investigations of many concrete developments, such as the phenomenon of migration, the economies of North Africa, the place of the Mediterranean in the world economy and others. The enormous volume of Samir's work on aspects of planning and the developmental trajectories of a major chunk of African countries, from Egypt to Mali, Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast, is based on his first-hand and generally frustrating experience of acting as an advisor for the economic planning of many of these newly independent countries.3 His first spell of experience as a planner was acquired in his home country, Egypt, soon after Gamal Abdel Nasser had come to power and been recognized as the leader of Arab nationalism, a major player in the non-aligned movement and an exponent of the development of the public sector as a means of strengthening the national economy.4 Unfortunately, the army officers on whose support Nasser relied and the class origins of the other bureaucrats aligned to them considered the Communists to be a menace because of their call for radical social change and their criticism of the undemocratic nature of decision-making that was bound to lead to major failures in the planning process. So, even as he was receiving enormous help from the Soviet Union - in the construction of the Aswan dam, for example - Nasser cracked down on Communists and many of Samir's friends were imprisoned. Samir escaped a similar fate with the connivance of a friendly police officer and with the help of his father, and he took refuge in Paris in January 1960.5 But soon he went to Bamako in Mali as planning advisor to the Sudanese Union government, and thus began his intensely active and peripatetic career. In 1963 Samir joined the newly established African Institute for Economic Planning and Development (IDEP) as a professor. In his own words:

After my university studies, I had decided not to pursue an academic career, but to prefer positions (in Cairo and Bamako) that were more directly linked to economic and social activity. . . . I like teaching - as long as it is not just a question of passing on more or less frozen pieces of knowledge. I find it meaningful only if it is linked to ongoing research, preferably not in stuffy libraries but in a close and living relationship to action. The job offered me at IDEP fitted very well into that conception.6

While Samir enjoyed teaching, IDEP's policies and the focus of its activities, paying little attention to the social and economic factors that had destroyed the macroeconomic coherence of most of the plans made for developing Africa, left him dissatisfied with his job. He decided to sit for the competitive aggregation for professorship of political economy in France, passed it easily, and became a Professor of Political Economy first in Poitiers and then in one of the campuses in Paris. Then, in 1970, he was offered the post of Director of IDEP and he remained its Director until 1980. Under his direction IDEP became, perhaps, the most important think-tank for African economic development, and for the critical assessment of many of the government plans and projects under way in Sub-Saharan countries (I believe that there was an Asian Development Institute in Bangkok on the same pattern as IDEP, but I have never come across any work worth looking at produced by it.) From 1980 onwards, Samir has directed the Third World Forum, an organization founded by him. That organization has succeeded in bringing together critical thinkers fighting imperialism and exposing the destructive face of capitalism from all across the world.

From 1997 he has also been directing, in association with Francois Houtart, the World Forum for Alternatives. A journal (in French) is being published under its auspices, called Alternatives Sud, in which many issues of interest to radical scholars and activists are discussed. In 2003 Samir Amin and Francois Houtart edited a volume called Mondialisation des Résistance: L'État des Luttes 2003 (Paris: L'Harmattan), which has been translated into Bangla as Pratirodher Bishwamoyota (Kolkata: National Book Agency, 2004).

I have provided a sketch of some of the activities Samir Amin has been engaged in, in order to indicate their extraordinary spread and multifaceted nature. His life has been almost as non-linear as the conception of history he has nurtured, from the time he wrote his dissertation on the roots of underdevelopment. While he has been critical of the economism that is regarded, at any cost, as the only route out of underdevelopment and towards socialism, he has been equally critical of the voluntarism that disregards not only internal social barriers but also geopolitical constraints on the possibility of a socialist revolution. He has been severely critical of most forms of post-modernism because, implicitly, they regard progress towards a better future for all of mankind to be an impossible project. Moreover, they often resort to the most obscurantist forms of tradition when critiquing the modernization project. It would repay to make a close study of many of Samir's writings if we want to understand how the attempt to give local specificity to the projects of the ruling classes in the third world has led to the entrenchment of many oppressive social practices, and the suppression of critical thinking in the name of protecting religion and regional cultures.

He is critical of the naïve environmentalists who, for example, oppose the construction of the high dam at Aswan on the grounds that it would interfere with the natural flow of the Nile and disturb the ecology: such critics do not realize that without irrigation the very survival of the Egyptian poor would be threatened. On the other hand, he untiringly criticizes the despoilation of nature that is caused by profit-hungry corporations and by the exploitation of the poor by the poor. The latter, deprived of all their normal means of subsistence in the imperialist-capitalist social order, try to survive by violating the legacy of nature.

Samir Amin has consistently tried to combine his relentless critiques of this unacceptable geopolitical order with a refashioning of the concrete details of his vision of socialism. His Beyond US Hegemony? Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World (London, 2006) unblinkingly examines whether the high-performing economies of East Asia, with India as a possible late-comer to the club of high-growth economies, can lead to the emergence of a world in which the United States of America is no longer the hegemonic power, and whether that emergence has opened new doors for the realization of a socialist vision. The current book takes that quest further.

The readers of the book will, I am sure, benefit from Samir's dialectical approach to the concept of democracy and its realization on the ground, the relevance and limits of social movements, his delineation of the real face of the so-called free market economies, and so on. I am very happy that the latest work of this extraordinarily creative and visionary socialist thinker and activist is being published in India. I am also grateful that I have been given this opportunity to express my gratitude to a person who has remained a symbol of global resistance against imperialism and predatory capitalism.

AMIYA KUMAR BAGCHI

Notes and References

1 Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, Vol. XX, reprinted in P.A. Baran, The Longer View: Essays Toward a Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969: 249-70. It may be claimed that Lenin's concepts of uneven development or multistructural development, or Trotsky's concept of ‘uneven and combined development', should have led later Marxists to the kind of formulation that Baran advanced, but the fact of the matter is that many of them remained confined to a vulgarized, linear concept of stages of history.

2 Les effets structurels de l'intégration internationale des economies précapitalistes. Une etude théorique du mécanisme qui a engender les economies dites sous-développées.

3 See Samir Amin, A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist, London: Zed Press, 2006, chapters 3-5. This is one of the most fascinating autobiographies I have read for some time.

4 On my way to Britain by boat in September 1959, I, along with several of my fellow Indian passengers, went ashore in Port Said and were greeted with acclamations of Nasser and Nehru in those heady days of the non-aligned movement.

5 Amin, A Life Looking Forward, chapter 3.

6 Ibid.: 152.

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