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Samir Class and Nation, a Historically and in 1 L L L L the Current Crisis Samir Class and Nation, A Historically and in 1 l l l l the Current Crisis Class and Nation Historically and in the Current Crisis by Samir Amin Translated by Susan Kaplow London Heinemann Ibadan Nairobi Heinemann Educational Books Ltd 22 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3HH P.M.B. 5205, Ibadan P.O. Box45314, Nairobi EDINBURGH MELBOURNE AUCKLAND HONGKONG SINGAPORE KUALA LUMPUR NEW DELHI KINGSTON PORT OF SPAIN 0 435 96050 4 (cased) 0 435 96051 2 (paper) First published 1980 © Monthly Review Press 1980 I on I i?«$Tr‘- r ‘IF j HU..K t’: i LEA S r-.:'^ -.3 _ 141488 i I 3 ^ 'iZ Printed in the United States of America Contents Introduction vii Chapter 1 Classes, Nations, and the State in Historical Materialism 1 Chapter 2 Communal Formations 36 Chapter 3 Tributary Formations 46 Chapter 4 Unequal Development in the Capitalist Transition and in the Bourgeois Revolution 71 Chapter 5 Unequal Development in the Capitalist Centers 104 Chapter 6 Center and Periphery in the Capitalist System: The National Question Today 131 Chapter 7 National Liberation and the Socialist Transition: Is the Bourgeoisie Still a Rising Class? 182 vi Contents Chapter 8 The Theory of Imperialism and the Contemporary Crisis 225 Conclusion Revolution or Decadence? Thoughts on the Transition from One Mode of Production to Another 249 References 257 Index 283 Introduction A reader once remarked that my works deal with three sets of problems: (a) concrete analyses of the situation of third world countries (Egypt, the Maghreb, West Africa, the Congo), .(b) a theory of capitalist accumulation on a world scale, and (c) an interpretation of historical materialism. Indeed, this classification also corresponds to the sequence of my work. Doubtless, concrete analysis of a situation is never neutral; it always implicitly entails a theory . The first of my analyses (Nassarian Egypt, West Africa, the neocolonial Congo and Maghreb, and allegedly socialist attempts to break with imperialist domination) were in large part based on a theoretical interpretation of imperialism. This interpretation, formulated between 1954 and 1957, was questionable, due to the inadequacies of the Marxism which prevailed in the 1950s, inade­ quacies which marked my own intellectual and political formation. The theory in question enabled me to criticize bourgeois theo­ retical explanations of underdevelopment but did not enjoin a practical political elaboration of substituting national liberation movements for bourgeois nationalist politics. I produced my first works, concerning the Arab and African countries indicated, be­ tween 1960 and 1967; they suffered from this limitation. This unsatisfactory state of affairs obliged me to reexamine the theory of imperialism, which in turn brought me to rewrite (Unequal Devel­ opment) and to further explore (Unequal Exchange and the Law of Value) the theory of accumulation in the years 1968-1973. vii viii Introduction This was also the time of the clear failure of revisionist Marxism and, with the cultural revolution in China, of the elaboration of a global alternative. These favorable conditions led me to reconsider the most basic questions of historical materialism. Imperialism and Unequal Development, The Arab Nation, The Law of Value and Historical Materialism, written, as was this work, between 1973 and 1978, contain my interpretations of historical materialism. They also reexamine, in light of these interpretations, the concrete situations which most interest me: those of the third world in general and of Africa and the Arab world in particular. If I were to summarize what seems essential to me in this study, I would emphasize the following points. From the beginning, there have been two competing interpreta­ tions of historical materialism. The first virtually reduces the method to a linear economic determinism: the development of the productive forces automatically brings about the necessary adjust­ ment in the relations of production by means of social revolutions, the makers of which lay bare historical necessity. Then the politi­ cal and ideological superstructure is transformed to meet the re­ quirements of the reproduction of the relations of production. The other interpretation emphasizes the double dialectic of forces and relations of production on the one hand and of these latter and the superstructure on the other. The first interpretation assimilates laws of social evolution to laws of nature. From Engels' attempt at a Dialectics of Nature to the positivist interpretation of Kautsky, from Bolshevism itself to the Soviet dia-mat (dialectical materialism), this interpretation pur­ sues the philosophical work of the Enlightenment and constitutes the radical bourgeois interpretation of Marxism. The second in­ terpretation contrasts the objective character of natural laws with the combined objective-subjective character of social laws. The first interpretation either fails to deal with alienation or extends it to all of human history. Alienation thus becomes the product of a human nature which transcends the history of social systems; it has its roots in anthropology, that is, in the permanent Introduction ix relation between humanity and nature. History develops by “the force of circumstance.” The idea which people (or classes) have that they make history is naive: the scope of their apparent freedom is narrow because the determinism of technical progress weighs so heavily. The second interpretation leads us to distinguish two levels of alienation: (1) that which results from the permanence of the humanity-nature relation, a relation which transcends social modes, defines human nature in its permanent dimension but does not have a direct role in the evolution of social history; i.e., anthro­ pological alienation, and (2) that which comprises the ideological superstructure of societies, or social alienation. Attempts to detail the successive contents of this social aliena­ tion led to the conclusion that all precapitalist social class systems had the same type of social alienation, which I consider to be alienation in nature. Its characteristics derive, on the one hand, from the transparency of the economic relations of exploitations and, on the other hand, from the limited degree of mastery over nature at the corresponding levels of development of the produc­ tive forces. This social alienation necessarily had an absolute, religious character, due to the dominant place of ideology in social reproduction. In contrast, social alienation under capitalism is produced in part by the growing opacity of economic relations due to the generalization of commodity relations and in part by the qualitatively higher degree of mastery over nature. Commodity alienation thus replaces nature, with the economy as the external force which determines social evolution. The struggle for the abolition of exploitation and of classes entails liberation from economic determinism. Communism must put an end to social alienation, although it cannot abolish anthropological alienation. This interpretation reasserts the unity of universal history. This unity is not to be found in an overly detailed succession of modes of production. The classic line of development— slavery-feudalism- capitalism— is not only peculiar but is also largely mythical. The opposition between a European and a so-called Asian line belongs to a family of Eurocentric philosophies of history. Unity is re­ x Introduction created by the necessary succession of three families of modes of production: the family of communal modes, that of tributary modes, and the capitalist mode, the first to have universal charac­ teristics. The unity of the family of tributary modes is expressed in the universal character of social alienation in nature, in contrast to the social commodity alienation of capitalism. The peculiarity of Western history in this perspective resides exclusively in the incomplete character of its specific form of the tributary mode, the feudal mode, which was produced by its combination with communal modes. My intention in developing these general reflections on history is to propose a number of conclusions of a general and theoretical nature concerning the relations among class struggles—classes being defined in the framework of the economic formations which control the major, successive social systems and within which the dialectic of class struggle operates. This framework seems to be defined primarily by the state, the reality of which may cross-cut other realities depending on circumstances, either those of the nation or those of the ethnic group. Current political preoccupations furnish inspiration. Recent developments in our world everywhere underline the importance of the nation and of the state: the class struggle is the motive force of history but it occurs within a state-national framework which sets its scope, its modalities, and its outcomes. This book first presents a system of theoretical concepts concern­ ing these questions, then a series of accounts which follow the historical sequence of evolution. This is the reverse of the order in which I did research, as I began with reflections and observations about the contemporary world (imperialism, national liberation, socialist construction) and went back to the theoretical analysis of capitalism (and particularly of the dialectic between class struggle and economic laws in the capitalist mode) and then to the history of its gradual establishment (the mercantilist and then the pre­ imperialist periods during which the laws of unequal development
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