SAMIR AMIN
; Bicentenary of Marx (short summary)
Marx is a giant thinker, not for the XIX th
century, but even more for understanding our contemporary time. No other
attempt to develop an understanding of society has been as fertile. Provided
“marxists” move beyond “marxology” – repeating what Marx could write in his
time - by pursuing his method in accordance with new developments in history.
Marx himself continuously developed and revised his views in his life time.
Marx never reduced capitalism to a new mode
of production. He considered all the dimensions of modern capitalist society,
understanding that the law of value does not regulate only capitalist
accumulation, but rules all aspects of modern civilization. That unique vision
allowed him to offer the first scientific approach relating social relations to
anthropology. In that perspective he
included in his analyses what is to-day called “ecology”, re-discovered a
century after Marx. It lead to the understanding that communism is not a new
and more advanced mode of production but a higher stage in human civilization
(utopia becomes a reality); and that the
road through the socialist transition is a very long road.
Marx’s major work—Capital—presents a
rigorous scientific analysis of the capitalist society and how they differ qualitatively from earlier society forms. It directly clarifies the
meaning of the generalization of commodity exchanges between private property
owners specifically the emergence and dominance of value and abstract
social labour. From that foundation,
Marx leads us to understand how the proletarian’s sale of his or her labour power to the “man with money”
ensures the production of surplus value that the capitalist expropriates, and
which, in turn, is the condition for the accumulation of capital. The dominance
of value governs not only the reproduction of the economic system of
capitalism; it governs every aspect of modern social and political life. The
concept of commodity alienation points to the ideological mechanism through which
the overall unity of social reproduction is expressed. This exceptional
intellectual and political instrument demonstrated itself to be the best for
predicting in a correct way the general line of the historical evolution of the
capitalist reality.
No text written
in the mid-nineteenth century has held the road until today as well as the
Communist Manifesto of 1848. Even today entire paragraphs of the text
correspond to the contemporary reality even better than in 1848.
The capitalist system has always been and
remains globalized
Marx, more than anyone, understood that
capitalism had the mission to conquer the world. He wrote about it at a time
when this conquest was far from being completed. He considered this mission
from its origins, the conquest of the Americas which inaugurated the transition
of the three centuries of mercantilism to the final full- fledged form of
capitalism.
Yet Marx and Engels, in the Manifesto and
even later still hesitate: could the worldwide deployment of capitalism operate
as a homogenizing force giving to the conquered East its chance to become
similar to Western advanced countries? Late Marx reached the intuition that polarization,
inherent to the global expansion of capitalism, will make impossible catching
up in the frame of globalized capitalism and on the basis of capitalist
essential rules.
I gave priority to that intuition of Marx,
related to the future of globalization and devoted my efforts to formulate the
laws of unequal development resulting from a globalized formulation of the law
of accumulation. I derived from it an explanation for the revolutions in the
name of socialism starting from the peripheries of the global system.
Marx thus did have the intuition that the
revolutionary transformation could begin starting from the periphery of the
system – the « weak links » » in the ulterior language of Lenin.
This conclusion calls for another:
socialist transitions will happen necessarily « in one country »,
which will additionally remain fatally « isolated » through the
counter-attack of world imperialism. There is no alternative; there will be no
« world revolution».
Capitalism, a
short bracket in history
I also share another intuition of Marx
–expressed clearly as early as 1848 and further reformulated until his last
writings – according to which capitalism represents only a short bracket in
history; its historical function being to have created in a short time (a
century) the conditions calling for moving beyond to communism, understood as a
higher stage of civilization.
The systemic crises of senile capitalism
Capitalism took on its finished
form only with the industrial revolution-starting, as of 1800. From that time
onward the social contradiction immanent in the capitalist mode of production
has involved a permanent tendency of the system to "produce more than can
be consumed": downward pressure on wages has tended to generate a volume
of profits which, under competitive forces, flow into a volume of investment
relatively in excess of the investment level required to satisfy the effective
demand for the system's products. From this viewpoint, the threat of relative
stagnation is the chronic ailment of capitalism. Crises and depressions do not need to be explained by specific causes.
On the contrary, it is the expansion phases that are each produced by
their own particular circumstances.
The history since 1800 of "really existing capitalism" is the history
of a prodigious development of productive forces, unparalleled in earlier
epochs. The tendency to stagnate inherent in capitalism has thus been overcome
time and again.
That inherent instability of
capitalism is also its strength: during the expansion phases between the slumps it has fostered
an extraordinary expansion of
productive forces, incomparably greater than the slow growth prevailing in
previous epochs. Nevertheless, precisely because its growth is exponential (like cancer,
sustained exponential growth can lead only to death) that growth cannot be
sustained indefinitely. Capitalism is fated to be surpassed and, without doubt,
it will show up in history as a short transition period during which the
accumulation of productive forces will have created the material and human
conditions for a better form of mastery over nature and social development.
Capitalist crises and the crisis of
capitalism
The contemporary imperialist system is a
system of centralization of the surplus on the world scale. The imperialist
system for the centralization of value is characterized by the acceleration of
accumulation and by the development of the productive forces in the centre of
the system, while in the periphery these latter are held back and deformed.
Development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin. Facing this
challenge there is no alternative to the de-construction of the present global
imperialist system, creating the conditions for another pattern of
negotiated global relations.
The massive depression toward the close of the
nineteenth century, intensifying competitive pressures, sped up the process
of concentration and centralization of capital until the capitalist
system was qualitatively transformed: the competitive industrial capitalism
that prevailed from 1800 to 1890 gave way to oligopolistic (shared monopoly)
capitalism. These oligopolies were still groups organized on an essentially
national basis, despite the expansion of their activities abroad and the
occasional interpenetration and cosmopolitanism of their strategies. At that
time their competition sharpened the rivalry among national states, putting an
end to the previously dominant position of Great Britain. This period is that
in which the world was divided up among rival imperialist powers.
Our current and second
long slump-which began with the seventies of last century followed an expansion
that, from immediately after the Second World War, was based on three factors
arising from the defeat of fascism:
(a) historic capital-labor compromise maintained, in the developed
capitalist countries, by Keynesian national policies that put a new form of
governance over capital accumulation in place of the wage-depressing
competitive regime; (b) the "Soviet"
system, called an attempt to build socialism, although it really was an attempt to build
"capitalism without capitalists," which nevertheless set itself up as
a challenge to capitalism and so stimulated it; and (c) the attempts at
national-capitalist development in the peripheral
countries, which were made possible
by the victories of national
liberation movements.
At the origin of our current
slump is the progressive exhaustion of these three social
models, which followed from the fact that their very successes deepened global interdependence. This slump thus unfolds
in an environment of deepened imperialist globalization, the more so since the
Soviet alternative has collapsed and the national-capitalist project in the
third world could not resist the offensive of the dominant capitalisms which aimed at reducing the bourgeoisies of the peripheral continents to their former status
as dependent intermediaries.
The current slump, again, is
expressed through surplus capital unable to find
sufficiently profitable outlets in the expansion of productive capacity.
Capitalist management of the slump has therefore aimed at providing alternative
profitable outlets in the financial arena, and by that very
fact has made the preservation of capital values its main priority,
even when this is detrimental to economic growth. This new hegemony of the capital markets has
acted through a variety of means, notably
floating exchange rates, high interest rates, privatization
of formerly state-owned enterprises, huge deficits in the U.S. balance of
payments, and policies by international financial institutions forcing third
world countries to put service of their foreign debt above all other
considerations. As usual, such policies confine the world economy to a
stagnant, vicious circle out of which they offer no escape. In fact, this
stubborn stagnation affects only that half of the world—the United States,
Europe, and Japan with their Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern
dependencies—which is forced to undergo the measures adopted by the capital
markets to manage the slump. East
Asia (especially China),
followed by Southeast Asia and, to some
degree, India, have in contrast experienced a speeding up of their economic growth and
to that extent they have escaped the impact of the slump.
Systemic crises in contemporary monopoly
capital.
The challenge to day is therefore
not to attempt moving out of the crisis of capitalism, but starting moving out
of capitalism in crisis. Critical social thought should take a special interest
in this question, based as it is on the distinction between this sort of crisis
of the system and the crises within the system.
These new development
of the pattern of accumulation simply means that capitalism has entered the era
of its historical decline and has become a destructive senile system.
Revolutionary advances on the long road to socialism or decadence of
civilization?
Socialist transitions happen necessarily
« in one country ». Therefore the nations and states engaged on this
road will be confronted with the double challenge: resist to the permanent war
(hot or cold) conducted by the imperialist forces, and associate successfully
the peasant majority in the advances on the new road to socialism.
These reflections lead me to assess the
considerations which Marx and Engels developed concerning the peasants. Marx
situates himself within his time which was still the time of bourgeois
unfinished revolutions in Europe itself. Therefore whenever the bourgeois
revolution gave the land to the peasants as shown in the exemplary case of
France in particular the peasantry in its great majority becomes the ally of
the bourgeoisie within the camp of the defenders of the sacred character of private
property and becomes the adversary of the proletariat. However, the transfer of
the centre of gravity of the socialist transformation of the world, emigrating
from dominant imperialist centres to dominated peripheries radically modifies
the peasant question. Nevertheless revolutionary advances become possible in
the conditions of societies which remained still in great part peasant only if
socialist vanguards are able to implement strategies which integrate the
majority of peasantry within the fighting block against imperialistic
capitalism.
Marx writes in the Manifesto (1848),
with respect to class struggles: “a war which always ends by a revolutionary
transformation of the society or by destruction of the classes in conflict”.
That sentence attracted my attention since long time.
This is the reason for which we propose to
differentiate two qualitatively different types of transition from one mode of
production to another. If this transition envelops in unconsciousness, or with
alienated consciousness, that is if
ideology which influences classes does not allow them to control the process of
change, this process appears as if it operates in the way analogous to natural
change, while ideology becomes part of this nature. For this type of transition
we reserve the expression « model of decadence ».On the other hand,
if ideology manages to offer total and real dimension of the desired change,
and only then, we can speak of revolution.
I also mention other important
contributions of Marx, in particular with respect to the views of Marx on
“unity and diversity” in the long transition. These views are responding to
contemporary challenges more than ever.
This is a short summary of my book on the
Bicentenary of Marx, coming soon in English at MR Press (NY), as well as in
some other languages. The book was published in French under the title of “Le
bicentenaire de Marx” (Delga 2018).
