(This paper was presented on October 27, 2018, at a conference at Birzeit University following the passing of comrade and colleague Samir Amin.)
Delinking and the National Question
The class question lies at the center of Amin’s theses, particularly his concept of delinking, because adopting delinking means challenging a social and political force—a class—which is the comprador class, whether capitalist, parasitic, rentier, or speculative, at the national level, and, of course, counterrevolution at the global level.
It is true that the sovereign political decision to delink in a particular country is determined according to that country’s geography. However, if we begin with two central premises:
- Amin and his colleagues see the geography of the world as covered by capital, meaning that any development—or, more accurately, any major change or event—in one country does not remain confined to that country itself.
2. The counterrevolution never allows a country to exercise its decision freely.
This means that the decision to delink, and even any degree of delinking, has global consequences. It is a globalized confrontation.
But Amin did not become entangled in the misleading discourse that says the world is a single or small village. It is a small village in terms of the development of travel technology and the transmission of information. But socially, the world has preserved—and indeed reinforced—class differences: a world of the poor and a world of the rich. Thus, the village remains clearly divided between “Shanty Town and Downtown.” This is polarization.
At its first level, Amin argues that delinking opens the door to conflict with nationalist integrationist tendencies:
“…Delinking opens the struggle between socialists and statists and national capitalist tendencies.” (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 35.)
But since this project is a project of the popular majority, it is an alliance-based project concerned with building a progressive alliance within the country itself. In this sense, it is also national—a project embodying the nationalism of the popular classes. (See Adel Samara, In Defense of the Union State: The Bankruptcy of the Territorial State. A Response to Muhammad Jaber Al-Ansari, Dar al-Kunuz al-Adabiyya, Beirut, 2003; Mashriq/Al-Amel Center, 2004)
“…Delinking aims to restore the independence of the nation-state and to revise North–South relations with the aim of strengthening the national independence of the partners and broadening the perspective of the popular movement as the basis for a new internationalism.” (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 52.)
Amin eventually arrives at the necessary and final outcome of delinking:
“…If the formation of a national bourgeois state and the creation of a self-centered capitalist economy are impossible in the periphery, then a different path of development is necessary… It is the question of delinking and socialism.” (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 12.)
When he says that “self-centered development is fundamental to delinking because it means national control over accumulation,” he does not mean “national” in the classical bourgeois sense, but rather the interests of the people of the country concerned.
Despite his Marxist perspective, Amin’s concern with the strength of the nation-state rests on the Communist Manifesto, which asserts that a strong nation-state is the most appropriate foundation, or objective prerequisite, for the transition to socialism:
“…Therefore, in substance, if not also in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is first of all a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel J. Beer, Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York, 1955, p. 21.)
“…The Communists are also reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they do not possess. Since the workers must first acquire political supremacy, they must rise to become the leading class of the nation and constitute themselves as the nation, and in this sense, they are national, but not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” (Ibid., p. 29).
This is what I reached in my reading of the relationship between Marxism and the national question: there are:
- A bourgeois understanding and position regarding nationalism—the ruling nationalism.
- And an understanding and position of the popular classes regarding nationalism—the latent nationalism.
The first is a bourgeois class position seeking integration into the global capitalist system; the second has a national, patriotic, unifying, socialist content. (See Adel Samara, In Defense of the Union State, cited above.]
Marx wrote in his analysis of the Paris Commune:
“…The unity of the nation was not threatened in any way; rather, it was to be organized through the Commune’s constitution. In all its appeals to the inhabitants of France’s regions, the Commune called upon the various French communes to form a federal union with the Paris Commune, in order to establish a national arrangement by the French nation itself, and for the first time in its history.” (The Communist Manifesto: The First Unforged Edition, ed. Lafif Lakhdar, Galileo Publications, Jerusalem, 1976, p. 108).
What we conclude here is that taking the national question into consideration, particularly in its progressive dimension, did not lead Amin to lose sight of the class dimension. However, in the Arab case, he remained oscillating between Urobah and the nationalisms of fully formed individual states—Egypt, for example. Nor did he benefit from the Paris Commune’s thesis in calling for a federation of the French nation.
This is despite the fact that he came close to the Arab national question when he analyzed Kurdish claims concerning the existence of a unified Kurdish nation. (The original footnote points to an article on the Kurdish question published by Monthly Review).
In any case, that is a subject for another discussion.
A Difference from the Soviets and the Trotskyists
Amin insists on the difference between China’s development experience and that of the Soviet Union, considering the Chinese experience to be closer to delinking. In this respect, as he said, he differs from the generalizations of Bill Warren, Charles Bettelheim, and the Trotskyists.
He says that in the Chinese experience there was:
“…1- the creation of an autonomous organization claiming to be Marxist; 2- the evacuation of the cities as centers supportive of bourgeois-imperialist power and withdrawal to the countryside; 3- the launching and continuation of a class struggle in the countryside based on the aspirations of poor peasants and landless peasants, and the isolation of landlords; 4- the adoption of an organized guerrilla army to protect this struggle; 5- this was accompanied by diplomacy aimed at recruiting the broadest possible national support, intellectuals, the petty bourgeoisie, and even the bourgeoisie who, in principle, opposed the imperialist enemy (Japan, for example) and its allies. This was supported by the majority of the people, unlike the Bolshevik Revolution.”
[from Delinking Amin p.129]
This passage is useful in showing that a broad social-class alliance is fundamental to socialist development, bearing in mind that for Amin, delinking is a means of moving toward socialism.
Since the theory of delinking is fundamentally intended for the countries of the periphery to overcome underdevelopment resulting from their subordination to the capitalist center and the requirements of its interests, peasants have a fundamental role in Amin’s theory. There is no doubt that he was influenced by Maoism’s insistence on the revolutionary role of the peasantry. Frantz Fanon shared this position, regardless of the extent of Fanon’s knowledge of Maoism. By contrast, Marcuse insisted on the displaced as an alternative to workers, a position rejected by Maoism.
Despite Amin’s convergence with the Chinese experience, he did not overlook the fact that the Soviet experience was the first and original experience of delinking. He argues that:
“…the Soviet production system was an effective, actual delinking from the domination of the world capitalist system. That is, those in power [investment and pricing] were not derived from ‘open’ integration into globalization. This was accomplished rapidly, away from the world system.”
The question is: Was the decision to delink from the world system made solely by the Soviets? Or did imperialism itself make that decision through its boycott of the Soviet Union and its war against it, in what the Soviets called “war communism”?
What I mean here is that the boycott was not merely a position adopted by peoples and revolutionary forces, but also by imperialism. It is deeply ironic that Palestinians and Arabs are still immersed today in the debate over whether or not to boycott and reject normalization with the Zionist enemy, while the Zionist movement decided to boycott Palestinian products a full century ago in its aggression against peoples. (See The Other Israel: A Critique of Zionist History and Policy, by the Israeli Socialist Organization (MATZPEN)
As for his criticism of the trajectory of the Soviet experience, Amin says:
“…because a rupture is impossible, it is not correct to speak of autarky. The Soviet Union was like a periphery in its export of raw materials, through its integration into the world system.”
Complete autarky from the global capitalist system is not realistically possible. Here, delinking means exiting from relations of dependency on that system, or reducing the extent of such relations, and designing development policies according to the requirements of the development of the domestic economy. This means that delinking is neither absolute nor an abrupt rupture enacted by political decision; rather, it is an applied mechanism that ultimately leads toward socialism, which is an internationalist project.
Amin’s assessment of the Soviet experience changed from its initial phase to his assessment of its eventual trajectory, particularly beginning with the Khrushchev period and continuing through Gorbachev. Specifically, he focused on the peripheral role of the Soviet system through the export of raw materials, the imperialist counterrevolution, and the role of the Saudi regime in serving it by delivering a devastating blow to oil prices through the reduction of the price of a barrel of oil in the mid-1980s. This played a fundamental role in the disintegration of the country. (See Adel Samara, The USSR: From Revolution to Collapse. An Essay on the Soviet Experience. This paper was presented at the International Communist Seminar in Brussels in May 1995, sponsored by the Workers’ Party of Belgium. In 1998, it was published in a book, The Collapse of the Soviet Union: Causes and Lessons. The book contains 18 articles by communist thinkers and militants from around the world.)
Trotskyism, for its part, differs from Maoism regarding the role of the peasantry and the national question, and this difference also extends to its position toward Samir Amin. The Chinese Revolution relied on the peasantry, rather than on workers alone. Trotskyism also differed from the Soviets and the Maoists regarding revolution in one country and revolution in a country that was not industrially developed, where there was no substantial proletarian presence.
It may be useful to point to the contradiction between the positions of many Trotskyist leaders and delinking at both the national and international levels. At the Arab level, most Trotskyist movements opposed Arab nationalism and recognized the Zionist Entity. They supported the 1990–91 aggression against Iraq and its occupation, and supported what was called the Arab Spring. This amounted to deepening dependency and was in complete contradiction with delinking.
At the global level, Trotskyist leaders became involved in the neoconservative current and played a fundamental role in the U.S. imperialist decision against Iraq and later against Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc. In other words, they became involved in imperialism—the furthest possible position from delinking.
Delinking Before Delinking
Does It Have Historical Precursors?
The theory of delinking stands as an explicit counterpoint to various conventional and vulgar economic theories centered on the market, free exchange, and the like—from “laissez-faire” all the way to “liberalization of international trade,” and not stopping at the familiar refrain of the three financial institutions: the Bank, the Fund, and the World Trade Organization.
Following the 2007 crisis, these institutions did not tire of warning peripheral countries against adopting protectionist policies that might obstruct the flow of exports from the center to the periphery, or the flow of surplus draining from the periphery to the center. The aim was to facilitate the center’s management of the crisis rather than resolve it—to maintain, rigorously, the subordination of the periphery to the requirements of the center’s development and even to the treatment of the center’s crisis, or the cost of managing that crisis. And this is precisely what happened!
Although the Trump administration came as the equivalent of “Juhaina who put an end to every speaker”[a reference to the Arabic expression “Juhaina has brought the definitive word”], openly pursuing protectionism and a globalized trade war, ruling regimes/classes in the periphery will continue to “spread their legs to the wind.” This is despite the fact that it would not have been difficult for a first-year economics student to understand that the various economic policies of Western capitalist countries have been, and remain, protectionist policies, despite the enormous rhetoric about free markets.
To achieve any degree of growth, it is necessary to establish it on some degree of protection. This can be understood from the law of capitalist competition, whether at the level of an individual enterprise or the domestic economy of any country. Competition requires protection and ultimately leads to monopoly and competition among monopolies themselves—in other words, the marriage of competition and monopoly—until the capitalist system itself comes to an end.
The Western European capitalist formations did not allow others to develop because the requirements of the world system, with its colonial expansion, necessitated such policies and their implementation. The white racist settler-colonial societies were never an exception to this rule, because they were an extension of Western colonial expansion, which plundered the periphery and invested in those settler colonies.
For example, wealth was plundered from India and invested in North America; and wealth was plundered—or even stripped—from Palestinian peasants and invested in the Zionist settler economy prior to the usurpation of Palestine in 1948.
Amin argues that Europe was able to confront population growth by sending its surplus population to the Americas and elsewhere, leaving its remaining population at roughly one-third of what it would have been had those people not emigrated. In Africa, according to his view, there is no possibility of such emigration, making the solution internal. In the case of Africa and the Arab homeland today, migration to Europe is impossible because Europe does not need it; rather, Europe is a hostile environment toward migrants.
Nor can the Arab homeland rebalance, for example, the relationship between the Gulf and Egypt. This makes migration a potentially suicidal gamble. Consider Germany’s selective acceptance of Syrian migrants.
Accordingly, in the absence of a sovereign state decision to delink—and in the presence instead of a decision to remain externally dependent and internally repressive—the phenomenon of deadly migration emerged.
The four—Amin and his colleagues—agreed that development occurred among the formations of the center during the nineteenth century in a parallel fashion, and that the world system developed in parallel as well. (Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 161.)
Amin also argues that the new centers in Europe entered the world system through the end of the nineteenth century without delinking because they controlled their internal relations. But how did they manage to control their internal relations? Through accumulated surplus?
This can be attributed to:
- The availability of sovereign national political decision-making;
- The existence of a certain level of industrial development;
- The existence of opportunities for capitalist expansion within the country itself;
- The absence of an entirely dominant center in Europe capable of preventing one country or another from delinking.
Therefore, these countries did not need to delink in order to protect themselves. It may even have been in their interest not to delink from one another as long as the level of development was relatively comparable across Western and Northern Europe. In other words, there was some common interest in interconnection. (See below.)
But how did Japan become capitalist while the various countries of the periphery remained submerged in underdevelopment or on the margins of development?
Japan’s entry into capitalism under the Meiji dynasty, (YouTube reference in the original. (relatively free—or at least less constrained—from Western capitalist domination, may have been the first or an early attempt at what the Dependency School later developed as “self-reliance,” and what Amin developed further into “delinking.” (See Adel Samara, Beyond Delinking, cited above.)
Meanwhile, bourgeois economists claimed that delinking meant rupture or autarky.
He argues that delinking is not rupture but rather the subordination/adjustment of external relations to serve the logic of domestic development—the rejection of subordination to the globalized law of value. (Samir Amin, Preface to Azam Mahjoub, Adjustment or Delinking: The African Experience, Studies in African Political Economy, Zed Books, 1990.)
Muhammad Ali’s experience was similar to the Japanese experience, except that the alliance between Ottoman colonialism and European colonialism—British and French — and Russia broke the back of that attempt. This generated the famous saying, “No Japan after Japan,” meaning that Japan had become capitalist in a historical window of opportunity, or because an imperial center of total domination had not yet placed Japan among its priorities, although it did attempt to do so. Perhaps it was simply incapable of halting Japan’s development.
Ironically, Western Europe itself, including Northern Europe, developed in a relatively equal manner, though with some differences in timing, despite the fact that this period of common development coincided with horrific national wars among the countries of Western Europe, particularly Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.
Can we stretch the saying “No Japan after Japan” into “No Europe after Europe”?
Here it becomes necessary to connect these two formulations with Samir Amin’s firmly held conviction that delinking is the only possible path to the development of the periphery.
Reintegration
The victory of capital over labor constitutes a challenge to the possibilities of delinking. This victory began with the disintegration of the Soviet Union’s outer periphery—that is, the non-aligned states with socialist orientations, including Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and others—which moved toward broader exchange with the global market.
It was followed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union’s inner periphery—that is, the countries of Eastern Europe. Then came China’s, albeit gradual, capitalist transformation following Mao Zedong’s death and the arrest of the “Gang of Four,” (One of them was his wife. Ironically, one of the accusations made by the party right against Mao was that he had married a divorced woman! See our forthcoming book, Victorious Defeats and Defeated Victories.) and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself.
In other words, the final third of the twentieth century witnessed the liquidation of experiences of delinking, with a few limited oases remaining, such as Cuba and North Korea. In this respect, Amin’s prediction was not accurate, although of course we do not demand prophecy here.
Despite his criticism of the Soviet experience prior to its collapse, Amin wrote that the Soviet Union would not accept reintegration into the world capitalist system because this would threaten its internal political system. This was despite his recognition of its peripheral role through the export of raw materials to the center and its relationship with the center, as noted above.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the various other countries of the Eastern Bloc demonstrated that it was not the political authorities but the streets that made the decision—the streets that the system had failed to win over.
What matters today is not whether Russia and China are less integrated into the world capitalist system, or whether they are not dependent upon it, but that their systems are capitalist despite the existence of a statist role in the economy.
What matters to us is that they have, on the one hand, departed from delinking, and that BRICS does not constitute an exit from the world capitalist system but rather represents competition over leadership of that system—in other words, an attempt to participate from a position of leadership.
Perhaps China’s preservation of its economic relations with the United States and its defense of “free trade” in opposition to the American protectionist offensive supports this argument.
Regarding China, Amin believed—and more or less maintained this expectation—that “China will not integrate into the world capitalist system in a manner that threatens the purity of its independent development.”
In reality, this is the arena in which China operates: between the requirements of its development on the basis of Maoist principles and the integrationist orientations established by Deng Xiaoping.
As for Eastern Europe, Amin wrote:
“…on the other hand, the countries of Eastern Europe might, if circumstances permit, ‘cross over to the West.’ But the danger can be reduced to some extent, such that a degree of autonomy (Hungary and Yugoslavia) would allow them, in parallel and simultaneously with accepting internal social changes…” (Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, Zed Books, 1985, p. 55.)
Amin’s optimism regarding these countries was misplaced. Hungary—and the others—went much further than he had anticipated.
Ironically, the last to hold out was Yugoslavia, which he and many others had expected to be the first to join the West. Its incorporation ultimately required NATO’s war against it in 1998. (It is highly ironic that many Arab intellectuals belonging to the “sixth column” who supported the American aggression against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and against Syria and Libya, also endorsed the aggression against Yugoslavia! Perhaps this current is globalized.)
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The opinions and views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Kana’an’s Editorial Board.