Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World

by Samir Amin

Is it possible for the Third World to escape from the constraints imposed by the world's economic system? What room for manoeuvre do these states have, and are they condemned to dependence?



These are some of the questions Samir Amin confronts in Delinking. He argues that Third World countries cannot hope to raise living standards if they continue to adjust their development strategies in line with the trends set by a fundamentally unequal global capitalist system over which they have no control.

The only alternative, he maintains, is for Third World societies to 'delink' from the logic of the global system - each country submitting its external economic relations to the logic of domestic development priorities, which in turn requires a broad coalition of popular forces in control of the state. Delinking, he shows, is not about absolute autarchy, but a neutralizing of the effects of external economic interactions on internal choices.

Genres: Nonfiction, Economics, History, Africa

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

The Arabic profile: سمير أمين

Samir Amin (Arabic: سمير أمين) (3 September 1931 – 12 August 2018) was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist, political scientist and world-systems analyst. He is noted for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism in 1988 and considered a pioneer of Dependency Theory.

Reviews

[Dont · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book comes nearly three decades after the Bundung process for non-aligned states in which the project for independent development endorsed national bourgeois development as the pathway Third World advancement independent of both Euro-American and Soviet subordination. In Delinking, Amin’s starting point is that the Bundung process failed. It failed to articulate a development project that was truly autonomous from capitalist control. Second, it failed to recognize that the global centers of capital would never accept even these moderate goals if the pathway posed any risk to capitalist subordination. Thus, even states seeking bourgeois national development were the target of Euro-American political, economic, and military intervention.

Amin begins with the presumption that the global south faces but two options; adjustment (neoliberal subordination and assimilation) or delinking. The book is also something of an extended response the critical reception of his analytical work spanning the 1960s and '70s. During that time Amin was placed in relation to a number of other Marxist and world-system theorists, a group whose theoretical output was often labeled as Dependency Theory. Delinking affords Amin the opportunity to critical reflect on that project on his own terms; characterizing dependency as more accurately a descriptive term lacking any precise theoretical content. Rather, the problem to which Dependency Theory sought to address was the failure of Eurocentric development (i.e. modernization) to deliver on its promises of advancement of living standards for the poor and the flourishing of democratic institutions in the "Third World." For all the critiques of Dependency Theory, liberal bourgeois and Marxist, that basic problem was all too often swept under the rug. However, for Amin, what was and remains needed is a engagement with historical materialism that theorizes capitalist expansion in terms of center/periphery and, likewise, to advance a political project of transition to socialism and the abolition of class. Amin calls that project, delinking.

Having read quite a number of books by Amin over the years, it was his mid-period in the 1980s that stands out as the most compelling. With the failure of bourgeois national development and national liberation movements (many of which Amin had championed) haunting him, and the horizon of counter-globalization movements not yet fully formed, Amin enters the 1980s forced into self-critique. Beginning with Class and Nation, followed by The Future of Maoism, and then Delinking, Amin scratches his way through the rubble of history to make sense of both failure and any glimmer of revolutionary possibility. When he chastises his critics for rejecting the Chinese revolution because it failed to deliver full communism in a few years or a single generation, I can't help but hear Amin critiquing his younger self.

What is probably one of the most useful and relevant aspects of Amin's project during this phase of his research is his attempt to define the relevance of Maoism in the midst of the Deng retreat. Central to that project is an emerging critique of racist Eurocentrism in then-dominant Trotskyism and the primacy of national liberation of the Third World for global anti-capitalist struggle. In the words of Robert Biel, this is the period where Amin most forcefully applies an anti-Eurocentric critique of value to historical materialism.

With his death two weeks ago, perhaps it is time for a new generation to discover, not only Amin's total body of inquiry, but in particular this period of the 1980s. Perhaps some clever publisher (Monthly Review Press?) will deem it a good time to republish both Class and Nation and The Future of Maoism for contemporary militants. At a moment in history where the paucity of Western Marxism (what Perry Anderson once called, theory without practice) has loosened its grip on radical inquiry, Amin's work as a revolutionary intellectual is more relevant than ever.

[Pozzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oft schwer geschrieben würde nicht alle Thesen unterschreiben (Sowjetunion ab 1930 Revisionistisch, China unter Deng nicht,...)

[Nemanja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samir Amin builds upon the argument presented in his previous works such as "Accumulation on World Scale" and "Unequal Development" to present a development path for the Third World countries which would avoid the pitfalls of what Frank called development of underdevelopment. Amin's proposal can be summarised as establishing value according to the socially necessary labour within national borders instead of using the global one which is bound to the productivity of the First World countries.

Evidently, the book reflects the historical circumstances in which it was written (1985.) and dedicates a lot of space to the discussion of what Amin calls non-capitalist statist societies such as USSR and China. While he goes at length to describe why those societies are not exactly socialist, he doesn't really set the ground by explaining what he thinks socialism should be. In passing, he does mention socialism in terms of abolition of classes.

While he describes the economic aspects of delinking, he does not consider political and military repercussions such policy would imply in terms of an imperialist intervention, international isolation, etc.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

An accurate evaluation of the capitalist world system and the globalised relations within it, but the proposed Marxist solutions aren't going to help anybody.