S Amin The concept of a national sovereign project

SAMIR AMIN

The concept of a national sovereign project of development in the perspective of a negotiated globalisation

   

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A national sovereign project implies the concept and implementation of a set of consistent national policies aiming at “walking on two legs”, i.e. i) constructing an integrated autocentered industrial productive system ; ii) moving into policies of revival and modernization of a peasant agriculture; and iii) articulating the two goals into a consistent comprehensive plan of action.

a) constructing an integrated comprehensive industrial productive system implies that each industry is conceived in order to become a major provider of inputs and/or a major outlet for other industries. That concept conflicts with the neo liberal dogma which is based on the exclusive criterion of profitability for each industrial establishment considered separately from others. This concept leads to dismantling the industrial systems constructed previously (in the former Soviet Union, East Europe and some countries of the South) and subordinating what remains of them to the status of sub-contractors subordinated to further global expansion of major giant transnationals (operated by financial capital of the US, some Western European countries and Japan). Our alternative concept implies State intervention, i.e. State planning, managing an independent national financial system with a view to financing in priority the construction of industries, in the frame of budget constraints avoiding inflation and large foreign debt growing. Systems of taxation should be conceived in order to support the deployment of the project. Eventual foreign direct investments associated should be submitted to negotiated conditions that reinforce the national project, not annihilate it.

b) defining policies aiming at revival of peasant agriculture, the target of which is to reduce the out migration from rural areas at rates that cannot allow its being absorbed by urban industrial development. The target implies that land is not considered as a  “merchandise”, but as a common national good at the disposal of the whole peasantry. It therefore implies ownership patterns which protect the access to land for all peasant families, on as equal footing as possible. The target is also to ensure national food sovereignty. Such a vision conflicts again with neo liberal dogmas and policies of so called agricultural development based on massive dispossession of peasants to the benefit of agribusiness, large land owners and a minority of rich peasants. A number of priority industries should be conceived in order to support the modernization of peasant agriculture by providing requested inputs and offering consumption goods. Such plans for the revival of rural life should be conceived for a large majority of countries of Asia and Africa, as well as for Latin America, whenever the rural population still represent a significant proportion of the total population (30 % or more) and adjusted to the specificities of each national case.

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A) Such a project should provide an efficient basis for:

(i) Reaching targets ensuring social progress for the vast majorities of working classes; reducing inequalities. The concepts of neo liberal rule of an unregulated market which is supposed to generate social justice through the windfall effects of the expansion of the markets is denied in fact by the on-going continuous inequality ruling to day.

(ii) Creating objective favourable conditions for the invention of participatory democratic advances. Electoral representative democracy (pluripartism and elections) associated to social disaster as it is the case has already lost its credibility within wide segments of the society.

(iii) Creating the ground for global negotiations offering to countries of the South (and former East) chances to becoming active equal partners in the reconstruction of a pattern of globalization with no hegemony.

B) Recommendations:

Could be summarized in the two following sentences:

(i)Opening channels for a debate with citizens, the trade unions and other organizations of authentic popular civil society, resulting into a plan of State support to a project of comprehensive industrialization.

(ii) Opening channels with peasant mass organizations with a view to defining a plan of action for the revival of rural peasant agriculture.