The Clash over Delinking During the Transition from Imperialism to Globalization: Samir Amin’s Thesis (Part One), Dr. Adel Samara

(This paper was presented on October 27, 2018, at a conference at Birzeit University following the passing of comrade and colleague Samir Amin.)

Introduction

We may perhaps divide the world today into three geographical groupings:

• The periphery
• The Western capitalist center
• The new Second World.

In the five-part series on Development by Popular Protection DPP, we discussed how it is possible to confront the Western capitalist system, both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the discussion was the situation and experience of the occupied Palestinian territory, and, to some extent, the application—or extension as far as possible—of this perspective to the Arab world and elsewhere.

The Development-by-Popular-Protection model constitutes an introduction to delinking, whether at the level of individual countries of the periphery or collectively. As we have noted in previous articles, popular protection is not fundamentally statist; rather, it is grassroots in character. It may begin spontaneously and voluntarily, but it ultimately requires a political, class-based, and party-based leadership framework. Most importantly, it does not depend on the existing authority insofar as that authority is subordinate, class-based, and often comprador in character.

It is true that the natural development of Development by Popular Protection DPP is to move toward delinking, but the mechanism for achieving this becomes more complicated. The popular forces that organize themselves around, adopt, and implement popular protection are not yet in power and therefore cannot decide to delink from the world market and/or choose alternative markets to those of the capitalist West.

The popular classes can boycott the products of a particular country, either in order to produce alternatives or even when they are unable to produce such alternatives—that is, for political, humanitarian, or national purposes. This may compel the authorities to change their sources of imports. But the objective of popular protection is to push the authorities toward delinking. This means that delinking is ultimately in the hands of the state/authority that carries it out, within the limits imposed by the radicalism of its class character, and that popular-protection forces must push the authorities in the direction of delinking.

In other words, if popular protection is primarily—and perhaps entirely—mass-based, then the model of delinking is participatory between the two sides. The decision may be governmental, but in the case of a subordinate authority such a decision will not be voluntary unless there is popular pressure, whether through boycotting the products of the capitalist West or through popular pressure on the subordinate authority. In other words, it requires a certain degree of struggle and therefore of class struggle.

The model/theory of delinking goes back to the late Marxist Thinker Samir Amin, and it has acquired greater relevance today than ever before. We have therefore chosen to present our analysis of Samir Amin’s thesis as we formulated it following his death.

A Brief Reading of Samir Amin’s Thesis

Note

There is no consensus that there has been a fundamental change in the global capitalist system sufficient to justify naming the current era “globalization.” This is a period that began, approximately, in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continues to the present—a historically very short period. Yet its brevity represents an intensification of the crisis of the global capitalist system. I tend to describe this short period as globalization, and I do not agree with the argument that it constitutes another stage of imperialism, or that it is entirely contained within imperialism. (See Adel Samara, Beyond De-linking: Development by Popular Protection vs. Development by State, especially Chapter Seven, “Beyond Delinking,” pp. 159–171. Published by Al-Mashriq Al-A’amil for Cultural and Development Studies, Ramallah, and Palestine Research and Publishing Foundation, Glendale, CA, 2005.)

This paper is confined, as far as possible, to delinking, addressing the issues most closely related to it both intellectually and practically.

“Delinking means not submitting to the logic of the global capitalist system,

and rejecting the inevitability of passively adapting to the requirements of integration into the world system”  (Samir Amin, Beyond US Hegemony? Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, Zed Books, 2006, p. 27).

Samir Amin made important contributions to Marxist theory, grounding and concentrating his work on its three components. He began by employing the laws of dialectics in his various analyses with great mastery, allowing theory to dissolve into analysis without falling into linguistic obscurity or theoretical complexity. He also expanded historical-materialist analysis, making important contributions to the philosophy of political economy.

This was the starting point of Samir Amin’s Marxism—or communism, if you prefer—whether during the early period of his life in the Egyptian Communist Party, or subsequently through his role among the theorists of the Dependency School, which established the basis for his continuing analysis of peripheral formations. This eventually led to his distinguished role in the World-System School, where he was one of its four major figures: Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, André Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi.

This school within Marxism, and indeed within Marxist political economy, analyzes the global capitalist system beginning with the structure of the system in its broadest dimensions and moving down to the geography under investigation—that is, this country or that country. The reason is that the school regarded most of the world as being under capitalist domination and therefore believed that the world had to be understood as an interconnected whole, while still taking variables and specificities into account.

Dependency Theory emerged during the 1960s from a group/school associated with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLA), founded by Raúl Prebisch. His ideas concerning structuralism were developed into Dependency Theory, which reached the conclusion that developing the periphery was almost an impossible task.

What concerns us here is Prebisch’s thesis that deteriorating terms of trade between the center and the periphery perpetuate the dependency of the periphery. Here we can identify the influence of this thesis on Amin’s development of the theory of delinking, as well as its connection to Gunder Frank’s contribution, particularly concerning underdevelopment and the idea of the “development of underdevelopment.” This refers to the existence of social and political ruling classes with an interest in perpetuating underdevelopment and, consequently, dependency (See Adel Samara, “Developing of Unequal Development in the Arab Homeland,” Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, No. 197, July 1995, pp. 16–27).

Amin did not overlook the role of the international division of labor in perpetuating the underdevelopment of the periphery. This led him to criticize nationalist movements that failed to see a contradiction between the international division of labor and the development of their countries. Such movements remained trapped within the bourgeois conception of bridging the historical gap by participating in the international division of labor rather than rejecting it—that is, rather than delinking. (Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 91.)

Research into underdevelopment necessarily leads to—or means—the study of the factors of development in return. Hence, the study of the development of the centers was fundamental to Amin’s thinking. This led him, along with others, to the theory of self-centered development and regional self-reliance, until he and his colleagues reached the conclusion that it was impossible to reproduce the conditions of development achieved by the Western centers.

This was particularly because of the role played by those centers in preventing the periphery from catching up with the center. This represents a contradiction between the two components of the global capitalist system: center/periphery. Accordingly, it was natural to search for another path, and that path became the engagement with delinking.

Amin continued his critical examination through historical-materialist readings and analyses of the global system as a whole and of its crises, including the crisis that had continued from 2007 until his death that year. Nevertheless, the question of underdevelopment remained central to his intellectual concerns and, consequently, to his work.

Thus, his fundamental thesis concerned uneven development, which generates and preserves underdevelopment, establishes dependency, and perpetuates it. This encouraged him to devote his intellectual and practical life to the Third World, becoming part of the Third Worldist school, whose founding tradition is generally regarded as Maoism.

Eventually, Amin formulated his theory of delinking as a necessary condition if a country of the periphery is to develop. This was an unequivocal conclusion that was, of course, distorted by bourgeois thinkers, while Marxist currents themselves were divided between supporters and opponents:

• Supporters of the theory of the “non-capitalist path”, which was one of the symptoms of the theoretical—and consequently existential—decay of the actually existing socialist systems.
• Western Marxists who mistakenly believed that the periphery had moved toward capitalist development in the same way as the center—a catch-up theory. Bill Warren is an example:

“…despite the various mistaken policies, there has been a conscious recognition that the achievements of the less-developed countries improved generally during the 1960s, the decade that witnessed the highest growth in the less-developed countries during the century. If we take into consideration that the actual purchasing power of their exports rose at the same rate as the increase in gross domestic product, 5.5% (along with stable terms of trade), exports therefore increased more rapidly than imports during the 1960s… These positive indicators continued into the 1970s.” (Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, Verso, 1980, p. 178. See also Chapter 8, “The Illusion of Underdevelopment: Facts of Post-War Progress,” in the same book.)

Bill Warren’s early death should perhaps have been postponed long enough for him to see what happened to the Third World and how the Fourth World became articulated with it, particularly the accelerated growth of speculative and rentier economies and the financing by rentier states of the terrorism of political-religious regimes and forces.

Amin did not overlook responding to Bill Warren, Charles Bettelheim, and Gunder Frank:

“…Is the fundamental characteristic of our history the global expansion of capital? Bill Warren, Gunder Frank, and Charles Bettelheim, each in his own way, regard the Russian and Chinese revolutions as ‘capitalist’ and see them merely as stages, even if specific ones, in this expansion.” (Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 75.)

The question remains: Which is more accurate? Amin’s conviction that Russia and China had delinked sufficiently to become immune and protected against a return to capitalism, or the enthusiasm of Bettelheim, Warren, and Frank that the Russian and Chinese revolutions were merely stages and parts of capitalist expansion?

The thesis of transferring technology to the periphery in the form of productive working capital, without falling into the belief in the capitalization, industrialization, and catching-up of the periphery. Tamas Szentes writes:

“…Compared with most developed countries, the newly industrialized countries still remain in the position of producing and exporting primary products. These newly industrialized countries have reached a better position in the world economy. But although industrial growth has taken place, it has not been accompanied by the establishment of an advanced national industrial base together with research and development capabilities. Production linkages throughout the national economy have not emerged. Instead, their simple industrial enclaves have neither confirmed nor guaranteed greater benefits or better living standards for the majority. They may perhaps have become merely another reproduction of underdevelopment.” (Tamas Szentes, The Transformation of the World Economy: New Directions and New Interests, Zed Books, 1986, p. 74.)

Advocates of the need for deeper penetration of colonialism into the periphery, on the grounds that its penetration had not gone far enough or had been insufficient (Jeffrey Kay). (See Jeffry Kay, Development and Underdevelopment: A Marxist Analysis, London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1975.)

• And, last but not least, the broad old-new school of “positive colonialism”—indeed, the notion of the positivity of colonialism within bourgeois political-economic thought—which culminated with the neoconservatives, including Trotskyist leaders who joined this politicized religious current, in the occupation of countries in order to “democratize” them, as in the cases of Egypt Iraq, Libya, and others.

De-linking

“Under these circumstances, it was necessary to develop the productive forces away from capitalism.”

This sentence summarizes Amin’s conception of delinking. It means that the development of countries on the periphery places them before one of two choices:

• Either to leave the capitalist system completely, relying on the development of the productive forces, and to move beyond the standards of the socioeconomic and cultural relations resulting from being compelled to maintain some kind of relationship with the world market. This is an option in the interests of the popular majority.
• Or to remain trapped in the vicious circle of underdevelopment and dependency, an option that serves the interests of the smallest social groups, which are the wealthiest, the most detached from the country, and the least attached to it, since their homeland is their bank account number.

To what else can the issue of the minority and the majority be attributed if not to the class question, and to Amin’s complete alignment with the popular classes?

The productive forces—and the level of their development—are central to development; indeed, they constitute its fundamental axis, since production is the central link in any economy, upon which the other links depend: distribution, consumption, saving, reinvestment, waste, extravagance, etc. This means, particularly in the present era and with regard to the Arab situation, especially the oil-producing countries, that rent, understood as an expansion of financial liquidity, is not an entry point to development but to dependency. In both development and dependency, relations of production play a dialectical role alongside the productive forces, which is precisely where Marxist theorists differ over which of the two is decisive.

“…Delinking cannot take place without subordinating external relations and without the political capacity to carry out a profound social reform in an egalitarian direction, in addition to technological assimilation and innovation.”[1] (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 60.)

This political capacity is what we call the “political decision” of the ruling authority—that is, the class decision of the ruling class, which in every socioeconomic formation positions itself according to its interests, rather than according to its nationality, geography, history, etc.

Surplus, Accumulation, and Delinking as an Alternative

“…The fact is that the bourgeoisie of the Third World is not yet capable of going beyond [the system]. But one may say that there is an alternative to the bourgeoisie: can the other alternative (popular social alliances) do so? This is our thesis. But the forms necessary to do so include what we call delinking, which is part of the problem, since there is no longer any room for capitalist expansion. Hence, what is possible—and is rather its opposite—is a transition toward another society (socialism).” (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 13.)

In this work, Amin focuses on accumulation, pointing out that there is confusion between self-centered development and import-substitution industrialization, on the one hand, and the export-oriented strategy, on the other (where exports are treated as the driving force of growth), which finds its expansion in the enlargement of the domestic market. This raises the question of whether import substitution is intended to control accumulation, or whether it accepts a degree of control by foreign capital—financially, technologically, and in terms of dependency, etc. In other words: does accumulation escape the control of the state?[3] (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 18.)

Of course, here he goes beyond and rejects theories of catching up, adaptation, takeoff, etc., insofar as they represent bourgeois-liberal approaches to growth and nothing more.

But should Amin have begun—or returned us—to what precedes accumulation, to the foundation and generator of accumulation itself? Namely, capitalist class relations of production, which are based upon the epidemic/spread of private property, The problem of humanity historically is not based solely on the acquisitive and exploitative foundation established by private property as a class weapon and the victory of one class over others. It also rests on the psychological effect and motivation of the bourgeois individual, who elevates himself through what he owns, even though what he owns is not intrinsic to him as a person. This drives him to cling to private property through a reciprocal reinforcement between the pursuit of unlimited profit and the use of that pursuit to raise his social and consequently political status.

And consequently, exploitation and the appropriation of surplus value—that is, the extraction of the surplus and control over it? Considering that the surplus is the product of production generated by labor power, with all the exploitation and alienation that production entails.

Of course, he should have done so, but perhaps he assumed that this was self-evident. The surplus is fundamentally based on labor, and therefore it is the foundation of accumulation.

Amin was by no means distant from this perspective. Rather, he was one of the prominent members of the Monthly Review school (This school, which is close to Maoism, is the school I consider myself close to and from which I have benefited greatly, although I am not a member of it.)

Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Ellen Meiksins Wood, John Bellamy Foster, etc.—particularly from Baran’s work on the surplus in his important book The Political Economy of Growth (1957).

One of Marx’s most important theories in economics is the theory of surplus value, or value added, produced solely by human labor power. Of the effort expended in production and transformed into commodities, labor retains only what is necessary to secure a minimum level of survival or subsistence for itself and those it supports. The overwhelming proportion, almost entirely, goes to the person who owns but does not work, enabling him to consume, save, and then reinvest—thereby exploiting labor power again, and so on. As technology develops, the capitalist generates surplus value, which is transformed into profit.

Economists have devoted considerable attention to the question of surplus value, particularly development economists, who have linked it to the growth and subsequent development of one country or another. In other words, for growth and development to occur, a country must retain the surplus generated at the national level. The causes of underdevelopment become apparent when a country does not control the surplus generated within it—that is, the total surplus value generated by the country as a whole.

This question occupied the American economist Paul Baran, particularly in his analysis of the underdevelopment of countries on the periphery of the world system. He developed a theory of the surplus that he called economic surplus, understood at the level of the national state—that is, the country as a whole. He defined the surplus as the difference between a country’s total output and total consumption.

He went on to identify three specific variables in the concept of economic surplus:

1. Actual economic surplus: the difference between society’s current output and its current consumption. This is the surplus or savings with which economic theory deals. Baran also observed that peripheral countries generate little surplus, and that this is a basis of their underdevelopment—namely, a shortage of capital. (Of course, later it became clear that the availability of money was no longer the fundamental basis of development to the same extent as human beings and economic policy.)

2. Potential economic surplus: the difference between the output that could potentially be produced under given natural and technological conditions through the utilization of productive resources, and what would be considered basic consumption.

3. Planned economic surplus: a concept associated with a socialist system. It is the difference between the “optimal” output achieved under historically specific natural and technological conditions through optimal planning of the utilization of available productive forces, and the selection of an optimal level of consumption. The importance of planning lies in the fact that it is based on a scientific policy of rationalization that preserves human and natural resources.

Baran’s coherent conception, which was primarily concerned with explaining the causes of underdevelopment, did not sufficiently focus on class power in the periphery, which often transforms its role into a mechanism facilitating the hemorrhaging of surplus. This is something that is avoided under a socialist system.

The late Anouar Abdel-Malek, in turn, expanded the theory of surplus. Whereas Marx discussed and established it at the level of the individual enterprise—relations of production and class exploitation—while also touching upon the national level, and Baran expanded the concept of surplus beyond surplus value to encompass surplus in both the center and the periphery, that is, within the global capitalist system during a given period, Abdel-Malek developed the concept further by giving surplus a historical dimension that is neither static nor confined to a specific period or country.

Although he focused on, or began with, the fifteenth century, this approach actually intersects with Marx’s reading of the concept of value in general: the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human/social labor embodied in it—that is, labor in its various forms, living and dead, abstract, etc. It is historically accumulated labor.

He further argues that the roots of violence, the roots of globalized war, and the path toward armament are embedded in the historical structure of the world system. They are rooted in the historical formation of Western domination, itself deeply grounded in Historical Surplus Value since the fifteenth century and thereafter. The fundamental issue in the structural analysis of Western domination is not, in any case, confined to the dimension of militarism. Rather, research must be directed toward and concentrated on the formation of historical surplus value.” (As cited in the original text.)

No one on either the right or the left has ignored Marx’s contribution or Paul Baran’s contribution to the question of surplus. Yet hardly anyone has pointed to the contribution of Anouar Abdel-Malek. Is this an expression of Western cultural centrism and the dependency of non-Western thinkers? Is it an instance of anti-non-Western bias in political economy?

There is no doubt that Amin had read and benefited from Abdel-Malek’s thesis, particularly because the two came from the same background and also lived in a kind of semi-exile from Egypt. Hence, Amin concluded his contribution by further developing the concept of globalized surplus value.

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