from "eurocentrism", by samir amin, 1989
preface (vii-xiii)
Eurocentrism is not the sum of Westerner's preconceptions, mistakes, and blunders with respect to other peooples. After all, these errors are no more serious than the corresponding presumptions that non-European peoples hold with respect to Westerners. Eurocentrism is thus not a banal ethnocentrism testifying simply to the limited horizons beyond which no people on this planet has yet truly been able to go. Eurocentrism is a specifically modern phenomenon, the roots of which go back only to the Renaissance, a phenomenon that did not flourish until the nineteenth century. In this sense, it constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the modern capitalist world. (vii)
(...) On the one hand, the new culture breaks with its tributary past (a break which gives it its progressive dimension and feeds its universalist ambition). But on the other, it reconstructs itself on mythical foundations, whose function is to blur the extent of this rupture with the past through an affirmation of a nonexistent historical continuity. This false continuity constitutes the core of the Eurocetnric dimension of capitalist culture, the very dimension which undermines its intended universalist scope. (xi)
(...) The project for a critique of Eurocentrism is meaningless if it is not acknowledged from the start that capitalism has created a real objective need for universalism, both at the level of scientific explanation of the evolution of human societies (in particular, the explanation of the different courses of evolution by a single conceptual system) and the elaboration of a program for the future which addresses humanity as a whole. (xi) [capitalism makes clear the need for universalism]
(...) This subject is not new to me. For thirty years, all of my efforts have been dedicated to seeking a way to strengthen the universalist dimension of historical materialism; my thesis concerning unequal development is an expression of the results of these efforts. (xiii)
introduction (1-11)
(...) Under these conditions [in earlier social systems], the economic phenomenon remains too simple - that is to say, too immediately apprehensible - to give rise to a "science of economics" elucidating its mysteries. Science becomes necessary to explain an area of reality only when laws that are not directly visible operate behind the immediately apparent facts: that is, only when this area has become opaque due to the laws which govern its movement. (1-2)
(...) My hypothesis is that all tributary cultures are based upon the preeminence of the metaphysical aspiration, by which I mean the search for absolute truth. This religious or quasi-religious character of the dominant ideolgoy of tributary societies responds to an essential requirement of the social reproduction of these societies. By contrast, the culture of capitalism is founded upon the renunciation of this metaphysical aspiration in favor of a search for partial truths. Simultaneously, the ideology peculiar to the new society acquires a dominant economistic content necessary for the social reproduction of capitalism. By economism, I mean that economic laws are considered as objective laws imposing themselves on society as forces of nature, or, in other words, as fources outside of the social relationships peculiar to capitalism. (7)
(...) What are these historical limits [of capitalism]? The answer depends on the understanding that one has of capitalism itself. Two stances are possible. One can focus on that which defines capitalism at its highest level of abstraction - namely, the capital/labor contradiction - and define the historical limits of capitalist society by the boundaries imposed by its characteristic economic laws. This point of view inevitably inspires a "stagist" vision of the evolution of society: the backward (peripheral) capitalist societies must "catch up" with the advanced societies before they can, in turn, confront the challenge of possibly (or even perhaps necessarily) bypassing their limits. On the other hand, one may place more emphasis in one's analysis on what I propose to call "actually existing capitalism," by which I mean a system that, in its actual worldwide expansion, has generated a center/periphery polarization impossible to overcome within the framework of capitalism itself. From this perspective, another characteristic of unequal development is revealed: namely, that the calling into question of the capitalist mode of social organization is more deeply felt as an objective necessity at the periphery of the system than at its center. (10) [against dogmatism and economism]
(...) The European culture that conquered the world fashioned itself in the course of a history that unfolded in two distinct time periods. Up until the Renaissance, Europe belonged to a regional tributary system that included Europeans and Arabsm, Christians and Moslems. But the greater part of Europe at that time was located at the periphery of this regional system, whose center was situated around the eastern end of the Mediterranean basin. This Mediterranean system prefigures to some extent the subsequent capitalist world system. From the Renaissance on,k the capitalist world system shifts its center toward the shores of the Atlantic, while the Mediterranean region becomes, in turn, the periphery. The new European culture reconstructs itself around a myth that creates an opposition between an alleged European geographical continuity and the world to the south of the Mediterranean, which forms the new center/periphery boundary. The whole of Eurocentrism lies in this mythic construct. (10-11)
part one: central and peripheral tributary cultures (15-71)
Metaphysics is the ideology par excellence of the tributary mode of production. The cosmogony that it inspires justifies the social order in a world where inequality of wealth and power has transparent origins. The acceptance and the reproduction of the system therefore require that the ideological oder not be the object of any possible dispute; for this reason, the ideological order must also be made sacred. As a result, metaphysics becomes a major handicap to the maturation fo scientific social reflection. (31)
(...) The paradigm that I have suggested inspires the following conclusions:
[1] First, the bereak between the Age of Antiquity and the medieval era is not to be found where conventional Eurocentric history places it, that is, at the end of the Western Roman Empire in the first centuries of the Christian era. I situate this divison much earlier, during the time of Alexander the Great, at the moment of the Hellenistic unification of the East (335 B.C.). The medieval era therefore includes the Hellenistic (including Roman), Byzantine, Islamic (including Ottoman), and Western Christian (feudal) worlds. The choice of the conventional divison at the end of the Roman Empire betrays a deeply rootesd preconception that the Christian era marks a qualitative decisive break in world history,k when itn fact it does not. ... Its use in this context is Eurocentric and improper.
[2] Secondly, the transition from antiquity to the medieval era does not correspond to any important transofmation of the domimnant mode of production, such as, for examle, a pssage from slavery to feudalism.
[3] Third, the proposed divison therefore belongs to the domain of the history of ideas and ideological formations. This proposition is the logical consequence of the preceding one. In a certain way, this break is thus relative. My thesis is that the elaboration of the ideology of the long tributary period begins slowly in the civilized Orient (or, to be more precise, in the civilized Orients) and gradually takes shape in a more coherent, more consistent, and to a certain extent definitive fashion beginning in the Hellenistic period. It thus passes through seuccessive or coexistent forms as it crystallizes: Hellenistic, Byzantine, Islamic, and Western Christian.
[4] Fourth, the transition from the medieval period to the modern age really corresponds to the passage to the capitalist mode. The status of religion within the system of ideas, as well as that of science, philosophy, and social ethics, becomes the object of radical reinterpretation. (59)
(...) The structural relationship between China and Japan - constituting a center/periphery relationship analogous to that of East and West in the Mediterranean region, as much at the level of modes of production (Japanese feudalism corresponding to that of barbarian Europe) as of ideology - has produced the same "miracle" witnessed in the Mediterranean region: the rapid maturation of capitalist development at the periphery of the system. To my mind, this parallel development constitutes definitive proof of the value of seeking universal laws that transcend local particularities. It also proves that the hypothesis of unequal development has indisputable fecundity and usefulness in this domain. If this hypothesis is accepted and employed, all Eurocentric visions of European uniqueness collapse. (64)
part two: the culture of capitalism (71-)
(...) With the Renaissance begins the two-fold radical transformation that shapes the modern world: the crystallization fo capitalist society in Europe and the European conquest of the world. These are two dimensions of the same development, and theories that separate them in order to privilege one over the other are not only insufficient and distorting but also frankly unscientific. The new world is freed from the domination of metaphysics at the same time as the material foundations for capitalist society are laid. In this way, the cultural revolution of the modern world opens the way for an explosion of scientific progress and its systematic use in the service of the dvelopment of the forces of production, and for the formation of a secularized society that can successfully carry the democratic aspiration to its conclusion [?]. Simultaneously, Europe becomes conscious of the universal scope of its civilization, henceforth capable of conquering the word. (71)
(...) Unquestionably, the embryonic forms of capitalism (private enterprise, market exchange, free wage labor) had existed for a long time in the Mediterranean, particularly in the Arab-Islamic and Italian regions. The Mediterranean system that I discussed in the first part of this work formed, in a certain way, the prehistory of the capitalist world system. Nevertheless, this Mediterranean system did not make the qualitative leap forward to a completed capitalist world system. On the contrary, the driving forces of development emigrate from the shores of the Mediterranean toward the peripheral regions of the European Atlantic northwest, thereby crossing the divide that separates the prehistory of capitalism from its later flourishing. The capitalist world system is therefore fashioned around the Atlantic, marginalizing, in turn, the old Mediterranean center. (73)
(...) In a certain way, then, capitalism as a potential world system did not exist until there existed a consciousnes of its conquering power. In the thirteenth centruy, Venice was already organized along capitalist lines. But the Venetian merchants not only did not understand their society in these terms, but they also did not even suspect that their system was capable of conquering the world. ... Dante relegated Mohammed to Hell, but his was not a sign of a Eurocentric conception of the world, contrary to what Edward Said has suggested. It is only a case of banal provincialism, which is something quite different, because it is symmetrical in the minds of the two opposing parties. (74)
(...) Eurocentrism is much more than a banal manifestation of this type: it implies a theory of world history and, departing from it, a global political project. (75)
(...) The subsequent unfolding of the history of the capitalist conquest of the world showed that this conquest was not going to bring about a homogenization fo the societies of the planet on the basis of the European model. On the contrary, this conquest progressively created a growing polarization at the heart of the system, crystallizing the capitalist world into fully developed centers and peripheries incapable of closing the ever widening gap, making this contradiction within "actually existing" capitalism - a contradiction insurmountable within the framework of the capitalist system- the major and most explosive contradiction of our time. (75)
(...) A dominant ideology must remove this type of destructive doubt from its vfield of vision. It must succeed in affirming itself as a system founded on "eternal truths" with transhistoridcal vocation. The dominant ideology of the new world therefore fulfills three complementary and indissolubly linked functions. [1] First, this ideology ... replaces a lucid awareness of the economic alienation on which the reproduction of capitalist society is founded with a discourse of transhistorical, instrumental rationality.
[2] Secondly, the ideology deforms the vision of the historical genesis of capitalism, by refusing to consider this genesis from the perspective of a search for general laws of theevolution of human society; instead it replaces this search with a two-fold mythic construct. On the one hand, it amplifies the uniqueness of so-called European history, while on the other hand, it endows the history of other peoples with opposing "unique" traits. In this way, it succeeds in concluding that the miracle of capitalism could only have been a European one.
[3] Thirdly, the dominant ideology refuses to link the fundamental characteristics of actually existing capitalism - that is, the center/periphery polarization, inseparable from the system itself- to capitalism's worldwide process of reproduction. Here capitalist ideology gets off cheaply by simply refusing to take the world as a unit of analysis, thus allowing it to attribute inequalities among its constitutent national components to exclusively "internal" causes. In so doing, it confirms its own preconception regarding the specific, transhistorical characteristics of different peoples. (76-77)
(...) In this way, the dominant ideology legitimates at one and the same time the existence of capitalism as a social system and the worldwide inequality that accompanies it. This European ideology is constructed in stages from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment up until the nineteenth century by the invetnion of the eternal truths required for this legitimation. The "Christianophile" myth, the myth of Greek ancestry, and the artifical, antithetical construct of Orientalism define the new European and Eurocentric culturalism, thereby condemning it irremediably to consort with its damned soul: ineradicable racism. (77)
(...) Marxism is constituted as part of a contradictory movement that is at once the continuation of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and a break with this philosophy. To its credit, it successfully demystifies the fundamental economism of the dominant ideolgoy, to such an extent that after Marx it is no longer possible to think the way people did before him. But Marxism encounters limits that it always finds difficult to surmount: it inherits a certain evolutionist perspective that prevents it from tearing down the Eurocentric veil of the bourgeois evolutionism against which it revolts. This is the case because the real historical challenge confronting actually existing capitalism remains poorly understood. In its polarizing worldwide expansion, capitalism has propoosed a homogenization of the world that it cannot achieve. (77)
(...) The Renaissance breaks with medieval thought. Modern thought distinguishes itself from that of the medieval period by renouncing the dominant metaphysical preoccupation. The importance of partial truths is systematically valorized, while the pursuit of absolute knowledge is left to amateurs. As a result, scientific research in the different domains of the knowable universe is stimulated, and because this research necessarily involves the submission of facts to empirical testing, the break between science and technology becomes relative. Simultaneously, modern science recognizes the decisive value of inductive reasoning, thereby putting an end to the errors of a reason confined strictly to deduction. It is easy now to see the relationship between this revision of intellectual priorities and the demands of the development of the forces of production in the nascent capitalist system. The earlier definition of philosohpy, which, since Hellenism, had made philosophy synonymous with metaphysics, gives way to one that is inclusive and even eclectic. (79)
(...) European Enlightenment philosophy defined the essential framework for the ideology of the European capitalist world. This philosophy is founded on a tradition of mechanistic materialism that posits chains of causal determinations. Principal among these is that science and technology determine by their autonomous progress the advance of all spheres of social life. Class struggle is removed from history and replaced by a mechanistic determination that imposes itself as an external force, a law of nature. This crude materialism, often opposed to idealism, is in fact its twin: these two ideologies are the two sides of the same coin. The claim that God (Providence) guides humanity on the road of progress or that science fulfills this function amounts to the same thing: conscious, nonalienated people, along with social classes, disappear from the scene. (80-81)
(...) Bourgeois social science has never gone beyond this crass materialism, because it is necessary for the reproduction of the alienation that allows the exploitation of labor by capital. It leads necessarily to the domination of market values, which penetrate all aspects of social life and subject them to their logic. Science, technology, and organization as ideologies find their place here. At the same time, this philosophy pushes to the limit of absurdity its affirmation of a separation - in fact, opposition - between humankind and nature. It is on this level the direct opposite of Hinduism, if Hinduism is defined by the stress it places on the unity of humankind and nature. Bourgeois materialism opens the way to treating nature as a thing, even to destroying it, thereby threatening the very survival of humanity, as ecology is beginning to show us. (81)
(...) The autonomy of civil society is the first characteristic of the new modern world. This autonomy is founded on the separation of political authority and economic life, made opaque by the generalization of market relationships. It constitutes the qualatative difference between the new capitalist mode and all predcapitalist formations. The concept of autonomous political life and thus of modern democracy and the concept of social science result from this autonomy of civil society. For the first time, society appears to be governed by laws outside of human or royal will. The evidence for this is most immediately apparent at the level of economic relationships. From now on, the attempt to discover social laws is no longer, as it was until the time of ibn-Khaldun and Montesquieu, the product of a disinterested curiosity; it is a matter of urgen necessity for the "management of capitalism." It is therefore not by chance that the new social science is constructed on the base of this all-pervasive economics. (81-82)
(...) The new society is not, for all of that, paraidse gained. Human anxiety can no more be cured bay a vague positivist scientism than it could be by cosmogony or rationalizing metaphysics. Moreoever, the new society remains a class society, a society markedby continual exploitation and oppression. The yearning for "another society" - for utopia, as it is called - fuses with the ever-present moral preoccupation. (83)
(...) In fact, the plasticity of religions and the possibility of adapting them in ways that allow them to justify differing relationships among people invite us to ponder the fact that ideologies formed at one moment in history can subsequently acquire vocations very different from those of their origins. To this extent, religions are transhistorical, for they can readily outlast the social conditions of their birth. (84)
(...) In this domain, Eurocentrism rests upon teleology: namely, that the entire history of Europe necessarily led to the blossoming of capitalism to the extent that Christianity, regarded as a European religion, was more favorable than other religions to the flourishing of the individual and the exercise of his or her capacity to dominate nature. The corresponding claim is that Islam, Hinduism, or Confucianism, for example, constituted obstacles to the social change necessary for capitalist development. Their plasticity is therefore denied, either because it is reserved solely for Christianity, or even because it is believed that Christianity carried the seeds of capitlaist advancement within it from the beginning. (85)
(...) Certainly, in responding to metaphysical needs, religious faith transcends social systems. But religion is also the concrete social product of the conditions that preside over it birth. (85)
(..) In fact, the formation of the ideology of capitalism went through different stages; the first was the adaptation of Christianity, notably by means of the Reformation. But this transformation only represented a first step, limited to certain regions of the European cultural area. Because capitalism developed early in England, its bourgeois revolution took on a religious, and therefore particularly alienated, form. Masters of the real world, the English bourgeoisie did not feel the need to develop a philosophy. They contented themselves with empiricism, which complemented their crude materialism; nothing more was needed to ensure the development of the forces of production. English political economy had this empiricism as its counterpart, functioning in place of a philosophy. However, Protestantism did not play the same role on the European continent as it did in England, because the development of capitalism was not sufficiently advanced there. The second wave of the formation of capitalist ideology had, as a a result, a more directly philosophical and political cast. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism functioned as the specific ideology of capitalism. (86)
(...) In fact, it was quite some time before the ideology specific to capitalism detached itself from the earlier forms that had allowed the passage to capitalism. Economic alienation is its primary content, whose characteristic expression - supply and demand as external forces regulating society - exemplifies its mystified and mystifying nature. Once the ideology of capitalism reaches this stage of development, it abandons its earlier forms or empties them of their content. (86)
(...) Weber considers capitalism to be the product of Protestantism [straw man, certainly]. I am suggesting quite the opposite: that society, transformed by the nascent capitalist relationships of production, was forced to call the tributary ideological construct, the construct of medieval scholasticism, into quesiton. It was therefore real social change that brought about transformation in the field of ideas, creating the conditions for the appearence of the ideas of the Renaissance and modern philosohpy as it imposed a readjustment of religious belief - not the reverse. It took two or three centuries before the new dominant ideolgoy crystallized, the period of transition from mercantilism to fully developed capitalism, extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The decisive step is the development of English political economy, at the moment when the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution brought about the triumph of bourgeois power and the beginnings of the generalization of wage labor. The center of gravity shifts form metaphysics to economics, and economism becomes the content fo the dominant ideology. Doesn't the person in the street believe, today more so than ever, that his or her fate depends on these "laws of supply and demand," which determine prices, employment, and all the rest, just as Providence did in earlier times? (84-85)
(...) At the moment when this consciousness [referring to Marxism] emerged, modern ideology already had three centuries of history behind it, from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. It had therefore expressed itself as a particularly European, rationalist, and secular ideology, while claiming a worldwide scope. The socialist critique, far from forcing bourgeois ideology to take a better measure of its historical scope and social content, led it, beginning in the nineteenth century, to strengthen its culturalist side. The Eurocentric dimension of the dominant ideology was placed ever more in relief.
(...) This construct [referring to the dominant ideology], like the analogous Orientalist construct: (i) removes Ancient Greece from the very milieu in which it unfolded and developed -the Orient- in order to annex Hellenism to Europe arbitrarily; (ii) retains the mark fo racism, the fundamental basis on which European cultural unity was constructed; (iii) interprets Christianity, also annexed arbitrarily to Europe, as the principal factor in the maintenance of European cultural unity, conforming to an unscientific vision of religioius phenomena; (iv) concurrently constructs a vision of the Near East and the more distant Orients on the same racist foundation, again employing an immutable vision of religion. (90)
(...) ...Eurocentrism is not, properly speaking, a social theory, integrating various elements into a global and cohernet vision of society and history. It is rather a prejudice that distorts social theories. ... For example, for a long time the European bourgeoisie was distrustful - even contemptuous - of Christianity, and, because of this, amplified the myth of Greece. (900
(...) The myth of Greek ancestry performs an essential function in the Eurocetnric construct. It is an emotional claim, artificially constructed in order to evade the real question - why did capitalism appear in Europe before it did elsewhere? - by replacing it, amidst a panoply of false answers, with the idea that the Greek heritage predisposed Europe to rationality. In this myth, Greece was the mother of rational philosophy, while the "Orient" never succeeded in going beyond metaphysics. (91)
(...) The construct in question is entirely mythic. Martin Bernal has demonstrated this by retracing the history of what he calls "the fabrication of Ancient Greece." He recalls that the Ancient Greeks were quite conscious that they belonged to the cultural area of the ancient Orient. (92)
(...) The resulting opposition between Indo-European and Semitic (Hebrew and Arab) languages [result of racist, scientific linguistics], pompously elevated to a scientifically established" and indisputable dogma, constitutes one of the best examples of the lucubrations required for the construction of Eurocentrism. (95)
(...) The choice of Christianity as the basis of Europeanness obviously posed some thorny questions for social theory in general and the Eurocentric construct in particular. Since Christianity was not born on the banks fo the Loire or the Rhine, it was necessary to assimilate its original form - which was Oriental, owing to the milieu in which it was established - to Eurocentric teleology. The Holy Family and the Egyptian and Syrian Chruch Fathers had to be made European. Non-Christian Ancient Greece also had to be assimilated into this lineage, by accentuating an alleged contrast between Greece and the ancient Orient and inventing commonalities between these civilized Greeks and the still barbaric Europeans. The core of genetic racism therefore remains. But above all, the uniqueness of Christianity had to be magnified and adorned with particular and exclusive virtues that, by simple teleology, accoutn for the superiority of the West and its conquest of other peoples. The Eurocentric construct was thus founded on the same interpretation of religion used by all religious fundamentalisms. (99)
(...) Thus the social theory produced by capitalism gradually reached the conclusion that the history of Europe was exceptional, not in the sense that the modern world (that is to say, capitalism) was constituted there, which in itself is an undeniable fact, but because it could not have been born elsewhere. This being the case, capitalism in its Western model formed the superior prototype of social organization, a model that could be reproduced in other societies that have not had the good fortune of having initiated this superior form on the condition that these societies free themselves of the obstacles posed by their particular cultural traits, responsible for their backwardness. (106)
(...) ...these societies can only progress to the extent that they imitate the West. And this is what they are doing, in any case, even if they are doing it slowly and imperfectly, because of elements of resistance based on outmoded dogmatisms (like Marxism) or anachronistic motivations (like tribalism or religious fundamentalism). Consequently, it becomes impossible to contemplate any other future for the world than its progressive Europeanization. For the most optimistic, this Europeanization, which is simply the diffusion of a superior model, functions as a necessary law, imposed by the force of circumstances. The conquest of the planet by Europe is thus justified, to the extent that it has roused other peoples from their fatal lethargy. For others, non-European peoples have an alternative choice: either they can accept Europeanization and internalize its demands, or, if they decide against it, they will lead themselves to an impase that inevitbaly leads to their decline. The progressive Westernization of the world is nothing more than the expression of the triumph of the humanist universalism invented by Europe. (107-108)
(...) Under these circumstances, the European West has little to learn from others. The most decisive evolutions, destined to shape the future of humanity, continue to have their origin in West, from scientific and technological progress to social advances like the recognition of the equality of men and women, from concern with ecology to the critique of th efragmented organization of labor. The tumultuous events that shake the rest of the world - socialist revolutions, anti-imperialist wars of liberation - are, despite the more radical appearance of the ambitions that nourish them, in fact less decisive for the future than the progress being made almost imperceptibly in the West. These tumultuous events are only the vicissitudes through which the peoples concerned have been compelled to pass in order to attempt to correct their backwardness. (108)
(...) This vision of the world rests on two axioms that have not always been correctly described, both of which are erroneous in their principal formulations. The first is that internal factors peculiar to each society are decisive for their comparative evolution. The second is that the Western model of developed capitalism can be generalized to the entire planet. (109)
(...) The prevailing opinion is in fact that this inequality is only the result of a series of accidents, and that, consequently, the polarization between centers and peripheries can be resolved within the framework of capitalism. This opinion finds expression in the claim that "people are responsible for their condition." Is it not obvious that this simple and comfortable affirmation is analogous to the bourgeois invocation of the responsibility of individuals, designed to attribute the fate of the proletarian to his or her own deficiencies, disregarding objective social conditions? (109)
(...) As if integration into the world system had not rendered the internal factors unfavorable, when in fact the linkage of external factors and internal factors generally operates in a negative way, acounting for polarization of centers and peripheries. It is claimed, for example, that the West's progress was the result of class struggles, which imposed a less unequal distribution of national income and democracy. This proposition is certainly true, if somewhat out of style, given the success of right-wing ideology in asserting that inequality was the driving force or progress. But a second proposition cannot be derived from the first: namely, that the development of similar struggles at the periphery would bring about the same result. For the international class alliances by means of which capital rules on a global scale make the development of progressive internal class alliances, particularly those of the type that allowed European society to advance, extremely difficult and improbable. (111) [re: US imperialism and such]
(...) In reality, internal factors take on a decisive role in societal evolution only when a peripheralized society can free itself through delinking from the domination of international value. This impleis the break-up of the transnational alliance through which the subordinated local comprador classes submit to the demands of international capital. As long as this delinking does not take place, it is futile to speak of the decisive role of internal factors, which is nothing more than a potential, and artificial to separate these factors from worldwide factors, which remain dominant. (111)
(...) But this project is impossible [homogenization]. Isn't the proof of this impossibility contained in the popular opinion that the extension of the Western way of life and consumption to the 5 billion human inhabitants of the planet would run against absolute obstacles, ecoloigcal among otehrs? What is the point, then, in exhorting others, "Doas we do," if it is obvious from the start that it is impossible? Common sense is sufficient proof that it is impossible to imagine a world of 5 to 10 billion people benefitting from comprable high standards of living without gigantic transformations at every level and in every region of the globe, the West included. My purpose is not to characterize the necessary mode of organization of this ideal homogenized world, as socialist, for exmaple. Let us simply acknowledge that such a world could not be managed the way it is at the present time. (111-112)
(...) ...Those who stubbornly refuse to call into question the system that fosters this contrast and frustration are simply burying their heads in the sand. The world of "economists," who administer our societies as they go about the business of "managing the world economy," is part of this artificial world. For the problem is not one of management, but resides in the objective necessity for a reform of the world system; failing this, the only way out is through the worst barbarity, the genocide of entire people or a worldwide conflagration. I therefore charge Eurocentrism with an inability to see anything other than the lives of those who are comfortably installed in the modern world. Modern culture claims to be founded on humanist universalism. In fact, in its Eurocentric version, it negates any such universalism. For Eurocentrism has brought with it the destruction of peoples and civilizations who have resisted its spread. In this sense, Nazism, far from being an aberration, always remains a latent possibility, for it is only the extreme formulation of the theses of Eurocentrism. If there ever were an impasse, it is that in which Eurocentrism encloses contemporary humanity. (114)
(...) ...the capitalist centralization of surplus has today become the obstacle to the progress of peoples who are its victims. "Delinking," understood in this context, is the only reasonable response to the challenge. Therefore, socialist experiments and the efforts of Third World countries must be analyzed and appraised in some other way than by the yardstick of Eurocentrism. The soothing discourse that declares, "They could have done as we (Westerners) did; they did not, it is their fault," eliminates from the outset the real problems encountered by the peoples who are victims of capitalist expansion. (115)
(...) Marxism was founded on an awareness of the historical limits of the culture of the Enlightenment in relation to its real social content: namely, the rationalization of the national, European, and global capitalist project. It is for this reason that the tools developed by Marxism have the potential capacity to surpass the contradictions over which the Enlightenment philosophes stumbled. Nevertheless, "actually existing" Marxism was formed both out of and against the Enlightenment, and as a result, is marked by this origin and remains an unfinished construct. (119)
(...) it is essential to determine the deficiencies of classical Marxism in two key areas: [1] its explanations of world history and [2] the strategic vision it has of transcending capitalism. (119)
(...) In contrast to bourgeois eclecticism, Marxism gives a central place to the question of universal social dynamics and at the same time proposes a total method that links the different elements of social reality (the material base and the political and ideological superstructures). However, ... limited by the knowledge available at his time, Marx developed a series of propositions that scould suggest either the generality or the specificity of the succession from Graeco-Roman slavery to feudalism to capitalism. What was known in the middle of the nineteenth century about non-European peoples? Not much. And for this reason, Marx was careful about making hasty generalization. As is well known, he declares that the slavery-feudalism-capitalism succession is peculiar to Europe. And he leaves his manuscripts dealing with the "Asiatic mode of production" in an unsystematic state, showing them to be incomplete reflections. Despite these precautions, Marxism succumbed to the temptation to extrapolate from the European example in order to fashion a universal model.
(120)
(...) For a Eurocentric interpretation of Marxism, destroying its universalist scope, is not only a possiblity: it exists, and is perhaps even the dominant interpretation. This Eurocentric version of Marxism is notably expressed in the famous thesis of the "Asiatic mode of production" and "the two roads": the European road, open and leading to capitalism, and the Asian road, which is blocked. It also has a related, inverted expression. In claiming the universality of the succession primitive communism-slavery-feudalism-capitalism-socialism (Stalin's theory of the five stages), the European model is applied to the entire planet, forcing everyone into an "iron corset," condemned, and rightly so, by its adversaries. (120-121)
(...) But it seems to me that it is possible to break the impasse of Eurocentrism, common to both the dominant bourgeois culture and vulgar Marxism. The thesis of unequal developement, applied to the birth of capitalism, proposed to do so by suggesting that European feudalism, a peripheral form of the tributary mode, benefited from a greater flexibility which allowed the rapid success of European capitalist development. This thesis shows that at the level of the material base, constituted by the relationships of producion, the feudal form was only a peripheral - primitive - form of the tributary model. (121)
(...) The idea that Marx developed concerning the strategy for transcending capitalism is closely related to his conception of the worldwide expansion of capitalism. Here, Marx shared the excessive optimism of his time. He believed that capitalist expansion was irresistible and that it would rapidly suppress all vestiges of earlier modes of production, as well as the social, cultural, and political forms associated with them; in a word, that this expansion would homogenize global society on the basis of a generalized social polarization (bourgeoisie/proletariat), similar from one country to the next. This belief explains his vision of a worldwide workers' revolution and his hope for proletarian internationalism. Indeed, Marx envisioned the so-called socialist transition to a classless society (communism) as a relatively brief stage, that could be perfectly mastered by the working classes. (122)
(...) Actually existing capitalism is nothing like this vision. The global expansion of capitalism has never made it its task to homogenize the planet. On the contrary, this expansion created a new polarization, subjecting social forms prior to capitalism at the periphery of the system to the demands of the reproduction of capital in the central formations. Reproducing and deepening this polarization stage by stage in its worldwide expansion, capitalism placed a revolution on the agenda that was not the world proletarian revolution: the revolution of the peoples who were victims of this expansion. This is a second expression of unequal development. The demand for a reexamination of capitalism, as was the case in the past for the tributary social forms, is expressed more intensely at the peripheries of the capitalist system than at its advanced centers. (122)
(...) The double aspect of natonal and social polarization is the real form of expression of the law of the accumulation of capital on the world scale. This polarization creates the conditions for the massive reproduction of capital at the global level, by reproducing the material conditions that allow the functioning of the transnational class alliances that bind the peripheral ruling classes to imperialism. Simultaneously, it reproduces qualitatively different social and political conditions at the centers and the peripheries. In the former case, this polarization brings about, as a result of the auto-centered character of the economy, an increase in the revenues from labor parallel to that of productivity, thereby assuring the continued functioning of the political consensus around electoral democracy. At the peripheries, this polarization separates the evolution of revenues from labor from the progress of productivity, thereby making democracy impossible. The transfer of value associated with this process of accumulation is made opaque by the price structure, which derives from the law of international value. (123)
(...) The irreducibility of historical trajectories may be expressed either by an avowed refusal to define general laws of social evolution that are valid for humanity as a whole, or by an idealist construct - like the Eurocentric one - that opposes "Occient" and "Orient" in absolute and permanent terms. Dominant Western historiography has oscillated between these two attitudes, which have the same implications, since both effectively legitimize the status quo. Historical materialism can potentially serve as a means of escape from the impasse, provided that it is liberated from the distortions of Eurocentrism. (124)
(...) The nineteenth century certainly gave predominance to the philosophical impulse in history. Europe's discovery of itself and its power, its conquest of the planet, hte permanent revolution in the forces of production that capitalism brought about, the new freedom of though, openly rejecting all taboos: all of this created a general atmosphere of optimism. It is not astonishing given these circumstances that nineteenth-century Europe produced all of the philosophies of history from which we still draw today, in close association with the two great movements of the time: namely, nationalism and the social movement. The former found its moral justification by invoking the "mission" of the people to which it was addressed. In this way, modern racism was introduced, in its singular ("pan-Aryan") and plural (British, French, and Germanic nationalist) forms. The social movement yielded Marxism. In varying degrees, all of these forms of thought were nourished on the scientism of the century, the almost naive expression of a religious faith in progress. This faith was assimillated into universalism, without calling into question the capitalist and European content that it trasmitted. Europe was the model for everything, and the idea of calling into question its civilizing mission could only seem preposterous. (126)
(...) Then the pendulum returned. Fascism and world war; revolutions...; the horrors of the colonial wars...; the nuclear arms race...: all of these developments shook the unshakeable faiths of the nineteenth centruy. In their place appeared a belief in the multiplicity of ways of evolution and a call for the right to difference. Specificity seemed to triumph over supposed general laws of eveolution, both as an object of analysis and as a demand. The universalist aspiration became the object of both scientific and moral distrust. The result was an inability to produce anything more than impressionistic histories and a nurturing of simplistic philosophies of history. By default, there is nothing left but a fragmented history and a triumph of provincialism. (127) [so Amin is not demanding that we eschew scientism, per se, but the Eurocentric content of that scientism; the idea that we can still demystify the workings of our world through furiously studing them is not considered ludicrous. a tension here perhaps appears, then, when we ourselves express our discomfort with this approval of an "expert" thesis?]
(...) I ... reject the infantile optimism of American positivism and conclude that success - that is, the capacity to find the objectively necessary solution - is not guaranteed for everoyne at every moment. History is filled with the corpses of societies that did not succeed in time. The impasses resulting from the rejection of Eurocentric and imperalist universalism by means of simple negation - the affirmation of a society's own cultural "specificity" - bear witness to this danger of failure. These impasses have their own history and their concrete genesis, woven by the intersection of causes unfolding in different domains of social reality. (128)
(...) The misfoturne is that until now the classes and powers responsible for the destiny of the Arab world have thought it was possible toliverate themselves from Western domination by imitating the bourgeois path of European development, both at the level of material and social organization and at least in part, the level of ideas. (129)
(...) The failure of the liberal bourgeoisie's project, at the levels of real liberation and of development, is the origin of Nasserism. As a result, Nasserism contained the potential of going further by becoming a popular national movement of renewal, but it did not do so, either in the conceptualization and carrying out of its social and political project or at the level of thought. As for its political dimesnions, just as Mohammed Ali had wanted to construct capitalism without relying on the bourgeoisie, Nasser gradually came to the point of wanting "socialism" without daring to entrust the people with the responsibility for its construction. Here again, the same dualism of the earlier period remains. (131)
(...) The current crisis... therefore results from the failure of the "Left," meaning the ensemble of forces capable of finding a popular and national way out of the impasse. The void has been brutally filled by the "fundamentalist project" - a symptom of the crisis, not a response to it. (131)
(...) Ignorance is cloaked in the backward-looking myth of a golden age, preceding what is described as the "great deviation," by which is meant the construction of the Ummayid state following the Abbassid era, to which Islam and the Arab world are, however, indebted for their subsequent historical achievements. The golden age in question - left completely vague - is not linked to any coherent social project whatsoever and, as a consequence, the most flagrant contradictions are accepted in daily life (the West is rejected in its entirety, for example, but its technology is accepted without difficulty...). (132)
(...) The reason for the impasse is that modernity requires an abandonment of metaphysics. The failure to recognize this leads to a false construction of the question of "cultural identity" and a confused debate in which "identity" (and "heritage") are place in absolute contrast with "modernization," viewed as synonymous with "Westernization". (133) [very fundamental belief in the cogency of the term "modernity"]
(...) I have argued that Christianity and Islam carried out a furst revolution with full success. This revolution allowed both Christianity, initially a religion of popular revolt, and Islam, created on the margins of the civilized Orient, to form the central axis of a rationalist metaphysical construct conforming to the needs of an advanced tributary society. ... But Christianity carried out a second, bourgeois revolution and may perhaps be in the midst of a third. Islam is still far from making the revolution it needs. Far from calling for it, the fundamentalists are working hard to postpone it, a service for which the West is grateful. (34)
(...) The impasse of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not the only one of its type. On the contrary, all signs point to analogous culturalist reactions elsewhere, from India to black Africa. In every case, it seems to me that nationalist culturalist retreat procees from the same method, the method of Eurocentrism: the affirmation of irreducible "unique traits" that determine the course of history, or more exactly the course of individual, incommensurable histories. These fundamentalisms are no different from Eurocentric fundamentalism, which itself tends to take the form of Christian neofundamentalism. On the contrary, they are only its reflection, its negative complement. (135) [how does Fanon escape this?]
(...) Substituting a new paradigm for the one on which Eurocentrism is based is a difficult, long-term task. ... Its importance derives from the fact that the dominant bourgeois mainstream in the social sciences was initially founded on an overtly culturalist philosophy of history, and then, when this philosophy gradually lost its stregnth of conviction, took refuge in agnosticism, refusing any search for the general beyond the specific and thus remaining under the spell of culturalism. Vulgar Marxist theories are not fundamentally different. The thesis of the so-called "two roads" tries unsuccessfully to reconcile the concepts of historical materialism with Eurocentric prejudice about the exceptional nature of European history; while the thesis of the "five stages" avoids the difficulty by minimizing specific traits to the point of artificially reducing the diversity of different historical paths to the mechanical repetition of European schema. (136)
(...) [the principal contradiction of the world-wide expansion of capitalism:] the integration of all of the societies of our planet into the world-capitalist system has created the objective conditions for universalization. However, the tendency toward homogenization, produced by the universalizing force of the ideology of commodities, that underlies capitalist development, is hindered by the very conditions of unequal accumulation. The material base of the tendency toward homogenization is the continuous extension of markets, in breadth as well as in depth. The commodity and capital markets gradually extend to the entire world and progressively take hold of all aspects of social life. (137)
(...) The tendency toward homogenization is the necessary consequence not of the development of the forces of production, but of the capitalist content of thisdevelopment. For the progress of the forces of production in precapitalist societies did not imply the submission of use value to exchange value and hence was accompanied by a diversity of paths and methods of development. The capitalist mode implies the predominance of exchange value and hence standardization. (138)
(...) Should the tendency of capitlaism toward standardization be welcomed, the way progress of the forces of production is welcomed? Should it be defended, or at least never actively opposed, keeping in mind the reactionary character of the nineteenth-century movements that sought to destroy machinery? ... There have been two co-existing responses to this question. In the first half of his life, Marx adopted a laudatory tone when describing the progress of the forces of production, the achievements of the bourgeoisie, and the tendency toward standardization that liberates people from the limited horizons of the village. But gradually doubts crept in, and the tone of his later writings is more varied. The dominant wing of the labor movement elogized the "universal civilization" under construction. ... However, any fundamental critique of capitalism requires a reappraisal of this mode of consumption and life, a product of the capitalist mode of production. Such a critique is not, moreover, as utopian as is often believed: the malaise from which Western civilization suffes is ample testimony. For in fact, the tendency toward standardization implies a reinforcement of the adjustment of the superstructure to the demands of the capitalist infrastructure. This tendency diminshes the contradictions that drive the system forward and is therefore reactionary. Spontaneous resistance to this standardization thus expresses a refusal to submtit to the relationships of exploitation that underlie it. (139) [zerzan enters stage right]
(...) Moreover, this tendency toward standardization collides with the limits imposed by unequal accumulation. This unequal accumulation accelerates tendencies toward homogenization at the center, while it practically destroys them for the great mass of people at the periphery, who are unable to gain access to the modern mode of consumption, reserved for a small minority. For these people, who are often deprived of the elementary means of basic survival, the result is not simply malaise, but tragedy. Actually existing capitalism has therefore become a handicap to the progress of the forces of production on the world scale, for the mode of accumulation tha tit imposes on the periphery excludes the possibility of the periphery "catching up." This is the major reason why capitalism has been objectively transcended on the world scale. (140)
(...) The crisis of social thought, in its principal dimension, is above all a crisis of bourgeois thought, which refuses to recognize that capitalis is not the "end of history," the "definitive and eternal expression of rationality." But this crisis is also an expression of the limits of Marxism which, underestimating the dimesnions of the ineuqality immanent in the worldwide expansion of capitalism, has devised a strategy of a socialist response to these contradcitions that has proven to be impossible. (140-141)
(...) It is therfore indispensable to center the analysis of the contemporary world on unequal development and imperialism. Then, and only then, does it become possible to devise a strategy for a transition beyond capitalism. The obstacle is disengaging oneself from the world system as it is in reality. This obstacle is even greater for the societies of the developed center than it is for those of the periphery. And therein lies the definitive implication of imperialism. The developed central societies, because both their social composition and the advantages they enjoy from access to the natural resources of the globe are based on imperialist surpluses, have difficulty seeing the need for an overall reorganization of the world. A popular, anti-imperialist alliance capable of reversing majority opinion is as a result more difficult to construct in the developed areas of the world. In the societies of the periphery, on the other hand, disengagement from the capitalist world system is the condition for a development of the forces of production sufficient to meet the needs and demands of the majority. This fundamental difference explains why all the breaches in the capitalist system have been made from the periphery of the system. The societies of the periphery, which are entering the peirod of "post-capitalism" through strategies that I prefer to qualify as popular and nationalist rather than socialist, are constrained to tackle all the difficulties that delinking implies. (142)
(...) ...as is often the case, the reaction to a new challenge is in its first phase more negative than positive. The Eurocentric universalism of capitalism is not critiqued in order to allow the construction of a new universalism; all aspirations for universalism are rejected in favor of a "right to difference" (in this context, differences of cultures and forms of social organization) invoked as a means of evading the real problem. This is what I call "provincialism", very much in fashion today. (146)
(...) Prejudice against the Third World, very much in favor today, contributes to the general shift to the right. Certain elements of the socialist movement in the West reject this shift, of course. But they do so most often in order to take refuge in another, no less Eurocentric discourse, the discourse of traditional trade unionism, according to which only the mature (read European) working classes can be the bearers of the socialist future. A impotent discourse, in contradiction with the most obivous teachings of history. (148)
(...) For the peoples of the periphery the inevitable choice is between a national popular democratic advance or a backward-looking culturalist impasse. The progressive option cannot, ohwever, be reduced to some kind of simple prescription, for each of its three components - socialist, capitalist, and statist - is essential, partly complementing and partly conflicting with the other. For example, the bureaucratic prescription of "state socialism" that sacrifices democracy in the name of "national development" has demonstrated that the blockages that it brings about call development itself beyond certain limits into question. But in the opposite direction, the proposal, fashionable today in the West, only to retain the democratic objective - reduced, moreover, to human rights and pluralist electoral democracy - has already manifested its ineffectiveness, in a shorter space of time than anyone imagined. As has been seen a propos of Brazil, the Philippines, and a few other experiments in progress, democracy must be linked to gigantic social transformations or perish. But these necessary transformations are of course in direct conflict with the interests of the prevailing capitalist system. (149)
(..) The future is still open. It is still to be lived. (152)