Samir Amin’s Theory of Delinking: An Evolutionary Evaluation

A. K. Anwar

Capitalism as a world system has a long history of lingering deprivation and crisis. However, the crisis still continues even today and the distress was felt to be more adverse during or after the economic recession of 2008. Capitalism favoured, as we saw, some economies to flourish as the spearheads of the world system depriving or reducing others to the role of mere subordination. Inflation, debt crisis, bankruptcy set a major impasse to the mechanism of world economy hence the entire system got crippled. In these circumstances it has been proven difficult to continue with that very system. During the Davos WEF summit 2012 the prospects and feasibilities of capitalism have been questioned fiercely. Samir Amin who is considered to be one of the famous development theorists came up with a grand strategy to get rid of the vicious circle of the capitalist structure. To him the crisis was felt far before one can imagine. In this paper his strategy is considered very contemporary and its implications as well as threats are scrutinized on the part of the Third World countries.

IntroductionIt is really nice to have a slight resemblance to the thoughts of Pieterse, though which is a truism in fact, as to the theoretical evolution of the famous political economist Samir Amin which is centered around a particular concept of his immense expertise in the form of what he referred to as ‘Delinking’. Pieterse (2010:54) asserts that Amin’s recent ideas are not virtually something new or ground-breaking but further arguments in support of his previous theses particularly the theory of delinking. Samir Amin, who established himself as the worst critic of what is broadly termed capitalism in contemporary development discourses and global political economy. His criticism of classical economic theories such as the law of comparative advantage or global Keynesianism or liberalism paved way to innovate new theories of alternative development. The introduction of the concept of delinking as the alternative explanation of the global trends of development and underdevelopment contributed much to development theories. Delinking, in the simplest sense of the term, demands a nationalist system that minimizes the dominance of external constrains on third world economies and helps the exploited nations to implement their autocentric development policies for the betterment of indigenous economy. Initially, this definition may suffer from immediate malaise as being a one line statement. This paper, however, is an attempt to have a clear conception of the concept

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which also discusses its adjoining ideas those come up with significant relevance as well. We will have a glimpse of the evolution of the theory of delinking and will quest for its traces in the subsequent works by the same author. However, its implications with the developing countries will also be discussed. As has already been put that his concept of delinking got its prototype within the former discussions and continued to evolve in his subsequent discussions as in Eurocentrism (1989), Maldevelopment (1990), Obsolescent Capitalism (2003), The Liberal Virus (2004), The World We Wish to See (2008), Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism? (2011). In all these, Amin expressed his grave hatred towards the monocentric (as opposite to Amin’s polycentric) system which is capitalism along with its European and American versions altogether. His alternative approach, falls under the category of dependency theory, brought a new wave of development thinking that is the reason why in this current paper we will find occasions for tracing the development of the theory of delinking and its essence even after the publication of the title volume ‘Delinking: Toward a Polycentric World’ in 1990.

Background of Amin’s Theory of DelinkingConsider the publication of “Accumulation on a World Scale” as the prologue of the movie storied by Amin then definitely the publication of “Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World” be thought to be the climax of the same motion picture whose the end is yet to reach. The idea of such a partial isolation from the world system did not come from vacuum as he had analyzed the traces of the worldwide development of capitalism as a means of worldwide exploitation of the Third World countries in the medieval Europe as well as the ghost of capitalism in disguise of what has been called neocolonialism or imperialism. Apart from the traditional hegemonic system, the military interventions of the US nowadays posed a dangerous threat to the process of delinking.In regard to the worldwide expansion of capitalism, which is the starting point for the antagonism, Amin (1990a:1-2) discussed the entire process and the internal mechanisms of capitalist expansion while discussing the elementary aspects of the unequal or irregular proliferation of the same. Capitalist expansion, as has been seen, never followed a unilinear way for the homogenization of the centre countries i.e. when one centre reached the point viz. Japan while others as was Britain saw stagnation. Amin mentioned,

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afterward, three broad general trends of capitalist mode as (1) the development of the forces of production, (2) the intensification of ‘interdependence’ i.e. transnationalization, and (3) the generalization of a certain number of forms characteristic of capitalism as wage labour, urbanization, certain kinds of organization of labour and of ownership of the means of production etc. Moreover Robinson (2011a), after Amin, argues that capitalism did start in certain place but spread globally hereafter. Capitalist proliferation has been split into three consecutive phases. Chronologically these phases are (1) the mercantilist phase (1500-1800 CE) significant for the looting of countries of India and China; (2) the competitive phase (1800-1880 CE) competition came to determine the degree of capitalism among countries and (3) the phase of recent monopoly capitalism (1880-Present), age of unequal exchange.

We will have little time to explore the true nature of capitalist expansion and its internal dynamics both within, what is advocated by dependency theorists, centre and peripheral countries around the globe. To do the very few discussions about the countries of superordinate and subordinate, the rise of capitalism in both of these countries with different types of social formations is to be examined. However, in all these three phases of capitalist proliferation Amin (2011:51-52) sees the process had been fueled by the dispossession of the people of peripheral countries. He summarizes some basic postulates that act as the boosters for capitalist accumulation existing now or previously. These can be sorted as (1) accumulation through dispossession is universal feature of the history of capitalism; (2) historical capitalism is imperialistic in its nature in all stages of development; (3) historical capitalism is not inseparable from Eurocentric roots. Taking the idea from Marx, Amin asserts that this kind of accumulation is primitive in its origin, known as primitive accumulation that continues even today, had been used as a tool for the massive storage through whatever the means are-the subjugation of peripheral countries as colonies or trading through unequal exchange. This primitive (or brutal as can be put) extraction had been crucial for India under the British rule as Alavi (1989:12) estimated that the British merchants drained some 2 million pound sterling annually to their native land which powered numerous factories across the British Isles during the heyday of industrial revolution.

The scenarios of capitalist and peripheral countries in the process of capitalist development have been portrayed differently. Amin (1990a:5-6) viewed the total process as a global capitalistic formation asserting that the advent of

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centres demanded the first need for capitalist accumulation in the real sense. Moreover, he argued that the extraction is conditioned by two possible impediments as internal decisions and external constraints on which the feasibility of accumulation depends. Capitalistic system was designed to create a homogenizing world system where an economy based on open markets and exchange would continue to exist but what impeded was the fact that all territories around the world could not reach or catch up the advanced world what we see in the recent world. Amin (1976:294) also argued that the core states, even after having some internal decision problems, achieved a homogeneous social formation while conversely their peripheral counterparts failed to achieve the same structure since the peripheral formation aka peripheral capitalism took a distorted form of the system. In these regions for dearth of a permanent bourgeoisie, as it was in medieval Europe, peripheral countries failed to produce a firm national economy of their own that would have led towards the process of homogenization. In such societies there was a zaminder class (as was in British India) who lived in towns, rarely visit their farms and proprietary, leaving their supervision under their subordinate men or officials. This absentee zaminders as well as their subordinate class known together as the comprador class did play their parts in favour of colonial powers to ensure a greater portion of extraction from their native land thus producing a tributary system that according to Amin put a different label on Indian feudalism. Obviously, the social formations of medieval European societies and their contemporary peripheral societies differ greatly and their capitalist formation also took different shape as Karim (1996:69) argued that European feudalism provided the necessary properties to turn the system into a capitalist mode while the Indian feudalism failed to homogenize and shaped distortedly. The capitalist social formation of the Third World countries had thus been distorted historically and relevantly Frank (1969) argued that the underdevelopment of the peripheral countries is not merely for their traditionalism or originality but rather for the penetrations of capitalist countries through colonization ( quoted by Peet & Hartwick 2009:168). Amin (1990a) calls for an alternative strategy to come out the lingering impasse created by the capitalist world system in the form of delinking their national economy from those of the former.

Delinking: Meaning and Mechanism

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Delinking, as an alternative strategy to combat the shortcomings of the world capitalist system and to avoid dependency on capitalists has gained significant concern after the publication of Amin’s title volume. It is worth mention that some others as well as even Amin himself talked about such a conservative alternative before he coined the term. It demands own development policies and strategies: a national law of value placed in against the dominant capitalist law of value and thus what I call relinking the national institutions and organizations, which were comparatively weak before, to initiate autocentric development (cf. Kay 2001:297, Pieterse 2010:60). Let me first quote some definitions to commence the discussion.Amin (1990a:62) defines delinking as,

…pursuit of a system of rational criteria for economic options founded on a low of value on a national basis with popular relevance, independent of such criteria of economic rationality as flow from the dominance of the capitalist law of value operating on a world scale.

In another place Amin (1990b:70-71) again argued that,

…delinking is the refusal to submit to the demands of the worldwide law of value, or the supposed rationality of the system of world prices that embody the demands of reproduction of worldwide capital. It, therefore, presupposes the society’s capacity to define for itself an alternative range of criteria of rationality of internal economic options, in short a ‘law of value of national application’.

In the latest definition, while discussing the penetration of the North into the South, Amin (2011:36) as previously proposed defines it as a revolutionary strategy.

In the countries of the South, the crisis provides an opportunity to renew a national, popular and democratically self-managed development, subordinating its relationships with the North to its own needs, in other words, delinking.

In all these definitions Amin definitely maintained consistency in order to establish his position as he intended before. But merely citing few definitions does not shade lights on our objective as to the continuation of an evolutionary discussion of this alternative plan. Few points need to be clear up. What comes first is the apparent or immediate irony that might strike readers, which he made crystal clear in several places that the strategy of delinking is not or by no way

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synonymous with autarky which demands complete disassociation or avoidance or rejection of external links and at the same time tries to insulate domestic policies from external powers. Delinking is a revolution against all the odds comes in association with the system of capitalism i.e. private ownership, monopoly, worldwide extraction of surplus value and many more (Robinson 2011b). The concept demonstrates a socialist approach to establish equity for people and gives a sense of revolutionary movement, as was seen in the Latin America, for eradicating the grievances of the mass. It wants to subordinate the capitalist principles to their own ones and thus he ‘calls for a socialist movement.’ Definitely as we can see delinking is a mass-oriented strategy in which the polarization of resources does not centre around the trifling minority, say the 20% of the population known as capitalist, but rather around the overwhelming majority consisting the rest 80%.

Amin (1990a:63-67) discussed the fact of a dominant modes of value based on national and international division of labour as an initial strategy to the way to delink. The law of value on a national basis requires popular relevance and it is related to agrarian structure. It stresses to ensure the distribution of national output between urban and rural sectors according to the proportion of their input or contribution in the total quantity of labour. He surely here takes a socialist move. On the other hand, the world capitalist law of value creates unequal distribution of value as the productivity achieved in the capitalist countries becomes the basis of value system that measures the value by dividing the number of labourers in the concerned sector. It introduces a referral of ‘reference price’. This level of measurement produces less output for the Third World countries than that of the capitalist countries through unequal distribution of exchange. That is, in the underdeveloped countries within industrial sector productivity increases comparatively bigger than the agrarian sector. However, this point is crucial for the latter countries as they depend largely on agricultural productivity and their progress is hampered for that very unequal distribution of value. The impasse triggered by the capitalist system is frequently facing challenges in a frequently changing world. Popular struggles are being led by peripheral countries against the capitalist system (Amin 2010:13-14).

There are some possible, as proposed by Amin (2011:36), tactics to defend the national interests which involves ‘national control over the monetary and financial markets, recovering the uses of natural resources, overturning globalised management dominated by the oligopolies (the World Trade

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Organization-WTO) and the military control of the planet by the United States and its associates; and freeing themselves from both the illusions of a national, autonomous capitalism and a backward-looking system with its own enduring myths’. For a scientific solution to the now discussed problem he offered agrarian movements that will help make their own choices i.e. Third World countries should increase wages in agriculture sector. They need to produce food to the extent that they will be able to feed their population and subsequently achieve food sovereignty for the reason that due to the lack of food sovereignty the countries depend on the capitalists for adequate food supply (Robinson 2011). Moreover, an egalitarian agrarian system should be built up so as to accommodate lands to every farmer irrespective of ethnicity or locality and thus make the system enable to yield sufficient wages for them. This strategy will help reduce the problems or hassles relating to the exodus of rural people to the cities and the rampant proliferation of urban slum areas.

On the other hand, Kay (2001:297) mentioned some basic factors in order to measure the feasibility or success of the delinking process as in the forms of ‘the size of the domestic market, the resource-base available, the composition and geographical pattern of foreign trade, the availability of local skill and entrepreneurship, the degree of internal social cohesion, consciousness and support in favour of delinking, and so on’. These factors are really crucial for the initiation of the process of delinking. However, it depends on the countries since how they will provide such conditions and their potentialities are determined by their inherent capabilities. We will come back to the points later on. Hence, the process of delinking produces more clarification as we depict the entire mechanism by the following schema.

DELINKING

ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL

ARTICULATED ECONOMY DISARTICULATED ECONOMY

(CENTRE) (PERIPHERY)

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PERIPHERAL CAPITALIST FORMATION

MORE INTERNAL & EXTERNAL CONSTRAINTS

HAPHAZARDLY INTEGRATED

DEPENDED

INADEQUATE ENTREPRENURSHIP

BALANCED CAPITALIST FORMATION

LESS INTERNAL & EXTERNAL CONSTRAINTS

WELL INTEGRATED

SELF-RELIANT

AMPLE ENTREPRENURSHIPS

Source: Self-depiction.

The two separate circles symbolize the economic systems of the capitalist countries and the countries of the Third World. The broken circle refers to the Third World countries as for, to use Amin’s (1982:205) term, their ‘disarticulated economy’ that could not flourish from within and depends on the channels to the capitalist countries for export and unequal exchange. This economy is characterized by many more traditional practices and institutions which eventually shaped their social, political and economic behaviour patterns. On the other hand, the capitalist economy ‘is an integrated whole’ with strong channels of internal exchanges and less external exchanges. It is the nature of external exchanges that determines the dependency on the part of the underdeveloped countries. According to the capitalist formula raw materials or cheap labour cost is drained or transferred to the West through colonization (in the past) or the modern day imperialism. That channel needs to be delinked. The arrows show the direction of transformation of capital to the capitalist countries and the big broken slash has been drawn as an attempt to delink from the total system of capitalism.

The theory of delinking is a life-time theoretical endeavour of Samir Amin that continues to evolve still today within his recent publications. What Amin meant by his alternative strategy in ‘Delinking’ (1990a) and ‘Maldevelopment’ (1990b) is still vivid and balanced today in the 2011 volume ‘Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism?’ Before the publication of the former volumes Amin in Eurocentrism (1989) took a culturalist approach through criticizing the unilinear or partial explanation of history through the views of European enlightenment. Here Amin rejects the European discourses that are believed to be the designer of the continental histories and argued that the Crusade and the Islamic expansion in the medieval period had profound effects in shaping the world history. In the same line he criticized the Americanization in ‘The Liberal Virus’ (2004) as the total capitalist system (American version) spread as a virus of liberty and property. As a global spearhead the American policy is to terrify the subordinate countries in extracting resources such as oil and other minerals in the name of war on terror. On the other hand in ‘The World We Wish to See’ (2008) Amin continued his discussion as to the adverse effects of capitalist expansion globally and urged a popular strategy as ‘Internationalism’ to combat the challenges of the former. He found that since capitalism is an international system so the socialist movements need to be

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internationalized also for a better platform on which the universalization of proletarians would be possible. The very few evidences that I have demonstrated earlier definitely reveal the hatred of Amin towards capitalism as a world system and in this regard he offered possible solutions especially in the form of delinking for the underdeveloped world. But question rises that how much the Third World is capable of delinking from the hegemonic effects of the realpolitik of the USA?

Delinking and the Third World in the Twenty-first CenturyEarlier we discussed the factors regarding the feasibility of the process of delinking for the underdeveloped world on which much depend as deficiency of one or more of these factors may hinder the entire process. Due to the peripheral social formation of the Third World countries during the colonial era which shaped a disarticulated economic structure in the same countries these countries become extensively aid depended supplied by the capitalists for their survival in recent global political arena. Moreover, the post 9/11 US foreign policy posed devastating threats for the poor countries intended to delink. What I think is that the discussion of delinking is unlikely nowadays without taking the issues of US and its allies along with the nonstate actors such as WTO, WB, IMF policies. The American invasions of Afghanistan and subsequently Iraq in March, 2003 were just the implementation of the 2002 Global Agenda. An international affairs specialist John Ikenberry described the declaration as a “grand strategy [that] begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor… permanent [so] that no state or coalition could ever challenge [the US] as global leader, protector, and enforcer” (quoted by Chomsky 2003:6). Uncle Sam is still strong enough in holding the rein of the horse named capitalism in his favour through military invasions in countries abundant in precious minerals especially oil. However, I didn’t intend to offer a detail depiction of the recent hegemonic expansion instead will try to examine the feasibilities and potentialities of the underdeveloped countries on the path to delink.The Chinese and the Indian development schemes are surely citable examples for the developing countries, the role model for economic development. These two countries are supposed to overtake the USA in the near future in term of economic progression. In China major coastal areas especially in Guangdong province has undergone massive industrialization and wage increase. But the apparent development of the countries especially of China conceals the inside

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story of its development saga. In rural areas farmers are paid with little wages, disposed from the land due to land grabs and pollution, people have lost their jobs, millions have lost their houses and migrated to urban regions and since the dispossession of farmers occurred so frequently China lost the state of food sovereignty hence falls extensively depended on import. Moreover, dependency on oil import and foreign investment still hinders China to implement its own foreign policies as a dominant power at large (Robinson 2011b).

However, we have traces of the concept of delinking in some Bangladeshi literatures of which two are most notable. The first contribution is from the famous economist Rehman Sobhan. Sobhan (1982:209) resembles Amin in the sense that for the sustainable development, as Sobhan argued, Bangladesh should follow a strategy in the form of ‘self-reliance’ to get rid of aid dependency that is socialist by nature and similarly in the latest definition of delinking by Amin includes a popular and democratic self-managed development for the South. In both cases self initiatives and endeavours are stressed as “such a strategy would aim to recognize the economy and towards using available domestic resources and capacity as instruments of policy and to seek aid as a supplement to such efforts at resource mobilization” (ibid, p. 205).

Sobhan discovered the fact of aid dependency and underdevelopment of Bangladesh since the partition of the subcontinent and the inclusion of Bangladesh into the dominion of Pakistan. The aid to develop the internal infrastructure, as he sees it, is a major irony as it creates dependency on foreign policy rather than national development. Bangladesh had been led to a situation of permanent dependency for its vulnerable bases on the British colonization and the subsequent Pakistani neo-colonization as well as unfavourable topographical characteristics and overpopulation. The process still continues today. However, the issue of centre-periphery dichotomy still emerges. The internal exploitation by local bourgeoisie and their subordinates had been crucial for national development. However, these classes had grown up by exploiting the foreign aid in the sense that the then state-owned national system for the running of investment and financial activities faced many difficulties only for their appropriation of the aid. Rich farmers by easy access to state mechanism grasped imported fertilizers, irrigation facilities, pesticides and aid-financed credit programmes. The situation became worse when ‘the food gap, the foreign exchange gap, the savings gap, and the revenue gap, all come to be covered by foreign aid’ (Sobhan 1989:102).

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While introducing his alternative mechanism Sobhan (1982:206-226) offered few possible techniques on the way to self-reliance that includes enhancing export earnings, enhancing jute exports, enhancing other exports, the political economy of import substitution, scope for import substitution, self reliance in food, mobilizing domestic resources, subsidies and self-reliance, raising productivity, a new external economic policy, the need for more research. Amin himself also discussed the process of dependency through aid dependency in “Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Colonizer?” in order to explore the nature of African unequal development.

The second one was contributed by Marxist writer Ashabur Rahman. Rahman (1986:123-136) repeatedly discussed the issues regarding the problems of agrarian development in Bangladesh. Like Amin, Rahman also sees the tangled situation of the Third World countries within the world capitalist system for their autocentric development and criticized the worldwide capital accumulation of the west severely. The powerlessness conditions, inability and lack of technology, external and internal constraints made Bangladesh depended on the foreign aid altogether. The transfer of technology for better yields in the underdeveloped countries had been crucial since the entire process involves a new form of imperialism as the technologies are capitalist in nature and encourages capitalist mode of production. Hence, the adoption of the technology is to be more firmly integrated into the imperialist system (Amin 1977:172). Rahman explained the problems of dependency on technological affairs, the internal disarticulation of the economy, the indifference of the local bourgeoisie and especially the hegemonic attitude of the USA on the way of a self-developed Bangladesh. He did not completely refute the importance of aid for the betterment of the agriculture but also reveals the dark aspects of the same in destroying the internal infrastructure of the system as the parasitic comprador class exploits the rest through the polarization of land property. In this regard he called for a massive land reform in order to survive the deteriorated structure or to escape the capitalist grip. At the outset the state should act as the spearhead and thus without the aid promote national development.

ConclusionSamir Amin contributed a lifetime effort to the analysis of the global economic system. He dreams of a world system of socialist mode of production against

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the capitalist mode of production unlike the latter which brings a world system of equal distribution. His depictions of the characteristics of worldwide accumulation of capital and the unequal development of the peripheral countries have been intellectually very much significant in dependency discourses. The theory of delinking is a big strategy innovated by Amin in order to escape the impasse prevailing within the economic structure of the Third World countries. He in several places (almost entirely in all his discussions) and from different angles tried to criticize the capitalist system and suggested alternatives which bear close connotations with his theory of delinking from the capitalist system. Delinking is not an isolated idea and still today Amin advocates in favour of the strategy which is believed to be the redeemer of underdeveloped countries and their people.

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