Only People Make Their Own History - Samir Amin

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obsolete and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception’.

      19 Two other books of the 1970s that extend the arguments first presented in his original dissertation can be cited here. His Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (French original 1973; English translation 1976) shifts the focus of analysis from how values produced all over the world are utilized for accumulation in the imperial centres to the consequences of those processes for social formations of the peripheralized tricontinent. This was followed by Imperialism and Unequal Development (French edition 1976; English translation 1977), comprised of essays on related topics which address the debates that ensued around Unequal Development.

      20 Samir Amin, Class and Nation, Historically and in the Current Crisis, French original 1979; English translation 1980.

      21 Fichte was by no means a right-wing romantic of that kind. Even so, his Addresses to the German Nation (1808) is the classic statement of that position on the idea of the nation. No wonder Fichte is often cited on the more ideologically oriented websites of the self-styled American alt-right of today.

      22 For the Arab world in particular, Amin analysed the transition from precapitalist tributary mode to the modern bourgeois nationhood (with all its failures) that emerged in the course of the 20th century in his short book, The Arab Nation: Nationalism and Class Struggle (French original 1976; English translation 1978, Zed Books). Here, as in so much of his other writing, Amin explores the relationship, possibly an overlap, between the national (anti-imperialist) revolution and the struggle for socialism.

      23 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, French original 1988; English translation 1989.

      24 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (three volumes: 1987, 1991, 2006), New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. The basic argument in favour of a distinct civilizational unity of the Mediterranean world was laid out in great detail in Volume 1, published the year before Eurocentrism.

      25 Samir Amin, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, 2016.

      26 Significantly, Amin wrote a critical but enthusiastic review of William K. Carroll’s The Making of an International Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century, London and New York: Zed Books, 2010. See his ‘Transnational Capitalism or Collective Imperialism’, Pambazuka News, May 23, 2011.

      27 A Life, p. 48.

      28 The World We Wish to See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty-First Century (2008) is a good place to start for following Amin’s thinking on these issues. My own exegesis in the following paragraphs is culled, however, from a broader range of his writings.

      29 Mao’s conception of a multi-class revolutionary alliance for the transitional period, which includes the national bourgeoisie, is sometimes invoked by the Chinese authorities these days not only in defining the specifically Chinese form of socialism but also to justify admitting a wide range of capitalists into the communist party, some of them reaching into the party’s highest organs.

      30 Foxconn isn’t satisfied with employing the ill-paid, super-exploited Chinese workers. It wants to replace them with thousands of robots.

      31 ‘The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half this century, and the one that cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry,’ says Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. This is an inexplicably exaggerated claim. Even so, it is not clear just what proportion of the agrarian population can still be counted as ‘peasants’; nor is it clear from the rapid rate of outward migration into urban slums just how long the countryside in the various Asian zones will remain so very densely populated.

      32 See Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System, Monthly Review Press, 1990, a collection of separate essays by Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein.

       THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

       THE BELLE ÉPOQUE

      The twentieth century came to a close in an atmosphere astonishingly reminiscent of that which had presided over its birth—the ‘belle époque’ (and it was beautiful, at least for capital). The bourgeois choir of the European powers, the United States, and Japan (which I will call here ‘the triad’ and which, by 1910, constituted a distinct group) were singing hymns to the glory of their definitive triumph. The working classes of the centre were no longer the ‘dangerous classes’ they had been during the nineteenth century and the other peoples of the world were called upon to accept the ‘civilizing mission’ of the West.

      The belle époque crowned a century of radical global transformations, marked by the emergence of the first industrial revolution and the formation of the modern bourgeois nation-state. The process spread from the northwestern quarter of Europe and conquered the rest of the continent, the United States, and Japan. The old peripheries of the mercantilist age (Latin America and the British and Dutch East Indies) were excluded from the dual revolution, while the old states of Asia (China, the Ottoman sultanate, and Persia) were being integrated as peripheries within the new globalization. The triumph of the centres of globalized capital asserted itself in a demographic explosion, which swelled the European population from 23 per cent of the world’s total in 1800 to 36 per cent in 1900. At the same time, the concentration of industrial wealth in the triad created a polarization of wealth on a scale humanity had not witnessed during the entirety of its history. On the eve of the industrial revolution, the disproportion in the social productivity of work between the most productive fifth of humanity and the remainder had never exceeded a ratio of two to one. By 1900, this ratio was twenty to one.

      The globalization celebrated in 1900, even then called ‘the end of history’, was nevertheless a recent fact, emerging during the second half of the nineteenth century. The opening of China and of the Ottoman Empire in 1840, the repression of the Sepoys in India in 1857, and the division of Africa that started in 1885 marked successive steps in the process. Globalization, far from accelerating the process of capital accumulation (a distinct process to which it cannot be reduced), in fact brought on a structural crisis between 1873 and 1896; almost exactly a century later, it did so again. The first crisis, however, was accompanied by a new industrial revolution (electricity, petroleum, automobiles, the airplane), which was expected to transform the human species; much the same is said today about electronics. In parallel, the first industrial and financial oligopolies were created—the transnational corporations (TNCs) of the time. Financial globalization seemed to be establishing itself in a stable fashion (and being thought of as eternal, a familiar contemporary belief) in the form of the gold-sterling standard. There was even talk of the internationalization of the transactions made possible by the new stock exchanges, with as much enthusiasm as accompanies talk of financial globalization today. Jules Verne was sending his hero (English, of course) around the world in eighty days—for him, the ‘global village’ was already a reality.

      The political economy of the nineteenth century was dominated by the figures of the great classics—Adam Smith, Ricardo, then Marx and his devastating critique. The triumph of fin-de-siécle globalization brought to the foreground a new ‘liberal’ generation, driven by the desire to prove that capitalism was ‘unsurpassable’ because it expressed the demands of an eternal, transhistorical rationality. Walras, a central figure in this new generation (whose discovery by contemporary economists is no coincidence), did everything he could to prove that markets were self-regulating. He had as little success proving it then as neoclassical economists have today.

      The ideology of triumphant liberalism reduced society to a mere multiplication of individuals. Then, following this reduction, it was asserted that the equilibrium produced by the market both constitutes the social optimum and guarantees stability and democracy. Everything was in place to substitute

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