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G'day Thaxalotls, Sorry to lay yet another long document on you, comrades. I'd heard of this essay, but (thanks to a Pen-L subscriber) have only just found it. I think it's required reading. Hope you agree. Best to all, Rob. http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/462/samir.htm Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Dec. 1999 - 5 Jan. 2000 Issue No. 462 Not a happy ending Globalisation and the market were celebrated as 'the end of history' at the beginning of this century, just as they are being celebrated today, at its conclusion. This is not a case of history repeating itself, however, writes Samir Amin. And capitalism's contradictions are sharper today than ever before ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE BELLE ÉPOQUE: The 19th century came to a close in an atmosphere astonishingly reminiscent of that which had presided over its birth --the "belle époque" (and it was beautiful, at least for capital). The bourgeois of the Triad, which had already been constituted (the European powers, the United States and Japan) were singing hymns to the glory of their definitive triumph. The working classes of the centres were no longer the "dangerous classes" they had been during the 19th century, and the other peoples of the world were called upon to accept the "civilising mission" of the West. The "belle époque" crowned a century of radical global transformations, during which the first industrial revolution and the concomitant constitution of the modern bourgeois nation-state emerged from the north-western quarter of Europe --the place of their birth --to conquer the rest of the continent, the United States and Japan. The old peripheries of the mercantilist age --Latin America, British and Dutch India --were excluded from this dual revolution, while the old states of Asia (China, the Ottoman sultanate, Persia) were being integrated in turn as peripheries within the new globalisation. The triumph of the centres of globalised capital was manifested in a demographic explosion, which was to bring the European population from 23 per cent of global population in 1800 to 36 per cent in 1900. The concentration of the industrial revolution in the Triad had simultaneously generated a polarisation of wealth on a scale humanity had never witnessed during the whole of its preceding history. On the eve of the industrial revolution, the gaps in the social productivity of work for 80 per cent of the planet's population had never exceeded a relation of 2 to 1. Towards 1900, this relation had become equal to 20 to 1. The globalisation celebrated in 1900, already as the "end of history", was nevertheless a recent fact, brought about progressively during the second half of the 19th century, after the opening of China and of the Ottoman Sultanate (1840), the repression of the Sepoys in India (1857) and finally the division of Africa (starting in 1885). This first globalisation, far from accelerating the process of capital accumulation, in fact brought on a structural crisis from 1873 to 1896; almost exactly a century later, it was to do so again. The crisis, however, was accompanied by a new industrial revolution (electricity, petroleum, automobiles, the airplane), which, it was expected, would transform the human species; much the same as is said today about electronics. In parallel, the first industrial and financial oligopolies were being constituted --the transnational corporations of the time. Financial globalisation seemed to be establishing itself definitively in the form of the gold-sterling standard, and there was talk of the internationalisation of the transactions made possible by the new stock exchanges, with as much enthusiasm as accompanies talk of financial globalisation today. Jules Verne was sending his hero (English, of course) around the world in 80 days --the "global village", for him, was already reality. The political economy of the 19th century was dominated by the figures of the great classics (Adam Smith, Ricardo, then Marx's devastating critique). The triumph of fin-de-siècle liberal globalisation brought to the foreground a new generation, moved by the desire to prove that capitalism was "unsurpassable" because it expressed the demands of an eternal, transhistorical rationality. Walras --a central figure in this new generation, who was rediscovered (no coincidence here) by contemporary economists --did everything he could to prove that markets were self-regulating. He never managed --no more than the neoclassical economists of today have been able to prove the same thing. Triumphant liberal ideology reduced society to a collection of individuals and, through this reduction, asserted that the equilibrium produced by the market both constitutes the social optimum and guarantees, by the same token, stability and democracy. Everything was in place to substitute a theory of imaginary capitalism for the analysis of the contradictions in real capitalism. The vulgar version of this economistic social thought would find its expression in the manuals of the Briton Alfred Marshall, the bibles of economics at the time. The promises of globalised liberalism, as they were vaunted at the time, seemed to come true for a while --during the "belle époque". After 1896, growth started again on the new bases of the second industrial revolution, oligopolies, financial globalisation. This "emergence from the crisis" sufficed not only to convince organic ideologues of capitalism --the new economists --but also to shake the bewildered workers' movement. Socialist parties began to slide from their reformist positions to more modest ambitions: to be simple associates in managing the system. The shift was very similar to that constituted today by the discourse of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, a century later. The modernist elites of the periphery also believed then that nothing could be imagined outside the dominant logic of capitalism. The triumph of the "belle époque" lasted less than two decades. A few dinosaurs (still young at the time --Lenin, for instance!) predicted its downfall, but no one heard them. Liberalism --that is, the unilateral domination of capital --would not reduce the intensity of the contradictions of every sort that the system carries within itself. On the contrary, it aggravated their acuity. Behind the workers' parties and professional syndicates' mobilisation in the cause of capitalist-utopian nonsense, lurked the muted rumble of a fragmented social movement, bewildered but always on the verge of exploding and crystallising around the invention of new alternatives. A few Bolshevik intellectuals used their gift of sarcasm with regard to the Leninised discourse of the "rentier political economy", as they described the sole way of thinking of the time. Liberal globalisation could only engender the system's militarisation in relations among the imperialist powers of the era, could only bring about a war which, in its cold and warm forms, lasted for 30 years --from 1914 to 1945. Behind the apparent calm of the "belle époque" it was possible to discern the rise of social struggles and violent domestic and international conflicts. In China, the first generation of critics of the bourgeois modernisation project were clearing a path; this critique, still in its babbling stage in India, the Ottoman and Arab world and in Latin America would finally conquer the three continents and dominate three quarters of the 20th century. Three quarters of our century are therefore marked by the management of more or less radical projects designed to retrieve or transform the peripheries, projects made possible by the dislocation of "belle époque" utopian liberal globalisation. Our century, coming to its end, has therefore been the century of a series of massive conflicts between the dominant forces of globalised oligopolistic capitalism and the states that support it, on one hand, and the peoples and dominated classes that refuse such dictatorship, on the other. THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR (1914-1945): Between 1914 and 1945, the stage was held simultaneously by the "thirty years' war" between the United States and Germany, over who would inherit Britain's defunct hegemony, and by the attempts to "recoup", by other means, the hegemony described as the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union. In the capitalist centres, both victors and vanquished in the war of 1914-1918 attempted persistently --against all odds --to restore the utopia of globalised liberalism. We therefore witness a return to the gold standard; the colonial order was maintained through violence; economic management was liberalised once again. The results seemed positive for a brief time, and the 1920s witness renewed growth, drawn by the US's dynamism and the establishment of new forms of assembly line labour (parodied so brilliantly by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times). These would find fruitful ground for generalisation only after the second World War, however. But the restoration was fragile, and as early as 1929 the financial stakes --the most globalised segment of the system --collapsed. The following decade, until the war, was a nightmare. The great powers reacted to recession as they would again in the 1980s and '90s, with systematically deflationist policies which served only to aggravate the crisis, creating a downward spiral characterised by massive unemployment --all the more tragic, for its victims, in that the safety nets invented by the welfare state did not yet exist. Liberal globalisation could not withstand the crisis; the monetary system based on gold was abandoned. The imperialist powers regrouped in the framework of colonial empires and protected zones of influence --the sources of the conflict that would lead to the second World War. Western societies reacted differently to the catastrophe. Some sank into fascism, choosing war as a means of redistributing the deck on a global scale (Germany, Japan, Italy). The United States and France were the exception and, through Roosevelt's New Deal and the Front Populaire in France, launched another option: that of market management through active state intervention, backed by the working classes. These formulas remain timid, however, and were expressed fully only after 1945. In the peripheries, the collapse of the belle époque myths triggered an anti-imperialist radicalisation. Some of the countries of Latin America, taking advantage of their independence, invented populist nationalism in a variety of forms: that of Mexico, renewed by the peasant revolution of the 1910s-1920s; Peronism in Argentina in the '40s. In the East, Turkish Kemalism was their counterpoise, while China settled into civil war between bourgeois modernists, engendered by the 1911 revolution --the Kuo Min Tang --and communists. Elsewhere, the yoke of colonial rule imposed a delay several decades long on the crystallisation of similar national-populist projects. Isolated, the Soviet Union sought to invent a new trajectory. During the 1920s, it had hoped in vain that the revolution would become global. Forced to fall back on its own forces, it followed Stalin into a series of Five-Year Plans meant to allow it to make up for lost time. Lenin had already defined this course as "Soviet power plus electrification". We should note that the reference here is to the new industrial revolution --electricity, not coal and steel. But electricity (in fact, mainly coal and steel) would gain the upper hand over the power of the Soviets, emptied of meaning. Centrally planned accumulation, of course, was managed by a despotic state, regardless of the social populism that characterised its policies. But then, neither German unity nor Japanese modernisation had been the work of democrats. The Soviet system was efficient as long as the goals remained simple: to accelerate extensive accumulation (the country's industrialisation) and to build up a military force which would be the first capable of facing the challenge of the capitalist adversary, first by beating Nazi Germany, then by ending the American monopoly on atomic weapons and ballistic missiles during the 1960s and '70s. |
Title: Samir Amin on C20 (and C21?) #1
