Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary. - book reviews

Samir Amin, Translated by Michael Wolfers. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1094. 256pp. $26.00 cloth; $14.00 paperback.

This book's renowned author introduces it as a "kind of intellectual autobiography ... trying to retrace the steps I took in formulating my positions on capitalism and socialism ... within the history of the period." Hence, rather than a new analysis of the evolution of the post-second World War global political economy, Re-Reading narrates Amin's developing concern with world-historical questions in the context of his participation in left political movements, organizations, and debates during his student days in Egypt and France (1940s and 1950s), his stints in various development planning agencies (late 1950s until 1980), and his recent Directorship of the Africa office of the Third World Forum (a center for progressive research and debate on development issues) in Dakar, Senegal. While disagreeing with some of Amin's analytical views, I found his Re-Reading an excellent model for the kind of global public intellectual inquiry so sorely needed in this age of capitalism's purported final triumph over socialism.

Amin's book is especially useful in light of the integrity shining through his account of the interrelations between his historical-analytical, political, and professional work. Amin has never been afraid to take unpopular positions--e.g., his critical stance on the Nasser government in Egypt and other state-capitalist projects at a time when such regimes were viewed as unambiguously liberating and progressive by the bulk of communist-left and bourgeois-nationalist forces in the Third World. Such integrity is a necessary condition for forging the strategic-analytical weapons of a new Socialism Ill to replace the historically exhausted Socialism I of Social Democracy and the recently deceased Socialism 11 of the Leninist variety--to use Amin's terminology. Even more important is what Re-Reading tells us about the historical vision needed to avoid uncritically succumbing to the latest intellectual and political fashions, "progressive" and otherwise.

According to Amin, the "postwar system rested on three pillars: Fordism in the Western countries, Sovietism in the East European countries, and developmentalism in the third world." As a historical backdrop to Amin's intellectual and political development, Re-Reading begins with a retrospective outline of the complex interrelations evolving between these three pillars. It is suggested that Fordism in the advanced countries entailed a historic compromise between capital and labor, as real wages rose in step with the productivity gains generated by "autocentric" advances in the productive forces. This regime received support from anti-Sovietism and the Cold War, which justified large-scale military outlays that helped solve effective demand problems. Sovietism itself involved a kind of class compromise between the Soviet "bureaucratic bourgeoisie" and the working class, in which catching up with Western per capita GDP and consumption eclipsed the goal of a revolutionary-democratic transformation of socio-economic and political relations. However, the material basis of this Soviet compromise was squeezed by the arms race forced upon the USSR by the United States, and by the Soviet system's failure "to go from the successful extensive accumulation of the first half of its existence to intensive accumulation."

The character and limits of Third World developmentalism were shaped by the needs of the center's accumulation regime, and by the Cold War and developing competition between Sovietism and capitalism. Western imperialism under U.S. hegemony tended, with strategically determined exceptions like Taiwan and South Korea, to define all Third World non-comprador development efforts as communist and hence requiring overt or covert destruction regardless of the costs in terms of social disintegration. In addition to helping reproduce the unequal division of labor between center and periphery, the U.S. and other western imperialist efforts to keep Third World countries in the "free world" helped legitimize the military-industrial complexes which supported center (especially U.S.) accumulation in the postwar period. Meanwhile, the USSR, largely for pre-emptive defensive reasons, began to provide ideological, military, and economic support to state-capitalist and other developmentalist regimes as it recovered from the Second World War and from the initial U.S. nuclear monopoly. Sovietism not only helped overtly revolutionary regimes (Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea), but also contributed to the political and ideological atmosphere surrounding any development initiatives under the rubric of the so-called "non-capitalist road" to development, which legitimized attempts by leftists to cooperate with nationalist and developmentalist factions of Third World bourgeoisie. This background was complicated by the rise of Maoism as a revolutionary-left critique of Sovietism--a development underpinned by such apparent contrasts as the USSR's increasingly economistic internal policies versus China's Cultural Revolution.

Despite a certain incompleteness in the notion of Fordism, Amin's historical sketch nicely conveys the challenges facing any young Marxist activist and scholar coming of age in the 1950s. He shows how the world-historical forces manifested themselves in debates over conjunctural global and national issues within and among left movements. Underpinning these complex debates were such questions as: How could one critically support the opportunities opened up by Soviet aid to Third World movements and regimes without accepting the essentially bourgeois visions of the "noncapitalist road" and of many non-revolutionary, but nonetheless non-comprador, nationalist-developmentalist regimes? What was the real potential of bourgeois-nationalist development projects in the Third World? The answer to this last question was particularly unclear in the heady years of the 1950s and early 1960s, during which the non-aligned and "new international economic order" movements emerged, long before the recent phase of peripheral accumulation impasse, debt crisis, and intensified economic retrenchment under IMF/World Bank "adjustment" policies. In this earlier developmentalist era, the question of industrial production in the periphery was widely debated: did it represent a negation, or merely a new form of the unequal international division of labor, and the accompanying development of underdevelopment? Although Amin's most detailed historical-political account is of the Arab world, he also touches on the different national forms these questions took in other African countries, in terms of their own unique histories, while self-critically relating his public positions on these questions to his scholarly and development-planning concerns at the time. His account of this evolving interplay between theory, professional, and political practice is the most valuable feature of the book.

A crucial point here is that early on (in his doctoral dissertation written over the years 1954-57), Amin developed a basic vision of the global-historical process and was able to present this vision in a relatively understandable theoretical framework. This framework is broad enough to encompass the sweep of world capitalist and socialist history while possessing the flexibility needed to deal with specific national and regional contradictions and conflicts in ways that do not reduce everything to the abstractly considered "needs of capital accumulation." The main focus of this framework is the polarized development resulting from capital accumulation on a world scale as the peripheral economies are historically shaped and reshaped in line with the needs of center-country capital. This perspective implies that underdevelopment, far from being a condition of inadequate capitalist development, is in reality an inevitable outcome of global capital accumulation. The subordination of the periphery to the more self-driven productive capital accumulation patterns of the center is reinforced during periods of global accumulation crisis, when the unequal position of the periphery forces it to accept the lion's share of the burden associated with the devaluation of productive and financial capital. Some of Re-Reading's sharpest analytical discussions are those emphasizing, in opposition to IMF/World Bank ideology, the true meaning of "structural adjustment" as a systemic mechanism reproducing unequal development on a global scale.

Amin's framework suggests that the primary initial locus of revolutionary activity in the global political-economy is likely to be the systemically underdeveloped periphery, and that the only hope for success of such revolutionary movements lies in a strategy of de-linking from the global-capitalist system and establishing alternative systems of material reproduction geared toward an integration of popular needs with domestic resource use. Amin makes it abundantly clear that de-linking is not the same as autarky; rather it would be most workable within a "polycentric" framework of relatively equal nations whose socio-economic, political, and cultural interchanges would involve complementary dynamic extensions of each nation's unique system of popularly-oriented production. This revolutionary vision is designed to deal with the contradiction afflicting prior attempts at socialist construction: the tendency for the goal of developing productive forces to obscure the goal of developing socialist relations and the human beings capable of reproducing these relations. In short, Amin replaces the notion of socialism as basically a state-led industrial "catching up with the West," with a more emancipatory vision of socialist construction as an epochal process of mutually constituted development of social relations and productive forces, the latter including above all the individual and collective productive force of human beings.

The analytical and political richness of Amin's analysis is rooted in his theorization of capital accumulation as a historical process. Two main aspects of this process can be distinguished, accumulation in the core countries and accumulation in the periphery. In both, what Marx called "the general law of capitalist accumulation" is at work. This law states that capital accumulation results in increasing wealth at one pole of society and growing poverty and degradation at the opposite pole, but it operates not only within each of the two but also between them. Amin is acutely aware of this double process of polarization, as is to be expected from one whose life experiences incline him to view the world from a Third World perspective. At the same time I think this angle of vision sometimes leads him to focus on core-periphery accumulation in its twentieth-century monopoly capital phase.

In particular, core capitalism's alienation of production from the needs of, and from any effective collective control by, the producers is manifested in this system's historical tendency toward overaccumulation and stagnation. The development of the core capitalist economies involves a competitive build-up of productive capacity which, in conjunction with the limits to working-class demand, erodes the profitability of additional net productive investment in these economies. Capitalism's polarizing tendencies, both within the center and between center and periphery, need to be located in conjunction with the mature capitalist stagnation dilemma. While overproduction of (actual and potential) surplus is itself a historical function of class polarization within center capitalist economies, the resulting tendency toward stagnation creates new forms of polarization, waste, and instability.

Currently, we seem to have entered an era in which the overaccumulation of industrial capital and the resulting movement of surplus capital into the financial sphere have increased the veto power of international financial capital over state policies. In addition to wasting huge amounts of human capacities and other social and material resources, this process is quickly relegating reformist national capitalist development projects to history's scrap-heap in both center and periphery. The resulting pressures on center-country workers' living and work conditions should not be equated to the larger "adjustments" occurring in the peripheral countries. Yet the worldwide erosion of the scope for ameliorative reforms does involve a qualitative convergence of center working-class political and socio-economic conditions toward a situation similar in some ways to that long familiar to peasants and workers in the periphery. None of this is meant to downgrade the continued importance of the center-periphery distinction for understanding the world system, including the fact that the periphery always suffers greater polarization within and between countries than does the center. Indeed, the rising power of global finance capital has greatly intensified class polarization within the periphery--as registered, for example, in the ascendancy of peripheral financial capitalists with increasingly strong ties to the global financial system and weaker and weaker allegiance to comprador bourgeois-nationalist development projects in their home countries. The point is, rather, that recent developments contain at least some potential for enhanced international working-class solidarity and anti-capitalist struggle, and this potential is impossible to understand if one focuses on center-periphery polarization to the neglect of, rather than in conjunction with, center capitalism's basic in-built historical tendency toward overaccumulation, stagnation, and increasing destruction of its own social and material conditions of existence.

While recognizing mature capitalism's overaccumulation dilemma, Amin never really internalizes the stagnation tendency into his world-historical vision. This may reflect the historical situation in which this vision was initially developed, namely, the early phase of the long post-second World War boom when maintenance of a robust global rate of capital accumulation seemed relatively unproblematic and the main problems appeared to be the unevenness of accumulation on a world scale and various other social and cultural difficulties specific to "the affluent society." In any event, this partial lapse in historical vision is manifested in Amin's somewhat muted adoption of the Fordist view of accumulation in the center-countries--a view which basically limits historical analysis to areas of technology and the supporting institutions of accumulation (class compromises and business-government accords in all their regulatory manifestations), while treating accumulation itself in purely functional terms and simply placing certain minimum demands on this technological and institutional structure. Here, capitalist history essentially becomes a series of equilibria and disequilibria within a qualitatively eternal accumulation process and its supporting structures, with the erosion of one supporting structure leading to a general socio-economic and political struggle over the shape of the next structure which must, however, satisfy the qualitatively unchanging requirements of accumulation. This approach loses sight of the historical limits of accumulation itself as capitalism matures and becomes an increasingly irrational form of material reproduction from the standpoint of individual and collective needs due to the intensifying contradiction between social production and private profit. In this way, it tends to promote searches for a more humane capitalism (based on reforms of the system's supporting technological and institutional structure) rather than a revolutionary movement toward a more rational and emancipatory form of productive relations. Amin, of course, continues to reject such a non-revolutionary reformist course, but only by placing what may be an inordinate weight of revolutionary hopes on de-linking projects in the peripheral countries.

Fortunately, none of these difficulties negate the usefulness of Re-Reading's retrospectives on the developing relationship between Amin's theory and practice. One can disagree with some of his substantive positions and polemical flourishes while still learning a lot from Amin's evolution as a public intellectual in service of popular struggles against, and the ultimate emancipation from, capitalism. Re-Reading's foremost lesson is the importance of maintaining a radical vision of the historical process, as a basis for developing and clearly enunciating principled positions on politically charged issues as this process unfolds on world and national levels. This lesson seems particularly important today, with capitalism busily eroding the social and material conditions of its latest end-of-history craze, making it more clear than ever that "the choice we face is not capitalism or socialism, but socialism or barbarism."

Paul Burkett teaches in the department of Economics at Indiana State University. He thanks Marty Hart-Landsberg for commenting on a first draft.

The deterioration of Russia's periodical press cannot be separated from other social processes. Thus the growth of a cynical and powerful bourgeoisie reflects itself in a distorted mirror, the steady growth of a large and disaffected underclass. (About 30 percent of all Russians live below the official subsistence level.) I recently visited the town of Surgut, in Siberia, where a young woman journalist said to me, "Every time someone gets richer, I get poorer." Every time I see another advertisement for a gold-plated lighter or a pair of designer sunglasses in one or another glossy, I think of that young woman.

Abraham Brumberg, New York Times Book Review, October 15, 1995

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