The Long Revolution of the Global South

Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International

Samir Amin

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781583677759
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

The final writings of Samir Amin—a mix of personal experiences and theoretical analysis of global challenges and movements In this second volume of his memoirs, Amin takes us on a journey to a dizzying array of countries, recounting the stages of his ongoing dialogue over several decades with popular movements struggling for a better future. As in his many works over the years, The Long Revolution of the Global South combines Amin’s astute theoretical analyses of the challenges confronting the world’s oppressed peoples with militant action. In these final writings based on his life, Amin presents us with theoretical interventions, analyses of political conjunctures, and narration of personal experiences. Amin’s reminiscences of travels to places too often overlooked by the world at large are a joy to read. We even catch a glimpse of some of his memorable—and sometimes not so memorable—culinary adventures.

1

THE ARAB WORLD
Nationalism, Political Islam, and the Predicted Arab Revolutions

I am prefacing this chapter on the Arab world with five introductory documents: 1) the contemporary Arab world’s historical trajectory; 2) the failure of the Nahda; 3) modernity, democracy, secularism, and Islam; 4) the deployment of the United States military project; and 5) the Palestinian question.

These documents should allow the reader to pinpoint my position within the larger context of the Arab debates I am going to summarize. The Arab scene is the site of an ongoing conflict between three groups of political positions that, in turn, leads to three different future possibilities: 1) bourgeois modernism, certainly comprador, but nevertheless motivated by the intention to build “modern” though not necessarily democratic Arab states; 2) reactionary political Islam propagated by the archaic monarchies of the Gulf, the Muslim Brothers, and the Salafists; and 3) a possibly universalist Arab left, which would be part of a movement toward socialism.

We need to examine first what the real reasons are for such fault lines before looking at how they are manifested in current debates. These underlying positions recur with nagging frequency in all Arab debates.

1. THE HISTORICAL TRAJECTORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY ARAB WORLD

The Arab world has gone through three important stages over the past halfcentury. Nasser’s Egypt, Baathist Syria and Iraq, and Boumediene’s Algeria were, from 1955 to 1975, major participants in the nonaligned movement and its expansion into Africa. The first conference of African liberation movements took place in Cairo in 1957; it led to the establishment of the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The proposed New International Economic Order—the swan song of the non-aligned movement—was drafted in Algiers in 1974. None of these are chance occurrences.

But while the socially positive effects of the “Arab revolutions,” which I have called “national populist,” were exhausted in the brief time of a decade or two, rising oil profits became dominant after 1973 and encouraged the illusion of an easy modernization. The play on words known by all Arabs, al-fawra mahal al-thawra (the spurt, meaning oil, in place of the revolution), captures this transfer of hopes, which is simultaneously the transfer of the center of gravity of strategic decision making from Cairo to Riyadh. Ironically, this occurred at the time when we began to see that this nonrenewable resource was on the way to exhaustion. Within this context, the United States began the implementation of what would become the project for military control of the world, a means for it to ensure exclusive access to this irreplaceable energy resource for its benefit. From 1990, the armed intervention of the United States, now become a reality, completely transformed the nature of the challenges confronting Arab and other societies.

Mired in the infitah, the “opening” connected to the petroleum illusion, Arab governments lost the legitimacy from which they had benefited until then. Political Islam rushed into the political void, where it has been in the forefront ever since. As Antonio Gramsci once said, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”

For someone my age, who has lived through these three periods, the involution associated with this sequence necessarily called for in-depth consideration of the reasons for this dramatic failure. Having experienced this from the inside, I put forward written analyses on the issues involved, which the reader will find elsewhere. I attributed the involution to two sets of causes: those related to the limitations and contradictions of the Nahda, the Arab “Renaissance” initiated in the nineteenth century, which were behind the longevity of the political model called the “mameluk regime,”¹⁰ and those related to the world geopolitics of the new collective imperialism of the triad (United States, Europe, and Japan) under the leadership of the United States.¹¹

2. THE FAILURE OF THE NAHDA

Modernity and the European Renaissance

Modernity is based on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively, make their own history, and to do that, they have the right to innovate and not respect tradition. The proclamation of this principle was a rupture with the fundamental principle that governed all premodern societies, including those of feudal and Christian Europe. This principle called for renouncing the dominant forms of legitimizing power—in the family, in communities within which ways of living and modes of production are organized, and at the level of the state—that were based up to then on a metaphysics with a generally religious expression. It implies, then, a separation between the state and religion, a radical secularization, which is a condition for the development of modern forms of politics.

Modernity is born with this declaration of principle. This is not a question of a rebirth (renaissance), but a birth as such. The characterization Europeans themselves gave to this moment of history, the Renaissance. is thus misleading. It is the result of an ideological construction in which Greco-Roman antiquity was already supposedly familiar with the principle of modernity, buried during the Middle Ages (between ancient modernity and new modernity) by religious obscurantism. This is a mythical understanding of antiquity, the basis for Eurocentrism, through which Europe claims to inherit its past and “return to the sources,” hence re-naissance, while in fact this renaissance is actually a rupture with its own history.

The concomitant birth of modernity and capitalism is not accidental. The social relations that characterize the new production system implied freedom of enterprise, free access to markets, and proclamation of the inviolable right to private property, which is made “sacred.” Economic life, freed from the type of supervision by political authorities that characterized the premodern systems, developed into an autonomous area of social life, driven by its own laws. In place of the traditional determination in which power is the source of wealth, capitalism substitutes a reverse causality in which wealth is the source of power.

The Arab Islamic Nahda

The European Renaissance was the result of an internal social dynamic. It was, in effect, the solution provided by the invention of capitalism to contradictions specific to Europe in that era. In contrast, what Arabs called, by imitation, their Renaissance—the Nahda of the nineteenth century—was not that at all. It was the reaction to an external shock. Europe, made powerful and victorious by modernity, had an ambiguous effect on the Arab world. It was a cause of both attraction (admiration) and repulsion (through the arrogance of its conquest). The Arab Renaissance took the qualifying term literally. It believed that if, as the Europeans had done (and this is what they themselves said), the Arabs “returned” to their sources, a disparaged time, they would rediscover their greatness. The Nahda did not understand the modernity that made Europe powerful.

The Nahda did not implement the necessary ruptures with tradition that define modernity. It did not grasp the true significance of secularism, a necessary condition for politics to become a domain of free innovation, thus of democracy in the modern sense of the term. The Nahda believed that it could substitute a reinterpretation of religion purged of its obscurantist excesses. Even now, Arab societies are poorly equipped to understand that secularism is not a Western “specificity,” but a necessity of modernity. The Nahda did not understand the meaning of democracy, understood properly as the right to break with tradition. It thus remained a prisoner of concepts of the autocratic state; it hoped and prayed for a “just” despot (al-moust-abid al-adel)—not even an “enlightened” one. The nuance is significant. The Nahda did not understand that modernity also produced women’s aspiration for liberation, thereby exercising their right to innovate, to break with tradition. It reduced modernity to the immediate appearance of what it produces: technological progress. This deliberately simplified presentation does not mean that I am unaware of the contradictions expressed in the Nahda, or that some avant-garde thinkers were aware of the real challenges of modernity, such as Qasim Amin concerning the importance of women’s liberation, Ali Abdel Raziq on the centrality of secularism, or Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi on democracy. But none of these breakthroughs were followed through; on the contrary, Arab society reacted by giving up any pursuit of the indicated paths forward. The Nahda is not, then, the moment of the birth of modernity in the Arab world; it is in fact the moment of its failure.

In his magnificent book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, Gilbert Achcar dissects the writings of Rashid Rida, the last link in the chain of the Nahda in decline.¹² Rida wrote in the 1920s and was one of the original inspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islam that he proposed, described as a “return to the sources,” is utterly devoid of thought. It is a ritualistic, conservative Islam of convenience and communitarian affirmation. The adherence of Rida and the Muslim Brotherhood to Wahhabism, an equally heinous expression of a total lack of critical thinking, which scarcely responds to the requirements of an archaic society of nomads, heralds the advent of political Islam.

Limits and Contradictions of Modernity

The modernity that developed under the restrictions of capitalism’s limitations is, consequently, contradictory, promising much that it cannot produce and thus giving rise to unsatisfied aspirations. Contemporary humanity is thus confronted with the contradictions of this modernity—the only one we have experienced up to now—a modernity that began with the capitalist stage of history. Capitalism and its modernity are destructive of the human being, reduced to the status of a commodity embodying labor power. Moreover, polarization on the world scale caused by capitalist accumulation on the same scale nullifies any possibility for the majority of human beings—those in the peripheries—to satisfy their needs as promised by modernity. For the great majority, the modernity in question is quite simply odious. Hence, the rejection of this modernity is violent. But rejection is a negative act. The inadequacies of various alternative projects eliminate the effectiveness of any revolt and ultimately lead it to submit to the requirements of the capitalism and modernity that it supposedly rejects. The main illusion is sustained by nostalgia for the premodern past. In the peripheries, the backward-looking posture proceeds from a violent and justified revolt, of which it is only a neurotic and powerless form, because quite simply it is based on ignorance of the nature of the challenge of modernity.

The backward-looking position is expressed in various ways, generally in terms of a fundamentalist religious interpretation, which in fact masks a conventional conservative choice, or in terms of an ethnicity adorned with specific virtues that transcend other dimensions of social reality—classes, among others. The common denominator to all these forms is their attachment to a culturalist thesis in which religions and ethnic groups are characterized by transhistorical specificities that define inviolable identities. Even though without scientific foundation, these positions are nonetheless able to mobilize the masses who are marginalized and made helpless by destructive capitalist modernity. They are thus effective means for manipulation that are incorporated into strategies designed to reinforce submission to the joint dictatorship of the dominant forces in capitalist globalization and their local and subaltern transmission channels. Political Islam is a good example of this method for managing peripheral capitalism. In Latin America and Africa, the proliferation of quasi-Protestant obscurantist “sects,” supported by North American authorities to hinder liberation theology, manipulates the helplessness of the excluded and their revolt against the conservative official church.

[ABOVE EXTRACTS ARE FROM THE REAWAKENING OF THE ARAB WORLD.]¹³

3. MODERNITY, DEMOCRACY, SECULARISM, AND ISLAM

The image that the Arab and Islamic region gives of itself today is that of societies in which religion (Islam) is in the forefront of all areas of social and political life—to the point that it seems incongruous to imagine that it could be otherwise. The majority of foreign observers (political leaders and the media) conclude from this that modernity, even democracy, must be adapted to the heavy presence of Islam, thereby de facto precluding secularism.

Modernity is a rupture in universal history that began in sixteenth-century Europe. Modernity proclaims that the human being is responsible for his or her own history, individually and collectively, and consequently breaks with the dominant premodern ideologies. Modernity thus allows democracy, just as it demands secularism, in the sense of separation of the religious and the political.

From this point of view, where do the peoples of the Middle Eastern region stand? The image of crowds of bearded men prostrating themselves, as well as cohorts of veiled women, can and does inspire hasty conclusions about the intensity of the religious commitment being expressed. The social pressures exerted to obtain the result are rarely mentioned. The women have not chosen the veil, it has been imposed on them with prior violence. Absence from prayer almost always costs the person in question work, sometimes even that person’s life. Western “culturalist” friends who call for respect for the diversity of beliefs rarely inquire into the procedures implemented by governments to present an image that suits them. There are certainly religious extremists (fous de Dieu). Are there proportionately more of them than the Spanish Catholics who parade at Easter, or the innumerable fanatics in the United States who listen to televangelists?

In any case, the region has not always presented this image of itself. Beyond differences from one country to another, we can identify a large region extending from Morocco to Afghanistan, including all Arabs (except those from the Arabian peninsula), Turks, Iranians, Afghans, and the peoples of the former Soviet Central Asia, in which the potential for the development of secularism is far from negligible. The situation is different among some neighboring peoples, such as the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula or the Pakistanis.

In this extensive area, the political traditions were strongly affected by the radical currents of modernity. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the communism of the Third International had an impact on thinking and acting and certainly were more important than Westminster-style parliamentarianism, for example. These dominant currents inspired the major models of political transformation that the ruling classes implemented, which in some ways could be called forms of “enlightened despotism.”

This was certainly the case in the Egypt of Muhammad Ali or the Khedive Ismail Pasha. Kemalism in Turkey and modernization in Iran proceeded with similar methods. The national populism characteristic of the more recent stages of history belongs to the same family of “modernist” political projects. The model’s variants were numerous (the Algerian FLN, Tunisian Bourguibism, Egyptian Nasserism, and Baathism in Syria and Iraq), but moved in a similar direction. The apparently extreme experiences—the so-called communist governments in Afghanistan and South Yemen—were in reality not very different. All these governments accomplished a great deal and, consequently, had very wide popular support. That is why, even when they were not truly democratic, they opened the way to a possible evolution in that direction. In some circumstances—such as those in Egypt between 1920 and 1950—an experiment in electoral democracy was attempted, supported by the moderate anti-imperialists (the Wafd) and fought by the dominant imperialist power (Great Britain) and its local allies (the monarchy). Secularism—admittedly implemented in moderate versions—was not “rejected” by the people. It was, on the contrary, religious figures that were considered obscurantists in public opinion—which most of them were.

Modernist experiments—from enlightened despotism to radical national populism—were not the product of chance. Powerful political movements, dominant in the middle classes, were behind these experiments. In this way, these classes were asserting themselves as full and equal partners in modern globalization, and their “national bourgeois” projects were modernist, secularist, and potentially bearers of democratic developments. But precisely because these projects came into conflict with the interests of the dominant imperialism, the latter fought them relentlessly and systematically mobilized obscurantist forces for this purpose.

The history of the Muslim Brotherhood is well known. The British and the monarchy literally created it in the 1920s in Egypt to counter the democratic and secular Wafd. Also well known is that the CIA and Anwar Sadat organized its mass return from Saudi exile after the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Then there is the history of the Taliban formed by the CIA and Pakistan to fight against the “communists” who had opened schools to everyone, boys and girls. Let us also remember that the Israelis supported Hamas at the beginning to weaken the secular and democratic currents of the Palestinian resistance.

Political Islam would have had much difficulty in expanding beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan without the firm, powerful, and ongoing support of the United States. Saudi society had not even begun its transition from tradition when the vast petroleum reservoirs were discovered. The business and political alliance between imperialism and the “traditional” ruling class was immediately sealed, thereby reinvigorating reactionary Wahhabi political Islam. For their part, the British succeeded in breaking Indian unity by convincing the Muslim leaders to create their own state, imprisoned from the very beginning in political Islam. Note that the theory by which this curiosity was legitimized—attributed to Mawdudi—had previously been fully drafted by English Orientalists in Her Majesty’s service.

In the same vein, the U.S. initiative to break the united front of Asian and African states established in Bandung in 1955 led to the creation of an “Islamic Conference” immediately promoted (beginning in 1957) by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Political Islam penetrated into the region by this means.

The least of the conclusions that should be drawn from these observations is that political Islam is not the spontaneous product of an authentic assertion of religious conviction by the peoples in question. Political Islam was systematically constructed by imperialism and supported, of course, by obscurantist reactionary forces and subservient comprador classes. It is undeniable that the various left forces neither saw nor knew how to confront the challenge, and that is their failure.

4. THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE UNITED STATES’ MILITARY PROJECT

The United States’ project, supported to varying degrees by its subaltern European and Japanese allies, is to establish its military control over the entire world—what I have called the “extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the planet.” With that in mind, the “Middle East” was chosen as the region for the “first strike” for at least four reasons: (i) it harbors the world’s most abundant petroleum resources, and its direct control by the armed forces of the United States would give Washington a privileged position, placing their allies—Europe and Japan—and its potential rivals (China) in the uncomfortable position of dependence on the United States for their energy supplies; (ii) it is located at the center of the old world and facilitates the exercise of a permanent military threat against China, India, and Russia; (iii) the region is going through a period of weakness and confusion that allows the aggressor to achieve an easy victory, at least in the short term; (iv) imperialism has an uncondit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Table of Acronyms
• Prologue: Successive Waves of the South’s Awakening
• 1. The Arab World: Nationalism, Political Islam, and the Predicted Arab Revolutions
• 2. Africa: African Socialisms, Colonial Disasters, and Glimmers of Hope
• 3. Asia: Triumphant Capitalism, Dead Ends, and Emergence in Question
• 4. Latin America: End of the Monroe Doctrine? Popular Advances
• 5. Eastern Europe, the USSR, and Russia: The End of the Tunnel?
• 6. China, Vietnam, and Cuba: Fears and Hopes
• 7. The World Forum for Alternatives and the Social Forums
• 8. The North and the Question of Imperialism
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index