Brad’s Reviews > Only People Make Their Own History: Writings on Capitalism, Imperialism, and Revolution > Status Update

If [the European] left had the audacity to propose real advances beyond current capitalism, it would gain the credibility that it lacks. An audacious radical left is necessary to provide the coherence that the current piecemeal protest movements and defensive struggles still lack.

This dovetails powerfully into Vincent Bevins's retrospective on the 2010s, If We Burn.

“The fact that the Chinese project is not capitalist does not mean that it ‘is’ socialist, only that it makes it possible to advance on the long road to socialism. Nevertheless, it is also still threatened with a drift that moves it off that road and ends up with a return, pure and simple, to capitalism.”

"[Articulation of reality at these three levels---peoples, nations, and states--conditions the success of transition.] It is a question of reinforcing the complementarity of the advances of the people, of the liberation of the nation, and of the achievements by the power of the state. But if contradictions between the popular agent and the state agent are allowed to develop, any advances are finally doomed."

"'Western Marxism' has ignored the decisive transformation represented by the emergence of generalized-monopoly capitalism. The intellectuals of the new Western radical left refuse to measure the decisive effects of the concentration of the oligopolies that now dominate the production system as a whole, in the same way that they dominate all political, social, cultural, and ideological life."

the contradictions of which we are speaking do their work quietly and one day the ‘stable’ structures collapse. History then enters a phase that may be described later as transitional, but which is lived as a transition toward the unknown, during which new historical subjects crystallize slowly.

On occasion, Amin transitions seamlessly between humanist/structuralist language.

I'm sympathetic to Amin's emphasis on worker-peasant alliance and highlighting systematic pauperization by capitalist agriculture, but his macro-level analysis flattens out the strata in the peasant class historically, as well as complications of class position for today's temporary agricultural workers (which includes "overqualified" professionals from the periphery---see Gabriel Allahdua's "Harvesting Freedom").

"The twenty-first century will not be America's century. It will be one of vast conflicts, and the rise of social struggles that question the ambitions of Washington and of capital. The crisis is exacerbating contradictions within the dominant classes."

- Samir Amin, June 1, 2000

Aijaz Ahmad's Introduction was a brilliant summary of Amin's critique of Eurocentric history (vindicated as even bourgeois historians of the mercantilist Mediterranean seem sometimes willing to decenter Europe's position, placing it at the fringe of a regional system--see Noel Malcolm's "Agents of Empire").

Also helpful is his contrast of Eurocentrism's geopolitical economy with Said's post-structural "Orientalism".