Contemporary Imperialism

monthlyreview.org /2015/07/01/contemporary-imperialism/

by Samir Amin topics: Imperialism , Political Economy places: Americas , Asia , Global , Latin America
Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His books published by Monthly
Review Press include The Liberal Virus, The World We Wish to See , The Law of Worldwide Value, The
Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism, and Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory .

Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, and Trotsky in Russia, as well as Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Den Xiaoping in China,
shaped the history of the two great revolutions of the twentieth century.1 As leaders of revolutionary
communist parties and then later as leaders of revolutionary states, they were confronted with the
problems faced by a triumphant revolution in countries of peripheral capitalism and forced to “revise” (I
deliberately use this term, considered sacrilegious by many) the theses inherited from the historical
Marxism of the Second International. Lenin and Bukharin went much further than Hobson and Hilferding in
their analyses of monopoly capitalism and imperialism and drew this major political conclusion: the
imperialist war of 1914–1918 (they were among the few, if not the only ones, to anticipate it) made
necessary and possible a revolution led by the proletariat.

With the benefit of hindsight, I will indicate here the limitations of their analyses. Lenin and Bukharin
considered imperialism to be a new stage (“the highest”) of capitalism associated with the development of
monopolies. I question this thesis and contend that historical capitalism has always been imperialist, in the
sense that it has led to a polarization between centers and peripheries since its origin (the sixteenth
century), which has only increased over the course of its later globalized development. The nineteenth-
century pre-monopolist system was not less imperialist. Great Britain maintained its hegemony precisely
because of its colonial domination of India. Lenin and Bukharin thought that the revolution, begun in
Russia (“the weak link”), would continue in the centers (Germany in particular). Their hope was based on
an underestimate of the effects of imperialist polarization, which destroyed revolutionary prospects in the
centers.

Nevertheless, Lenin, and even more Bukharin, quickly learned the necessary historical lesson. The
revolution, made in the name of socialism (and communism), was, in fact, something else: mainly a
peasant revolution. So what to do? How can the peasantry be linked with the construction of socialism? By
making concessions to the market and by respecting newly acquired peasant property; hence by
progressing slowly towards socialism? The New Economic Plan (NEP) implemented this strategy.

Yes, but…. Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin also understood that the imperialist powers would never accept the
Revolution or even the NEP. After the hot wars of intervention, the cold war was to become permanent,
from 1920 to 1990.2 Soviet Russia, even though it was far from being able to construct socialism, was
able to free itself from the straightjacket that imperialism always strives to impose on all peripheries of the
world system that it dominates. In effect, Soviet Russia delinked. So what to do now? Attempt to push for
peaceful coexistence, by making concessions if necessary and refraining from intervening too actively on
the international stage? But at the same time, it was necessary to be armed to face new and unavoidable
attacks. And that implied rapid industrialization, which, in turn, came into conflict with the interests of the
peasantry and thus threatened to break the worker-peasant alliance, the foundation of the revolutionary
state.

It is possible, then, to understand the equivocations of Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin. In theoretical terms,
there were U-turns from one extreme to the other. Sometimes a determinist attitude inspired by the
phased approach inherited from earlier Marxism (first the bourgeois democratic revolution, then the
socialist one) predominated, sometimes a voluntarist approach (political action would make it possible to
leap over stages). Finally, from 1930–1933, Stalin chose rapid industrialization and armament (and this
choice was not without some connection to the rise of fascism). Collectivization was the price of that
choice. Here again we must beware of judging too quickly: all socialists of that period (and even more the
capitalists) shared Kautsky’s analyses on this point and were persuaded that the future belonged to large-
scale agriculture.3 The break in the worker-peasant alliance that this choice implied lay behind the
abandonment of revolutionary democracy and the autocratic turn.

In my opinion, Trotsky would certainly not have done better. His attitude towards the rebellion of the
Kronstadt sailors and his later equivocations demonstrate that he was no different than the other Bolshevik
leaders in government. But, after 1927, living in exile and no longer having responsibility for managing the
Soviet state, he could delight in endlessly repeating the sacred principles of socialism. He became like
many academic Marxists who have the luxury of asserting their attachment to principles without having to
be concerned about effectiveness in transforming reality.4

The Chinese communists appeared later on the revolutionary stage. Mao was able to learn from Bolshevik
equivocations. China was confronted with the same problems as Soviet Russia: revolution in a backward
country, the necessity of including the peasantry in revolutionary transformation, and the hostility of the
imperialist powers. But Mao was able to see more clearly than Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin. Yes, the
Chinese revolution was anti-imperialist and peasant (anti-feudal). But it was not bourgeois democratic; it
was popular democratic. The difference is important: the latter type of revolution requires maintaining the
worker-peasant alliance over a long period. China was thus able to avoid the fatal error of forced
collectivization and invent another way: make all agricultural land state property, give the peasantry equal
access to use of this land, and renovate family agriculture.5

The two revolutions had difficulty in achieving stability because they were forced to reconcile support for a
socialist outlook and concessions to capitalism. Which of these two tendencies would prevail? These
revolutions only achieved stability after their “Thermidor,” to use Trotsky’s term. But when was the
Thermidor in Russia? Was it in 1930, as Trotsky said? Or was it in the 1920s, with the NEP? Or was it the
ice age of the Brezhnev period? And in China, did Mao choose Thermidor beginning in 1950? Or do we
have to wait until Deng Xiaoping to speak of the Thermidor of 1980?

It is not by chance that reference is made to lessons of the French Revolution. The three great revolutions
of modern times (the French, Russian, and Chinese) are great precisely because they looked forward
beyond the immediate requirements of the moment. With the rise of the Mountain, led by Robespierre, in
the National Convention, the French Revolution was consolidated as both popular and bourgeois and, just
like the Russian and Chinese Revolutions—which strove to go all the way to communism even if it were
not on the agenda due to the necessity of averting defeat—retained the prospect of going much further
later. Thermidor is not the Restoration. The latter occurred in France, not with Napoleon, but only
beginning in 1815. Still it should be remembered that the Restoration could not completely do away with
the gigantic social transformation caused by the Revolution. In Russia, the restoration occurred even later
in its revolutionary history, with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It should be noted that this restoration remains
fragile, as can be seen in the challenges Putin must still confront. In China, there has not been (or not yet!)
a restoration.6

A New Stage of Monopoly Capital

The contemporary world is still confronted with the same challenges encountered by the revolutions of the
twentieth century. The continued deepening of the center/periphery contrast, characteristic of the spread of
globalized capitalism, still leads to the same major political consequence: transformation of the world
begins with anti-imperialist, national, popular—and potentially anti-capitalist—revolutions, which are the
only ones on the agenda for the foreseeable future. But this transformation will only be able to go beyond
the first steps and proceed on the path to socialism later if and when the peoples of the centers, in turn,
begin the struggle for communism, viewed as a higher stage of universal human civilization. The systemic
crisis of capitalism in the centers gives a chance for this possibility to be translated into reality.

In the meantime, there is a two-fold challenge confronting the peoples and states of the South: (1) the
lumpen development that contemporary capitalism forces on all peripheries of the system has nothing to
offer three-quarters of humanity; in particular, it leads to the rapid destruction of peasant societies in Asia
and Africa, and consequently the response given to the peasant question will largely govern the nature of
future changes;7 (2) the aggressive geostrategy of the imperialist powers, which is opposed to any attempt
by the peoples and states of the periphery to get out of the impasse, forces the peoples concerned to
defeat the military control of the world by the United States and its subaltern European and Japanese
allies.

The first long systemic crisis of capitalism got underway in the 1870s. The version of historic capitalism’s
extension over the long span that I have put forward suggests a succession of three epochs: ten centuries
of incubation from the year 1000 in China to the eighteenth-century revolutions in England and France, a
short century of triumphal flourishing (the nineteenth century), probably a long decline comprising in itself
the first long crisis (1875–1945) and then the second (begun in 1975 and still ongoing). In each of those
two long crises, capital responds to the challenge by the same triple formula: concentration of capital’s
control, deepening of uneven globalization, financialization of the system’s management.8 Two major
thinkers (Hobson and Hilferding) immediately grasped the enormous importance of capitalism’s
transformation into monopoly capitalism. But it was Lenin and Bukharin who drew the political conclusion
from this transformation, a transformation that initiated the decline of capitalism and thus moved the
socialist revolution onto the agenda.9

The primary formation of monopoly capitalism thus goes back to the end of the nineteenth century, but in
the United States it really established itself as a system only from the 1920s, to conquer next the Western
Europe and Japan of the “thirty glorious years” following the Second World War. The concept of surplus,
put forth by Baran and Sweezy in the 1950–1960 decade, allows a grasp of what is essential in the
transformation of capitalism. Convinced at the moment of its publication by that work of enrichment to the
Marxist critique of capitalism, I undertook as soon as the 1970s its reformulation which required, in my
opinion, the transformation of the “first” (1920–1970) monopoly capitalism into generalized-monopoly
capitalism, analyzed as a qualitatively new phase of the system.

In the previous forms of competition among firms producing the same use value—numerous then, and
independent of each other—decisions were made by the capitalist owners of those firms on the basis of a
recognized market price which imposed itself as an external datum. Baran and Sweezy observed that the
new monopolies act differently: they set their prices simultaneously with the nature and volume of their
outputs. So it is an end to “fair and open competition,” which remains, quite contrary to reality, at the heart
of conventional economics’ rhetoric! The abolition of competition—the radical transformation of that term’s
meaning, of its functioning and of its results—detaches the price system from its basis, the system of
values, and in that very way hides from sight the referential framework which used to define capitalism’s
rationality. Although use values used to constitute to a great extent autonomous realities, they become, in
monopoly capitalism, the object of actual fabrications produced systematically through aggressive and
particularized sales strategies (advertising, brands, etc.). In monopoly capitalism, a coherent reproduction
of the productive system is no longer possible merely by mutual adjustment of the two departments
discussed in the second volume of Capital: it is thenceforward necessary to take into account a
Department III, conceived by Baran and Sweezy. This allows for added surplus absorption promoted by
the state—beyond Department I (private investment) and beyond the portion of Department II (private
consumption) devoted to capitalist consumption. The classic example of Department III spending is
military expenditure. However, the notion of Department III can be expanded to cover the wider array of
socially unreproductive expenditures promoted by generalized-monopoly capitalism.10

The excrescence of Department III, in turn, favors in fact the erasure of the distinction made by Marx
between productive (of surplus-value) labor and unproductive labor. All forms of wage labor can—and do—
become sources of possible profits. A hairdresser sells his services to a customer who pays him out of his
income. But if that hairdresser becomes the employee of a beauty parlor, the business must realize a profit
for its owner. If the country at issue puts ten million wage workers to work in Departments I, II, and III,
providing the equivalent of twelve million years of abstract labor, and if the wages received by those
workers allow them to buy goods and services requiring merely six million years of abstract labor, the rate
of exploitation for all of them, productive and unproductive confounded, is the same 100 percent. But the
six million years of abstract labor that the workers do not receive cannot all be invested in the purchase of
producer goods destined to expand Departments I and II; part of them will be put toward the expansion of
Department III.

Generalized-Monopoly Capitalism (Since 1975)

Passage from the initial monopoly capitalism to its current form (generalized-monopoly capitalism) was
accomplished in a short time (between 1975 and 2000) in response to the second long crisis of declining
capitalism. In fifteen years, monopoly power’s centralization and its capacity for control over the entire
productive system reached summits incomparable with what had until then been the case.

My first formulation of generalized-monopoly capitalism dates from 1978, when I put forward an
interpretation of capital’s responses to the challenge of its long systemic crisis, which opened starting from
1971–1975. In that interpretation I accentuated the three directions of this expected reply, then barely
under way: strengthened centralization of control over the economy by the monopolies, deepening of
globalization (and the outsourcing of the manufacturing industry to the peripheries), and financialization.
The work that André Gunder Frank and I published together in 1978 drew no notice probably because our
theses were ahead of their time. But today the three characteristics at issue have become blindingly
obvious to everybody.11

A name had to be given to this new phase of monopoly capitalism. The adjective “generalized” specifies
what is new: the monopolies are thenceforward in a position that gives them the capability of reducing all
(or nearly all) economic activities to subcontractor status. The example of family farming in the capitalist
centers provides the finest example of this. These farmers are controlled upstream by the monopolies that
provide their inputs and financing, and downstream by the marketing chains, to the point that the price
structures forced on them wipe out the income from their labor. Farmers survive only thanks to public
subsidies paid for by the taxpayers. This extraction is thus at the origin of the monopolies’ profits! As
likewise has been observed with bank failures, the new principal of economic management is summed up
in a phrase: privatization of the monopolies’ profits, socialization of their losses! To go on talking of “fair and
open competition” and of “truth of the prices revealed by the markets”—that belongs in a farce.

The fragmented, and by that fact concrete, economic power of proprietary bourgeois families gives way to
a centralized power exercised by the directors of the monopolies and their cohort of salaried servitors. For
generalized-monopoly capitalism involves not the concentration of property, which on the contrary is more
dispersed than ever, but of the power to manage it. That is why it is deceptive to attach the adjective
“patrimonial” to contemporary capitalism. It is only in appearance that “shareholders” rule. Absolute
monarchs, the top executives of the monopolies, decide everything in their name. Moreover, the deepening
globalization of the system wipes out the holistic (i.e., simultaneously economic, political, and social) logic
of national systems without putting in its place any global logic whatsoever. This is the empire of chaos—
the title of one of my works, published in 1991 and subsequently taken up by others: in fact international
political violence takes the place of economic competition.12

Financialization of Accumulation

The new financialization of economic life crowns this transformation in capital’s power. In place of
strategies set out by real owners of fragmented capital are those of the managers of ownership titles over
capital. What is vulgarly called fictitious capital (the estimated value of ownership certificates) is nothing but
the expression of this displacement, this disconnect between the virtual and real worlds.

By its very nature capitalist accumulation has always been synonymous with disorder, in the sense that
Marx gave to that term: a system moving from disequilibrium to disequilibrium (driven by class struggles
and conflicts among the powers) without ever tending toward an equilibrium. But this disorder resulting
from competition among fragmented capitals was kept within reasonable limits through management of the
credit system carried out under the control of the national state. With contemporary financialized and
globalized capitalism those frontiers disappear; the violence of the movements from disequilibrium to
disequilibrium is reinforced. The successor of disorder is chaos.

Domination by the capital of the generalized monopolies is exercised on the world scale through global
integration of the monetary and financial market, based henceforward on the principle of flexible exchange
rates, and giving up national controls over the flow of capital. Nevertheless, this domination is called into
question, to varying degrees, by state policies of the emerging countries. The conflict between these latter
policies and the strategic objectives of the triad’s collective imperialism becomes by that fact one of the
central axes for possibly putting generalized-monopoly capitalism once more on trial.13

The Decline of Democracy

In the system’s centers, generalized-monopoly capitalism has brought with it generalization of the wage-
form. Upper managers are thenceforward employees who do not participate in the formation of surplus-
value, of which they have become consumers. At the other social pole, the generalized proletarianization
that the wage-form suggests is accompanied by multiplication in forms of segmentation of the labor force.
In other words, the “proletariat” (in its forms as known in the past) disappears at the very moment when
proletarianization becomes generalized. In the peripheries, the effects of domination by generalized-
monopoly capital are no less visible. Above an already diverse social structure made up of local ruling
classes and the subordinate classes and status groups there is placed a dominant superclass emerging in
the wake of globalization. This superclass is sometimes that of “neo-comprador insiders,” sometimes that
of the governing political class (or class-state-party), or a mixture of the two.

Far from being synonyms, “market” and “democracy” are, on the contrary, antonyms. In the centers a new
political consensus-culture (only seeming, perhaps, but nevertheless active) synonymous with
depolitization, has taken the place of the former political culture based on the right-left confrontation that
used to give significance to bourgeois democracy and the contradictory inscription of class struggles within
its framework. In the peripheries, the monopoly of power captured by the dominant local superclass
likewise involves the negation of democracy. The rise of political Islam provides an example of such a
regression.

The Aggressive Geostrategy of Contemporary Imperialism

The Collective Imperialism of the Triad; the State in Contemporary Capitalism

In the 1970s, Sweezy, Magdoff, and I had already advanced this thesis, formulated by André Gunder
Frank and me in a work published in 1978. We said that monopoly capitalism was entering a new age,
characterized by the gradual—but rapid—dismantling of national production systems. The production of a
growing number of market goods can no longer be defined by the label “made in France” (or the Soviet
Union or the United States), but becomes “made in the world,” because its manufacture is now broken into
segments, located here and there throughout the whole world.

Recognizing this fact, now a commonplace, does not imply that there is only one explanation of the major
cause for the transformation in question. For my part, I explain it by the leap forward in the degree of
centralization in the control of capital by the monopolies, which I have described as the move from the
capitalism of monopolies to the capitalism of generalized monopolies. The information revolution, among
other factors, provides the means that make possible the management of this globally dispersed
production system. But for me, these means are only implemented in response to a new objective need
created by the leap forward in the centralized control of capital.

The emergence of this globalized production system eliminates coherent “national development” policies
(diverse and unequally effective), but it does not substitute a new coherence, which would be that of the
globalized system. The reason for that is the absence of a globalized bourgeoisie and globalized state,
which I will examine later. Consequently, the globalized production system is incoherent by nature.

Another important consequence of this qualitative transformation of contemporary capitalism is the

emergence of the collective imperialism of the triad, which takes the place of the historical national
imperialisms (of the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France, and a few others). Collective
imperialism finds its raison d’être in the awareness by the bourgeoisies in the triad nations of the necessity
for their joint management of the world and particularly of the subjected, and yet to be subjected, societies
of the peripheries.

Some draw two correlates from the thesis of the emergence of a globalized production system: the
emergence of a globalized bourgeoisie and the emergence of a globalized state, both of which would find
their objective foundation in this new production system. My interpretation of the current changes and
crises leads me to reject these two correlates.

There is no globalized bourgeoisie (or dominant class) in the process of being formed, either on the world
scale or in the countries of the imperialist triad. I am led to emphasize the fact that the centralization of
control over the capital of the monopolies takes place within the nation-states of the triad (United States,
each member of the European Union, Japan) much more than it does in the relations between the partners
of the triad, or even between members of the European Union. The bourgeoisies (or oligopolistic groups)
are in competition within nations (and the national state manages this competition, in part at least) and
between nations. Thus the German oligopolies (and the German state) took on the leadership of European
affairs, not for the equal benefit of everyone, but first of all for their own benefit. At the level of the triad, it is
obviously the bourgeoisie of the United States that leads the alliance, once again with an unequal
distribution of the benefits. The idea that the objective cause—the emergence of the globalized production
system—entails ipso facto the emergence of a globalized dominant class is based on the underlying
hypothesis that the system must be coherent. In reality, it is possible for it not to be coherent. In fact, it is
not coherent and hence this chaotic system is not viable.

In the peripheries, the globalization of the production system occurs in conjunction with the replacement of
the hegemonic blocs of earlier eras by a new hegemonic bloc dominated by the new comprador
bourgeoisies, which are not constitutive elements of a globalized bourgeoisie, but only subaltern allies of
the bourgeoisies of the dominant triad. Just like there is no globalized bourgeoisie in the process of
formation, there is also no globalized state on the horizon. The major reason for this is that the current
globalized system does not attenuate, but actually accentuates conflict (already visible or potential)
between the societies of the triad and those of the rest of the world. I do indeed mean conflict between
societies and, consequently, potentially conflict between states. The advantage derived from the triad’s
dominant position (imperialist rent) allows the hegemonic bloc formed around the generalized monopolies
to benefit from a legitimacy that is expressed, in turn, by the convergence of all major electoral parties,
right and left, and their equal commitment to neoliberal economic policies and continual intervention in the
affairs of the peripheries. On the other hand, the neo-comprador bourgeoisies of the peripheries are
neither legitimate nor credible in the eyes of their own people (because the policies they serve do not make
it possible to “catch up,” and most often lead to the impasse of lumpen-development). Instability of the
current governments is thus the rule in this context.

Just as there is no globalized bourgeoisie even at the level of the triad or that of the European Union, there
is also no globalized state at these levels. Instead, there is only an alliance of states. These states, in turn,
willingly accept the hierarchy that allows that alliance to function: general leadership is taken on by
Washington, and leadership in Europe by Berlin. The national state remains in place to serve globalization
as it is.

There is an idea circulating in postmodernist currents that contemporary capitalism no longer needs the
state to manage the world economy and thus that the state system is in the process of withering away to
the benefit of the emergence of civil society. I will not go back over the arguments that I have developed
elsewhere against this naive thesis, one moreover that is propagated by the dominant governments and
the media clergy in their service. There is no capitalism without the state. Capitalist globalization could not
be pursued without the interventions of the United States armed forces and the management of the dollar.
Clearly, the armed forces and money are instruments of the state, not of the market.

But since there is no world state, the United States intends to fulfill this function. The societies of the triad
consider this function to be legitimate; other societies do not. But what does that matter? The self-
proclaimed “international community,” i.e., the G7 plus Saudi Arabia, which has surely become a
democratic republic, does not recognize the legitimacy of the opinion of 85 percent of the world’s
population!

There is thus an asymmetry between the functions of the state in the dominant imperialist centers and
those of the state in the subject, or yet to be subjected, peripheries. The state in the compradorized
peripheries is inherently unstable and, consequently, a potential enemy, when it is not already one.

There are enemies with which the dominant imperialist powers have been forced to coexist—at least up
until now. This is the case with China because it has rejected (up until now) the neo-comprador option and
is pursuing its sovereign project of integrated and coherent national development. Russia became an
enemy as soon as Putin refused to align politically with the triad and wanted to block the expansionist
ambitions of the latter in Ukraine, even if he does not envision (or not yet?) leaving the rut of economic
liberalism. The great majority of comprador states in the South (that is, states in the service of their
comprador bourgeoisies) are allies, not enemies—as long as each of these comprador states gives the
appearance of being in charge of its country. But leaders in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris know
that these states are fragile. As soon as a popular movement of revolt—with or without a viable alternative
strategy—threatens one of these states, the triad arrogates to itself the right to intervene. Intervention can
even lead to contemplating the destruction of these states and, beyond them, of the societies concerned.
This strategy is currently at work in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. The raison d’être of the strategy for military
control of the world by the triad led by Washington is located entirely in this “realist” vision, which is in
direct counterpoint to the naive view—à la Negri—of a globalized state in the process of formation.14

Responses of the Peoples and States of the South

The ongoing offensive of United States/Europe/Japan collective imperialism against all the peoples of the
South walks on two legs: the economic leg—globalized neoliberalism forced as the exclusive possible
economic policy; and the political leg—continuous interventions including preemptive wars against those
who reject imperialist interventions. In response, some countries of the South, such as the BRICS, at best
walk on only one leg: they reject the geopolitics of imperialism but accept economic neoliberalism. They
remain, for that reason, vulnerable, as the current case of Russia shows.15 Yes, they have to understand
that “trade is war,” as Yash Tandon wrote.16

All countries of the world outside the triad are enemies or potential enemies, except those who accept
complete submission to its economic and political strategy. In that frame Russia is “an enemy.”17
Whatever might be our assessment of what the Soviet Union was, the triad fought it simply because it was
an attempt to develop independently of dominant capitalism/imperialism. After the breakdown of the Soviet
system, some people (in Russia in particular) thought that the “West” would not antagonize a “capitalist
Russia”—just as Germany and Japan had “lost the war but won the peace.” They forgot that the Western
powers supported the reconstruction of the former fascist countries precisely to face the challenge of the
independent policies of the Soviet Union. Now, this challenge having disappeared, the target of the triad is
complete submission, to destroy the capacity of Russia to resist. The current development of the Ukraine
tragedy illustrates the reality of the strategic target of the triad. The triad organized in Kiev what ought to be
called a “Euro/Nazi putsch.” The rhetoric of the Western medias, claiming that the policies of the Triad aim
at promoting democracy, is simply a lie. Eastern Europe has been “integrated” in the European Union not
as equal partners, but as “semi-colonies” of major Western and Central European capitalist/imperialist
powers. The relation between West and East in the European system is in some degree similar to that
which rules the relations between the United States and Latin America!

Therefore the policy of Russia to resist the project of colonization of Ukraine must be supported. But this
positive Russian “international policy” is bound to fail if it is not supported by the Russian people. And this
support cannot be won on the exclusive basis of “nationalism.” The support can be won only if the internal
economic and social policy pursued promotes the interests of the majority of the working people. A people-
oriented policy implies therefore moving away, as much as possible, from the “liberal” recipe and the
electoral masquerade associated with it, which claims to give legitimacy to regressive social policies. I
would suggest setting up in its place a brand of new state capitalism with a social dimension (I say social,
not socialist). That system would open the road to eventual advances toward a socialization of the
management of the economy and therefore authentic new advances toward an invention of democracy
responding to the challenges of a modern economy.

Russian state power remaining within the strict limits of the neoliberal recipe annihilates the chances of
success of an independent foreign policy and the chances of Russia becoming a really emerging country
acting as an important international actor. Neoliberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic
and social regression, a pattern of “lumpen development,” and a growing subordinate status in the global
imperialist order. Russia would provide the triad with oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its
industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial
monopolies. In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system,
attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by
“sanctions” which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands
of dominant monopolies of the triad. The current outflow of “Russian capital” associated with the Ukraine
crisis illustrates the danger. Reestablishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective
response to that danger.

Outside of China, which is implementing a national project of modern industrial development in connection
with the renovation of family agriculture, the other so-called emergent countries of the South (the BRICS)
still walk only on one leg: they are opposed to the depredations of militarized globalization, but remain
imprisoned in the straightjacket of neoliberalism.18

Notes

1. ↩In this article, I am limiting myself to examining the experiences of Russia and China, with no
intention of ignoring the other twentieth-century socialist revolutions (North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba).
2. ↩Before the Second World War, Stalin had desperately, and unsuccessfully, sought an alliance with
the Western democracies against Nazism. After the war, Washington chose to pursue the Cold War,
while Stalin sought to extend friendship with the Western powers, again without success. See
Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007). See the important preface by Annie Lacroix Riz to the French edition: Les
guerres de Staline: De la guerre mondiale à la guerre froide (Paris: Éditions Delga, 2014).
3. ↩I am alluding here to Kautsky’s theses in The Agrarian Question, 2 vols. (London: Pluto Press,
1988; first edition, 1899).
4. ↩There are pleasant exceptions among Marxist intellectuals who, without having had
responsibilities in the leadership of revolutionary parties or, still less, of revolutionary states, have
nonetheless remained attentive to the challenges confronted by state socialisms (I am thinking here
of Baran, Sweezy, Hobsbawn, and others).
5. ↩See Samir Amin, “ China 2013,” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013): 14–33, in particular for
analyses concerning Maoism’s treatment of the agrarian question.
6. ↩See Eric J. Hobsbawn, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French
Revolution (London: Verso, 1990); also see the works of Florence Gauthier. These authors do not
assimilate Thermidor to restoration, as the Trotskyist simplification suggests.
7. ↩Concerning the destruction of the Asian and African peasantry currently underway, see Samir
Amin, “Contemporary Imperialism and the Agrarian Question ,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political
Economy 1, no. 1 (April 2012): 11–26, http://ags.sagepub.com.
8. ↩I discuss here only some of the major consequences of the move to generalized monopolies
(financialization, decline of democracy). As for ecological questions, I refer to the remarkable works
of John Bellamy Foster.
9. ↩Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973;
written in 1915); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International
Publishers, 1969; written in 1916).
10. ↩For further discussions of the Department III analysis and its relation to Baran and Sweezy’s
theory of surplus absorption see Samir Amin, Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2013), 67–76; and John Bellamy Foster, “Marxian Crisis Theory and the
State,” in John Bellamy Foster and Henryk Szlajfer, eds., The Faltering Economy (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1984), 325–49.
11. ↩Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, “Let’s Not Wait for 1984,” in Frank, Reflections on the World
Economic Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981).
12. ↩Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).
13. ↩Concerning the challenge to financial globalization, see Samir Amin, “From Bandung (1955) to
2015: New and Old Challenges for the Peoples and States of the South,” paper presented at the
World Social Forum, Tunis, March 2015, and “The Chinese Yuan,” published in Chinese, 2013.
14. ↩“Contra Hardt and Negri,” Monthly Review 66, no. 6 (November 2014): 25–36.
15. ↩The choice to delink is inevitable. The extreme centralization of the surplus at the world level in
the form of imperialist rent for the monopolies of the imperialist powers is unsupportable by all
societies in the periphery. It is necessary to deconstruct this system with the prospect of
reconstructing it later in another form of globalization compatible with communism understood as a
more advanced stage of universal civilization. I have suggested, in this context, a comparison with
the necessary destruction of the centralization of the Roman Empire, which opened the way to
feudal decentralization.
16. ↩Yash Tandon, Trade is War (New York: OR Books, forthcoming).
17. ↩Samir Amin, “Russia in the World System,” chapter 7 in Global History: A View from the South
(London: Pambazuka Press, 2010), “ The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism,” Monthly
Review 66, no. 4 (September 2014): 1–12.
18. ↩Concerning the inadequate responses of India and Brazil, see Samir Amin, The Implosion of
Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), chapter 2, and “ Latin America Confronts the
Challenge of Globalization,” Monthly Review 66, no. 7 (December 2014): 1–6.