World capitalism (2011)

Book Review from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? Samir Amin. Pambazuka Press. 2011

Samir Amin was one of the pioneers of “dependency theory” in the 1970s. Its exponents regarded capitalism as a single world system divided into a centre which exploited the “periphery”. They challenged the conventional view, held also by those Amin here calls “historical Marxists” (which would include us), that the sort of capitalism that exists at the centre could develop in the periphery. This was impossible, they claimed, as, to continue to exist, the centre needed a dependant periphery to exploit for what Amin calls “monopoly rent” (and Lenin called “super-profits”).

This led Amin to Maoism and its modification of the famous slogan at the end of the Communist Manifesto into “Workers and Oppressed Peoples of All Lands Unite”. He still stands by this slogan and is still sympathetic to Maoism.

In this book he argues that capitalism developed in the centre by dispossessing those who worked on the land. In the 19th century these dispossessed were able to emigrate, in particular to the US where capital accumulation in search of labour-power was expanding. Capitalism, he says, is still developing by dispossessing the peasantry, this time in the South, but this time there is nowhere for the dispossessed to migrate to. So, they are condemned to vegetate in dire poverty. Pauperisation is still inherent in capitalist development.

He sees world socialism as the only way out but envisages it as coming into being just as capitalism did over centuries, with the countries of the South breaking the link to the centre (now merged into a single imperialism of the US, Europe and Japan which he calls the “Triad”) and developing on a non-capitalist basis.

While we do not share this perspective (there can be no non-capitalist development within world capitalism), or the view that the centre depends on “monopoly rent” from the South (they are just ordinary profits) we can credit the dependency theorists with bringing out the fact that capitalism is a single world system, not just a collection of national capitalisms, real or potential.

Adam Buick