After the Book
By “after the book,” I mean the period following the publication of Amin’s book Delinking.
Azam Mahjoub wrote in 1990:
“…twenty out of fifty African states at some point declared their intention, with varying degrees of radicalism, to break with the colonial and neocolonial past and adopt a radical approach to independent socialist development… In most, if not all, of these cases, the army played an important role in the political transformation under discussion…
But neither economic liberation from dependence on the world capitalist system completed the political liberation, nor did the construction of a new society in sharp contradiction with the capitalist world appear to have advanced far enough to reach the point of no return.
…Accordingly, the development of the periphery became entangled in continuous restructuring, in favor of the requirements and constraints of dominant capital. The centers were restructured and the periphery was adjusted according to the restructuring of the centers. The reverse did not happen…
Those who took restructuring lightly ended up either trapped in debt according to the prescriptions of the Bank and the Fund, as in the case of newly industrialized nations, or they moved, deliberately or inadvertently, into a Fourth World outside the system… This made re-compradorization the dominant system today.” (Samir Amin, Preface to Azam Mahjoub, Adjustment or Delinking: The African Experience, Studies in African Political Economy, Zed Books, 1990.)
This intersects with part of Wallerstein’s analysis concerning the existence or emergence of semi-central/semi-peripheral countries, as well as with the argument concerning a Fourth World, outside history.
This thesis belongs to the category of the victory of capital over labor, while emphasizing that the semi-centers did not become centers.
Perhaps the 1997 crisis in South Korea confirms this, when banks from the center “grabbed” or plundered its wealth. This made the task of delinking more difficult as geographical integration expanded.
If the reintegration referred to by Mahjoub was the reintegration of Africa, then the reintegration of Eastern Europe is even more paradoxical and strange, because the latter group had experienced a high degree of delinking that the former had not.
What is frightening is that this reintegration took on a humiliating character, transforming most of those countries into pawns of imperialism, training grounds for “orange revolutions,” or export warehouses for night butterflies and cheap labor, not to mention their transformation into markets for Western capitalist products.
Mahjoub says that delinking is not rupture, but rather the subordination/adjustment of external relations to serve the logic of domestic development. It is a rejection of subordination to the globalized law of value. (Mahjoub.)
Income distribution is less equal in the periphery than in the center, and this makes the center more stable. This stability is largely attributable to the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the center—that is, to the bribing of the popular classes in the center, and their acceptance of this bribe at the expense of other nations. This raises the need to criticize the opportunism involved in praising civil society when it accepts the plundering of other nations so that its own members can live comfortably.
This correct observation opens up important questions. The class contradiction is sharper in the periphery, yet class consciousness is deeper in the center! Does contradiction in itself fail to generate political class consciousness and therefore fail to generate a revolutionary condition? Or does it generate a self-interested, opportunistic class consciousness in the West across different classes, except among those who have been spared by a radical consciousness?
Amin also argues that the popular classes in the periphery are in contradiction with capital, but the fragmentation of their interests as popular classes makes confronting capital difficult.
He believes that what bridges this gap is neither the petty bourgeoisie as a confused class nor the single party that emerged through national liberation. Rather, it is the existence of organic revolutionary intellectuals as an expression of the various social classes.
But, paradoxically, the working class in the center is fragmented as well. (Adel Samara, The Globalization Epidemic)
Amin finds himself here in the middle of a contradiction concerning the respective roles of the political power of the party and the cultural power of the organic revolutionary intellectual—and even the engaged intellectual. “(SeeThe engaged intellectual.”)
This raises the question of what revolutionary force is required for delinking, and indeed for socialism. (See below.)
Is it the grassroots party? The cultural stratum?
The engaged intellectual is, of course, active in the field, but he is not the popular force for change. What happens, then, when he is confronted by the abortive role played by the “cultural sixth column”?
State’s Role
At a certain stage, delinking becomes a national project, and this is acceptable during the nation-building phase, based on: (1) giving priority to industrialization, the production of basic necessities, and the distribution of resources; and (2) making the state the principal engine of economic life. However, despite the role of the state and its ownership of the public sector, if it (1) remains dependent on foreign technology, (2) implements pricing and income policies that work against the growth of agricultural-sector efficiency and diminish the value of labor on the land, and (3) finances industrialization through foreign borrowing, then it will not achieve delinking. Rather, it will achieve adaptation and adopt the liberal solution of trade liberalization—i.e., the free flow and movement of capital and goods, but not the free movement of labor. In other words, it protects the center while opening up the periphery. Despite this, it continues to dream of catching up instead of adopting a policy that serves the requirements of the domestic economy, which, formally speaking, is the responsibility of the state.
The concept of delinking has been accompanied by considerable confusion since the Soviet experience, particularly the confusion between development and delinking—the assumption that development necessarily leads to delinking. The Mensheviks believed that delinking becomes appropriate after society has exhausted the logic of capitalism, allowing it to move to a higher stage of civilization. (p. 106, from Mahjoub.)
The same confusion appears in the belief that the goal of economic activity is the full exploitation of human and natural resources. Accordingly, they regard society’s use of these resources as equivalent to delinking from underdevelopment and non-development, even though this represents merely a lower degree of dependency and therefore does not constitute delinking.
The same applies to self-reliance as a policy based on a country’s control over: (1) natural resources, (2) mobilizing and utilizing the economic surpluses generated by exploiting natural resources, and (3) a technological base. Delinking, by contrast, means expropriating foreign capital, nationalizing industries and commercial activities controlled by the comprador class, and breaking the links of financial, monetary, and commercial dependency.
The question that remains, as we shall see below, is: Is the state/authority a reliable vehicle for delinking and the transition to socialism? This is something Samir Amin never resolved.
Issues for Discussion
This term immediately raises a decisive question: Is the substance of delinking fundamentally class-based? Or is it populist, and specifically nationalist? Or does it lie somewhere “in between”?
It may help to clarify the issue by saying that delinking is essentially directed not merely against the global capitalist market, but against the classes subordinate to the center. Although the struggle against these classes is not openly declared and is not the starting point, the decision to delink rests with the state/authority, yet it presupposes, requires, and leads to a class struggle with those classes whose interests are integrated into the global capitalist system. Nevertheless, the question remains legitimate: Does delinking initially begin as a national project at a certain stage, and if so, does it remain national, or does it undergo class transformations?
Delinking, Sovereignty, and Corporate Rule
According to Amin, delinking begins at the national-state level, which requires the existence of a national authority oriented toward development. This becomes increasingly difficult in the era of globalization, in which sovereignty is being overridden—especially in peripheral countries—in favor of “international trade liberalization,” whose essence is the free movement of capital and products across national borders, without corresponding freedom of movement for labor power. The movement of capital and goods means the movement of corporations protected by the policies of the core state(s).
Accordingly, the dilution of national sovereignty moves in the opposite direction from delinking because it entails the existence of subordinate and fragmented authorities, thereby negating the starting point of this strategy.
If it is correct that the era of globalization began during the last third of the twentieth century, and that this era arrived alongside—or brought about—the decline of the role of the state or its absorption into the role of corporations, while the state in the core did not lose its global sovereignty, then the loss of sovereignty is a phenomenon that:
- is directly proportional to the weakness of the state;
- follows the adoption of neoliberal policies, particularly privatization;
- follows the fragmentation of the socialist bloc;
- accompanies the expansion of incentives toward integration into the global market;
- accompanies the third wave of nationalism.
These developments have created an environment even more hostile to delinking, particularly because the state and its military have become, in particular, instruments of capital in a new series of wars against peripheral countries, and because the Cold War has been transformed into a hot war, especially against the Arab republics. During imperialists’ the invasion of Kuwait and Iraq 1991, after Iraq had liberated Kuwait 1990, U.S. arms companies sent experts to witness on the ground the effectiveness of American weapons. In terms of participation in the aggression, thirty-three countries participated, either actively or symbolically, while Japan—which, under its constitution, was not permitted to send its military abroad—was compelled by the United States to pay $18 billion to cover the costs of the aggression.
We therefore arrive at a sharp contradiction between:
- the urgent necessity for countries to delink at this stage, on the one hand, and the center’s fierce aggression aimed at consolidating the domination of market laws in accordance with the requirements of the capitalist center—and indeed in the interests of corporations whose production of components is globally dispersed—on the other. This makes delinking highly costly, particularly with technological development. (With regard to the globalization/dispersal of industrial components, particularly advanced components, Arkady Savitsky wrote an article on Strategic Culture entitled “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” discussing U.S. decisions to pressure Russian industries. According to the article, the United States sought to impede the development of Russia’s aircraft industry, which had begun attracting global attention, particularly the MC-21, described as unique in the world. Russian-produced materials make the aircraft lighter and cheaper, and therefore the ban on carbon fibers and composite materials could create problems for completing and developing the project. The U.S. State Department is fully aware of this and therefore targeted this area.
- The engine also represents a problem. It is the first engine to be built 100 percent in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union and is intended to replace the engine currently used by the MC-21, produced by the U.S. company Pratt & Whitney.
- Russia’s weakness in this context lies in its outdated avionics. Although development is underway, it remains weak, and Russia continues to rely here on major American, British, and French companies. Saudi Arabia’s globalized NEOM city represents another model of an industrial integration that cannot be easily disentangled, regardless of developments in the project following the crisis surrounding the dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Delinking, Laxity, and Rent
It is true that the disintegration of the actually existing socialist bloc transformed the Cold War into a hot war and gave capital an opportunity to expand geographically on the one hand, and socially, economically, and ideologically on the other. Talk of the “end of ideology” became widespread, despite the dominance of the ideology of the market, the true form of totalitarianism. This was followed, however, by a deep and prolonged economic crisis in the center and subsequently throughout the world beginning in 2007.
Perhaps the most important consequence of this crisis has been the loosening of the imperialist grip, particularly the inability of the United States to launch direct aggression after its economic, human, and moral losses in Iraq following its occupation in 2003.( Beyond De-linking: Development by Popular Protection vs. Development by State, 2005.)
This led it to resort to new forms of warfare:
- a counter-revolutionary alliance in which terrorism and politicized religious forces act on behalf of imperialism and Zionism;
- trade warfare during the Trump era.
These are the product of an unequal alliance between Western capitalist powers in the center and comprador capitalisms in the periphery, and of their mobilization of global terrorist forces against nations, on the one hand, and their transformation of the world into a single globalized capitalist sector serving this class alliance, on the other.
Historically, the absence of a dominant center creates room for a degree of delinking or independent development, as in Japan during the Meiji era. Likewise, the weakening of the imperialist grip between the two imperialist world wars contributed to acceptable growth in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Some countries were able to begin industrialization and achieve an initial degree of delinking because of their relationship with the Soviet Union, as was the case with Nasser’s Egypt.
All these experiences raise a fundamental issue: Development, in its broad sense, requires the existence of a sovereign political decision by the state concerned. This condition is more important than the availability of financial liquidity.
The situation is reversed in the rentier Gulf countries, where there is an absence of sovereign political decision-making in development, let alone in delinking. This is despite the availability of financial liquidity/surplus, which prevented them from taking advantage of this moment of imperialist weakness, a moment that coincided with the emergence of other poles that generally reduced the opportunities for imperialist invasion.
Instead, these regimes moved toward deeper dependency within the global system, placing their various capabilities at the service of the requirements of imperialist aggression rather than merely the economic requirements of the domestic situation in the core countries. In other words, they placed everything at the service of the counter-revolution operating on a global scale, with the rent they accumulated being mobilized in support of global terrorist organizations (Al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Nusra, Khorasan, Boko Haram, etc.), while in Saudi Arabia, for example, poverty reaches 40 percent and unemployment 13 percent.
This involvement of the Gulf countries was accompanied by their influence over Arab countries suffering from deficits, such as Egypt and Morocco. From the beginning of Anwar Sadat’s rule, Egypt’s regime developed toward political Islam, allied with political-religious forces, parasitic capitalism, and comprador capitalism. This undermined Egypt’s economic and political autonomy through economic openness and placed the region’s cards in the hands of U.S. imperialism and the Zionist Entity. This policy continued throughout the rule of Hosni Mubarak.
Despite Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s overthrow of the political-Islamist regime of Mohamed Morsi, he maintained essentially the same path of dependency, repression, and normalization with the Zionist Entity practiced by Sadat, while oscillating politically between the rentier regimes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE and their Salafi-Wahhabi orientations.
Delinking and the Third Wave of Nationalism
If the first wave of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe was led by the bourgeoisie on the basis of the Industrial Revolution—even though Eurocentrism has attempted to claim that this wave was universal rather than exclusively European—and if the second wave of nationalism emerged in peripheral countries in the mid-twentieth century through national liberation movements, which, as Mahjoub pointed out, were oriented toward delinking from the global capitalist system, then the third wave of nationalism is an imperialist form of industrialization in the era of globalization. It operates through an alliance with its subordinate comprador capitalist class in the periphery, and therefore represents the geographical expansion of dependency, the weakening of the nation-state, and the expansion of the market system in the service of the requirements of the economies of the centers at the expense of the periphery. It is, of course, in contradiction with and obstructive to delinking.
Here we observe a number of paradoxes. While U.S. imperialism is unable to launch new military wars, it wages proxy wars and trade wars instead. Rather than rentier regimes taking advantage of the opportunity created by the decline in U.S. military aggression in particular, they have moved toward providing their sovereign wealth funds to rescue the U.S. economy, not to mention their leading role in the terrorist war. This raises the most important question: Delinking requires the dismantling of entire political systems and confirms the necessity of the national state/authority and sovereign political decision-making.
Between Theory and Instrument
A problem with Amin lies in his hesitation to identify decisively the revolutionary instrument appropriate to his revolutionary thesis. A theoretically categorical position requires a categorical and decisive revolutionary instrument capable of producing structural class formation and consciousness.
In one of his later papers on delinking, he introduced the formulation of the Sovereign Popular Project, (“The Sovereign Popular Project: The Alternative to Liberal Globalization in Labor and Society,” published in the Journal of Labor and Society, Volume 20, Issue 1, March 2017, pp. 7–22.) in addition to emphasizing the nation when he stated:
“The nation-state remains the only framework for development and the decisive struggle which ultimately transforms the world.”
He therefore concluded his paper without identifying or naming the leading instrument, remaining satisfied with the “Sovereign Popular Project” without clarifying its class basis or class party instrument. I discussed this in my reading of Amin’s paper, ( Adel Samara, “Amin Bets on the State for Development: Great Goal but Blunt Tool.”) drawing on what I presented in my book Beyond Delinking (Beyond De-linking: Development by Popular Protection vs. Development by State, 2005.) and my thesis on the paradigm of development through popular protection.
It is true that the Sovereign Popular Project bears traces of Amin’s approach toward Maoism. Yet China’s own experience demonstrated that an alliance, while generally necessary—and particularly so in a delinking project understood as a comprehensive social transformation—requires overcoming the problem of the Maoist party, which became a refuge for the “capitalist roaders” through the fusion of the state and the party. This necessitated the Cultural Revolution both within the country and within the party itself, as expressed, for example, in Mao’s slogan “Target the Headquarters.”
Furthermore, Amin never fully escaped the statist legacy of the Dependency School, namely the emphasis on the role of the state/authority in realizing his project. He confined himself to the question of the “nation-state,” as noted above, meaning the transfer of state power. The experiences of actually existing socialist countries demonstrated that party power could become a bureaucratic apparatus—the nomenklatura elite—which ultimately became an isolated shell detached from the class and society. Its removal therefore became relatively easy, regardless of the subsequent outcomes, as part of the defeated victory of the counter-revolution.
Reading theory alongside reality requires generating something new, which in turn requires many things, particularly:
- that an organized, militant, intellectual, and field-based movement emerge from this alliance;
- that its popular character means that it must always remain subject to popular class decision-making, which defines its general framework of action and holds it accountable at specified intervals, while adding or removing some of its members through comprehensive elections, as pioneered by the experience of the Paris Commune.
I conclude by saying that the question of the revolutionary instrument, and the nature of this instrument, remains a matter of debate that has not yet reached even a relatively satisfactory formulation. Perhaps one of the best attempts to address or contribute to this question was made by the French philosopher Alain Badiou in his book The Communist Hypothesis, which studies the Paris Commune, the Cultural Revolution, and the student/worker uprising of 1968. Badiou rejected party organization on the Stalinist model and also moved beyond the party in its Leninist conception. He attempted to adopt a position that would move beyond the party and “strike at its headquarters,” relying on the people in the broadest sense of the term. In doing so, Badiou left the horse without its rider.
I reiterate the importance of the two conditions mentioned above:
- that an organized, militant, intellectual, and field-based movement emerge from this alliance;
- that its popular character means that it must always remain subject to popular class decision-making, which defines its general framework of action and holds it accountable at specified intervals, while adding or removing some of its members through comprehensive elections (the experience of the Commune).
This is what I attempted in both my thesis, Development through Popular Protection, and later in my book Beyond Delinking. I may be able to contribute to this open question in my forthcoming book, Victorious Defeats and Defeated Victories.
Here we return once again to Samir Amin. There must be delinking from the global market and a rejection of its requirements in favor of the requirements of autonomous development in peripheral countries, whether in relation to the West or the East, both of which are capitalist, albeit with certain differences. That is one side of the matter.
On the other hand, there must be a transition toward exchange with the new bloc competing with the capitalist West, but under a clear form of popular protectionism modeled on the Commune or on the Palestinian Intifada of 1987, and without subordinate integration.
It is precisely here that the transition from delinking to socialism takes place: by affirming the role of the Third World/periphery in revolution at this stage, beginning with the undermining of the global capitalist system from its peripheries and moving toward the center. Here, too, the contradiction may extend to Russia and China, regardless of whether or not they surpass the capitalist West.
It may be argued that China, and even Russia today, are moving toward overcoming capitalism and advancing toward socialism, while others argue that they are already imperialist. What will determine this is:
- the social and class struggle within them—in other words, whether they merely seek to replace the existing center, defeating it through integration, or whether revolutionary forces and popular classes are able to reach power and continue the process of delinking toward socialism;
- and the extent to which the experiences of delinking in the periphery are revolutionary.
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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.