Ma communication, dans le cadre de cet hommage rendu au regretté Samir Amin, décédé le 12 août 2018, et afin de permettre aux
My paper, as part of this tribute to the late Samir Amin, who passed away on August 12, 2018, and in order to enable readers – and especially budding political economists – to benefit from the work of the organic intellectual he was and debate the major issues of the times, focuses on a reading of the themes that forged the intellectual itinerary of this outstanding social thinker. To begin with, I would say that Samir Amin is one of the few social thinkers who was unwavering in the face of the misery of politics and thought, especially with the collapse of the communist bloc and the decline of the great narratives of social thought. The economist of the South, which he undoubtedly was, was also very attentive to the irony of history and had the great intellectual audacity to announce, on the basis of a political and historical reading of facts and events, the failure of the great societal projects that appeared in the twentieth century, whether it was the welfare state in the West, the socialist experiments in the East or the development projects led by the national liberation movements in the South[i].
1. Samir Amin is among the eminent founding social thinkers of the school of underdevelopment and imperialism - and not the school of dependency as some distorting readings of his thought think - alongside Paul Sweezy , Paul Baran, André Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallrestein, Aziz Belal, Arghiri Emmanuel, Charles Bettelheim, and many other contemporary Enlightenment thinkers. The work of these enlightened Marxists was called the "Labors of Hercules" because it competes with and outstrips the work of the liberals, and in particular that of the mainstream orthodox and conservatives who prepared the advent of globalized neo-liberalism, which is at the origin of the dismantling of public services and even of the state and its institutions in order to impose a new mode of management led by the oligarchies. Samir Amin was not the intellectual who lived in his ivory tower, isolated from what was going on around him by merely forging ideas and concepts in his notebooks for entertainment, but he was the organic intellectual, the independent social thinker, not the intellectual of bias, but the one who tested the theories he developed by observing reality with great care. Indeed, from IDEP[ii] to the Third World Forum (TWF[iii], through several non-governmental institutions, such as CODESRIA[iv] but also ENDA TIERS-MONDE[v] and many other social movement forums[vi], this distinguished scholar had the great merit of putting these laboratories of political economy and social sciences at the service of the oppressed peoples of the planet to make their voice heard. Samir Amin has left his mark on several generations of economists, intellectuals, experts and consultants, politicians, etc. The work of this intellectual constitutes a school of thought of emancipation like Karl Marx, Frederic Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Samir Amin constantly questioned reality and made numbers speak to discover the essence of social phenomena. 1 He is among the few intellectuals who have fought on all fronts for great intellectual and political projects for justice, freedom and emancipation of oppressed peoples and for all citizens of the world. Certainly, these are societal projects that are difficult to implement in the face of imperialist and Zionist hegemony, but history will see reason in the thought of this great visionary that he was. Today, for Samir Amin, the alternative is to build an international bloc expressing the internationalism of workers and peoples[vii], and imposing relations of force to counter the imperialist triad (USA, Europe, Japan) and "to pass from the defensive to the offensive and to open again debates on the anti-capitalist alternatives and the processes of socialist transition"[viii]. I - Accumulation on a global scale [ix] This paragraph is named after Samir Amin's masterpiece in which the author presents a usefully polemical and acerbic but constructive critique of conventional theories of underdevelopment that advocates the (pure) theory of prices as its toolbox.In this voluminous book (590 pages), Samir Amin explains that development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin. In other words, the underdevelopment of Third World countries is historically the product of the development of Northern countries: the unlimited expansion of capitalism has given rise to a developed center and underdeveloped peripheries; capitalism is expansive and polarizing in nature[x]. For the author, price fixing is not done by means of the self-regulating market - via the auctioneer à la Walras, which fixing is an appearance - but by the dominant forces of the capitalist system on a global scale. Samir Amin has also strongly criticized the concept of capitalist development in the countries of the South, which has been disseminated in vulgar academic discourse and in the main dominant international financial, banking and commercial institutions, notably the Bretton Woods institutions; a discourse initiated by the model of catching up, conveyed at the beginning of the 1960s by the American economist W. W. Rostow[xi]. xi] The latter proposed that newly independent countries should follow a path known as catching up with the countries of the North. The Rostowian thesis has been defeated, as we shall see in the following paragraph. II - From Unequal Exchange [xii] to Unequal Development [xiii] Samir Amin starts from a critique of Arghiri Emmanuel's theory of unequal exchange [xiv], which he sees as a fundamental contribution [xv], but its flaw is that, on the other hand, its author remains confined to the sphere of exchange, a kind of economism according to the author of "Accumulation on a Global Scale". Indeed, for Samir Amin, the relations between the North and the South in the conditions of the international division of labor, whether old or new, are relations that lead to an unequal exchange between the two blocks. The exchange between the center and the periphery is an unequal exchange because, with equal productivity, work in the periphery is underpaid in relation to that in the center. In principle, the factors of production should be paid at the same rate. However, the wage, as the price of labor, is paid differently between countries in the South and countries in the North. This phenomenon is explained by the management of labor power imposed by dominant capital on the periphery within the framework of the NDIT. "The economic theory of comparative advantage (...), says S. Amin, describes the conditions of exchange at a given moment, and does not allow for a preference for specialization based on comparative productivities as they are at a given moment of development (...). (...). It cannot account for two essential facts that characterize the development of international trade (...): 1- The more rapid development of trade between countries with similar structures, whose distributions of comparative productivities are therefore similar, a development that is more rapid than that of trade between developed and underdeveloped countries, whose distributions of comparative productivities are, however, more diverse; 2- The successive and different forms of specialization of the periphery (...)"[xvi]. Interpreting Samir Amin, Rémy Herrera emphasizes that "the polarization that is inseparable from the functioning of a system based on an integrated world market for goods and capital, but which excludes the mobility of labor, is thus defined by the differential in labor remuneration, which is lower in the periphery than in the center, with equal productivity"[xvii]. This leads to a transfer of value from the peripheries to the center, thus causing a blockage of development, i.e., a distortion of the sectors of activity for which the productive effort is pumped out. The author specifies that this transfer is not the basis for the development of the center: the transfer of value allows the acceleration of accumulation in the center and blocks it in the peripheries. The theory of international exchanges between centers and peripheries cannot be conducted from an economistic perspective, as conventional economists do, but from a socio-political angle.
More precisely, as Amin easily puts it, the elaboration of a liberal economic theory of international exchange is a matter of the appearance of the functioning of the capitalist mode of production (MPC) in its pure state. A true theory of exchanges between the dominant and the dominated blocs is a matter of history[xviii]. Therefore, for an objective analysis of international exchange, it is a question of going beyond the sphere of exchange, to the essence, that is to say to the sphere of production, to the submission of labor power to the laws of the market, which is under the weight of a process of merciless commodification with the rise of neo-liberal policies which, beyond the dismantling of public services, are waging an unprecedented war against the working class: flexibility and individualization of work, dismantling of trade unions, precariousness of employment, marginalization, etc. [xix]. Moreover, the formation of the value of labor power, in Amin's sense, is understood through the dialectic between the laws of accumulation and class struggle: these relations between the economic and the political constitute the substratum of historical materialism. In this perspective, the wage cannot be an independent variable since its level depends on the objective forces, i.e. on the level of development of the productive forces[xx].III - Capitalist polarizationPolarization constitutes in Samir Amin's conceptual apparatus a primordial tool of analysis for the understanding of the dominant system. Indeed, for the author of the theory of the center and the peripheries, capitalism really exists with this characteristic that is immanent to it: polarization. In its general sense, it means the concentration of wealth in the North and the exploitation of the South. If polarization can be dated to the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century with the imperialism of monopolies[1][xxi], it must be said that the premonitory signs of this phenomenon date from the mercantilist phase, which coincides with the period of plunder and colonization. This period is therefore the high point that prepared the conditions for the emergence of polarization. This period is therefore the high point that prepared the conditions for the emergence of polarization. Matured in the imperialist period, polarization was exacerbated in the post-independence phase with the adoption by the countries of the South of the development models imposed within the framework of the New International Division of Labor (NIDL). It is therefore the product of their truncated insertion into the capitalist world market. "Samir Amin explains polarization in the following three theses: Thesis 1: "Polarization is an immanent law of the global expansion of capitalism"[xxiii]. This means, for the author, that the capitalism that actually exists is different from the MPC (in its pure state). The latter "presupposes a three-dimensional integrated market (commodity, capital and labor markets) that defines the basis of its functioning"[xxiv]. This definition is valid only for the history of capitalism at the center; but the extension of capitalism to the rest of the world (to the peripheries) has not experienced this integration of the three markets. "The world market is exclusively two-dimensional in its expansion, progressively integrating the exchange of products and the circulation of capital to the exclusion of labor, whose market remains compartmentalized"[xxv].Thesis 2: the law of globalized value explains that the expansion of capitalism is not homogeneous between the center and the peripheries. Thesis 3: For Amin, despite the industrialization of some countries in the periphery, the phenomenon of polarization and consequently the blocking of development is still on the agenda. The industrialization of the peripheries does not therefore erase polarization, a phenomenon inherent to really existing capitalism. It is therefore necessary to go beyond the artificial aspect of supposed catching up in terms of industrialization. In other words, fighting polarization presupposes a logic of accumulation other than that imposed by the NDIT. Breaking with the market mechanisms dictated by the hegemony of the monopolies and oligopolies of multinational firms and imperialist powers suggests the establishment of a self-centered logic of accumulation according to which the external relations of the peripheries must submit to the modalities of internal development[xxvii]. 1- Emergence and lumpen-development. 1 With the collapse of real socialism and the failure of popular and national projects in the countries of the South, as well as the eclipse of the notions that were the basis of modern history in the newly liberated countries, notably the notions and theories of development, other theoretical frescoes have appeared in the economic and political literature, such as emergence, governance, sustainable development, etc., whose content is open to strong criticism. Indeed, in the case of emerging countries known as BRICS, Samir Amin believes that, although these countries have achieved high and permanent growth rates that have allowed them to industrialize, they are not able to eradicate poverty and marginalization of the poor. For Amin, these countries have not been able to break the factors that weave and promote the capitalist polarization and expansion imposed by the imperialist states. "To the antipodes of the favorable evolution that would be drawn by a project of authentic emergence of this quality, the unilateral submission to the demands of the deployment of the globalized capitalism of generalized monopolies produces only what I will call a "lumpen-development", and here I borrow freely the term by which the late André Gunder Frank had analyzed an analogous evolution, but in other conditions of time and place. Today the "lumpen-development" is the product of the accelerated social disintegration, associated to the model of "development" (which therefore does not deserve its name) imposed by the monopolies of the imperialist centers to the societies of the peripheries they dominate. It manifests itself in the vertiginous growth of survival activities (the so-called informal sphere), in other words, in the pauperization inherent in the one-sided logic of capital accumulation. 1 It is worth noting that before this notion of emergence found the favorable ground for its popularization, the author of "Accumulation on a Global Scale" had the merit of highlighting similar but critical notions such as the notion of semi-peripheral countries, thus qualifying the development strategies initiated by the World Bank, notably import-substitution, as strategies doomed to failure. History has proven the author's theses right, as we can see. Samir Amin believes that China has succeeded in disconnecting itself from polarizing capitalist development and has embarked on a process of building socialism as a revolutionary popular process. Today, this country, which has tactically mobilized the concept of the market - under the banner of market socialism and not under the banner of market social capitalism - has unquestionably succeeded in imposing its trade strategies as a global superpower. For Rémy Herrera "the new China marks an opening and not a change in development strategies. It is a modification of socialist planning to make it more effective and to prolong development. To counter the triad (United States, European Union, Japan), efforts between these countries (the BRICS) and the other states of the South must be intensified to move from the defensive to the offensive. 1 We stress, in passing, that the strategies that the BRICS (except China) and the new BRICS are adopting do not give them the status of economies (and societies) that could make their way towards non-capitalist development. On the other hand, Samir Amin believes that in these countries a new capitalism could "mature", but nothing is certain to guarantee the advance towards social progress and emancipation. What is plausible, as the facts and events suggest, is that we are facing two scenarios, one led by the triad that would lead to barbarism and a second produced by the uprisings of the peoples of the South from which would crystallize the long transition to a post-capitalism[xli]. IV - Historical materialism revisited.As a reminder, Karl Marx considers that the economic is the determining factor in the last resort. This factor can be determining and dominant at the same time. As for the non-economic factors (political, ideological, cultural, etc.), they are in close connection with the economic factor and interfere dialectically. In certain circumstances, they are, like the economic factor, determining and dominant at the same time. This debate has been much written about[xlii] but unfortunately it is buried today. Samir Amin undertakes this substantive theme in order to clarify major confusions with the rise of fundamentalist and post-modernist currents.For him, in the tributary modes of production, those prior to capitalism, the political was the determining factor in social life, the economic was subject to these factors. In the new social organization, in this case capitalism, the previous pattern was reversed: the political factor (and the law) gave way to the economic factor[xliii]. From now on, politics is subject to the dictatorship of economics. Indeed, the law of globalized value[xliv] teaches that all aspects of social life are embedded in the economy, as Serge Latouche says[xlv]. The reign of the commodity in the life of societies leads to their commodification and produces, in fine, an atomized market society in the sense of Karl Polanyi[xlvi]. In these conditions, Samir Amin proposes to substitute culture for economy to carry out the politics of the city and the city-world[xlvii]. It is a question of subjecting politics to the springs of culture in place of its submission to the economy. One attends from then on a change from bottom to top of the configuration of the political factor in the social structuring. The politics will be conceived not as the art of the possible to manage the interests of the dominant classes but as the mode of management of the societies in order to establish the values of the democracy, the justice and the freedom. This change of register, by passing from the domination of the economy to that of the culture, entails in the long run the withering away of the law of the value[xlviii]: the capitalist exchange will cease to be the epicenter of the dominant relations of production for an exchange liberated from the economist alienation. In this respect, Samir Amin tells us: "I said the cultural and not the ideological, substituting itself to the economic and to the political because the accent has been placed on the political in the historical Marxism, about the so-called socialist transition to the communism. In a formulation of which one did not fail to point out the ambiguity: in the long term the withering away of the State (...) and the substitution of "the administration of the things to the government of the men (...), in the medium term, in the transition, the affirmation of the political, in the honorable form of the comments of Marx about the Commune of Paris (...), in the more doubtful one of the Soviet State, and in the one renewed by the Maoist discourse of the cultural revolution (...)". [xlix] 1V - Critique of culturalisms. In 1988, Samir Amin published his book "L'eurocentrisme: critique d'une idéologie"[l] in which he exposes the different civilizations that have marked the history of humanity. The author notes that many civilizations, including the Egyptian, Arab, Chinese, Greek, Roman, etc., exceed by far the European civilization and yet they did not show any egocentrism. It is true that the West has produced modernity and its eldest daughter secularism, from which its peoples have been able to achieve many achievements in terms of individual and collective freedoms, but today, says Samir Amin, this modernity of liberal essence, but produced by the Enlightenment, remains unfinished: today, democracy is swept away by the domination of the market economy, thus translating a low-intensity democracy [li] - at this precise moment of the collapse of the great narratives, in other words the failure of the democratic project. The backlash is that modernity is being ousted by currents claiming to be post-modernism[lii]: the thesis of the end of history (Francis Fukuyama) as well as that of the clash of civilizations (Samuel Huntington) wrongly announce that capitalism is unsurpassable[liii]! In other books[liv], Samir Amin sketches another form of Eurocentrism, but this time an inverted Eurocentrism embodied in religion, which also claims to hold the truth. It is a form of fundamentalism whose weapon of mass destruction is to exclude all forms of ideas and thoughts that do not go along with its precepts. Political Islam is an illustration of this inverted Eurocentrism. It is a new phenomenon produced by the really existing capitalism. Its followers instrumentalize religion to legitimize and appropriate power and wealth! The fundamental issue here in order to enter into a real competition to govern is that the religious sphere must be separated from the political sphere. This is what the apologists for this discourse keep blurring.lv] For Amin, reverse Eurocentrism is the product of Northern Eurocentrism. The latter has mobilized a whole armada, including Islamic fundamentalism, to combat all the societal projects that have been developed in other regions of the world, particularly the popular and socialist revolutions. 1 Samir Amin believes that the modernity of the Enlightenment (and its first-born daughter, secularism) has been undermined by religious chauvinism and obscurantism, which have muddied the waters. This is what led to the failure of three forms of historical projects: the Welfare State project (the failure of the Welfare State in the North plus the betrayal of the Left which allied itself with American imperialism), socialism in the East and the Bandoeng project initiated by the national liberation movements of the South. 1 To conclude, we would say that Samir Amin began his battle against injustice and for emancipation with what Karl Marx ended his fight for a just and egalitarian world, in other words, the economy. He ended his journey with what Marx began his, that is, politics and philosophy. For the two Enlightenment thinkers, however, economics and politics go hand in hand. 1 Samir Amin played the role of the "prophetic" intellectual to understand the world but above all to change it, as Karl Marx said. This great internationalist thinker has succeeded brilliantly in this gigantic work in theory and practice.
[1] Amin Samir, L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, op.cit.
[i] Amin, Samir (1992), De la critique de l’État soviétique à la critique de l’État national : L’alternative nationale et populaire (en arabe),Centre d’études arabes, Le Caire..[ii] Samir Amin était le Directeur de l’IDEP (Institut de développement et de planification, institution relevant des Nations-Unies, située à Dakar) de 1970 à 1980.Voir à ce titre Itinéraire intellectuel (2006), Tome 1, traduit en arabe par Saâd Taouil, Ed. Essaki, Beyrouth.[iii] Samir Amin est fondateur du FTM en 1980 et fut son Président jusqu’à sa mort.[iv] Le Conseil pour le développement de la recherche en sciences sociales en Afrique, créé en 1973, son siège est basé à Dakar (Sénégal). Samir Amin fut le 1er Secrétaire exécutif de cet organisme (de 1973 à 1975).[v] Environnement, développement, Action dans le Tiers-Monde est une organisation non gouvernementale, créée en 1972 et située à Dakar (Sénégal),[vi] Notamment le Forum mondial des alternatives dont Samir Amin fut le Président , le Forum social mondial, etc.[vii] Amin, Samir (2017), L’indispensable reconstruction de l’international des travailleurs et des peuples, (Manifeste), Forum du Tiers-Monde et Forum mondial des alternatives.[viii] Herrera, Rémy (2010), Un autre capitalisme n’est pas possible, Ed. Syllepse, p.190.[ix] Amin, Samir (1970), L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, Ed. Anthropos.[x] Amin, Samir, L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, op.cit.[xi] Rostow, Whitman Walt (1960), Les étapes de la croissance économique, Economica, Paris.[xii] Amin, Samir (1973), L’échange inégal et la loi de la valeur, Ed. Anthropos.[xiii] Amin, Samir (1973), Le développement inégal, Ed. de Minuit.[xiv] Cf. l’ouvrage de l’auteur L’échange inégal : Essai sur les antagonismes dans les rapports, internationaux (1969), Ed. Maspero. Ce livre a suscité, dans les années 1970, un débat houleux entre marxistes.[xv] Cf. la critique de Samir Amin dans L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, op. cit. , puis dans L’échange inégal et la loi de la valeur, op.cit. et également dans Le développement inégal, op. cit.[xvi] Amin, Samir, L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, op.cit, p.79. Pour l’auteur, la prise en compte de ces deux phénomènes doit faire appel « à la théorie de la tendance inhérente au capitalisme à l’élargissement des marchés et à celle de la domination du centre sur la périphérie », Ibidem. Voir également, Samir Amin, Le développement inégal, op. cit.[xvii] Herrera, Rémy (2000), Les théorie du système capitaliste mondial ,Cahiers de la MSE ,n° 43, Paris , p.8[xviii] Amin, S, L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, op.cit.[xix] Amin, Samir (2003), Le virus libéral : La guerre permanente et l’américanisation du monde, Ed. Le Temps des Cerises.[xx] Amin, Samir, Le développement inégal, op.cit.et Amin, Samir, L’échange inégal et la loi de la valeur, op.cit.[xxi] Amin, Samir, L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale, op.cit.[xxii] Amin, Samir (1996), Les défis de la mondialisation, L’Harmattan, Paris, p.81.[xxiii] Amin, S, Les défis de la mondialisation, op.cit. p.77.[xxiv] Ibidem.[xxv] Ibidem.[xxvi] Amin, S, Les défis de la mondialisation, op.cit. p.78.[xxvii] Samir Amin distingue ici capitalisme et développement autocentré : le 1er est par nature polarisant, le second est un outil critique du capitalisme.[xxviii] Blondel, Marc, cité par Ramonet, Ignacio (1999), Géopolitique du chaos, Ed. Gallimard, p.85.[xxix] Amin, Samir (1993), Mondialisation et accumulation, L’Harmattan.[xxx] Amin, Samir (1986), La déconnexion , pour sortir du système mondial, L’Harmattan.[xxxi] Amin, Samir, (2013), La loi de la valeur mondialisée, Ed. Le Temps des Cerises.[xxxii] Amin, Samir (2002), Le capitalisme sénile : pour un 21ème siècle non américain, Collection Actuel Marx Confrontation, PUF.[xxxiii] Amin, Samir (2006) , La Cinquième internationale, Ed. Le Temps des Cerises.[xxxiv] Amin, Samir, L’indispensable reconstruction de l’international des travailleurs et des peuples, (Manifeste), op.cit.[xxxv] Amin, Samir, La Cinquième internationale, op.cit..Voir aussi Amin, Samir (2017) Le Centenaire de la révolution d’octobre 1917, Ed. Delga.[xxxvi] Amin, Samir (2011), Le monde arabe dans la longue durée, le Printemps arabe ? Le Temps des Cerises.[xxxvii] Amin, Samir (1991), Le grand tumulte : les mouvements sociaux dans l’économie-monde (en collaboration), Ed. La Découverte. [xxxviii] Souligné par nous (A.Z).[xxxix] Amin, Samir (2013), Emergence et lumpen-développement, Préface à l’ouvrage de Zoubdi, Ahmed, Les pays du Sud dans le système mondial, L’Harmattan, Collection Forum du Tiers-Monde.[xl] Herrera, Rémy dans son entretien avec Le Blog Réveil communiste, à l’occasion de la sortie de son livre (co-écrit avec Zhiming Long) : (2019), La Chine est-elle capitaliste ? Les éditions Critiques.[xli] Amin, Samir , Conférence animée à la faculté de Droit de Rabat-Agdal , sous le thème « Economie politique du Printemps arabe » , le 08 – 12 – 2011.[xlii] Cf. Belal, Aziz (1980), Développement et facteurs non économiques, Ed. S.M.E.R.[xliii] Amin, Samir (1997), Critique de l’air du temps, L’Harmattan, Collection Forum du Tiers-Monde.[xliv] Amin, Samir, La loi de la valeur mondialisée, op.cit.[xlv] Latouche, Serge (1998), Les dangers du marché planétaire, Presses de la Fondation nationale de sciences po..[xlvi] Polanyi, Karl (1983), La grande transformation, Ed. Gallimard.[xlvii] Amin, Samir (1989), Pour une théorie de la culture, Centre arabe de développement, Beyrouth.[xlviii] Amin, Samir, Critique de l’air du temps, op.cit.[xlix] Samir Amin, Critique de l’air du temps, p.65.[l] Livre paru aux éditions Anthropos (1988).[li] Amin, Samir (2003), Le virus libéral : La guerre permanente et l’américanisation du monde, Ed. Le Temps des Cerises.[lii] Amin, Samir, Critique de l’air du temps, op.cit.[liii] Amin, Samir (2008), Modernité, religion et démocratie : Critique de l’eurocentrisme et critique des culturalismes, Œuvres complètes, Ed. Paragon/Vs. Voir également son livre (2012), L’implosion du capitalisme : Automne du capitalisme, Printemps de peuples, Ed. Delga.[liv] Notamment Vers une théorie de la culture(en arabe), op.cit. Voir également, Modernité, religion et démocratie, op. cit, et De la critique du discours arabe contemporain (en arabe, 2015), Editions de l’Instance égyptienne générale du livre, Le Caire.[lv] Amin, Samir , Vers une théorie de la culture, op.cit.[lvi] Samir Amin , Le Centenaire de la révolution d’octobre 1917, op.cit.
