Journal of World-Systems Research Forum on Samir
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JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.948 | jwsr.pitt.edu FORUM ON SAMIR AMIN’S PROPOSAL FOR A NEW INTERNATIONAL OF WORKERS AND PEOPLES Samir Amin, a leading scholar and co-founder of the world-systems tradition, died on August 12, 2018. Just before his death, he published, along with close allies, a call for ‘workers and the people’ to establish a ‘fifth international’ to coordinate support to progressive movements. To honor Samir Amin’s invaluable contribution to world-systems scholarship, we are pleased to present our readers with a selection of essays responding to Amin’s final message for today’s anti-systemic movements. This forum is being co-published between Globalizations, the Journal of World-Systems Research, and Pambazuka News. Readers can find additional essays and commentary in these outlets. The following essay has been published in Globalizations and is being reproduced here with permission. Truncated 21st-Century Trajectories of Progressive International Solidarity Patrick Bond University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance [email protected] 1. Introduction: From High Theory to African Development to Global Geopolitical Economy The possibilities of progressive internationalism are exemplified by Samir Amin’s extraordinary networking, which was in many respects the world’s cutting edge in personal and institutional terms over the last half-century. Amin was born into a petit-bourgeois Cairo family in 1931 and educated in Paris during the 1950s. There, increasingly radicalized, he elaborated a unique, neo- Marxist theory of unequal exchange and super-exploitation to explain Third World underdevelopment. Amin’s career was mainly based in Dakar, Senegal, where he first lectured in economic planning and then built Africa-wide organizations during the 1960s-70s, with a focus on non-capitalist, patriotic-developmental politics. Among his successes were the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, still the continent’s leading intellectual © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article was first published in Globalizations, and is reproduced with permission. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | Bond 260 institution with 4000 members. He worked within the sometimes-heterodox offices of the United Nations, based initially at the African Institute for Economic Planning and Development (IDEP) in Dakar from 1963-79. He was fired by UN Economic Commission for Africa leader Adebayo Adedeji due to explicit pressure from the U.S. government, for pushing the institution too far leftwards (Amin 2006, p. 181). 1 Never flatfooted nor discouraged, though, Amin from the early 1970s built a preferred organizational vehicle: a network of likeminded institutes, the Third World Forum (TWF). His objective was “to bring together intellectuals who were critical of conventional concepts of development… In April 1973, the Allende government in Chile invited us to organize a meeting in Santiago. I remember this as the date when the Forum really saw the light of day.”2 The origins of a South-centric organic intelligentsia with global visions are to be found here, and through the 1980s, Amin’s TWF generated scores of books and other major publications. By the early 1990s, as neoliberal corporate globalization penetrated every part of the world, Amin recommitted to jumping scale to the global. In 1997 he established the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA) in Cairo. As Amin (2006, p. 195) put it, the WFA most opposed the pro-corporate, Northern-centric logic of the World Economic Forum and indeed first appeared on the international stage when it organized the ‘anti-Davos’ in January 1999, on the occasion of the annual elite conference at Davos. We were, of course, denied access to the holy precinct itself, but we took up position fifty meters away, on the other side of the snow-covered street in this beautiful winter resort. Our small group included a number of committed intellectuals and figures from mass movements in the five continents, chosen for their high degree of representativeness: the farmers’ organizations of Burkina Faso, Brazil and India; the labor unions of South Africa, Korea and Brazil; the neo- Zapatistas of Chiapas in Mexico; the activists of the World March of Women; the ‘Sans’ in France 1 In prior years, models for this internationalist anti-capitalist networking included Berlin-based communist Willi Münzenberg, or subsequently – albeit in military-charismatic mode – Che Guevara. For a review of forty years of efforts by Amin’s networks and similar institutions, see the survey by William Carroll (2016) of what he termed Transnational Alternative Policy Groups, under a rubric Amin exemplified: “expose, oppose, propose.” 2 Allies whom Amin brought to the TWF were a mix of revolutionaries, independent leftists, communists and socialists, dependencia-nationalists and social democrats, including Latin Americans Celso Furtado, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enrique Iglesias, Juan Somavia, Enrique Oteiza and Pablo Gonzalez Casanova; numerous Africans including Claude Ake, Justinian Rweyemamu, Ismail Abdallah, Lamine Gakou, and from Algiers the Applied Economics Research Centre; and from Asia, Paresh Chattopadhay, Amiya Bagchi, Lau Kin Chi, Ramkrishna Mukerjee, Kien Theeravit, Suthy Prasartset, Ponna Wignaraja, Paul Lin, Gamani Corea and George Asniero. His closest comrades in Dakar included Lily Bayoumy, Bernard Founou and Cheickh Gueye, and in Cairo, Mamdouh Habashi and Helmy Shawary. Among Northern sponsors was Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme, a fact which assisted fundraising from “various institutions in Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada and Italy, as well as the EU and the UN University” (Amin 2006: 182). His main english-language publisher was Monthly Review Press but he also published recent books in a Fahamu (Pambazuka) series headquartered in Kenya, as well as French and Arabic publishing houses. jwsr.pitt.edu | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2019.948 Journal of World-Systems Research | Vol. 25 Issue 2 | Samir Amin’s New International 261 and the ATTAC group. Helped into Davos by Le Monde Diplomatique, we were there to say that it was we, not the club of billionaires, who represented the real world.3 The following February, the activist-oriented Peoples Global Action summit in Geneva cemented Amin’s role in linking theoretical, analytical, strategic and activist perspectives. There, his praxis approach to challenging world power combined with hopes for revived Third World nationalism in the Latin American Pink Tide that began at roughly the same time. The first major wave of coordinated protests against corporate globalization began in Geneva in mid-1998 (when the Multilateral Agreement on Investment was the target), Seattle in late 1999 (World Trade Organization), Washington and Prague in 2000 (World Bank and IMF), Gothenburg (European Union summit) and Genoa in 2001 (G8), and Durban and Johannesburg in 2001-02 (United Nations global conferences on racism and environment), to provide a few examples. In these sites, a strategic orientation emerged: the ‘globalization of people’ against the ‘globalization of capital’ (Bond 2003). But just as global-scale economy and ecology became intertwined in social movements’ sensibilities and alliances, the George W. Bush era interrupted this process, as Washington declared war on Islam in 2001. The 9/11 terrorist attacks frightened organized labor’s leadership away from the global justice movements, in the process derailing the emerging alternative economic, social and environmental agendas. The Northern left prioritized mobilization against U.S. and European militarism, especially the Iraq War (albeit with ever-weaker anti-war rallies after 15 million rallied unsuccessfully in March 2003). The subsequent mass movements of the 2000s—however disconnected and limited by their national bases—defended civil liberties in the internet era, advocated for climate policies, offered intense critiques of national financial elites in scores of ‘Occupy’ cities in 2011, and overthrew several local tyrants during that year’s global protest wave. As for social movements that retained much of their strength in the Global South, the main potential site to regularly unify their politics was the World Social Forum (WSF), established in 2001 by Brazilian and French social democrats as a direct competition to Davos. But after starting with great potential, the biannual WSF became less relevant during the 2010s given its organizers’ reluctance to generate a tough ideology and organization fit for the times, in part because of the excessive influence of mild-mannered international NGOs and the general sense of ‘horizontality’ and over-valorization of micro-based struggles. There were, still, thousands of global-justice advocates adopting anti-war, anti-surveillance, anti-emissions and anti-finance targets, but the major multilateral institutions slipped out of the public eye, even though they were amongst the parties most responsible for implementing neoliberalism, austerity for the Global South and hedonistic capital accumulation for the Global North. 3 Amin (2006: 195) continued: “The Davos organizers, like the narrow-minded Swiss authorities, were so furious that it was impossible to produce