Introduction
Samir Amin was not exaggerating when he reminded Monthly Review readers in 2018, ‘from my PhD thesis in 1957 to my latest book, I have devoted my efforts to unequal development resulting from a globalized formulation of the law of accumulation’ (Amin 2018, 17). Producing a remarkable oeuvre of work around this central claim, Amin was an exemplary scholar-activist. I first became aware of his work through a professor’s reference to his intellectual and activist contributions to the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Amin began his two-year term as its Executive Secretary (1973–1975) the same year as the publication of Neo-colonialism in West Africa (hereafter NWA) in English by Monthly Review Press (1973). Six years later, as a senior in college, I bought the book at a sidewalk sale for $1.50 (the list price was $11.50). It was one of those bargains where you get much better than you hoped. At the twilight of the Carter years and on the brink of Reagan’s presidency, reading NWA was one of the things that helped me to begin to develop an alternative reading of the conventional scholarly, mainstream media, and US government accounts of the ‘problems’ of development facing the global South.
Twenty-five years after the publication of NWA, under the equally compelling influence of feminist theory, I used object relations theory and other feminist interpretive tools to analyse the way that Amin and dependency theorists more generally relied on gender in explanations of underdevelopment, obstacles facing the Third World, and prescriptions for achieving autocentric development (Scott 1995). In this essay, I reflect on how dependency theory and feminist theory both give powerful alternatives to modernisation theory and its heir, neoliberalism. While often operating singly, the possibility of a powerful conjunction continues to both tantalise and remain out of reach.
Two of Amin’s books, NWA and The implosion of contemporary capitalism (hereafter Implosion), serve as bookends for this chapter (1973, 2013). Spanning a 40-year period, a comparison and contrast of these books demonstrates that there were changes in Amin’s conceptualisation of core–periphery relations, and significantly less change to chart with respect to the relationship among women, gender and the reproduction of underdevelopment.
The article begins with Amin’s analysis of neocolonialism in West Africa, which remains a classic statement about the continuing significance of foreign aid and distorted economies, with a bleak prognosis should the region continue on its current trajectory. I argue that the Amin of NWA noticed gender in a number of instances but failed to recognise its significance. By the early 1980s, sustained feminist critique of regnant theories of modernisation and development had established a firm ground from which to engage theories of modernisation and development. One approach pointed to benefits gained by adding women to our understanding of development theory and practice. In order to demonstrate the arguments for adding women, I unpack two favourite Amin topics: delinking and the Chinese model of revolutionary development. The second angle of feminist criticism is in my 1995 work, which sought to dive deeper and suggested that the very categories of analysis in dependency theory contain social constructions of gender differences that relegate women and the household to the realm of tradition, something to overcome or conquer in order to achieve both capitalist modernisation and revolutionary, autocentric development. In general, autocentric development, for Amin and other dependency theorists, would entail significantly less reliance on the former colonial power to fund public finances, new and more varied external trading partners, investment in new types of agriculture, manufacturing for the home market, and significant investment in scientific and technical education. The political basis of autocentric development would necessarily shift from the post-colonial state structure to the popular classes of agricultural and industrial workers, traders, and artisans (see, for example, Kvangraven 2019, 641).
In what follows I compare NWA and Implosion and the way they both, though 40 years apart, notice gender without engaging in analysis of it, in the first case because gender and development barely existed as a category of analysis, and in the second case because it competed with class analysis. As an interlude, Amin’s discussions of delinking and China are shown to be amenable to gender analysis. The final section of the paper takes a more detailed look at the different iterations of women in development, and gender and development, in Amin’s work in order to point to some gendered gaps and deferrals in Amin’s theory of underdevelopment.
Dependency theory in West Africa
In NWA Amin developed a powerful thesis about the causes of underdevelopment in nine former French and two former British colonies.1 Ideas and arguments that would be in common use during the long career of (under)development theory appear throughout this work. Working as a scientific Marxist, Amin used empirical data to chart the operation of postcolonial underdevelopment, but what makes this a path-breaking work are the concepts he used to explain why the stage theories of development embraced by modernisation theorists were flawed.
There were three main observations about the dynamics of underdevelopment that Amin arrived at inductively from his analysis of the post-colony in West Africa. The first was that the highly touted development economics prescription, comparative advantage through the growth of the cash crop or mineral sector, was an economic dead end. International specialisation (or, as Amin put it in scare quotes, ‘international specialization’; 1973, 16) might produce economic growth spurts or even slightly prolonged growth but would always be hostage to international price fluctuations, and producers would have to rely increasingly upon state support for their continued survival. In sometimes-vivid language that enlivened the text, Amin warned of the limitations of export-led growth and the inevitable decline in the terms of trade between core and periphery. After calculating the difference in labour productivity between Senegalese peasants producing groundnuts and the increasing labour productivity in France, Amin declared the ‘“world market mechanism” a synonym for robbery’, because Senegal’s declining terms of trade would ensure the immiseration of groundnut producers (1973, 11). After comparing the prices herders and fishers could obtain in the domestic Senegalese market with that of groundnuts produced for export, the higher prices obtained by the herders and fishers further demonstrated how the lives of groundnut producers were permanently disadvantaged by ‘the mechanisms of domination expressed in the world market’ (1973, 25).
The only state that came close to a strategy envisioned by Amin was Nkrumah’s Ghana, which tried to develop industry and mining and planned the Volta Dam project as one step on a pathway to autonomous, self-generating development. In fact, Amin argued that ‘Nkrumah’s mistake was to not go far enough’, thereby ensuring opposition to his policies by the dominant cocoa-planting class (1973, 249). Nkrumah’s failure to mobilise the peasantry to support autocentric development weakened the government and increased its vulnerability, eventually leading to the 1966 military takeover.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some Latin American economists associated with the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) recommended diversification of the peripheral economy through light import-substitution industrialisation. Amin’s second observation was that while perhaps offering possibilities in the Latin American context, packing, canning, brewing, palm oil processing, shoe factories and brick making, in Amin’s discerning analysis, were in fact signs of a disarticulated economy, a ‘truly underdeveloped country’ (1973, 169). Countries where import substitution was barely perceptible tended to rely on a single product: bauxite in Guinea and iron ore in Mauritania, for example, where the reliance on foreign aid and investment was the most glaring (1973, 79, 86). Amin found little structural difference between the colonial and postcolonial periods in the economies in the region, and insightfully pointed out that even in the face of overwhelming evidence of continuing stagnation in Senegal, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) still proposed a ‘renewed advance down this same blind alley’, which promised continued vulnerability to world markets (1973, 27). As the face of modernisation theory at work in West Africa, the IBRD had a keen interest in validating modernisation theory-inspired growth strategies. Fourteen years after the publication of NWA, Amin summarised the (in)famous World Bank Berg Report as yet another endorsement of the weaknesses of West African strategies of development he had already identified over a decade before: export-oriented industry, low wages, dependence on minerals, and import substitution industrialisation targeting the middle classes ‘at the expense of rural and urban popular classes’ (Amin 1987, x).
A third theme found throughout NWA was the disadvantage bequeathed to West Africa by colonial boundaries. The defeat of the Mali Federation by the Ivory Coast and French colonial administration sealed the isolation of Dahomey, and it ‘never recovered from this balkanization’ (1973, 110). Just as crop and mineral export specialisation and reliance on external financing resembled the ‘colonial growth strategy’ adopted by the region’s post-colonial states, balkanisation suited colonial dictates as well (1973, 163). Amin, like Frantz Fanon, recognised that balkanisation was perhaps the most significant colonial legacy facing the region. The problems of balkanisation and market size appear for the first time on page 19, and the drawbacks of divided markets figure in nearly all of Amin’s subsequent analysis. In fact, Amin concluded his study by noting, ‘It can never be emphasized enough that the overriding obstacle to development is the division of the area into nine states’ (1973, 273).
By 1973 Amin was in the thick of debates with modernisation theorists about development, particularly the alleged economic miracle in the Ivory Coast. He had already published Le développement du capitalisme en Côte d’Ivoire in 1967, with the theme of ‘growth without development’ heavily featured. In 1973, he took up considerable space in NWA to criticise the ‘contemporary miracle’ there (1973, 50). After pointing out the wildly optimistic reports issued by the government and international institutions, Amin explained why the goals were impossible to reach. The rural bourgeoisie of cocoa and coffee planters was ‘not progressive’ (1973, 62). The state remained highly dependent on foreign, particularly French, capital, and the plantation economy had yet to allow the country to achieve independence in food production. Amin concluded that the Ivory Coast represented, borrowing a phrase from Andre Gundar Frank, the ‘development of underdevelopment’, and predicted a deepening of underdevelopment if the state continued its export-oriented strategy.
The acuity of Amin’s analysis is noteworthy. By the early 1970s he had defined the meaning of what he would later call autocentric development. If Ghana had continued Volta Dam-based development it could have prevented disarticulation between the urban and rural sectors. If the Ivory Coast had invested in manufacturing instead of coffee plantations, Ivoirians would not have remained dependent on foreign imports. Economies of scale would have enabled states in the region to lessen their dependence on the former coloniser. Furthermore, there are a number of timely trends that Amin spotted nearly 50 years ago that were quite prescient. The region’s population was 32 million at the time of writing NWA, with 13% of the population living in urban areas. Amin predicted that the urban population would grow to 20% by 1993. According to United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR) 2018 data, the 1995 urban population in the 11 countries averaged 32.4% of the entire population in each country (UNHCR 2018). Amin comments on the significance of immigrants to many West African economies, too. Labour migration was inherent in the balkanisation of the region, with workers in Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), for example, immigrating to Ivory Coast for work on the plantations (‘a manpower reservoir for the Ivory Coast’; 1973, 139). Today’s significant movements of people around the region derive from both economic conditions and intercommunal violence, the latter downplayed because of the overwhelming focus of the book on political economy.
As Amin continued to pursue his analysis of dependency, working for the Mali government and then founding CODESRIA and working from Senegal, a number of scholars found fault with various components of his project. Modernisation theorists, of course, disagreed at both descriptive and prescriptive levels. Authors such as Richard Stryker (in a review of NWA in 1976) advised Amin to use more reliable data from the World Bank to make his argument, a criticism often made by supporters of the status quo, and characterised his overall approach as ‘a deterministic commitment’ to neo-Marxist analysis (Stryker 1976, 161). According to Stryker, Amin used dubious data to make his claims, and the recommendation to delink from the global economy was impractical and dangerous. Those using a radical approach found aspects of Amin’s work to criticise as well. Smith criticised Amin’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s as static and guilty of ignoring the bargaining power of some less-developed countries (Smith 1980, 18). Marxists took issue with Amin’s ‘unequal exchange’ thesis, especially the claim that the working class in the core benefited from the exploitation of peasants and workers in the periphery (Hensman 1976, 604). While in some respects apropos, my discussion turns now to the issue of women and gender and Amin’s understanding of both through the lens of class.
Noticing but not recognising gender?
There are several tantalisingly brief references to women in NWA.2 In one of the many discussions about immigrants contributing to various national economies, Amin noted (1973, 44) that 340,000 women ‘foreigners’ (and 490,000 men) worked on cocoa plantations in Ghana, although it is impossible to know whether they were from Togo, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) or Nigeria. Interestingly, Amin commented that ethnic origins no longer affected the political consciousness of these workers. While he failed to comment on the persistence of gender identity, subsequent research would explore whether and how gender identity affected the political consciousness of women workers in West Africa as well as variations in the ways in which ruling parties mobilised women to vote, especially in Guinea (Schmidt 2002). Amin also observed that women in Ghana, Togo and Dahomey (Benin) played a key role in both retail and wholesale trade (1973, 114). This observation presaged later work by anthropologists such as Gracia Clark on the lives of women traders in Ghana that gave a vivid and painstaking account of the crucial role they play in the local and international economy (Clark 1994). In a discussion of educational progress in Senegal, Amin recorded that 9.5% of the men and 0.6% of the women spoke French, and in Abidjan men between 15 and 60 years of age made up 33% of the population, as compared with 25% for women in the same age range (1973, 160, 53). The explosion of data collection and the construction of various indexes, such as the UNHDR, would later chronicle the persistence in inequality of access for women throughout the world when it comes to education, healthcare and a host of other benefits, while Amin’s succession of detailed statistics on the economies of West Africa in NWA undertook no such disaggregation. It is intriguing to consider what Amin made of these various observations on women as migrant workers, urban dwellers, traders and French speakers, but it would be conjecture because they are observations made without note or further scrutiny.
Writing around the same time, O’Laughlin (1975, 364) suggested that a fuller analysis would explore the articulations of more than one mode of production (interestingly, one might consider dominant and ‘accessory’ modes of production). As Amin would continue to insist, O’Laughlin argued that it was capital, not men, that appropriated the surplus labour of women (1975, 366). Nevertheless, her argument that articulations between multiple modes of production (a dominant and accessory one) pointed to new directions in the analysis of articulations between gender and class in the periphery.
Fast forward to 2013. In Implosion, Amin defined the operations of generalised monopoly capitalism, explored the national challenges to its operations, and discussed the possibilities of its demise. Firmly rejecting the discourses of globalisation, humanitarianism and post-industrial society, Amin described the world of monopoly capitalism dominated by a ‘financial aristocracy’ of the Triad (the United States, Europe and Japan) that required centralisation of power, backed by force, to continue to realise profits (2013, 27, 37). Elsewhere in Implosion, Amin argued that the ‘duty to intervene’ and ‘democracy’ are discourses designed to secure consent for imperialism in the Triad and not humanitarian motives (2013, 10). The remonstrance to the optimism of sanguine modernisation theory echoes the 1973 study of West Africa, and in 2013 Amin called modernisation a case of ‘lumpen-development’ – that is, ‘the product of accelerated social disintegration associated with the “development model” (which does not deserve its name) imposed by the monopolies from the imperialist core on the peripheral societies they dominate’ (2013, 47). Amin contrasted lumpen-development with the concept of ‘emergent states’: those countries that could challenge domination by the Triadic core. Only China qualified as a genuine emergent state, with promising starts made by Turkey, Iran and Egypt. China’s status warranted a separate chapter, and Amin argued the reverse of received wisdom: it was China’s enormous success in developing its sui generis model of development that attracted foreign capital and not foreign capital that nurtured China’s development (2013, 76). Unlike Ghana, in other words, China had been able to dictate the terms of its interactions with the global economy. Thanks to its achievements in building an integrated industrial economy, a diversity of ownership patterns in the rural areas, and foremost, perhaps, its success in remaining outside of contemporary financial globalisation, China was able to undertake ‘sovereign projects that initiate a true rupture with the logic of dominant capitalism’ (2013, 76, 80).
Interestingly, there are about as many references to work, women and gender in the 2013 book as there were in 1973 in NWA. In the context of discussing Iran’s struggle for independence from monopoly capitalism, Amin found merit in Pahlavi's (1921–1979) efforts at conservative revolution, which included the ‘modernization of morals (especially toward women)’, while Islamic victors in the 1979 revolution were reactionaries, not only in their ‘cultural approaches (women are veiled)’, but in their false claims to be modernising (2013, 53). While the female marriage age was raised, and more women were in the workforce, ‘Modernity, not to mention emancipation, requires much more’ (2013, 54). The reader can speculate on the parenthetical references to women as well as exactly what modernity would require. In the discussion of China’s successes, Amin alluded to the ‘furious pace of workshops that employ women’, a signal of the extent to which women’s low-paid labour fuelled China’s extraordinary modernisation drive (2013, 71). By 2013, there was extensive documentation of working conditions for women in what many scholars have described as sweatshops rather than innocuous-sounding ‘workshops’. The appropriation of women’s labour power by the state, and the household relationships that made migration for work common for women, were not central to Amin’s understanding of China’s modernisation drive, and it is worth asking why this was the case. The gains from women’s labour benefited both China and the global capitalist system, a point that a number of feminist political economists were making before and after the publication of Implosion (see for example Mezzadri 2014; Ossome 2015).
In fact, while Amin did directly address women, gender and development in 2013, the comparison between 1973 and 2013 suggests the limits of his analysis. The standpoint for understanding the subject of both dependency and lumpen-development as well as revolutionary change remained the male worker or peasant. Rather than extending and strengthening his analysis through a study of the role of unwaged labour and the legacy of the colonial capitalist sexual division of labour, Amin in effect argues ‘of course women are included’, and leaves it at that, making him vulnerable to continued criticism and challenge when it comes to the exploitation of women and the invisibility of gender dynamics in dependency analysis.
By 2013, Amin’s foe was something he called ‘postmodernist chatter’, led by those who gave unwarranted attention to social movements rather than classes, activism against state power rather than class struggle, and proclamations about the new knowledge economy instead of the operations of capitalism. In the course of criticising postmodernism, he mentioned that a misplaced focus on ‘individualism’ elevated categories such as ‘The Citizen’ of civil society or ‘a generic category (women) … to the rank of transformative social actors’ (2013, 11–12). In offering a vision of socialist democratisation opposing Dahl’s polyarchy, at the end of Implosion he wrote that authentic democratisation would ‘integrate the major issues of gender as well as the guarantee of individual liberties’ (2013, 128). It would be helpful to know how this integration might take place.
Amin’s continued insistence on the primacy of class is evident in his 2016 contribution to Monthly Review. In the course of interpreting Marx’s Capital, Amin impatiently alluded to Implosion, where, he claims, he already addressed the ‘segmentation’ of the working class, as if he had already explored the complexities and intersections of class, race and gender. This is telling. In fact, the first chapter of Implosion on the ‘Knowledge Economy’ and ‘Civil Society’ lambasted analysts who insisted on seeing a ‘diversity of interests within’ the working class (2013, 32). Undue attention given to gender, race and ethnicity had weakened the possibility of revolution in the periphery. Three years later, in the Monthly Review consideration of Capital, Amin was again compelled to address gender and environmental questions that invariably are important in imagining a socialist future. When it comes to gender and ecology, Amin wrote, ‘Let me be clear that I do not believe these are minor problems, far from it.’ His elaboration is worth quoting:
Furthermore, it is unfortunately true historically that socialist movements have rarely acknowledged the central importance of relations between men and women … . No, struggles on these two fronts are inseparable. No social advance is possible without a simultaneous advance in gender relations, at each stage of humanity’s movement towards emancipation. No solid advance will be possible without articulation of all struggles in a conscious, overall movement that would then be capable of attacking and destroying the fortress of generalized monopoly capitalism. (Amin 2016, 144)
Delinking and China
A closer examination of two of Amin’s core concepts can help locate the blind spots that persisted in spite of glancing references to household labour. The concept of delinking is central to Amin’s vision of a world beyond capitalism. Delinking entails removing the state from the operations of global monopoly capitalism and presumably would necessarily entail extensive popular mobilisation of the kind envisioned by Fanon in The wretched of the earth (2004). As Kvangraven describes it, delinking would require giving priority to the needs of the people rather than the demands of international capital (2019, 641). Like Marx, Amin respected the specificity and variation of local struggles and therefore did not bequeath a recipe for revolution. In 1987 he wrote that delinking would have a ‘national foundation and a popular content’, with references to generic rural and urban workers, peasants and middle classes but no references to women or gender relations (Amin 1987, 436).
If a gender revolution unfolded in tandem with delinking, then there should be a discussion about how a revolution in the relations of the household might occur. First, women’s ideas are often the least likely to be heard, not because they are not worth a hearing, but because of the identity of the person who came up with them. There would need to be some mechanism that would make space for women’s voices, as a revolution that included strategies derived from all of the best ideas would be a more successful revolution. Second, no revolutionary movement can succeed without collective solidarity, and collective solidarity requires participatory movement building. In the course of constructing a more egalitarian world that takes gender into account, men’s ideas and demands could change through the experience of collective struggle. An iterative process of reconciling the views of men and women with a collective intent would ensure that the space for transformation exists. Third, if decisions will affect the lives of everyone in the household, then decisions need everyone’s participation. Democratising decision-making legitimises and democratises. Without such revolutionary modifications in gender relations, gender equity continues to belong to an imagined future of socialist egalitarianism. To extend Amin’s analogy, a lack of progress in addressing non- or poorly remunerated labour calls for a revolution in gender relations: a militant refusal to do reproductive care in the absence of shared labour, and a sexual strike as well. Smith and Sender recognised aspects of the critique offered here 35 years ago. Lamenting Amin’s failure to discuss strategic and tactical questions in the drive for socialism, they asked a series of questions, including ‘how can gender relations begin to be reconstructed? … how can prefigurative forms of organization begin to demonstrate to a wide popular base the positive superiority of socialism?’ (Smith and Sender 1983, 654, 656). Democracy, then, would include both ‘the organizing of society free from the alienating submission to the demands of the accumulation of capital’ and freedom from the alienating demands of patriarchy (Amin 2004, 8).
The case of China was of continuing importance to Amin. In The implosion of contemporary capitalism he devotes an entire chapter to the country that has been ‘following an original path since 1950’ (2013, 65). The economic reforms of the 1980s, such as the Household Responsibility System (HRS) in the rural areas and the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Amin maintains, were actually nationalistic policies of protectionism and statism. They allowed China the space to introduce economic reforms and set the terms of its participation in the global economy. Amin described Chinese state capitalism as operating according to some of the principles of capitalism: ‘Brutal forms of extreme exploitation workers exist in China, for example, in the coal mines and in the furious pace of the workshops that employ women’ (2013, 71). Such practices are inevitable, Amin points out, on the long road to socialism. Meanwhile, as those Chinese women work furiously in FoxConn workshops, Amin lauded what Chinese capitalism has achieved between 1950 and 2012 as ‘quite simply amazing’ (2013, 72). Feminist analyses of China’s impressive achievements in some respects echo Amin’s laudatory description of China’s development model. Summerfield, for example, takes into account the growth of income that benefited all members of rural households in China, especially when it comes to expanding and improving homes (Summerfield 2006, 142). Yet, despite the drop in absolute overall poverty, women in the rural areas remain the primary caregivers for children and in-laws, keeping house, and raising chickens and hogs (Summerfield 2006, 151). In the urban areas, non-governmental organisations in China have documented the punitive and exploitative conditions faced by women in the workplace (Chan 2006, 20). Amin’s claim that the ‘social dimension’ of China’s modernisation project – that is, basic healthcare and the eradication of illiteracy – has ‘won back its place’, after years of neglect, is dubious in light of the consistent failure of the Chinese government to address occupational illnesses, low wages and the absence of labour contracts among Chinese women workers (Amin 2013, 74; Chan 2006, 21).
The phases of feminist engagement with Amin
In 1992, Colette Harris criticised Amin’s Maldevelopment: anatomy of a global failure (1990) on a number of familiar counts, chiefly the implicit assumption shared by Amin and many other dependency theorists that the poverty reproduced by neocolonialism made all in the periphery poor, which in turn assumes that men’s and women’s interests are identical and that little is gained by disaggregating categories on the basis of religion, race, sex or ethnicity (Harris 1992). Also underlying this theoretical claim (made by Marx and Engels in The communist manifesto) is the assumption that urbanisation and industrialisation dissolve competing identities, with every worker embracing class identity as the economy industrialised. Amin’s focus on class is evident throughout the 40-year arc between NWA and Implosion. In 1973 he ridiculed the claim by Hoiphouet Boigny and the Ivory Coast Democratic Party that ‘classes do not exist in the Ivory Coast’, and claimed that before the inexorable deepening of dependence in Ghana and Senegal, there had been a ‘virtual disappearance of tribalism’ (79). It is likely that Amin would make a similar argument with regard to the women he noticed in 1973, working on plantations, migrating to the urban areas, learning French and actively engaging in trade.
NWA had extensively documented evidence in charts at the end of each chapter about the ‘growth without development’ under way in West Africa. Recognising gender would entail disaggregating many of those charts, according to Harris’s argument, because ‘patriarchy is missing from his theoretical framework’, and reflected the fact that ‘Mr. Amin has no conceptual base for incorporating women into his analysis’ (Harris 1992, 260). One can use Harris’s critique to reimagine Amin’s charts in NWA. What would become widely known as the feminisation of poverty, caused by lower wages, divorce, abandonment, and notably, migration were probably evident in the early 1970s (Harris 1992, 262). Table 8 in NWA (Amin 1973, 68) notes the increase in emigration from the north and defines it as ‘People born in the north who have made their homes in the south.’ Amin’s observation about fewer women knowing French was already part of a larger pattern of educational discrimination. This would no doubt also be the case if the data on the composition of Senegal’s civil service were disaggregated along gender lines (79). One major factor accounting for the pattern is that women perform reproductive care in the household (Harris 1992, 262). Harris points to differential health outcomes for women, while Amin does not assess health outcomes for either men or women. While Amin took note of urbanisation and the limits on job creation through import substitution, he did not examine the consequences of predominantly male migration on rural households headed by women. Finally, the centrepiece of Amin’s analysis was the empirical demonstration that cash crop production and mineral extraction had a detrimental impact on local food production, which in turn produced greater reliance on imported food. Amin failed to explore Harris’s point about the effects of cash crop and mineral economies on subsistence agriculture, often the responsibility of women. As Harris notes, ‘Official labor statistics tend to concentrate on men’s work and omit much of women’s work with the result that little emphasis has been given to the relation of the treatment of women to falling food production’ (Harris 1992, 274). The deterioration in the terms of trade, the increasing reliance on imports, growing costlier by the year, the slow growth in the production of food crops, and declining investments in agriculture, would all likely have differential, and usually worse, effects on women. Amin did recognise some of these dynamics, but not through systematic analysis. The concession about how ‘it is unfortunately true historically that socialist movements have rarely acknowledged the central importance of relations between men and women’ is made in the context of also claiming that the ‘center of gravity of struggles’ – that is, class struggle – ‘is displaced towards fields of action viewed as critical for certain aspects of social life’ (Amin 2016, 143–144). If the latter indeed are not minor problems, then why not undertake systematic, extensive study of them?
To be fair to Amin, many of the feminist criticisms of his work make assumptions with which he would vehemently disagree. That is, many of the criticisms generally legitimise the development project, and then argue for integrating women into those projects as a matter of equity, justice, and fairness. In other words, Harris and others take either the WID (women in development) or WAD (women and development) perspective, the former a Boserupian strategy of including women in development planning, and the latter calling for an examination of household politics that ensure women’s continued subordination in all spheres of life. For Amin, neocolonialism, imperialism and monopoly capitalism guarantee that mainstream development strategies ensure the reproduction of poverty. As Bush states in his appreciation of Amin’s contributions in Review of African Political Economy, ‘monopoly capital controls everything, all sectors of life which have now reduced to zero the relative autonomy of agriculture and industry to the gains of imperialist monopoly rent’ (Bush 2018, 369). To argue for the further inclusion of women into this system is to accept within-system premises that development is a matter of giving more women greater access to education, employment, technology and healthcare. Greater access in a system controlled by a global structure designed to ensure the further impoverishment of the periphery provides little promise of radical political change. After all, for example, the World Bank offered ‘Voices of the Poor’ studies in 2000 that purported to capture the experiences of those on the receiving end of development, and there was little structural change in the global system as a result. Access does not necessarily end exploitation. Furthermore, gaining access is often available only to the wealthy, and gaining access for the few often legitimises the system itself; it offers to remedy design flaws rather than usher in significant political change. Harris’s claims that Amin’s definition of maldeveloped is itself maldeveloped implies that if Amin simply counted women’s reproductive labour in calculations of surplus value the calculations would be more accurate and complete and therefore a better guide to development. Amin criticises WID in his evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals. Goal 3, he notes, reduces gender equality to access to education and the proportion of wage-earning women (Amin 2006). Furthermore, Amin argues it is the ‘neoconservative fundamentalists of the United States, Poland, and elsewhere, the Muslims of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other countries, and the fundamentalist Hindus [who] agree on eliminating any reference to the rights of women and the family’ (Amin 2006, 3). It is not only neoconservative fundamentalists who object to a discussion of women’s rights and the family, however. Secular men all over the world both benefit from women’s unpaid labour and often evade responsibility for gender subordination by blaming religious conservatives.
It is worth asking about the extent to which Amin considered the specificity of women’s experience and gender politics as in some respects resonant with the problems he found with social movements such as neoconservative fundamentalism. As a thought experiment, one could construct an Amin-inspired continuum of the obstacles to the realisation of revolution and delinking (discussed below). Keeping in mind that there are qualitative differences along each point of the continuum, in terms of both type and degree of obstacle, at one end would be the forces of generalised monopoly capitalism, along with militarised US hegemony that keeps the system in place. At the other end would be those militant movements in the periphery based in ‘wide popular mobilization’, and ‘the acquisition of suitable combat equipment and techniques’ capable of successfully removing the nation from the operations of the global capitalist system and then successfully engaging with that system from a position of strength (Amin 2018, 263). Between these extremes of generalised monopoly capitalism and thoroughgoing revolution would lie a number of different diversions and distractions, some salutary and others reactionary and dangerous. When it came to political Islam, for example, Natasha Shivji summarised Amin’s views as follows: ‘Political Islam, at best, was a cultural project that concealed the class character of our societies, that if given the chance would act as all purely cultural projects have acted historically, reactionary and against the oppressed masses’ (Shivji 2018, 369). In a 2012 interview Amin called the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt ‘ultra-reactionary’, because it sided with the authoritarian Egyptian state in its attacks on workers, some peasants, and significantly, favoured the market, global capitalism, and US military hegemony (Hui, Tiejun and Kin Chi 2012, 170). According to Amin, Hardt and Negri substituted a diverse multitude for the proletariat and Empire for imperialism, thereby diverting attention from the proper focus of analysis (Amin 2014, 30–31). Likewise, Amin found the topic of feminism and gender of lesser importance or a distraction from the ‘real’ axis of class struggle. Follow the logic of this excerpt from 2018:
Yet all these achievements [of modernization] have been marked and limited by capitalism’s class nature. The ‘free’ individual is in fact nothing more than ‘a well-off male bourgeoisie’, while the persisting patriarchate has kept most of the female half of humanity in subordinate positions. In the opulent centres of the system, capitalism has no longer much to offer beyond a consumerism that is alienating and destructive and of the relationships of human fraternity, blocking the genuine emancipation of women, and the liberating dimension of the practice of democracy. (Amin 2018, 260, emphasis added)
Diving deeper
Amin noticed women in West Africa in the early 1970s. Just like men, they were vulnerable to the continued operations of exploitative capitalism in the former colonies. In some respects, Amin’s theoretical perspective rests on a thin ontology for both men and women. The worker described in NWA, whether located in mineral production, light industry, cash crop production or foreign investment, seems to have no family, home or identity – a subaltern that indeed does not speak (Spivak 1988). In a revealing passage on post-colonial Mali, Amin described the broken alliance between the ‘little urban bureaucracy’ and the ‘micro-bourgeoisie of traders’, that produced internal struggles among the ‘new elite’, while the peasants who had provided nationalist power for anti-colonialism ‘looked on passively’ (NWA, 133). While there are references to ‘Niger peasants’, ‘Hausa traders’, and the ‘rural bourgeoisie’ in the Ivory Coast, they are all passively part of a stagnant regional economy. The word ‘industry’ hardly applies to Mauritania, for example (NWA, 79). The debate about the Ivory Coast economic miracle was unnecessary because ‘by the late 1950s, the country’s economy presented all of the structural characteristics of underdevelopment’ (NWA, 45).
A fuller recognition of gender’s place in the mode of production would have opened new vistas that were explored later by a number of scholars. The maintenance of gender hierarchies, for example, can impede the development of class consciousness and class solidarity, as Naidu and Ossome have pointed out in the case of South Africa and India (2018, 342). Mezzadri’s work on regimes of sweatshop labour suggests that global capitalism reacts with different, local ‘classes of labor’, and contributes to our understanding of global capitalism’s local manifestations along the axes of both gender and class (2014, 339). Rather than obscuring the operation of class, gender provides a valuable lens for explaining the operations of peripheral capitalism without having to decide a priori which factor should be given greater significance. The abstract worker would thus become a more fully realised subject located in systems of local gender and class that articulate in complicated ways with global capitalism.
Amin’s flat, vague descriptions are not Eurocentric, Orientalist or racist but rather an effort to debunk modernisation theory assumptions and teleology about how the stages of economic development in the periphery can take place through comparative advantage, foreign aid and import substitution industrialisation. In the course of making this claim, however, Amin’s canvas of West Africa is notably inert, rendered as perpetually disadvantaged labour power. Empiricist accounts of dependency such as Amin’s took part in a representational politics, inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism, that paradoxically concurred with modernisation theory that poor countries must accumulate the resources to embark on industrialisation through domestic savings, embrace education and deemphasise traditional, local practices, and subject development strategies to rigorous, social scientific models in order to guide successful policymaking. In the course of dissecting Amin’s call for autocentrism and delinking, Arturo Escobar alluded to prescriptions that are ‘written in a universalistic mode and a realist epistemology’ (Escobar 1995, 100). Escobar’s criticism also applies to modernisation theory, which considered Rostow's stages of growth to be a universal path to modernity and had great confidence in bringing an objectivist, independent stance towards understanding the causes of underdevelopment. Escobar’s larger point, however, was that most theories about development and underdevelopment were as much discursive and representational as they were empiricist and scientific. Moreover, how are Third World countries constituted in Amin’s theories of unequal development? Until Third World countries brought modern techniques to both rural and urban life, they would remain, in Amin’s words, the ‘passive subjects of globalization’ (Amin 2004, 13).
Passive, inert, helpless. To what extent are dependency theory categories anchored in pervasive social constructions of gender and gender difference? I began asking this question inchoately in the 1980s, in the context of theories of Hyden’s characterisation of the ‘soft state’, which posited the engulfing power of ‘economies of affection’ resistant to the forces of state strengthening, a prerequisite for development (Hyden 1983). Engagement with the soft state literature prompted a return to the classics of dependency theory, including Amin’s 1974 two-volume Accumulation on a world scale. While politically and prescriptively far apart from modernisation theory, Amin still characterised the traditional sector as an unproductive obstruction to the development of an economy with its own ‘independent dynamics’ (Amin 1974, 32, 35–36). The traditional sector, on the other hand, constituted a realm of necessity, what feminist political philosophers described as ‘mere energy’ expended to meet basic needs and reproduce the species (DiStefano 1991, 124). NWA reads differently with this new lens. Neglect of the traditional, ‘primitive’ techniques, the site of the household and its primary attachments, could not constitute a new centre of gravity in the postcolony (Amin 1974, 28).
Deeply anchored gender dichotomies help us understand why Amin’s advocacy of delinking neglects household politics as well as politics in the public sphere. In addition, as revolutionary as China has been since 1949, it also serves as a case study of how revolutionary movements systematically postpone and equivocate about women’s status in the post-revolutionary period. While professing the priority of class, Amin and other dependency theorists convey deeper preoccupations with gender. To what extent does the image of nationalist popular development replicate deeper concerns about the traditional (and feminine) drag on autocentric development, a term that favours breaking out of global hierarchies as well as domestic obstacles to revolutionary action?
Amin would no doubt challenge this interpretation of his work. It does offer, however, one way of addressing the puzzle of how to notice yet fail to recognise the ongoing significance of women and gender in modernisation, development and dependency. While Amin’s critique of including women in development has merit, his insistence, from 1973 until 2013, that women be included as workers in his theory of revolutionary development continues to defer questions about the interactions of gender and class rather than class politics alone.