A New Bandung?

“The Long Revolution of the Global South – Towards a New Anti-Imperialist International,” by Samir Amin, 2019

This book is part 2 of a memoir of Amin’s work and travels throughout the global south from about 1970 to 2016.  The book covers individual countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the rest of Africa, central Asia, the ‘far’ east, Latin America, eastern Europe and lastly China, Vietnam and Cuba.  It is a work of historical materialism that reads a bit like a leftist travelogue, which sometimes turns humorous when he derides the corrupt characters he meets.  Through it Amin elucidates his theory that a new movement has to be formed in the peripheral economies of the global south against the imperialist triad – the dominant capitalists of the U.S., Europe and Japan. 

 

Samir Amin

The title hints that he thinks this process will be … long - really long.  Amin:  “We must understand that the polarization produced by the history of really existing capitalism requires another view of the long transition (over centuries) from capitalism to socialism.”  To my mind, this stagest perspective shades the whole book.  The text of the book makes it clear that the comprador bourgeoisies in the global south who preside over ‘lumpen development’ are the majority of countries, while “emergent nations” who are successful in a “national popular” project are few – China and southern Korea only.  To quote Amin on South Korea:  “Korea’s success is a real danger for imperialism.”  He discounts Iran, Brazil, India and South Africa as only partly emergent.  He is mum on Russia’s status. He is somewhat positive on fragile developments in Latin America (the pink tide) – at least in 2016.  That tide is fragile as he predicted – turned back in Brazil and Ecuador.

Amin, through his organizations, held conferences over the years where socialists, revolutionary nationalists, ordinary nationalists, progressives and reformers of various countries debated and discussed politics.  He name-checks intellectuals and activists he met and comes across as non-sectarian.  Amin was known throughout Africa as someone expert in political economy.  He was hired by various governments to look at their accounting books and recommend new economic policies.  According to him, the governments never took his advice. 

The emphasis for Amin is on organizing the economy democratically – which means in the interests of the workers and peasants.  He opposes false ‘representative’ democracy controlled by capital and supports a direct participatory democracy of the masses.  His program for ‘national popular’ states is aimed at gaining food security, bolstering small farming, reducing or ending debt and charitable ‘aid’ from the IMF, WB and imperialist NGOs, stopping sole reliance on exports and building an industrial base in each country.  He is for mass organizations of the oppressed, supporting labor fronts, unions and peasant organizations to pressure this vision.  In this context he frequently suggests combining many countries into economic and political blocs, as his travels have shown him how ethno-nationalism, communitarianism and nationalist divisions weaken the global south.  Fragile, small and failed states are to the benefit of imperialism, as they are more easily manipulated and penetrated, able to produce imperialist rent with ease.  In this case he mentions Western Sahara, Eritrea and East Timor as among questionable ‘national’ struggles.

As someone who came out of the Maoist tradition, Amin elides over the damage wrought by Mao’s ‘3 Worlds’ Theory,’ which posited that the USSR was the ‘main enemy’ in the world.  It was the largest split in the Communist movement in history.  Regarding Angola, Amin advocated a coalition government between the Soviet-backed MPLA and their U.S. and South-African backed opponents.  China supported the latter in the armed struggle.  He jokes about the ‘little Stalins’ that seemed to proliferate in the Communist Parties around the world.  Or as he puts it:  “The ‘dictatorship of the party’ has been proven to be prone to sink into careerism, opportunism and even corruption.”   The main emphasis in the book is really on finding a new Bandung / non-aligned alliance of national capitalists who can stand up to imperialism – a hope that corporate globalism in 2019 has whittled down to a very few.  As such, his emphasis on a ‘new anti-imperialist international’ seems not to be viable or class-based. 

Maoism was based on activating the peasantry as the main base for revolution. A few years ago the urban population of the planet passed the number of rural farmers and inhabitants.  Reflecting this, few rural guerilla struggles still exist.  Amin sees the strongest in India, the ‘Naxalite’ rebellion, as being defensive and unable to become national.  China itself has no interest in a working-class international due to it being closely intertwined with the triad’s production facilities.  Reflecting this, Amin’s ideas about the non-transferability of land in China seem to be dated.  National liberation struggles have almost all ended, reducing the attraction of slogans of national independence and the popular front.  The USSR and its eastern European allies, which Amin as a Maoist called “capitalism without capitalists,” disintegrated.  Thus much aid they provided in the past is done. 

Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito at Bandung, 1955

In retrospect, present ‘globalism’ puts past globalization into the shade, as U.S. military control over the planet has increased while neo-liberalism has benefited the growth of a new middle-class in the global south.  This middle-class has become a bulwark for reaction and capital, as Amin points out. Technology has enabled corporate globalism to penetrate every location in the globe, though he has no words on this. 

None of these conditions were present at the time the ‘non-aligned’ movement was born in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia led by Tito, Nasser and Nehru.  All of them are gone in more ways than one.  Worldwide, it is more and more ‘class against class.’  It seems it is only the working classes that can accomplish anti-imperialist and democratic tasks. 

This book is valuable for those who want a snapshot of the material history of many individual countries in the global south.  As part of his analysis, Amin continually opposes ‘political Islam’ as a long-running creation and tool of imperialism and as an anti-popular force of domestic reaction.  Amin is unrelentingly anti-imperialist and focuses on the continuing damage done by colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism to the working class, peddlers, small businessmen and farmers of the global south. 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Other reviews on this subject on the blog, use blog search box, upper left:  “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” “The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism,” “The Law of Worldwide Value,” (all by Amin); “The Musings of the Professors,” “The Death of the Nation,” (Prashad) “Open Veins of Latin America,” (Galeano)“American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “The Management of Savagery,” (Blumenthal) “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire.”

 

Red Frog

July 19, 2019