Date: Sat, 24 Aug 96 18:39:30 +0200
From: kls-AT-unidui.uni-duisburg.de (Hinrich Kuhls)
Subject: Re: P.B. Proyect squirms some more


At 21:06 23.08.96 -0800, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

>Re Monthly Review and MIM

>Even in his most recent work (his intellectual biography), Samir Amin
>relies on Baran and Sweezy's ideas about the capacity of a 'third
>department' to realize 'surplus' in the imperialist countries, which leads
>him (in my very humble opinion) to misuderstand not only the
>contradictions, dynamics and thus open possibilities here but also, and as
>a result, the nature of growing imperialist pressures stemming from a
>crisis of imperialist profitability (in the form of net value inflows,
>unequal terms of trade, restrictive intellectual property rights and unfair
>trade agreements, etc)and thus the real reasons for  worldwide
>polarization.
>
>So it would probably be a good idea, as always, to get back to the basic
>questions here: value, accumulation and crisis.

Yes indeed, Rakesh, and as always I appreciate your arguments focussing on
sources. But as Doug Henwood noted Samir Amin is a *smart guy with good
politics*. I think his political goal is to lay bare the connections between
capitalist expansion, its reflection in common consciousness and its
ideological reflexes. His recent critique of Huntington's theory of clash of
civiliziations - published by Monthly Review in June 96 - is one example for
trying to get together the *basic questions* and those of the superstructure.

As Amin's article is also a good example to illustrate once again what is at
stake to be discussed by the *current directions in Marxism* as described by
Louis Proyect and which has been denounced as squirming in the starting post
of this thread, I reproduce some central paragraphs. Amin presents his
results in brief words here; this, too, could provoke a long discussion
concerning theoretical, analytical, and political issues. Nothing to squirm.

Hinrich

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

From:
Imperialism and Culturalism complement each other
by Samir Amin (Monthly Review, vol. 48, No. 2)

[....]

Ideologies especially religions are no doubt important. But for two hundred
years we have been developing an analysis that situates ideology within
society, and can identify functional analogies in different societies
subject to similar historical conditions. Such analogies among the social
functions of religious ideologies can be seen clearly over and above their
particularities. In this framework diverse traditional cultural spaces have
not disappeared, far from it. But they have been deeply transformed from
within and without by modern capitalism (what Huntington calls, wrongly,
Western culture ). I have arrived at the conclusion that this culture of
capitalism (and not of the West ) was globally dominant, and that it was
this domination that emptied ancient cultures of their content. Where
capitalism is most developed its modern culture has been internally
substituted for ancient cultures, such as for medieval Christianity in
Europe and North America, and in a precisely parallel fashion for the
originally Confucian culture of Japan. On the other hand, in the capitalist
peripheries the domination of capitalist culture did not fully manage to
transform radically the ancient local cultures. This difference has nothing
to do with the specific characters of diverse traditional cultures, but
everything to do with the forms of capitalist expansion, both central and
peripheral.

In its global expansion, capitalism revealed the contradiction between its
universalist pretensions and the polarizations it produces in material
reality. Emptied of all content, the values invoked by capitalism in the
name of universalism (individualism, democracy, freedom, equality,
secularism, the rule of law, etc.) come to appear as lies to the victims of
the system, or as values appropriate only for Western culture. This
contradiction is obviously permanent, but each phase of deepening
globalization (including the one we are living through) lays bare its
violence. The system then discovers, thanks to the pragmatism that
characterizes it, the means of managing the contradiction. It suffices that
each should accept the difference, that the oppressed cease to demand
democracy, individual freedom, and equality, in order to substitute the
appropriate values, which are usually the complete opposite. In this useful
model, the victims then internalize their subaltern status, allowing
capitalism to unfold without encountering any serious obstacle from the
reinforced polarization its expansion of necessity engenders.

Imperialism and culturalism are thus always good bedfellows. The first
expresses itself in the arrogant certitude that the West has arrived at the
end of history, that the formula for managing the economy (private property,
the market), political life (democracy), society (individual freedom), are a
priori interconnected, definitive, and unsurpassable. The real
contradictions that may be observed are declared to be imaginary, or are
claimed to be produced by absurd resistance to submission to capitalist
rationality. For all other peoples, the choice is simple: to accept this
false unity of Western values, or to closet themselves in their own cultural
specificities. If, given the polarization that market and imperialism must
produce, the first of these two options is impossible (as is the case for
most of the world), then cultural conflict will occupy the foreground. But
in this conflict the dice are loaded: the West will always win, the others
will always be beaten. This is why the others' culturalist option can not
only be tolerated, but can even be encouraged. It only poses a threat to the
victims. Given this situation, and contrary to mythological discourse on the
end of history and the clash of civilizations, critical analysis seeks to
define the real stakes and challenges. Riddled with contradictions that
cannot be transcended through its own logic, capitalism is only a stage in
history, and the values it proclaims are presented deprived of their
historical context, of the limits and contradictions of capitalism, and thus
made empty.

The self-satisfied discourse of the West does not respond to these
challenges, since it deliberately ignores them. But the culturalist
discourse of the victims bypasses them as well, since it transfers the
conflict outside the field of the real stakes these it gives to the enemy to
find refuge in the imaginary space of culture. What matter, then, if Islam
for instance is firmly seated at the controls of local society, if within
the hierarchy of the world economy the rules of the system lock Islamic
societies into the comprador status of the bazaar? Like fascism yesterday,
today's culturalisms work through lies: they are in fact means of managing
the crisis, despite their pretensions to constitute its solution. But
looking forward, and not back, means that real questions must be faced: how
are we to combat economic alienation, waste, global polarization; and how
are we to create conditions that allow the genuine advance of universalist
values beyond their formulation by historical capitalism?

Simultaneously a critique of cultural heritage suggests itself. The
modernization of Europe would have been unthinkable without the critique to
which Europeans submitted their own past and their own religion. And would
that of China have been begun without the critique of the past, and
especially of Confucian ideology, to which Maoism devoted itself?
Afterwards, certainly, the heritage (Christian in one case, Confucian in the
other) was re-integrated within the new culture, but only after it had been
radically transformed by a revolutionary critique of the past. On the other
hand, in the Islamic world, the stubborn refusal to engage in any critique
of the past accompanies (not by coincidence) the continuous degradation of
the countries comprising this cultural space in the hierarchy of the world
system.

[...]




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