The Deprogram Podcast

This guy is a personification of the defeatist Eurocentric Western left. Just sad. If he actually read works by Marxists, he would have had all his questions answered.

The reconstruction of social theory along truly universalist lines must have as its base a theory of actually existing capitalism, centered on the principal contradiction generated by the worldwide expansion of this system.

This contradiction could be defined in the following way: 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. The labor force, at first limited in its migrations by different social, linguistic, and legal handicaps, tends to acquire international mobility. [...]

The principal contradiction of capitalism has, thus, placed an anticapitalist revolution on the agenda--a revolution that is anti-capitalist because it is necessarily directed against capitalism as it is lived by those who endure its tragic consequences. But before that revolution can occur, it is necessary to finish the task that capitalism could not, and cannot, complete.

Some of these problems are not new, but rather have confronted the Russian and Chinese revolutions from the beginning. But these problems must be discussed in the light of the lessons of history, which implies something quite different from the sweeping Eurocentric judgment that socialism is bankrupt and the only alternative is a return to capitalism. The same may be said, mutatis mutandis, for any discussion of the lessons to be drawn from the radical movement of national liberation, which reached its apogee during the Bandung Era from 1955 until 1975.

Without a doubt, the so-called socialist societies (which are better qualified as "popular national" societies) have not solved the problem. This is quite simply because the popular national transition will necessarily be considerably longer than anyone had imagined, since it is faced with the task of developing the forces of production in a permanent struggle with the logic of world capitalist expansion and on the basis of conflicting internal social relationships (what I have called the dialectic of three tendencies: socialist, local capitalist, and statist). In societies that have successflilly made a popular national revolution (usually termed a "socialist revolution"), the dialectic of internal factors once again takes on a decisive role. Unquestionably, because the complexity of post-capitalist society had not been fully grasped, the Soviet experiment--such as it is--exercised a strong attraction over the peoples of the periphery for some forty years. The Maoist critique of this experiment also had considerable influence for approximately fifteen years.

Today, a better awareness of the real dimension of the challenge has already brought less naive enthusiasm and more circumspection concerning definitive prescriptions for development. There has been, in fact, progress in both practice and in thought, a crisis in the positive sense of the term and not a failure that would prefigure capitulation and a return to normalcy, that is, a reinsertion into the logic of worldwide capitalist expansion. The discouragement that has overtaken the forces of socialism in the West, who find in the situation of the "socialist" countries an alibi for their own weaknesses, has its source elsewhere, in the depths of the Western societies themselves. As long as it does not have a lucid understanding of the ravages of Eurocentrism, Western socialism will remain at a standstill.

For the peoples of the periphery, there is no other choice than that which has been the key to these so-called socialist revolutions. Certainly, things have changed gready since 1917 or 1949. The conditions for new popular national advances in the contemporary Third World do not allow the simple reproduction of earlier approaches, sketched out in advance by a few prescriptions. In this sense, the thought and practice inspired by Marxism retain their universal vocation and their Afro-Asiatic vocation even more. In this sense, the so-called socialist counter-model, despite its current limits, retains a growing force of attraction for the countries of the periphery.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, For a Truly Universal Culture