Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (The United Nations University Third World Forum Studies in African Political Economy)

283 Pages·1990·1.34 MB·English

by  Samir Amin

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Mal-Development - Anatomy of a Global Failure

Table of contents

General Editor:
Samir Amin
THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY/THIRD WORLD FORUM
STUDIES IN AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY
The United Nations University's (UNU) Project on the Third World and World
Development aims to study contemporary global developments from the
perspective of the South: ongoing trends and structural changes in the
world-system are analysed in terms of their consequences for the different
regions of the third world and their implications for development strategies
and policy options that the developing countries can pursue, singly and
collectively through South-South co-operation. Through an interdisciplinary
and global comparative framework, the Project integrates the UNU's
previous research work on the regional perspectives of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America - research which has been undertaken over the last decade
and has involved, worldwide, hundreds of researchers organized into
regional networks. (The Studies in African Political Economy series grew out
of the work of the African regional network as part of an earlier UNU project,
Transnationalization or Nation-Building in Africa.) The comparative research
into the different regions' experiences of the 1980s provides a basis for
comprehending their expectations for the 1990s and for formulating
development strategies that would be fully cognizant of the changes that
hew occurred at all levels of the global system. Those changes have been
analyzed in this Project through five main themes: the process of
transnationalization, the crisis of states, the emergence of social
movements, the cultural dimension of contemporary developments, and
conflicts and the possibilities of co-operation in the third world.
TITLES IN THIS SERIES
M.L. Gakou
The Crisis in African Agriculture
1987
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Peter Anyang' Nyong'o (editor)
Popular Struggles for Democracy in Africa
1987
Samir Amin, Derrick Chitala, Ibbo Mandaza (editor)
SADCC: Prospects for Disengagement and Development in Southern Africa
1987
Faysal Yachir
The World Steel Industry Today
1988
Faysal Yachir
Mining in Africa Today: Strategies and Prospects
1988
Faysal Yachir
The Mediterranean: Between Autonomy and Dependency
1989
Azzam Mahjoub (editor)
Adjustment or Delinking? The African Experience
1990
Hamid Ait Amara, Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua (editor)
African Agriculture: The Critical Choices
1990
Samir Amin
Maldevelopment: Anatomy of A Global Failure
1990
Fawzy Manour
The Arab World Nation. State and Democracy
1990
THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY/THIRD WORLD FORUM
STUDIES IN AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY
United Nations University Press
Tokyo
Zed Books Ltd.
London and New Jersey
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Maldevelopment Anatomy of a Global Failure was first published in 1990 by:
Zed Books Ltd., 57 Caledonian Road, London N1 9BU, UK, and 171 First
Avenue, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey 07716, USA and:
United Nations University Press, The United Nations University, Toho Seimei
Building, IS-I Shibuya 2-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150, Japan in co-
operation with The Third World Forum, B.P. 3501, Dakar, Senegal.
Copyright © The United Nations University, 1990.
Translation by Michael Wolfers
Cover designed by Andrew Corbett.
Typeset by EMS Photosetters, Rochford, Essex.
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd. Guildford and
King's Lynn.
All rights reserved.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
Amin, Samir 1931
Maldevelopment: anatomy of a global failure. - (The United Nations
University/Third World Forum Studies in African Political Economy).
1. Economic development. Sociopolitical Aspects
1. Title II. Series
330 9
ISBN 0-86232-930-2
ISBN 0-86232-931-0 pbk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amin, Samir.
Maldevelopment: anatomy of a global failure/Samir Amin; translated from
the French by Michael Wolfers.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-86232-930-2. - ISBN 0-86232-931-0 (pbk.)
1. Developing countries - Economic policy.
2. Africa - Economic conditions - 1960 -
3. Economic history - 1971 - 1. Title.
HC59.7.A7777 1990
338.9'009172'4 dc20
89-70607
CIP
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Contents

Introduction: why a political analysis?
Notes
1. Africa's economic backwardness
Sources and methods for the analysis
South of the Sahara
The origins of Africa's agricultural failure
Analysing the exploitation of peasants
North Africa and the Arab world: from statism to comprador
capitalism
False analyses, false solutions
Conceptions of Africa's agricultural development: a critique
Industrialization and the agricultural revolution
Notes
2. The decade of drift: 1975-1985
The excitement of the Bandung plan (1955-73)2
The battle for a new international economic order (NIEO): 1974-
1980
Structural costs; the stakes; the struggle for the NIEO
Africa: from the Lagos plan (1980) to the world bank plan and the
United Nations Conference (1986)
Debt and the threat of a financial crash
The efforts of radical African nationalism: adjustment or delinking?6
Notes
3. The crisis of state
Nation-state and the ideology of nation in crisis'
Ethnicity: myth and reality
The cultural dimension of development in Africa and the third world
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The cultural dimension: the example of the crisis in the arab world
today - the end of the Nahda?7
New forms of the social movement
Notes
4. Complexities of international relations: Africa's vulnerability and
external intervention
African economies' vulnerability vis-à-vis the challenge of
capitalism's new worldwide expansion
Some specific aspects of Africa's economic integration in the world
system, ACP-EEC association and Euro-American mercantile conflict1
Special links with France: the Franc zone2
Evolution in Euro-Arab relations: interwoven economics and politics
Conflict and national and regional security in Africa
The Middle East conflict in a world perspective
Africa and the Arab world in the world system
Notes
5. Alternative development for Africa and the third world
Inequality in income distribution the centre and periphery1
The alternative: popular national development, social and political
democracy, delinking3
Obstacles to popular national, autocentric and delinked development
Notes
6. Political and social conditions for alternative development in the
third world
Impossibility of the bourgeois national state in the peripheries of the
world system1
Inequality in the worldwide expansion of capitalism; the state's
central role
The worldwide spread of value3
A return to the third world?4
The consequences of unequal development
The issue of democracy
The historical subject of the popular national option; the role of the
intelligentsia
Notes

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7. Inter-African and south-south co-operation
Pan-Africanism in the light of the colonial inheritance1
The problematic of the Arab nation2
Afro-arab co-operation3
Prospects for south-south co-operation4
Notes
8. A polycentric world favourable to development: a possibility?
The scope and stakes of the global crisis
Conservative forces' offensive
The difficulties of forecasting
The real options for the peoples of the West
Options for socialist societies and east-west relations
The genuine long-term option, transnationalization or a polycentric
world and broad autocentric regions
Conclusion: a crisis of transnationalization, ideology and
development theory
Notes

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Introduction: Why a Political Analysis?

Notes

If the 1960s were characterized by the great hope of seeing an irreversible
process of development launched throughout what came to be called the
Third World, and in Africa particularly, the present age is one of
disillusionment. Development has broken down, its theory is in crisis, its
ideology the subject of doubt. Agreement on failure in Africa is sadly
general. Opinions are more varied in regard to Asia and Latin America. Some
emphasize the economic successes of the newly industrializing countries,
such as South Korea, Brazil and India, and conclude that the only possible
development is one that intelligently succumbs to the increasing worldwide
expansion of all economies on the earth. These examples should be
followed, and the illusions of alternative paths to the transnational model
abandoned, since, in the meantime, socialism is itself in crisis in the
countries of the East, and the Third World countries who look to them for
inspiration, and the socialist countries themselves are obliged to yield to a
harrowing revisionism and are seeking reintegration in the expansion of a
world economy.
In this book it is proposed to analyse this failure of development from a
political stand-point, for discussion of the options in the framework of
macroeconomic schema provides no more than commonplace and
foreseeable findings. We must aim higher and integrate in the discussion all
the economic, political, social and cultural facets of the problem and at the
same time fit them into a local framework that takes account of interaction
on a world scale.
We acknowledge that this aim comes up against major theoretical
difficulties. Social reality as a whole has three facets: economic, political and
cultural. The economic aspect is perhaps the best known. In this field,
conventional economics has forged tools of immediate analysis and with
greater or lesser success of management of an advanced capitalist society.
Historical materialism has sought to plunge deeper and has often succeeded
in illuminating the character and extent of social struggles underlying the
economic choices.
The field of power and politics is relatively less known; and eclecticism in the
theories advanced shows the inadequate scientific mastery of the reality.
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Functional political thought, like its former or recent ingredients (geopolitics,
systems analysis, etc.) may sometimes be of immediate use in shaping
strategies but remains conceptually impoverished and does not warrant the
status of a critical theory. It is true that historical materialism provides a
hypothesis as to the organic relationship between the material base and the
political superstructure, and the hypothesis is fruitful if it is not too crudely
interpreted. The Marxist schools, however, have not conceptualized the issue
of power and politics (modes of domination) as they have the
categories(modes of production). The propositions in this direction, by
Freudian Marxists for example, have the undoubted merit of drawing
attention to neglected aspects of the issue but have not yet produced an
overall conceptual system. The field of politics lies virtually fallow.
It is not by chance that the first chapter of Volume One of Capital includes
the section entitled 'The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof.
Marx intends to unveil the mysteries of capitalist society, and the reason
why it appears to us as directly governed by economics, in the forefront of
the social scene and the determinant of the other social dimensions that
seem then to accommodate to its demands. Economic alienation thus
defines the essence of the ideology of capitalism. Conversely, pre-capitalist
class societies are governed by politics, which takes the forefront of the
stage and provide the constraints that other aspects of the social reality -
including economic life-seem bound to obey. If a theory of these societies
were to be written, the work would be entitled 'Power' (instead of capital for
the capitalist mode) and the opening chapter would deal with 'the fetishism
of power' (instead of the fetishism of commodities).
But no such work has been written. There is nothing analogous to the
clockwork precision with which the economic operation of capitalism has
been described. Marxism has not provided a theory of politics for pre-
capitalist society (and hence a theory of politics in general) as it has
provided a theory of capitalist economics. At best there are concrete
analyses of the relationship of politics and economics in such and such a
capitalist society (in Marx's political writings devoted particularly to the
vicissitudes of France) highlighting the degree of the autonomy of politics in
these circumstances and especially the conflict that may arise between the
logic of power and that of capitalist management.
As for the cultural dimension, it is an even more complex mystery, as
empirical observation of this aspect of reality (of religious faiths for example)
has so far yielded no more than intuitive forays. This explains why
discussion of the cultural dimensions of history remains imbued with
culturalism, meaning the tendency to treat cultural characteristics as trans-
historical constants. Furthermore, culture has no generally accepted
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