The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin

politico-military coalition? Do they, consequently, accept the strategies implemented by NATO? Or do they attempt to counter them?

      An authentic project of emergence is the exact opposite of one that includes unilateral submission to the requirements of the globalized capitalism of the generalized monopolies, which can only result in what I call “lumpen-development.” I am here freely borrowing the term used by the late André Gunder Frank to analyze a similar development, but in different spatial and temporal conditions. Today, lumpen-development is the result of accelerated social disintegration connected to the model of “development” (which does not deserve the name) imposed by the monopolies of the imperialist centers on the dominated societies of the periphery. It is reflected in the dramatic growth in survival activities (the so-called informal sphere), in other words, by the pauperization inherent to the unilateral logic of capital accumulation.

      Among the experiences of emergence, some fully deserve the label because they are not part of processes of lumpen-development. In other words, in these situations, pauperization does not afflict the working classes. Instead, there is an improvement in their conditions of life, whether modest or strong. Two of these experiences are clearly capitalist: Korea and Taiwan (I will not discuss here the particular historical conditions that made possible the success of the emergence project in these two countries). Two others inherit the legacy of socialist revolutions: China and Vietnam. Cuba could be included in this group if it succeeds in surmounting the contradictions it is currently undergoing.

      There are other cases of emergence connected to obvious processes of lumpen-development. India is the best example of that. Parts of that country’s situation correspond to what emergence requires and produces. There is a state policy that aims at strengthening a sizable industrial system, there is an accompanying expansion of the middle classes, there is progress in technological capacities and education, and there is a foreign policy capable of autonomy on the world scene. But there is also accelerated pauperization for the great majority—two-thirds of the society. This is an example, then, of a hybrid system that combines emergence with lumpen-development. We can even bring out the complementarity of these two faces of reality. I believe, without intending to make a huge overgeneralization, that all the other countries considered to be emergent belong to this hybrid family, whether it be Brazil, South Africa, or others. But there are also—and this is true of most other countries in the South—situations in which the elements of emergence are barely apparent while the processes of lumpen-development clearly are dominant.

      THE CONTRIBUTION OF MAOISM

      The “workerist” and Eurocentrist Marxism of the Second International shared with the era’s dominant ideology a linear view of history in which all societies have to pass first through a stage of capitalist development, for which colonization—in this regard “historically positive”—planted the seeds, before being able to aspire to socialism. The idea that the “development” of some (the dominant centers) and the “underdevelopment” of others (the dominated peripheries) were inseparable, like two sides of the same coin, both immanent products of capitalism’s worldwide expansion, was totally alien to it.

      The polarization inherent to capitalist globalization—a major fact with significant worldwide social and political implications—calls for a perspective that leads to the surpassing of capitalism. This polarization is the basis for the possible support of large fractions of the working classes and, above all, the middle classes (whose development is itself favored by the position of the centers in the world system) in the dominant countries for social-colonialism. Simultaneously, it transforms the peripheries into a “zone of storms” (as the Chinese expression has it) in a permanent natural rebellion against the capitalist world order. Certainly, rebellion is not synonymous with revolution, but it is the possibility for the latter. Motivations for rejecting the capitalist model are not lacking, even at the system’s center, as the case of 1968, among other examples, illustrates. Undoubtedly, the Chinese Communist Party’s chosen formulation of the challenge at one time—“the countryside encircles the cities”—is consequently too extreme to be useful. A global strategy for the transition beyond capitalism toward global socialism must coordinate struggles in the centers with those in the peripheries of the system.

      Initially, Lenin distanced himself from the dominant theory of the Second International and successfully led a revolution in the “weak link” (Russia), but always with the belief that this would be followed by a wave of socialist revolutions in Europe. This was a disappointed hope. Lenin then moved toward a view that gave more importance to the transformation of rebellions into revolutions in the East. But it was up to the Chinese Communist Party and Mao to systematize this new perspective.

      Maoism made a decisive contribution to a comprehensive assessment of the issues and challenges the globalized capitalist/imperialist expansion represents. It allowed us to place the centers/peripheries contrast immanent to the expansion of the inherently imperialist and polarizing “really existing” capitalism at the center of the analysis, and to draw from that analysis all the implied lessons for the socialist struggle in both the dominant centers and the dominated peripheries. These conclusions have been summarized in a beautiful Chinese-style expression: “States want independence, nations want liberation, and peoples want revolution.” States—the ruling classes of all countries in the world when they are something other than lackeys and conveyors of external forces—work to enlarge their space of movement which allows them to maneuver within the (capitalist) world system and raise themselves from “passive” actors, condemned to adjust unilaterally to the dominant demands of imperialism, to “active” actors, who participate in shaping the world order. Nations—that is, historical blocs of potentially progressive classes—want liberation, specifically, “development” and “modernization.” Peoples—that is, the dominated and exploited working classes—aspire to socialism. The phrase allows us to understand the real world in all its complexity and, therefore, formulate effective action strategies. It shares the view that the transition from capitalism to world socialism will be long, very long even, and, consequently, breaks with the Third International’s concept of the “short transition.”

      THREE MAJOR CHALLENGES

       1. The Agrarian Question

      The agrarian question is at the heart of the problems of development and democracy and other challenges confronting the societies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Communist parties and national liberation movements were completely aware of this during the Bandung era. The main issue centers on the rules that regulate access to the use of agricultural land. These regulations must be formulated in a way that “includes rather than excludes,” allowing all farmers to have access to land, first condition for the reproduction of a “peasant society.” This fundamental right is certainly not sufficient. It must be accompanied by policies that allow peasant family farms to produce in conditions that ensure a marked growth in national production (in turn guaranteeing the country’s food sovereignty) and a parallel improvement in the real incomes of all peasants. Here we are talking about implementing a set of macroeconomic policies and concomitant forms of satisfactory political management, and then making sure that negotiations over the organization of systems of international trade are subject to the needs of those policies.

      Partisans of the capitalist path ignore the question since for them, in principle, modernity implies private property in land. It is forgotten that this so-called modern land tenure system results from the formation of historical (really existing) capitalism, established through the destruction of “customary” systems of regulating access to the land, beginning in England and subsequently elsewhere in Europe. Access to the land in feudal Europe was based on the superposition of rights over the same piece of land: those of the peasant and other members of a village community (whether serf or free), those of the feudal lords, and those of the king. The attack on this system took the form of the “enclosures” in England, imitated in various ways in all European countries throughout the nineteenth century. Marx quite early denounced this radical transformation that excluded the majority of peasants from access to use of the land—making them into proletarian emigrants into cities by force of circumstance or into agricultural laborers or tenant farmers—which he grouped with other measures of primitive accumulation that dispossessed the producers of property or the use of the means of production