Introduction
If Marxism offered us the most useful science and methodology predicated on a materialist conception of history for understanding capitalism, then the decoloniality (decolonisation of the 21st century) with its three units of analysis (being, knowledge, and power) offers us the best science and methodology to understand contemporary replications of racism and colonial matrices of power at a world scale from a global South perspective. If Samir Amin’s intellectual legacy was characterised by a very strong idea of Marxist historical materialism as a science and a persistent commitment to the advancement of the unfinished socialist project, the resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the 21st century (planetary decoloniality of the 21st century) is focused on the advancement of the unfinished decolonisation project as liberation struggle capable of delivering a better world free from racism, patriarchy and capitalism (coloniality). While the liberatory potential of classical Marxism was spoiled by Stalinism (cult of personality), its institutionalisation as Soviet Union state ideology, and undercut by the Cold War politics, the limits and indeed crisis of the decolonisation project of the 20th century were due to its being hijacked by native petit-bourgeois class with its intellectual laziness that fostered mimicry, pitfalls of consciousness that made it fail to take a clear stand against neo-colonialism, and lack of commitment to carry forward the historical tasks of genuine liberation of the peasants and the workers (refusal to commit class suicide).
This article uses the intellectual legacy of Amin to revisit Marxism and decolonisation as complementary liberatory visions. The entry point is the primacy of epistemology/knowledge in the creation of the modern world system and its global orders. Amin’s legacy enables an advancement from the constraints of rigid materialism (primacy of matter) and economic reductionism, without giving up on liberatory potential of Marxist-inspired socialist internationalism as a counter-hegemonic vision. This Marxist socialist internationalism encapsulated the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Marxist ‘Internationals’, fought for socialisation and communisation (democratisation of social relations of production and de-bourgeoisification of power relations) of the modern world system and global order in favour of the workers and the poor. What is distinctive about Amin’s legacy is that, unlike other Marxists who lost confidence in Marxism following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the rise of the United States of America as the sole superpower, Amin continued to write and agitate for socialism of the 21st century predicated on democratic Marxism of the 21st century. At another level, the ideological impasse caused by the weakening if not delegitimation of Marxism at the end of the Cold War opened the way for rearticulation of decolonisation beyond its traditional anti-colonial conception and of delivery of political independence into a planetary vision of liberation known as decoloniality (see Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2018). As internationalist imaginary, decolonisation worked actively to remake the modern world system and its global orders in favour of the ‘wretched of the earth’ (the enslaved, racialised, gendered and colonised – the dehumanised). This is where democratic Marxism of the 21st century and the planetary decolonisation of the 21st century intersect and converge.
This article addresses three main issues. The first is how epistemology informed, framed and shaped modern asymmetrical patterns of power underwritten by imperial, colonial, capitalist and patriarchal logics. Decoloniality highlights that the epistemic is as important as matter, hence it is for entanglements and heterarchies of power rather that the debilitating egg–chicken conundrum with its economic reductionism (Grosfoguel 2007). The second is how Marxism – including democratic Marxism of the 21st century and decolonisation of the 21st century, known also as decoloniality – offers a sustained critique of the present Euro–North American-centric internationalism informed by imperial, colonial, capitalist and patriarchal logics. The third is to draw insights from the contributions and legacy of Amin on these two positions, as well as how his ideas enable reflections on current and resurgent movements informed by decoloniality and democratic Marxism gesturing towards a pluriverse – a world where many worlds fit and strive (see Reiter 2018; Escobar 2018).
Epistemology and framing of a problematic modern world system and its global orders
The modern world system and its shifting global orders are simultaneously epistemic creations and creatures of materiality. This means that epistemic aspects are as important as the material (matter). It is the epistemic (knowledge) that gives life to the material (matter). This argument has nothing to do with bourgeois idealism and enables us to appreciate why the whole world is experiencing epistemic ferment, why there are calls for decolonisation of knowledge, and why universities have become sites of struggle at a planetary scale. This is because the modern world system and its global orders is fundamentally a product and artefact of certain epistemologies. This approach which privileges the epistemic behind the creation and construction of the present imperial/colonial/capitalist/patriarchal liberal bourgeois internationalism enables a clear identification of philosophers, theologians, and political theorists such as René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Hegel, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and other colonial imaginists including naturalists such as Charles Darwin (‘survival of the fittest’), poets such as Joseph Rudyard Kipling (‘The white man’s burden’) and novelists such as Joseph Conrad (The heart of darkness). On the ground, were ‘explorers’ such as Thomas Cook, Christopher Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco da Gama and many others – not to forget the active and directly involved colonial ideologues such as Thomas Babington Macaulay in India, Sir Henry Maine in India, Lord Frederick John Dealtry, Baron Lugard in Western and Eastern Africa, Cecil John Rhodes in southern Africa, Edmund Spenser in Ireland, General Jan Smuts in South Africa, and many others who produced colonial ideas and expressed what James Blaut (1993) termed ‘the colonizer’s model of the world’.
Broadly speaking, at the heart of colonial epistemology and imperial science was to reduce the world to an object of knowledge, mapping, conquest, appropriation, expropriation, naming, controlling, and owning by Europeans. Ngugi wa Thiong’o used two concepts to explain the epistemic devices used by imperialists to conquer, appropriate and expropriate the world on behalf of white male bourgeois and their accomplices who currently preside over the modern world system and shape its shifting global orders. The first device Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986) called the ‘cultural bomb’. The effects of the ‘cultural bomb’ are multiple and wide-ranging, from annihilation of a ‘people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’, to embracing imperialism as the cure to their problems (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986, 3).
Imperialism was able to deliver this devastation on its targets and victims because it is underpinned by an active ‘metaphysical empire’, or what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) calls ‘cognitive empire’. The metaphysical empire operates through invasion of the mental universe of its targets and victims (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986, 3). Thus, the second important device of invading the mental universe of the colonised is rendered by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2009, 21) in computational metaphor of changing hard disks and software of computers: ‘Get a few natives, empty their hard disk of previous memory, and download into them a software of European memory.’ Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s analysis dovetails with ideas of Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018, 144) who posited that knowledge ‘has a privileged position: it occupies the level of the enunciated, where the content of the conversation is established, and it occupies the level of enunciation, which regulates the terms of the conversation’. The important point here is that of the relationship between epistemology/knowledge and ontology/reality. Calling things into existence first, then naming them and also recruiting colonised subjects to fit into the newly invented categories is part of how knowledge created realities. To Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 135):
What matters is not economics, or politics, or history, but knowledge. Better yet, what matters is history, politics, economics, race, gender, sexuality, but it is above all the knowledge that is intertwined in all these praxical spheres that entangles us to the point of making us believe that it is not knowledge that matters but really history, economy, politics, etc. Ontology is made of epistemology. That is, ontology is an epistemological concept; it is not inscribed in the entities the grammatical nouns name.
Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 136) elaborated that: ‘It is knowledge weaved around concepts such as politics and economy that is crucial for decolonial thinking, and not politics and economy as transcendental entities.’ This means that politics, economy and society were first conceived epistemically, articulated ideologically and then ordered practically. To Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 137) such sectors of activity as economy, politics, and even history are fundamentally ‘enactments of certain types and spheres of knowledge that frame the praxis of living’ in which they are embedded. To simplify the complex relationship between epistemology/knowledge and ontology/reality, Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 144) used the metaphor of the puppeteer (the unseen enunciator/regulator of activity) and the puppets (the publicly displayed enunciated).
Amin’s work grappled with the epistemic question from the very beginning of his intellectual career. He rebelled against his discipline of economics arguing that ‘The only possible science is the science of society, for social reality is one: it is never “economic” or “political” or ideological’ noting that ‘The conceptual equipment of this “pure” economic theory is situated at the level of abstraction that makes it useless for analysing the working of the mechanisms – even the economic mechanisms – of any society whatsoever’ (Amin [1957] 1974, 5). With specific reference to African development, Amin posited that ‘The genuine implementation of the principle of autocentric development implies very different reasoning that has the nerve to challenge the criteria of economic rationality observed by conventional economics’ (Amin 1990, 58). To Amin (2011, 15), political analysis was a better science of society and development than economic analysis. In Amin’s analysis of capitalism, one finds a clear convergence of Marxism and decoloniality particularly in the concepts of colonial matrices of power and the notion of five monopolies. Amin (2019, 41) posited that the five monopolies (control of technology, control of global financial flows, access to the planet’s natural resources, control of media and communications, and control of weapons of mass destruction) ‘define the framework within which the law of global value expresses itself’. Representing the decoloniality perspective, Mignolo and Walsh (2018, 114) argued that within the colonial matrices of power ‘the creators of illusions (modernity)’ monopolise ‘human bodies (labour)’, ‘energy from biosphere (water, land, and oxygen)’, and the ‘cosmos (sunlight and moonlight)’ to dominate the world.
Thus, revisiting questions of epistemology which occupied a place of importance in the legacy of Amin one arrives at a deeper understanding of the hidden cognitive needs and technologies of modern capitalism as a leitmotif of global coloniality. Let us now turn briefly to the key interventions of Marxist socialist internationalism as a counter to the imperial/colonial internationalism and further draw insights from the contributions and intellectual legacy of Amin.
Marxist socialist internationalism and Samir Amin’s interventions
Marxist socialist internationalism assumed a counter-hegemonic character though it has itself never coalesced successfully into a dominant cohesive movement. At its centre were thinkers (individuals), political parties, trade unions, and of course the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which claimed embodiment of socialist internationalism while also concerned about its survival in a hostile capitalist-dominated world. Amin was one of those individual Marxist public intellectuals who persistently pushed for socialist internationalism right up to his death in 2018.
A historical background of the emergence and core ideas driving socialist internationalism points to the epistemic and political interventions of Karl Marx. Marx laid down a historical materialist understanding of the world and critiqued and opposed the naturalist and individualist position of natural rights (Green 1988). Marx posited that instead of nature of the human being a determinant, the continual changes in the material forces of production perpetually changed human needs. The position of the individual in society and more specifically in the process of production determined human rights. To Marx, the human existed as an ‘object-creating being’ and this determined human character (Green 1988, 314). Marx elaborated:
The social character is the universal character of the whole movement; as society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. […]. The human significance of nature only exists for social man, because only this in case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence for him. Only then is nature the basis of his own human experience and a vital element of human reality. (Marx cited in Green 1988, 314)
Marxism attempted to transcend the bourgeois binary of private–public realms of life. Because of Marxism’s emphasis on the collective, its discourse carried a strong antipathy towards private property. But to some extent Marxism’s idea of historical progress while grounded in materialist understanding shared a lot with bourgeois modernisation ideas. Perhaps it was Marxism’s embeddedness in Eurocentric ideas which led Immanuel Wallerstein (1984, 112) to specifically write about ‘Eurocommunism’ and ‘its roots in European working-class history’. However, there are clear features that distinguished the Marxist-inspired socialist internationalism from the imperial/colonial internationalism of white bourgeois supremacy. The first is its emphasis on the proletarian revolution in which the working class rather than the bourgeois is its concern. Marx advocated for a world revolution predicated on class struggle as the motive force of history and motor for social change from capitalism to socialism. Mobilisation of workers was pitched at a planetary scale because according to Marx workers had no country and capitalism was a planetary problem. Marxism had indeed emerged as a powerful theory. The second is its radical deviation from naturalism to historical materialism as a science of understanding the modern world. The third is its rejection of abstract individualism and to speak of social/collective human being. What emerged from Marx was a refreshing epistemic framework with very usable political implications and ends.
What is also important to note about the unfolding of socialist internationalism was its attempts to build what became known as the ‘Internationals’. The First International, known as the International Workingman’s Association, was organised in 1864 and Marx and Friedrich Engels were also actively involved. The purpose and indeed historical task of the First International was to lay down common principles, revolutionary programme, strategy, and tactics of planetary Marxism. The First International was inevitably hit by teething problems in that it did not genuinely unfold as Marxist international of workers as it was attended by a heterogeneous people including anarchists, reformist trade unionists and nationalists. It was also hit by divisions over strategies and tactics of delivering a world socialist revolution (Wallerstein 1984, 112–113).
What is significant is that the First International laid a good foundation for the Second International that was launched in 1889. Millions of workers gathered, and the future of international socialism seemed to be consolidating and raring to storm the world. The Second International lasted from 1889 to 1914. However, the Second International suffered from what Rob Sewell (2014, 1) called the ‘great betrayal’, first because it was born during a time of ‘upswing of capitalism’ and, secondly, the very leaders of trade unions increasingly turned away from Marxism into nationalism and social democracy and its reformist direction. Liberal democratic parliamentary politics undercut ideas of socialist international revolution. Wallerstein (1984, 114) posited that:
There was a third debate in the nineteenth century. It was the debate between socialists and nationalists, between those who argued the primacy of class factors and organization and those who sought to organize in terms of interclass alliances to achieve the political objective of creating a new state.
Despite these setbacks, Marxism continued to animate many people including Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky – great thinkers, theorists and committed revolutionaries. It was Lenin and Trotsky who organised the Third International and tried to define a clear and correct revolutionary internationalist programme. Millions of workers again responded enthusiastically. Unfortunately, after the death of Lenin in 1924 the Third International had to contend with Stalinism and his ideas of ‘socialism in one country’ (International Marxist Tendency 2010). The Stalinists vs Trotskyites conflicts resulted in the expulsion of Trotsky and his faction from the Communist Party and the International. Trotsky was exiled. The rise of Nazism and Fascism worsened the matters for the Third International (International Marxist Tendency 2010, 2–3).
While in exile Trotsky launched the Fourth International in 1938, but unfortunately he was assassinated in 1940. There was a leadership crisis. The Fourth International never existed as a functioning organisation. The post-World War II capitalist recovery destabilised organisations of the working class as they became lured by ideas of social welfare and social democracy. The ‘dilemmas of national organisation as the political weapon of the proletariat – both of organisation at all, and then of organisation at the level of the nation-state’ became the bane of ‘Eurocommunism’ (Wallerstein 1984, 122). The International Marxist Tendency (2010, 3) highlighted that: ‘The collapse of the Soviet Union has served to sow confusion and disorientation in the movement, and set the final seal on the degeneration of the former Stalinist leaders, many of whom have passed over to the camp of capitalist reaction.’ The glasnost and perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev became a form of ideological capitulation to the Western liberal democracy and its market fundamentalism. However, Donald Sassoon (1996) highlights how the failures of neoliberal economics and political managerialism opened space for revival of European social democracy informed by Marxist ideas.
With Amin, he was never deterred by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was Amin who reminded his comrades that communism has never been a ‘state’ or even ‘state affairs’ that could be limited to a single state, government or even a block of states. To Amin, communism was the praxis of liberation from oppression and exploitation. Armed with this thinking, Amin continued with the struggle for socialist revolution and to base his thinking and activism on Marxist thought. Amin explained that what it meant to be a Marxist (1990, 2) is to ‘continue the work that Marx merely began, even though that beginning was of an unequalled power. It is not to stop at Marx, but to start from him’, adding that ‘Marxism as formulated at a particular moment has to undergo a Marxist critique.’
While it is very difficult to summarise the expansive archive of Amin, it is possible to distil his core interventions, contributions and concepts that enabled a clear understanding of the operations of capitalism and imperialism at a global scale. His scholarly interventions were predicated on a world system as a unit of analysis and Marxist political economy as his approach (cited in Sharawy 2018, 14). But it is important to also highlight the fact that Amin emerged as a scholar within a context of African struggles for decolonisation and pan-African unity as well as Bandung initiative to chart autonomous development and economic systems. This context influenced him and partly contributed to his abandonment of conventional neoclassical economics as servicing imperial/colonial/liberal/capitalist world system.
It would seem to Amin, the whole agenda of ‘worlding’ (recreating the world) from the global South entailed not only a consistent and persistent challenging and critique of capitalism and imperialism but also an epistemic intervention of rewriting of human history from a global South perspective. This idea comes out clearly in his book Global history: a view from the South (Amin 2011) where recreating the world entailed the task of rewriting global history and freeing human history from Eurocentrism. In this ‘de-Europeanisation’ of global history, Amin delved deeper into histories of Central Asia (the East), highlighting how modernity moved ‘from the East to the West, from China of the Song to the Arab-Persian Abbassid Caliphate, then to the Italian towns, before finding its European form that took shape during the 16th century in the London-Amsterdam-Paris triangle’ (Amin 2011, 5).
Of course, as noted by Mahmood Mamdani, one has to begin with Amin’s multi-volume Accumulation on a world scale ([1957] 1974) based on his doctoral research where he opened a vast canvas and set out a lifetime revolutionary research trajectory and contours of transformative activism that preoccupied him for the rest of his life (see Mamdani 2018). A lifetime systematic analysis of the operations of capitalism and its consequences began in the 1950s. Amin gifted the world with such useful analytical concepts as ‘unequal development’, ‘maldevelopment’, and ‘law of worldwide value’, ‘economic extraversion’, ‘delinking’ and others – which are very helpful in understanding the unfolding of historical capitalism and imperialism – particularly their consequences for the global South (see Amin 1976, 1977, 1978, 1985, 1990).
In his Eurocentrism: modernity, religion, and democracy: a critique of Eurocentrism and culturalism (1989) Amin engaged with the epistemic and cultural underpinnings of the imperial/colonial/capitalist liberal bourgeois internationalism. The key contours of Eurocentrism include: (i) that the scientific spirit, rationality, democracy, human rights, and social justice are artefacts of ‘European West’; (ii) the other parts of the world have nothing better to offer humanity and the non-European world’s progress is dependent on imitating Europe; (iii) the European conquest and colonisation of the world was a progressive process that ‘aroused other peoples from their fatal lethargy’; (iv) the future of the world lies in its progressive Europeanisation; (v) the gifts of Europe to the world include ideas of free enterprise, individualism, the market, secularism, and pluralist electoral democracy; and lastly (vi) the European West has little to learn from others (Amin 1989, 180–181). Amin (1989, 183) refuted the claims of Eurocentrism, positing that it is ‘a political project on a global scale: a project of homogenization through imitation and catching up’. This political project is also ‘expressed in practically all areas of social thought’ (Amin 1989, 255).
Mamdani (2018, 16) correctly posited that Amin ‘wanted clear sight of the enemy and a clear choice between alternatives’. But what located Amin’s intellectual and activism in the true Marxist and socialist internationalism was his commitment to the building of the Fifth International as a transnational alliance of working and oppressed peoples. In Maldevelopment (1990, 12) he not only expressed his confidence in ‘the indispensable internationalism of the workers and the peoples’ but laid down a summary of the strategic objectives of building up a Fifth International of workers and peoples: (i) the need for a process of democratisation of society associated with social progress and not dissociated from it; (ii) the agrarian question and the need to guarantee access to land for all peasants; and (iii) the need to integrate the ecological challenge into the struggle against capitalism.
In his two most recent books, The world we wish to see: revolutionary objectives in the twenty-first century (2008) and Only people make their own history: writings on capitalism, imperialism and revolution (2019), Amin emphasised the urgent need for what he termed ‘transnational alliance of working and oppressed peoples’ in a century where:
Colonization and imperialist domination have been legitimized in this way – yesterday by the discourse of the ‘civilizing mission’, today by those who pretend to export democracy and defend human rights across the globe. Socialist parties and social democrats have often aligned themselves with these positions and thus deserve to be called social-colonialists (or social-imperialists). (Amin 2008, 9)
In The world we wish to see (2008) Amin meticulously took stock of the issues that compromised and undercut what he termed ‘the internationalism of peoples in the twentieth century’. He audited the four previous internationals, highlighting organisational as well as systemic factors. He identified three systems that dominated and complicated the post-1945 era: (i) the Western welfare system, (ii) the social democratic system, (iii) the Soviet/Maoist system, and finally (iv) the nationalist-inspired Bandung system. Amidst all this, Amin clearly spelt out the content of the new global socialist alternative distinct from the collapsed Soviet Union socialism grounded in (i) fundamental principles of democratisation, (ii) social progress, and (iii) solidarity and cooperation among peoples of the South within a context of a pluricentric world. At the centre of his proposed democratisation were to be the mobilised popular masses of trade unions, peasants, farmers and civil society – as fighting forces (Amin 1985; Amin 1990).
In a paradigmatic manner, when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were pushing for ‘structural adjustments’ of economies in Africa, Amin (1985) offered the ‘delinking’ thesis as the basis for building an autonomous development path and called for reconstruction of the world on the basis of polycentrism. He posed two important questions as he toyed with delinking: (i) could what I call delinking be the means of reconstructing the world on the basis of a genuine polycentrism?; and (ii) might it provide favourable conditions for a renaissance of a leftward evolution in the developed Western world, and thus lay the foundation for a renewal of internationalism of peoples and universalism? (Amin 1985, ix). He explained that delinking is not a form of ‘autarkic withdrawal’ but is about ‘subjecting the mutual relations between the various nations and regions of the whole of the planet to the varying imperatives of their own internal development’ (Amin 1985, xii). Amin (1985, xii) was opposed to what he termed ‘unilateral adjustment of the weakest to the strong’ and favoured ‘reciprocal adjustment’ based on humanism. He was also opposed to ‘exclusive bourgeois vision of the market’ (Amin 1985, xii).
But what gave Amin hope was the rise of such inter-class formations as the ‘World Social Forum’ and their slogans such as ‘the world is not for sale’ and ‘another world is possible’ (Amin 2008, 35–36). Amin stated that:
It is pleasing to see this positive transformation in the political activities of social strata that were often content to use their right to vote and the other means of representative democracy (lobbies, working through political parties and elected officials). (Amin 2008, 36)
Shortly before his death on 12 August 2018, Amin was working with Firoze Manji on a document aimed at guiding the process of creating a transnational alliance of working and oppressed peoples. In line with Amin’s Marxist analytical style, the document started by giving a scientific understanding of the current state of the modern world system and the capitalist economy. The first feature was ‘extreme concentration of power’ (making it a totalitarian system) which has led to the ‘domestication of the main right-wing and left-wing parties, as well as the unions and organizations of the so-called civil society’ (Amin and Manji 2019, 2). The second feature is the readiness of the present totalitarian world system to deliver ‘extreme violence as soon as the victims – the majority of workers and oppressed people – begin to revolt’ (Amin and Manji 2019, 2). The third feature is intensified scientific developments and technological innovations (information technology) aimed at rigorously subjecting all people to the logics of financial markets and profit maximisation. The fourth feature is the ‘new collective imperialism’ of the ‘triad’ (US, Western and Central European countries, and Japan), as opposed to the previous individual ‘national imperialisms’ of US, Britain, Japan, Germany, France and a few others that were formerly in permanent violent conflict (Amin and Manji 2019, 2). The guardian of the ‘new collective imperialism’ is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The fifth feature is that of five monopolies consisting of control of technology, global financial flows (through the banks, insurance cartels and pension funds of the centre), access to the planet’s natural resources, media and communications, and weapons of mass destruction – as benefiting the countries of the dominant triad (Amin 2019).
The next level of analysis focused on weaknesses of the struggles of the victims. The first is ‘extreme fragmentation of the struggles’ and their single-issue focus leading to their easy incorporation by the system that fosters the illusion of being reformed. The second is that the peoples in the zone of being (the rich global North) have ‘renounced international anti-imperialist solidarity’ and this has opened floodgates for humanitarian campaigns and aid programmes controlled by the capital of the monopolies. The third is the fact of a right-wing ideology which has gained support among the people (Amin and Manji 2019, 4). These weaknesses kicked in at a time when the world system is weakened by ecological crisis, the possibility of implosion of the European Union (EU) as a subsystem of the Eurocentric world system, and a terminal capitalist crisis manifesting itself in terms of stagnation in economic growth in the countries of the ‘triad’ (Amin and Manji 2019, 5). Amin and Manji (2019, 5) concluded with two reflections: first is that ‘We are now in the phase of the autumn of capitalism, without this being strengthened by the emergence of springtime of peoples and a socialist perspective’, and the second a call for a transnational alliance of workers and oppressed peoples:
This construction cannot be a remake of the internationals of the past – the Second, the Third, or the Fourth. It has to be founded on the other and new principles: an alliance of all working peoples of the world and not only those qualified as representatives of the proletariat (recognizing also that this definition is itself matter of debate), including all wage earners of the services, peasants, farmers, and peoples oppressed by modern capitalism. The construction must also be based on recognition and respect of diversity, whether of parties, trade unions, or other popular organizations in struggle, guaranteeing their real independence. (Amin and Manji 2019, 7)
To summarise, Marxist socialist internationalism is founded on the study of capitalist expropriation and exploitation of labour, and this analysis produced the materialist theory of history. It was augmented by Lenin with his conception of imperialism, the state, dictatorship of the proletariat and role of the party, continued by Leon Trotsky, and it informed struggles even outside Europe among peoples who experienced racial and class violence of the capitalist world system. Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar in Marxisms of the 21st century: crisis, critique and struggle (2013) correctly noted the resurgence of Marxist socialist internationalism particularly in the post-2008 global economic crisis. Michelle Williams (2013, 2) posited that the short-term triumphalism of neoliberalism, with its market fundamentalism, ‘wreaked havoc on the global economy as well as on livelihoods of the vast majority of peoples around the world, helping to reinvigorate Marxist scholarship in the twenty-first century’. The revival of Marxism under the banner of ‘twenty-first century socialism’ is linked to the enormous creativity of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial social movements taking the forms of feminism, ecological and indigenous traditions and their common slogans of ‘another world is possible’. What distinguishes ‘twenty-first century socialism’ is its openness to democratisation, egalitarianism and pluralism. Here, the Marxist socialist internationalism in its revived forms links with resurgent and insurgent pan-Africanist decolonisation internationalism of the 21st century.
The decolonisation of internationalism
Amin can best be described as a dedicated Marxist-internationalist, committed pan-Africanist, global South revolutionary activist, and indeed an advocate of decolonisation symbolised by his concept of delinking. Therefore, his intellectual contributions fed into the decolonisation as an international vision of liberation. Decolonisation as a liberatory vision is constituted by various anti-racism, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperial and anti-patriarchal forms of movements ranged against domination, exploitation and repression. Decolonisation has never been a monolithic and singular thought. The revolts against the hunting, kidnapping and reduction of African people into items of trade called ‘slaves’ laid the formative core of struggles against dehumanisation and indeed laid a foundation for decolonisation. It was within the context of critical reflections on enslavement and colonialism that Aimé Césaire posed what he termed the ‘tormenting question: who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?’ (Césaire cited in Thiam 2014, 2). These ‘tormenting questions’ reverberate at the centre of the pan-Africanist decolonisation as an international movement for liberation. Epistemically, the pan-Africanist decolonisation was underpinned by a black radical tradition and its ideological expression was black consciousness.
This is why when the Marx tradition concentrated on the rise of European workers’ class consciousness as the basis of revolutionary struggles and potential transformation of the world, Cedric Robinson ([1983] 2000) delved into black/African history and experience as the basis of revolutionary consciousness. To Robinson, the ‘radical tradition of the West’ including Marxism could not anticipate African revolutionary consciousness born out of their history and experience. This is why the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is always overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789 and the American Revolution (American war of independence of the white settlers against the British empire). But the Haitian Revolution was more revolutionary, as it was anti-systemic in its rejection of racism, slavery and colonialism by a people who were said to be slaves by nature and were pushed out of the human family. This is why Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 82) noted that the Haitian Revolution was ‘unthinkable’ in Western thought which, informed by Aristotle’s ideas, viewed black people as natural slaves.
This takes us to the limits of Eurocentric thinking in reflecting on non-European issues, including a brief critique of Amin’s work, which Afrocentric scholars considered to be stuck in Eurocentrism. For example, Ama Mazama (1995), who like Amin was critical of Eurocentrism as an exercise in self-glorification, is critical of Amin’s fidelity of universalism with its modernist origins. In a review of Amin’s celebrated work on Eurocentrism, Mazama pointed to Amin’s economistic reductionism which made him subordinate culture to economics and thus made him fail to problematise the super-structural phenomenon akin to Western Marxism. What provoked Mazama was that Amin defined Eurocentrism as ideological construct that is ‘capitalocentric’, and ignored its cultural aspects (Amin 1989). Therefore, Mazama introduced the key aspect of culture as primacy factor, positing that Amin missed this point because of thinking from a modernist Eurocentric Marxist framework. What is important about Mazama's intervention is that it brings us back into the epistemological framings of ontology but from the vantage point of Afrocentricity, thereby taking us to an understanding of enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism as fundamentally ‘a process of cultural domination and intellectual indoctrination through imposition of the European worldview’ (Mazama 1995, 763, 1998). This is an important critique which is directed at Western Marxism in general, which invariably led to the emergence of Black Marxism. To be fair to Amin, he was aware of the limits of Eurocentrism though he might have not appreciated the importance of culture.
What one can say is that without Eurocentric racism with its paradigm of difference, there would be no blackness and whiteness as opposed identities. Without white supremacy there would be no black consciousness as a counter-political formation to white domination and monopoly of being human. Black consciousness of being enslaved and colonised people produced pan-Africanism. Amin like all other Marxists was not too clear on the question of racism even though he embraced pan-Africanism as a necessary ideology ranged against imperialism and neo-colonialism. To Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasongo (1994, 109): ‘Pan-Africanism is, above all, an international phenomenon and, as such, it should deal with power and interest and their dynamics in the international arena: international political forums and international political economy.’ Without the shipping of African people as slaves to the Americas which created ‘continental’ and ‘diaspora’, and the Berlin consensus of 1884–1885 which concretised the scramble for Africa and resulted in the partition of the continent into colonies, pan-Africanism would not have arisen in the form it took. ‘Dismemberment’ provoked the need for ‘re-membering Africa’ (see Ngugi wa Thiong’o 2009). Such black and African figures as Marcus Garvey, William E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Steve Biko, Amílcar Cabral and many others adequately rose to the challenge of reimagining Africa. When Du Bois posited that the problem of the 20th century was the ‘race line’ and Nkrumah asserted that Africa was born inside him – they were sowing the seed for pan-Africanism and decolonial struggles (Mazrui 1963).
However, Amin’s intellectual interventions were critical of African petit-bourgeois politicians who were leading the decolonisation and pan-African struggles. For example, to Amin the celebrated Bandung Conference was another event led by the African and Asian petit-bourgeois who had imbibed Western thought and were even thinking about decolonisation from modernist bourgeois notions of development (Amin 2011, 77). Again, Amin brought the epistemological challenge to the fore of his critique, noting that the advocates of global South liberation were mentally imprisoned by conventional and classical economic thoughts and were unable to think beyond bourgeois ideas of progress. This is why it is ironic that Mazama (1995) criticised Amin for being Eurocentric, because Amin consistently mounted the same critique against African political elites. It was Amin who pointed to the limits of African national projects that failed to mobilise internal popular support and utilise endogenous knowledge to chart an autonomous development trajectory as well as being oblivious of imperialism and neo-colonialism (Amin 2011, 77). When Amin referred to endogenous knowledge, he was already taking into account culture.
At another level, Amin was not alone in keeping faith on universalism even with regard to decolonisation, pan-Africanism, and South–South solidarities. Gary Wilder (2015, 1), who studies Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, understood that the age of decolonisation was ‘a world-historical opening’ but that the realities of ‘anti-colonial nationalism, European neo-colonialism, American globalism, and UN internationalism made it appear to be a foregone conclusion that the post-war world would be organized around territorial nation states’. Amin was critical of territorial nationalism that was prescribed to the world by the Euro–North American imperialist and modernist world system. Amin supported the initiatives of the global South such as the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) and the concomitant demands for a New International World Order (NEIO) free from racial, power, economic, and development hierarchies while maintaining a consistent scepticism about the national bourgeois elites in charge of the territorial states (see Amin 1990).
Amin became one of the leading voices against neo-colonialism and underdevelopment even though it was Kwame Nkrumah who coined the term neo-colonialism in 1965. Neo-colonialism underscored the continuation of exploitative colonial relations after the attainment of ‘political independence’ (Nkrumah 1965). Amin became a leading thinker in the dependency school of the 1970s and it directly indicted the post-1945 modern world system and its United Nations global normative order which claimed to be for equality, human rights and self-determination of all nations – big and small (Amin 1977). Until his death in 2018, Amin never wavered in his confidence in the mobilisation of the oppressed people at a planetary scale against the equally planetary racial capitalist system and imperialism.
Conclusions: towards the construction of the pluriverse
Amin’s legacy enabled critical reflections on convergences of Marxism and decolonisation as planetary visions of liberation. Both the resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the 21st century and the democratic Marxism of the 21st century are very conscious of the traps of ‘anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism’ and well as coloniality. Neither Marxism nor decolonisation of the 21st century envisions an inclusive global system and global order which remains Eurocentric, imperial, patriarchal, sexist, racist, capitalist, and colonial, because such a configured modern world system would continue to generate not only conflicts but inequalities and poverty. However, since 2000, both Marxism and decolonisation have come face to face with the reality of ‘rewesternisation’, that is, Europe and North America in alliance with bourgeois elites of other parts of the world’s concerted effort not to lose the privileges acquired over the past five hundred years of imperial and colonial dominance. At the same time, the possibility of a ‘polycentric world’ as a precursor to a pluriversity was made possible by the emergence of dewesternisation, that is, an insurgent and resurgent heterogeneous set of responses cascading from the East led by China which are successfully disputing the unipolar character of the modern world system and its unilateral management of people and resources.
At the centre of rewesternisation and dewesternisation is a fierce struggle over the control of ‘colonial matrix of power’ rather than its destruction and decolonisation. Thus, the re-emergence of a Sinocentric world system led by China signals the looming end of Western hegemony but not the end of capitalism and coloniality. While dewesternisation is a necessary response, it is inadequate as it does not radically change the logics of capitalist operations. This is where Amin’s concept of delinking converges directly with decoloniality’s call for disengagement from ‘state forms of governance, from the economy of accumulation, and from the ego-centred personalities that both enact and reproduce Westernization’ (Mignolo 2018, xiii–xiv; Amin 1985). Escaping from the imperial and colonial mind-sets and frameworks of coloniality is the principal goal of decolonisation of the 21st century and the horizon is a pluriverse (a world where many worlds fit) (see Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018).
Finally, the convergence of the resurgent and insurgent ‘democratic Marxism’ of the 21st century and the equally resurgent and insurgent planetary decolonisation/decoloniality of the same century manifests itself in both formations taking into account the constantly changing historical conditions within a resilient racial capitalism and weakened Western hegemony to animate such planetary, multi-class and multi-racial movements as Black Lives Matter. Amin actively took part in the crafting of ‘The Bamako Appeal’ of 2006, with its aim to create a new popular, diverse and multi-polar historical subject. It was composed of eight principles enabling the emergence of a new historical subject: (i) a world based on solidarity among human beings and peoples; (ii) a world based on the full and complete affirmation of citizenship and equality of sexes; (iii) a universal civilisation that offers the greatest possibility for the creative development of diversity in all areas; (iv) socialisation through democracy; (v) a world based on the recognition of non-commodity status of nature; (vi) a world based on recognition of non-commodity status of cultural products; (vii) policies that closely combine democracy, social progress, and the affirmation of the autonomy of nations and peoples; and finally (viii) the solidarity of peoples of the North and South in construction of a new internationalism based on an anti-imperialist foundation (Amin 2008, 109–111).