The Liberal Virus. Samir Amin
which give meaning and import to political democracy is not even posed. Economics and politics do not form two dimensions of social reality, each having their own autonomy, operating in a dialectical relationship; capitalist economics in fact governs the political, whose creative potential it eliminates.
Apparently, the most “developed” country, the one in which the political is actually conceived and practiced entirely in the exclusive service of the economy (of capital, in fact)—obviously the United States—is held to be the best model for “all.” Its institutions and practices should be imitated by all those who hope to be contemporary with the world scene.
There is no alternative to the proposed model, which is founded on economistic postulates, the identity of the market and democracy, and the subsumption of the political by the economic. The socialist option attempted in the Soviet Union and China demonstrated that it was both inefficient in economic terms and antidemocratic in the political sphere.
In other words, the propositions formulated above have the virtue of being “eternal truths” (the truths of “Reason”) revealed by the unfolding of contemporary history. Their triumph is assured, particularly since the disappearance of the alternative “socialist” experiments. We will all truly arrive, as has been said, at the end of history. Historical Reason has triumphed. This triumph means then that we live in the best of all possible worlds, at least potentially, in the sense that it will be so when its founding ideas are accepted by everyone and put into practice everywhere. All the defects of today’s reality are due only to the fact that these eternal principles of Reason are not yet put into practice in the societies that suffer from these deficiencies, particularly those in the global South.
The hegemonism of the United States, a normal expression of its avant-garde position in using Reason (inevitably liberal), is thus both unavoidable and favorable to the progress of the whole of humanity. There is no “American imperialism,” only a noble leadership (“benign” or painless, as liberal American intellectuals qualify it).
These “ideas” are central to the liberal vision. In fact, as we will see in what follows, these ideas are nothing but nonsense, founded on a para-science—so-called pure economics—and an accompanying ideology—postmodernism.
“Pure” economics is not a theory of the real world, of really-existing capitalism, but of an imaginary capitalism. It is not even a rigorous theory of the latter. The bases and development of the arguments do not deserve to be qualified as coherent. It is only a para-science, closer in fact to sorcery than to the natural sciences which it pretends to imitate. As for postmodernism, it only forms an accompanying discourse, calling upon us to act only within the limits of the liberal system, to “adjust” to it.
The reconstruction of a citizen politics demands that movements of resistance, protest and struggle against the real effects of the implementation of this system be freed from the liberal virus.
II The Ideological and Para-Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism
1. IMAGINARY CAPITALISM AND THE PARA-THEORY OF “PURE” ECONOMICS
THE CONCEPT OF CAPITALISM cannot be reduced to the “generalized market,” but instead situates the essence of capitalism precisely in power beyond the market. This reduction, as found in the dominant vulgate, substitutes the theory of an imaginary system governed by “economic laws” (the “market”) which would tend, if left to themselves, to produce an “optimal equilibrium,” for the analysis of capitalism based on social relations and a politics through which these powers beyond the market are expressed. In really-existing capitalism, class struggle, politics, the state, and the logics of capital accumulation are inseparable. Consequently, capitalism is by nature a regime in which the successive states of disequilibrium are products of social and political confrontations situated beyond the market. The concepts proposed by the vulgar economics of liberalism—such as “deregulation” of the markets—have no reality. So-called deregulated markets are markets regulated by the forces of monopolies which are situated outside the market.
Economic alienation1 is the specific form of capitalism which governs the reproduction of society in its totality and not only the reproduction of its economic system. The law of value governs not only capitalist economic life, but all social life in this society. This specificity explains why, in capitalism, the economic is erected into a “science”—that is, the laws which govern the movement of capitalism are imposed on modern societies (and on the human beings which form those societies) “like laws of nature.” In other words, the fact that these laws are the product not of a transhistorical nature (which would define the “human being” vis-à-vis the challenge of “scarcity”) but of a particular historical nature (social relations specifically characteristic of capitalism) is erased from social consciousness. This is, in my opinion, how Marx understood “economism,” the unique characteristic of capitalism.
In addition, Marx brings to light the immanent instability of this society, in the sense that the reproduction of its economic system never tends towards the realization of any sort of general equilibrium, but is displaced from disequilibrium to disequilibrium in an unforeseeable manner. One can account for this after the fact but never define it in advance. The “competition” between capitals—which defines capitalism—suppresses the possibility of realizing any sort of general equilibrium and thus renders illusory any analysis founded on such a supposed tendency. Capitalism is synonymous with permanent instability. The articulation between the logics produced by this competition of capitals and those which are deployed through the evolution of the social relations of production (among capitalists, between them and the exploited and dominated classes, among the states which form capitalism as a world system) accounts, after the fact, for the movement of the system as it displaces itself from one disequilibrium to another. In this sense, capitalism does not exist outside of the class struggle, the conflict between states, and politics. The idea that there exists an economic logic (which economic science enables us to discover) that governs the development of capitalism is an illusion. There is no theory of capitalism distinct from its history. Theory and history are indissociable, just as are economics and politics.
I have pointed out these two dimensions of Marx’s radical critique precisely because these are the two dimensions of reality of which bourgeois social thought is ignorant. This thought is, in fact, economistic from its origins in the era of the Enlightenment. The “Reason” that it invokes attributes to the capitalist system, which replaces the Ancien Regime, a transhistorical legitimacy, making it the “end of history.” This economic alienation was to be accentuated thereafter, precisely in the attempt to respond to Marx. Pure economics, starting with Walras, expresses this exacerbation of the economism of bourgeois social thought. It substitutes the myth of a self-regulating market, which would tend through its own internal logic towards the realization of a general equilibrium, for the analysis of the real functioning of capitalism. Instability is no longer conceived as immanent to this logic, but as the product of the imperfections of real markets. Economics thus becomes a discourse which is no longer engaged in knowing reality; its function is no more than to legitimize capitalism by attributing to it intrinsic qualities which it cannot have. Pure economics becomes the theory of an imaginary world.
The dominant forces are such because they succeed in imposing their language on their victims. The “experts” of conventional economics have managed to make believe that their analyses and the conclusions drawn from them are imperative because they are “scientific,” hence objective, neutral and unavoidable. This is not true. The so-called pure economics on which they base their analyses does not deal with reality, but with an imaginary system which not only does not approach reality but is located squarely in the opposite direction. Really-existing capitalism is another thing entirely.
This imaginary economics mixes up concepts and confuses progress with capitalist expansion, market with capitalism. In order to develop effective strategies, social movements must liberate themselves from these confusions.
The confusion of two concepts—the reality (capitalist expansion) and the desirable (progress in a determined sense)—is at the origin of many disappointments expressed in the criticisms of implemented policies. The dominant discourses systematically mix up