Only People Make Their Own History. Samir Amin

       INTRODUCTION

       Aijaz Ahmad

      To be a ‘Marxist’ is to continue the work that Marx merely began, even though that beginning was of unequalled power. It is not to stop at Marx, but to start from him … Marx is boundless, because the radical critique that he initiates is itself boundless, always incomplete, and must always be the object of its own critique (‘Marxism as formulated at a particular moment has to undergo a Marxist critique.’).

      – Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value

      Samir Amin (1931–2018) was one of the grand intellectuals of our time.¹ A distinguished theoretician, his life of political activism spanned well over six decades. A socialist from an early age and trained as an economist, he insisted that laws of the economic science, including the law of value, were operationally subject to the laws of historical materialism. Trained also as a mathematician, he avoided too great a mathematization of his concepts and kept algebraic formulae to a minimum in even the most technical of his writings. The ambition always was to retain theoretical rigour while also communicating with the largest possible number of readers—and activists in particular—through exposition in relatively direct prose. His readership, like his own political activism, was spread across countries and continents.

      Amin came of age in the 1950s, when the wave of socialist revolutions seemed to be very much on the ascendant and the old colonial empires were being dismantled across Asia and Africa. Communist parties and socialist movements had emerged in these continents, more in Asia than in Africa, even before the Second World War. Onset of the postwar period witnessed immense expansion of revolutionary activity—the Chinese revolution, Korea, the onset of revolutionary liberation movements in Indochina and so on. With the notable exception of China, however, most countries in these continents had produced relatively little original work in the field of Marxist theoretical knowledge. Study of any sort of Marxism largely meant explication and/or translation of texts produced elsewhere, and that too was confined to the very brief texts or extracts from the Marxist classics or exegeses done in Britain, France or the Soviet Union. This now began to change, in several notable ways. First, we witness the rise of a new generation of Marxist scholar-activists across Asia and Africa over the very years when the colonial empires were getting dismantled. Second, a number of these new intellectuals, often associated with communist parties or national liberation movements, bring into their work increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the more fundamental of the classics: the major works of Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Kautsky and others. Third, attention shifts to extended, rigorous analyses of (1) the historical development, modes of production and class structures not so much of Europe as of Asian and African countries, and (2) the very elaborate mechanisms involved in the exploitation of the imperialized countries, i.e., the process whereby values produced in the colonies were appropriated for accumulation in imperialist centres.

      Mention of a few dates should clarify this. Thus, for example, Amin submitted his 629-page doctoral dissertation to the University of Paris in 1957 and published it much later as the two-volume Accumulation on a World Scale (French edition 1970; English translation 1974). In the course of roughly those same years, India witnessed the publication of three books that were foundational in the making of Indian Marxist historiography: D.D. Kosambi’s An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956), Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963) and R.S. Sharma’s Indian Feudalism (1965). Across the oceans, in Latin America, all the founding texts of Dependency theorists—Theotonio Dos Santos, Celso Furtado, Ruy Mauro Marini, Andre Gunder Frank, and others—also appeared in the 1960s and early ’70s.² Theoretically, Amin was much closer to Paul Baran who published The Political Economy of Growth in 1957, the year Amin submitted his mammoth dissertation. The great classic of Marxist political economy that Baran co-authored with Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, followed soon thereafter, in 1966. Anatomies of imperialism had thus arrived at the very centre of new Marxist thinking across the world, and Marxism itself had become a powerful tool for independent thought and research across the Tricontinent. On both these counts, Amin’s dissertation would appear to be among the first texts re-fashioning the contours of postwar Marxism in a very particular way, as we shall argue below.

      Amin was proficient in several languages but wrote primarily in French. He was a stunningly prolific writer, producing books and articles with great speed