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1. A Dependency Pioneer
Samir Amin
Director, Third World Forum
By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven
Sixty years ago, a young Samir Amin finished his PhD dissertation, which applied
Marxist principles to the global economy
5
. He went on to become a leading Marxist
scholar, particularly known for his analysis of global inequality based on the law of
worldwide value
6
. From the beginning, Amin was heavily influenced by Marx, Engels,
Lenin and Mao. Later he also drew inspiration from both Baran and Sweezy. I
recently had the pleasure of interviewing Amin, and was able to pick his brain on
varieties of dependency theory, possibilities for development, the consequences of
globalisation, the role of economists in society, and more.
Varieties of Dependency Theory
When I ask about Amin’s view on dependency theory, Amin points out that there is no
single unified theory of dependency. There are, rather, three schools of thought that
share some fundamental characteristics, but that also differ on important points. But
what they have in common is often more important than what separates them. Amin
identifies himself as being a part of the school of global historical materialism. This is
Marxism understood as a global system. Academics such as Baran and Sweezy also fall
into this category. Within this framework, the Marxist law of value is central and this
distinguishes this school of dependency from the others. The law of value may be
considered in other schools, but it is not at the core of this analysis.
In Amin’s analysis, the main characteristics of the worldwide law of value is that the
price of the labour force is distributed in a much more unequal way than are the
productivities of social labour. There are differences in the productivity of labour, of
course, but the differences in productivity are smaller than the differences in the price of
5
Samir Amin, Les Effets Structurels De L'intégration Internationale Des Économies Précapitalistes. Une Étude
Théorique Du Mécanisme Qui a Engendré Les Éonomies Dites Sous-Développées (Paris: Université de Paris, 1957).
6
See Samir Amin, The Law of Value and Historical Materialism (London: Harvester, 1977). Also see his
reformulation published as two volumes in 2010 by The Monthly Press, namely The Worldwide Law of Value and
Essays on Marx’s Law of Value.
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labour. For example, while the difference in productivity between the US and Congo is
1:5, the difference in the price of the labour force may be 1:20. With free trade and
relatively open borders allowing multinationals to move to where they can find the
cheapest labour, the law of value operates at the global level to allow the extraction of
the value produced in the peripheries to the benefit of the monopoly capital of the
centres. Unequal exploitation is thus manifested in unequal exchange, in Amin’s
framework.
The other two strands of dependency are the dependency school (so-called
dependencia) and the World Systems School, according to Amin. The dependencia
school is a Latin American school associated with Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio dos
Santos, Andre Gunder Frank, and others. The World Systems School was founded by
Immanuel Wallerstein, but Giovanni Arrighi can also be included in this school.
The dependencia school was in some ways a reaction to the dominant view of the
communist parties in Latin America in the 1950s. While the communist parties argued
that Latin America was feudal, or at least semi-feudal, the dependencia scholars argued
that the Latin American countries were capitalist from the start of colonization and from
their integration into the world economy in the 1500s. The problem was that as they
were colonized, their economies were built as a periphery to the capitalist system. Amin,
however, would argue that the 18th century should be defined as the period of transition
to capitalism and that capitalism only takes its full form with the industrial revolution of
England and politically with the French revolution. Either way, in the 19th century, the
Latin American countries found it very difficult to catch up with advanced countries,
due to the nature of the capitalist-like system that they were a part of.
World Systems theory is conceptualized and applied differently by the different authors
within the school. Central to the vision of Wallerstein and Arrighi was the idea that the
global system shapes the conditions of each country’s development at the national level.
Amin’s problem with World Systems theorists is that he feels that they have a tendency
to explain national processes as exclusively, or almost exclusively, shaped by global
tendencies. Therefore, they attribute the failure of national attempts to move out of the
system to the operation of the global system itself. Thereby the global system becomes
responsible for the failure of the Soviet attempt, the failure of the Maoist attempt, and
the failure of all the national popular regimes in Africa and Asia that came out of the
Bandung era
7
. Amin, in contrast, argues that there are dialectics between the effects of
7
The Bandung conference was the first large-scale meeting of Asian and African states, most of which were newly
independent, which took place in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. The conference's stated aims were to promote Afro-
Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation.
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the global system and the local national class struggles.
You cannot reduce these three schools to one, neither to dependencia nor to World
Systems theory, nor to global historical materialism. However, it is possible to identify
commonalities in these three strands. First of all, they all consider capitalism as
something that has always been global. Within these theories, globalisation is not
something new, but something immanent to capitalism. Secondly, they also share the
view that global capitalism has always been polarizing and that it has never permitted
countries to catch up with those that are the most advanced. Instead of convergence,
there has been a polarization between the centres and the peripheries. This brings us to
the final commonality, namely the vocabulary. All three theoretical strands tend to
employ the concepts core and periphery.
Another commonality between the three strands of dependency is the opposition to
orthodox Economics. The analysis is grounded in global history and the interactions
between economies in the world, whereas mainstream Economics tends to be confined
to what happens within the boundaries of the state. In orthodox Economics, the national
economy is assumed to be relatively autonomous and can be analysed separately from
the global economy. Amin argues that you cannot understand neither the United States,
nor Germany, nor the Congo, nor China, nor Egypt, if you separate them from each
other. You have to start from the global perspective and then move down to the
expression of globalisation operating at the national level.
Amin perceives orthodox Economics to be very naïve, as it assumes that poor countries
can catch up with advanced countries if they are clever enough and simply have the will
to do. This view – that globalisation can be good for all – completely ignores the
polarizing tendencies of globalisation.
The Polarizing Tendencies of Capitalist Globalisation
Amin first started studying the polarizing tendencies of globalisation in the 1950s. He
argues that globalisation has always been polarizing because the centres have shaped
the pattern of globalisation in their favour, thereby consigning other countries to the
periphery. Important for dependency thinkers is the concept that the centre and
periphery are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. By extension, development and
underdevelopment are also two sides of the same coin. This is a notion you can also find
in Andre Gunder Frank, who popularized the terminology: Frank argued that
development and underdevelopment are concomitant, not successive, and that you don’t
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move from one to the other, you remain in the category you started in
8
.
Already in his thesis in 1956, Amin wrote that the process of accumulation on a world
scale is a process inviting the peripheries to permanent “unilateral adjustment”. By
unilateral adjustment, he meant that the centres are actively shaping the globalisation
process, while the periphery is compelled to adjust unilaterally to it. For example, the
Congo is invited to adjust to the needs of the United States, but the United States does
not have to adjust to the needs of the Congo.
As Amin wrote about this polarizing tendency of globalisation in the mid-50s. This can
be considered quite forward-thinking, as it was in many ways an anti-Rostowian
manifesto before Rostow had even written his renowned Stages of Economic Growth!
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Amin’s point was that if you enter into a capitalist globalisation process, you will not go
through a variety of stages and eventually become ‘developed;’ on the contrary, you’ll
have to move out of the system and find some other way to catch up.
Notably, Mao had developed this point on the impossibility of catch-up even earlier,
when he was considering the conditions of China. According to Amin, Mao argued that
it would not be possible for the periphery to develop through phases, whereby a national
democratic bourgeois capitalist revolution would create the possibility of the
development of a nationalist capitalist economy, which would finally end in a socialist
revolution. To Mao this would be impossible because it is not possible to create a
national bourgeoisie in the conditions of the peripheries, particularly not in the context
of China. Mao did not mention any other region, but Amin interprets Mao’s thinking as
something that is relevant and applicable to all peripheries, whether in Asia, Africa or
Latin America. Therefore something different from unfettered capitalist development is
needed for these peripheral countries to prosper.
Dependency in a New World Order
The three dependency schools see today’s globalisation as a new stage of an old
phenomenon. Although one can point to many things that are “new” about today’s
globalisation, Amin focuses on the increased degree of centralization of the control of
capital, which he considers to be crucial to the pattern of financialization. This high level
of control is qualitatively new compared to what it was 50 years ago. The lion’s share of
activities today is production by subcontractors that tend to serve financialized
monopoly capital. This centralization leads to a series of consequences, such as a large
8
Andre Gunder Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
9
W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1960).
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part of the value created by the subcontractors both in the centres and peripheries being
captured by monopoly capital and transformed into monopoly rent. Amin calls this an
imperialist monopoly rent.
He argues that it is also this characteristic that explains the social disasters that can be
observed globally, such as stagnation, unemployment, and the destruction of the welfare
state. These can be observed globally, but most dramatically in the South, and
particularly in the weak countries of the South. This centralizing tendency also leads to
an accelerated growth of income and wealth inequalities in both the North and the
South. Amin argues that this pattern cannot continue on forever – not only for political,
social and ecological reasons, but also because of the system’s internal contradictions.
Many would argue that the world is now multipolar and that the rise of the BRICS
challenges this centralizing, polarizing tendency of globalisation. However, Amin has
two ways of responding to this claim. First of all, he scoffs at the thought of institutions
and economists calling the BRICS ‘emerging markets,’ both because a country is more
than a market or an economy – it is first and foremost a society – but also because some
of these countries are the oldest nations in the world and it is not only recently that they
are ‘emerging’.
Secondly, Amin points out that the BRICS are not homogenous countries and should not
be analysed as such. Some are of continental sizes such as China and India, while others
are smaller. Amin argues that China is perhaps the only country among the BRICS that
is trying to combine two things that are conflicting, namely a national sovereign project
and participating in the process of globalisation. A part of the sovereign project is
constructing an auto-cantered modern industrial system associated with a renewal of
peasant agriculture in order to ensure food sovereignty, which conflicts with free trade.
Amin estimates that China’s development is determined fifty per cent by its sovereign
project and fifty per cent by globalisation. When asked about Brazil and India, he
estimates that their trajectories are driven by twenty percent sovereign project, and
eighty per cent globalisation. Now, if we move to South Africa we’ll see zero percent
sovereign project and one hundred per cent globalisation, Amin adds. China is
challenging the present order, and so is potentially Russia. The others are not currently
challenging the status quo, but that doesn’t mean that they will not move towards doing
that, Amin explains. When it comes to the newly industrialised countries in East Asia,
such as South Korea and Taiwan, Amin argues that these were allowed to move from
periphery to core because of geostrategic reasons (i.e. the threat of communist North
Korea and China).
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Amin’s Alternative: Delinking
For Amin, the centrality of the law of value is crucial for understanding precisely why it
is impossible to catch up within the system and why delinking from that system is a
prerequisite for the development of productive forces
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. As the current system reduces
countries of the periphery to being the subcontractors of central monopoly capital, the
only way forward is to delink from the global system. Amin underlines that it is almost
impossible to delink 100%. When he says “delink,” he does not mean autarky. What
delinking means to him is that you try to compel the system to adjust to your needs,
rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the
core. Amin estimates that if you can reach seventy percent delinking, you’ll have done a
great job. A strong country that is for historical reasons relatively stable and has some
military power will have more leverage than a small country to do this. For example,
China has a margin of manoeuvre that Senegal does not have. The context is thus
important.
Finally, an essential part of delinking for Amin is to give more importance to building
national popular projects. What is needed is a national, democratic revolution, Amin
argues. Such a national popular revolution can open the road to socialism, but this is not
a given. A revolution can also open the road for conflict or for a socialist road with
capitalist tendencies. Regardless, the peripheral countries cannot develop unless they
try to delink from the current exploitative world system.
The Role of Ideas
Finally, Amin argues that we are not living in democratic times, as different economic
ideas are not tolerated by the mainstream. As orthodox Economics is being channelled
through both the media and universities, all the conventional economists end up saying
the same thing. There are a few academics that are critical of the hegemonic order, such
as Amin himself, but they are marginalized in the system and rarely get access to the
most popular media outlets. Amin sees the Young Scholars Initiative of INET’s initiative
to support unconventional critical social thought as a unique way for young scholars to
find like-minded people and pursue more radical projects, such as this this very e-book.
10
By this Amin means a pattern of development which leads to higher living standards for the majority of people.
