Samir Amin on the Future of Global Capitalism

The following brilliant article by Samir Amin was published electronically
by Al Ahram in Cairo in English:

http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/

Another article from Samir Amin you find in our book:

Global Capitalism, Liberation Theology, and the Social Sciences : An
Analysis of the Contradictions of Modernity at the Turn of the Millennium 
by Andreas Muller (Editor), Arno Tausch (Editor), Paul M. Zulehner (Editor) 

 Our Price: $69.00



Hardcover (April 2000) 
Nova Science Publishers, Inc.; ISBN: 1560726792 
This item is published in April 2000. You may order it now and we will ship
it to you when it arrives. 


Book Description 

At a time of the profound crisis of the world capitalist system, a group of
social scientists and theologians takes up anew the issue of liberation
theology. Having arisen out of the struggle of the poor Churches in the
world's South, its pros and cons dominated the discourse of the Churches
throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Then, dependency theory was
considered to be the analytical tool at the basis of liberation theology.
But the world economy - since the Fall of the Berlin Wall - has dramatically
changed to become a truly globalized capitalist system in the 1990s. Even in
their wildest imaginations, social scientists from the dependency tradition
and theologians alike would not have predicted for example the elementary
force of the Asian and the Russian crisis of today. The Walls have gone, but
poverty and social polarization spread to the center countries. After having
initially rejected Marxist ideology in many of the liberation theology
documents, the Vatican and many other Christian Church institutions moved
forward in the 1980s and 1990s to strongly declare their "preferential
option for the poor". Now, the authors of this book, among them Samir Amin,
one of the founders of the world system approach, take up the issues of this
preferential option anew and arrive at an ecumenical vision of the dialogue
between theology and world system theory at the turn of the new millenium. 




Please enjoy the reading.

Arno Tausch

Al-Ahram Weekly
30 Dec. 1999 - 5 Jan. 2000
Issue No. 462   
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875   
20th century Special issue  [INDEX] 


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Not a happy ending
 

Globalisation and the market were celebrated as 'the end of history' at the
beginning of this century, just as they are being celebrated today, at its
conclusion. This is not a case of history repeating itself, however, writes
Samir Amin. And capitalism's contradictions are sharper today than ever
before 
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THE BELLE ÉPOQUE: The 19th century came to a close in an atmosphere
astonishingly reminiscent of that which had presided over its birth --the
"belle époque" (and it was beautiful, at least for capital). The bourgeois
of the Triad, which had already been constituted (the European powers, the
United States and Japan) were singing hymns to the glory of their definitive
triumph. The working classes of the centres were no longer the "dangerous
classes" they had been during the 19th century, and the other peoples of the
world were called upon to accept the "civilising mission" of the West. 

The "belle époque" crowned a century of radical global transformations,
during which the first industrial revolution and the concomitant
constitution of the modern bourgeois nation-state emerged from the
north-western quarter of Europe --the place of their birth --to conquer the
rest of the continent, the United States and Japan. The old peripheries of
the mercantilist age --Latin America, British and Dutch India --were
excluded from this dual revolution, while the old states of Asia (China, the
Ottoman sultanate, Persia) were being integrated in turn as peripheries
within the new globalisation. The triumph of the centres of globalised
capital was manifested in a demographic explosion, which was to bring the
European population from 23 per cent of global population in 1800 to 36 per
cent in 1900. The concentration of the industrial revolution in the Triad
had simultaneously generated a polarisation of wealth on a scale humanity
had never witnessed during the whole of its preceding history. On the eve of
the industrial revolution, the gaps in the social productivity of work for
80 per cent of the planet's population had never exceeded a relation of 2 to
1. Towards 1900, this relation had become equal to 20 to 1. 

 
 The globalisation celebrated in 1900, already as the "end of history", was
nevertheless a recent fact, brought about progressively during the second
half of the 19th century, after the opening of China and of the Ottoman
Sultanate (1840), the repression of the Sepoys in India (1857) and finally
the division of Africa (starting in 1885). This first globalisation, far
from accelerating the process of capital accumulation, in fact brought on a
structural crisis from 1873 to 1896; almost exactly a century later, it was
to do so again. The crisis, however, was accompanied by a new industrial
revolution (electricity, petroleum, automobiles, the airplane), which, it
was expected, would transform the human species; much the same as is said
today about electronics. In parallel, the first industrial and financial
oligopolies were being constituted --the transnational corporations of the
time. Financial globalisation seemed to be establishing itself definitively
in the form of the gold-sterling standard, and there was talk of the
internationalisation of the transactions made possible by the new stock
exchanges, with as much enthusiasm as accompanies talk of financial
globalisation today. Jules Verne was sending his hero (English, of course)
around the world in 80 days --the "global village", for him, was already
reality. 

The political economy of the 19th century was dominated by the figures of
the great classics (Adam Smith, Ricardo, then Marx's devastating critique).
The triumph of fin-de-siècle liberal globalisation brought to the foreground
a new generation, moved by the desire to prove that capitalism was
"unsurpassable" because it expressed the demands of an eternal,
transhistorical rationality. Walras --a central figure in this new
generation, who was rediscovered (no coincidence here) by contemporary
economists --did everything he could to prove that markets were
self-regulating. He never managed --no more than the neoclassical economists
of today have been able to prove the same thing. 

Triumphant liberal ideology reduced society to a collection of individuals
and, through this reduction, asserted that the equilibrium produced by the
market both constitutes the social optimum and guarantees, by the same
token, stability and democracy. Everything was in place to substitute a
theory of imaginary capitalism for the analysis of the contradictions in
real capitalism. The vulgar version of this economistic social thought would
find its expression in the manuals of the Briton Alfred Marshall, the bibles
of economics at the time. 

The promises of globalised liberalism, as they were vaunted at the time,
seemed to come true for a while --during the "belle époque". After 1896,
growth started again on the new bases of the second industrial revolution,
oligopolies, financial globalisation. This "emergence from the crisis"
sufficed not only to convince organic ideologues of capitalism --the new
economists --but also to shake the bewildered workers' movement. Socialist
parties began to slide from their reformist positions to more modest
ambitions: to be simple associates in managing the system. The shift was
very similar to that constituted today by the discourse of Tony Blair and
Gerhard Schröder, a century later. The modernist elites of the periphery
also believed then that nothing could be imagined outside the dominant logic
of capitalism. 

The triumph of the "belle époque" lasted less than two decades. A few
dinosaurs (still young at the time --Lenin, for instance!) predicted its
downfall, but no one heard them. Liberalism --that is, the unilateral
domination of capital --would not reduce the intensity of the contradictions
of every sort that the system carries within itself. On the contrary, it
aggravated their acuity. Behind the workers' parties and professional
syndicates' mobilisation in the cause of capitalist-utopian nonsense, lurked
the muted rumble of a fragmented social movement, bewildered but always on
the verge of exploding and crystallising around the invention of new
alternatives. A few Bolshevik intellectuals used their gift of sarcasm with
regard to the Leninised discourse of the "rentier political economy", as
they described the sole way of thinking of the time. Liberal globalisation
could only engender the system's militarisation in relations among the
imperialist powers of the era, could only bring about a war which, in its
cold and warm forms, lasted for 30 years --from 1914 to 1945. Behind the
apparent calm of the "belle époque" it was possible to discern the rise of
social struggles and violent domestic and international conflicts. In China,
the first generation of critics of the bourgeois modernisation project were
clearing a path; this critique, still in its babbling stage in India, the
Ottoman and Arab world and in Latin America would finally conquer the three
continents and dominate three quarters of the 20th century. 

Three quarters of our century are therefore marked by the management of more
or less radical projects designed to retrieve or transform the peripheries,
projects made possible by the dislocation of "belle époque" utopian liberal
globalisation. Our century, coming to its end, has therefore been the
century of a series of massive conflicts between the dominant forces of
globalised oligopolistic capitalism and the states that support it, on one
hand, and the peoples and dominated classes that refuse such dictatorship,
on the other. 



THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR (1914-1945): Between 1914 and 1945, the stage was held
simultaneously by the "thirty years' war" between the United States and
Germany, over who would inherit Britain's defunct hegemony, and by the
attempts to "recoup", by other means, the hegemony described as the
construction of socialism in the Soviet Union. 

In the capitalist centres, both victors and vanquished in the war of
1914-1918 attempted persistently --against all odds --to restore the utopia
of globalised liberalism. We therefore witness a return to the gold
standard; the colonial order was maintained through violence; economic
management was liberalised once again. The results seemed positive for a
brief time, and the 1920s witness renewed growth, drawn by the US's dynamism
and the establishment of new forms of assembly line labour (parodied so
brilliantly by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times). These would find fruitful
ground for generalisation only after the second World War, however. But the
restoration was fragile, and as early as 1929 the financial stakes --the
most globalised segment of the system --collapsed. The following decade,
until the war, was a nightmare. The great powers reacted to recession as
they would again in the 1980s and '90s, with systematically deflationist
policies which served only to aggravate the crisis, creating a downward
spiral characterised by massive unemployment --all the more tragic, for its
victims, in that the safety nets invented by the welfare state did not yet
exist. Liberal globalisation could not withstand the crisis; the monetary
system based on gold was abandoned. The imperialist powers regrouped in the
framework of colonial empires and protected zones of influence --the sources
of the conflict that would lead to the second World War. 

Western societies reacted differently to the catastrophe. Some sank into
fascism, choosing war as a means of redistributing the deck on a global
scale (Germany, Japan, Italy). The United States and France were the
exception and, through Roosevelt's New Deal and the Front Populaire in
France, launched another option: that of market management through active
state intervention, backed by the working classes. These formulas remain
timid, however, and were expressed fully only after 1945. 


In the peripheries, the collapse of the belle époque myths triggered an
anti-imperialist radicalisation. Some of the countries of Latin America,
taking advantage of their independence, invented populist nationalism in a
variety of forms: that of Mexico, renewed by the peasant revolution of the
1910s-1920s; Peronism in Argentina in the '40s. In the East, Turkish
Kemalism was their counterpoise, while China settled into civil war between
bourgeois modernists, engendered by the 1911 revolution --the Kuo Min Tang
--and communists. Elsewhere, the yoke of colonial rule imposed a delay
several decades long on the crystallisation of similar national-populist
projects. 

Isolated, the Soviet Union sought to invent a new trajectory. During the
1920s, it had hoped in vain that the revolution would become global. Forced
to fall back on its own forces, it followed Stalin into a series of
Five-Year Plans meant to allow it to make up for lost time. Lenin had
already defined this course as "Soviet power plus electrification". We
should note that the reference here is to the new industrial revolution
--electricity, not coal and steel. But electricity (in fact, mainly coal and
steel) would gain the upper hand over the power of the Soviets, emptied of
meaning. 

Centrally planned accumulation, of course, was managed by a despotic state,
regardless of the social populism that characterised its policies. But then,
neither German unity nor Japanese modernisation had been the work of
democrats. The Soviet system was efficient as long as the goals remained
simple: to accelerate extensive accumulation (the country's
industrialisation) and to build up a military force which would be the first
capable of facing the challenge of the capitalist adversary, first by
beating Nazi Germany, then by ending the American monopoly on atomic weapons
and ballistic missiles during the 1960s and '70s. 


AFTER THE WAR --FROM TAKE-OFF (1945-1970) TO CRISIS (1970-PRESENT): The
second World War inaugurated a new phase in the world system. The take-off
of the post-war period (1945-1975) was based on the complementarity of the
three social projects of the age: a) in the West, the welfare state project
of national social-democracy, which based its action on the efficiency of
productive interdependent national systems; b) the "Bandung project" of
bourgeois national construction on the system's periphery (development
ideology); c) finally, the Sovietist project of "capitalism without
capitalists", relatively autonomised from the dominant world system. The
double defeat of fascism and old colonialism had indeed created a
conjuncture allowing the popular classes, the victims of capitalist
expansion, to impose the forms of capital regulation and accumulation, to
which capital itself was forced to adjust, and which were at the root of
this take-off. 

The crisis that followed (starting in 1968-1975) is one of the erosion, then
the collapse of the systems on which the previous take-off had rested. This
period, which has not yet come to a close, is therefore not that of the
establishment of a new world order, as is too often claimed, but that of
chaos, which has not been overcome --far from it. The policies implemented
under these conditions do not constitute a positive strategy of capital
expansion, but simply seek to manage the crisis of capital. They have not
succeeded, because the "spontaneous" project produced by the immediate
domination of capital, in the absence of any framework imposed by social
forces through coherent, efficient reactions, is still a utopia: that of
world management via what is referred to as "the market" --that is, the
immediate, short-term interests of capital's dominant forces. 

In modern history, phases of reproduction based on stable accumulation
systems are succeeded by moments of chaos. In the first of these phases, as
in the post-war take-off, the succession of events gives the impression of a
certain monotony, because the social and international relations that make
up its architecture are stabilised. These relations are therefore reproduced
through the functioning of dynamics in the system. In these phases, active,
defined and precise historical subjects are clearly visible (active social
classes, states, political parties and dominant social organisations). Their
practices appear solid, and their reactions are predictable under almost all
circumstances; the ideologies that motivate them benefit from a seemingly
uncontested legitimacy. At these moments, conjunctures may change, but the
structures remain stable. Prediction is then possible, even easy. The danger
appears when we extrapolate these predictions too far, as if the structures
in question were eternal, and marked "the end of history". The analysis of
the contradictions that riddle these structures is then replaced by what the
post-modernists rightly call "grand narratives", which propose a linear
vision of movement, guided by "inevitability", or "the laws of history". The
subjects of history disappear, making room for supposedly objective
structural logics. 

But the contradictions of which we are speaking do their work quietly, and
one day the "stable" structures collapse. History then enters a phase that
may be described later as "transitional", but which is lived as a transition
toward the unknown, and during which new historical subjects are
crystallised slowly. These subjects inaugurate new practices, proceeding by
trial and error, and legitimising them through new ideological discourses,
often confused at the outset. Only when the processes of qualitative change
have matured sufficiently do new social relations appear, defining
"post-transitional" systems. 

The post-war take-off allowed for massive economic, political and social
transformations in all regions of the world. These transformations were the
product of social regulations imposed on capital by the working and popular
classes, not, as liberal ideology would have it, by the logic of market
expansion. But these transformations were so great that they defined a new
framework for the challenges that confront the world's peoples now, on the
threshold of the 21st century. 

For a long time --from the industrial revolution at the beginning of the
19th century to the 1930s (as far as the Soviet Union is concerned), then
the 1950s (for the Third World) --the contrast between the centre and
peripheries of the modern world system was almost synonymous with the
opposition between industrialised and non-industrialised countries. The
rebellions in the peripheries --whether these were socialist revolutions
(Russia, China) or national liberation movements --revised this old form of
polarisation by engaging their societies in the modernisation process.
Gradually, the axis around which the world capitalist system was
reorganising itself, and which would define the future forms of
polarisation, constituted itself on the basis of the "five new monopolies"
that benefit the countries of the dominant Triad: the 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. 

Taken together, these five monopolies define the framework within which the
law of globalised value expresses itself. The law of value is hardly the
expression of a "pure" economic rationality that could be detached from its
social and political frame; rather, it is the condensed expression of the
totality of these circumstances, which cancel out the extent of
industrialisation of the peripheries, devalue the productive work
incorporated in these products, and overvalue the supposed added value
attached to the activities through which the new monopolies operate to the
benefit of the centres. They therefore produce a new hierarchy in the
distribution of revenue on a world scale, more unequal than ever, while
making subalterns of the peripheries' industries, and reducing them to the
status of putting-out work. Polarisation finds its new basis here, a basis
which will dictate its future form. 

During the "Bandung period" (1955-1975), the states of the Third World had
begun to implement autocentric development policies aimed at reducing global
polarisation (at "recouping"). This implied systems of national regulation
as well as the permanent, collective (North-South) negotiation of
international regulatory systems (the role of the CNUCED was particularly
important in this respect). This also aimed at reducing "low-productivity
labour reserves" by transferring them to higher-productivity modern
activities (even if they were "non-competitive" on open world markets). The
result of the unequal success (not the failure, contrary to common belief)
of these policies has been the production of a contemporary Third World now
firmly engaged in the industrial revolution. 

The unequal results of an industrialisation imposed on dominant capital by
social forces engendered by the victories of national liberation today allow
us to differentiate the front-line peripheries, which have been capable of
building productive national systems with potentially competitive industries
in the framework of globalised capitalism, and the marginalised peripheries,
which have not been as successful. The criterion of difference that
separates the active peripheries from those that have been marginalised is
not only that of competitivity in industrial production: it is also
political. 

The political authorities in the active peripheries --and, behind them, all
of society (this does not preclude the contradictions within society itself)
--have a project, and a strategy for its implementation. This clearly seems
to be the case for China, Korea, and to a lesser degree, for certain
countries of Southeast Asia, India, and some countries of Latin America.
These national projects are confronted with those of globally dominant
imperialism; the outcome of this confrontation will shape tomorrow's world. 

On the other hand, the marginalised peripheries have neither a project (even
when rhetoric like that of political Islam claims the contrary), nor their
own strategy. In this case, imperialist circles "think for them" and take
the initiative alone in elaborating "projects" concerning these regions
(like the EEC-ACP association, the "Middle Eastern" project of the US and
Israel, or Europe's vague Mediterranean projects). No local projects offer
an opposition; these countries are therefore the passive subjects of
globalisation. 

This rapid overview of the political economy of the transformations in the
20th century global capitalist system must be completed by a reminder of the
stunning demographic revolution that has taken place in the system's
periphery at the same time, bringing the proportion formed by the
populations of Asia (excluding Japan and the USSR), Africa, Latin America
and the Caribbean from 68 per cent of the global population in 1900 to 81
per cent today. 

The third partner in the post-war world system, made up by the countries
where "actually existing socialism" prevailed, has left the historical
scene. The very existence of the Soviet system, its successes in extensive
industrialisation and its military accomplishments, were one of the
principal motors of all the grandiose transformations of the 20th century.
Without the "danger" that the communist counter-model represented, Western
social democracy would never have been able to impose the welfare state. The
existence of the Soviet system, and the coexistence it imposed on the United
States, furthermore, reinforced the margin of autonomy available to the
bourgeoisie of the South. 

The Soviet system, however, did not manage to pass to a new stage of
intensive accumulation; it therefore missed out on the new (computer-driven)
industrial revolution with which the 20th century is coming to an end. The
reasons for this failure are complex; still, it places at the centre of its
analysis the antidemocratic drift of Soviet power, which was ultimately
unable to internalise the fundamental exigency of progress toward socialism
as represented by the intensification of a democratisation capable of
transcending that defined and limited by the framework of historical
capitalism. Socialism will be democratic or will not exist: this is the
lesson of this first experience of the break with capitalism. 

Social thought and the dominant economic, sociological and political
theories that legitimised the practices of autocentric national welfare
state development in the West, of the Soviet system in the East and of
populism to the South, as well as the negotiated, regulated globalisation
that accompanied them, were largely inspired by Marx and Keynes. The latter
produced his critique of market liberalism in the 1930s, but was not read at
the time. Relations between social forces, skewed in capital's favour at the
time, necessarily fuelled the prejudices of liberal utopia --as is the case
again today. The new social relations of the post-war period, more
favourable to labour, would inspire the practices of the welfare state,
relegating the liberals to a position of insignificance. Marx's figure, of
course, dominated the discourse of "actually existing socialism". But the
two preponderant figures of the 20th century gradually lost their quality as
originators of fundamental critiques, becoming the mentors of the
legitimation of the practices of state power. In both cases, we may
therefore observe a shift towards simplification and dogmatism. 

Critical social thought then shifted for a time --the 1960s and '70s
--toward the peripheries of the system. Here the practices of national
populism --a poor version of Sovietism --triggered a brilliant explosion in
the critique of "actually existing socialism". At the centre of this
critique was a new awareness of the polarisation produced by capital's
global expansion, which had been underestimated, if not purely and simply
ignored, for over a century and a half. This critique --of actually existing
capitalism, of the social thought that legitimated its expansion, and of the
theoretical and practical socialist critique of both of these --was at the
origin of the periphery's dazzling entry into modern thought. Here was a
rich and variegated critique, which it would be mistaken to reduce to
"dependency theory", since this social thought was to reopen the fundamental
debates on socialism and the transition toward it, but also on Marxism and
historical materialism, understood as having to transcend the limits of the
Eurocentrism that dominated modern thought. Undeniably inspired for a moment
by the Maoist eruption, it also initiated the critique of both Sovietism and
the new globalism glimmering on the horizon. 



THE "FIN-DE-SIECLE" CRISIS: That period of the 20th century is over and done
with. Starting in 1968-71, the collapse of the three post-war models of
regulated accumulation opened up a structural crisis of the system very
reminiscent of that of the end of the 19th century. Growth and investment
rates fell precipitously to half previous levels; unemployment soared;
pauperisation was intensified. The ratio used to measure inequality in the
capitalist world (1 to 20 toward 1900; 1 to 30 in 1954-48; 1 to 60 at the
end of the post-war growth spurt) increased sharply: the wealthiest 20 per
cent of humanity increased their share of the global product from 60 to 80
per cent during the two last decades of this century --globalisation has
been fortunate for some. For the vast majority --notably, for the peoples of
the South, subjected to unilateral structural adjustment policies, and those
of the East, locked into dramatic involutions --it has been a disaster. 

But this structural crisis, like its predecessor, is accompanied by a third
technological revolution, which profoundly alters modes of labour
organisation, divesting the old forms of worker and popular organisation and
struggle of their efficiency, and therefore their legitimacy. The fragmented
social movement has not yet found a strong formula for crystallisation,
capable of meeting the challenges posed; but it has made remarkable
breakthroughs, in directions that enrich its impact: principally, women's
powerful entry into social life, as well as a new awareness of environmental
destruction on a scale which, for the first time in history, threatens the
entire planet. 

The management of the crisis, based on a brutal reversal of relations of
power in capital's favour, has made it possible for liberalist recipes to
impose themselves anew. Marx and Keynes having been erased from social
thought, the "theoreticians" of "pure economics" have replaced the analysis
of the real world with that of an imaginary capitalism. But the temporary
success of this highly reactionary utopian thought is simply the symptom of
a decline --witchcraft takes the place of critical thought --that testifies
to the fact that capitalism is objectively ready to be transcended. 

Crisis management has already entered the phase of collapse. The crisis in
Southeast Asia and Korea was predictable. During the 1980s these countries,
and China as well, managed to benefit from the world crisis through greater
insertion in world exchanges (based on their "comparative advantage" of
cheap labour), attracting foreign investment but remaining on the sidelines
of financial globalisation, and inscribing their development projects in a
nationally controlled strategy (in the cases of China and Korea, not the
countries of southeast Asia). In the 1990s, Korea and Southeast Asia opened
up to financial globalisation, while China and India began to evolve in the
same direction. 

Attracted by the region's high growth levels, the surplus of floating
foreign capital flowed in, producing not accelerated growth but inflation in
movable property values and real estate investments. As had been predicted,
the financial bubble burst only a few years later. Political reactions to
this massive crisis have been new in several respects --different from those
provoked by the Mexican crises, for instance. The United States, with Japan
following closely, attempted to take advantage of the Korean crisis to
dismantle the country's productive system (under the fallacious pretext that
it was controlled oligopolistically!) and to subordinate it to the
strategies of US and Japanese oligopolies. Regional powers attempted to
resist by challenging the question of their insertion within financial
globalisation (with the reestablishment of exchange control in Malaysia), or
--in China and India --by removing participation from their list of
priorities. 

This collapse of the financial portion of globalisation forced the G7 to
envisage a new strategy, provoking a crisis in liberal thought. It is in
light of this crisis that we must examine the outline of the counterattack
launched by the G7. Overnight, it changed its tune: the term regulation,
forbidden until then, reappeared in the group's resolutions. It became
necessary to "regulate international financial flows"! The World Bank's
chief economist, Stiglitz, suggested a debate aimed at defining a new
"post-Washington consensus". 


US HEGEMONY ATTACKS --THE 21ST CENTURY WILL NOT BE AMERICAN: In this chaotic
conjuncture, the US took the offensive once more to reestablish its global
hegemony and to organise the world system in its economic, political and
military dimensions according to this hegemony. Has US hegemony entered its
decline? Or has it begun a renewal that would make the 21st century
"America's"? 

If we examine the economic dimension in the narrow sense of the term,
measured roughly in terms of per capita GDP, and the structural tendencies
of the balance of trade, we will conclude that American hegemony, so
crushing in 1945, receded as early as the 1960s and '70s with Europe and
Japan's brilliant resurgence. The Europeans bring it up continuously, in
familiar terms: the European Union is the first economic and commercial
force on a world scale, etc. The statement is hasty, however, for, if it is
true that a single European market does exist, and even that a single
currency is emerging, the same cannot be said of "a" European economy (at
least, not yet). There is no such thing as a "European productive system";
such a productive system, on the contrary, can be spoken of in the case of
the United States. The economies set up in Europe through the constitution
of historical bourgeoisie in the relevant states, and the shaping, within
this framework, of autocentric national productive systems (even if these
are also open, even aggressively so), have stayed more or less the same.
There are no European TNCs: only British, German, or French TNCs. Capital
interpenetration is no denser in inter-European relations that in the
bilateral relations between each European nation and the US or Japan. If
Europe's productive systems have been eroded, therefore, weakened by
"globalised interdependence" to such an extent that national policies lose a
good deal of their efficiency, this is precisely to the advantage of
globalisation and the forces that dominate it, not to that of "European
integration", which does not exist as yet. 

The US's hegemony rests on a second pillar, however: that of military power.
Built up systematically since 1945, it covers the whole of the planet, which
is parcelled out into regions, each under the relevant US military command.
This hegemonism had been forced to accept the peaceful coexistence imposed
by Soviet military might. Now that the page is turned, the US went on the
offensive to reinforce its global domination, which Henry Kissinger summed
up in a memorably arrogant phrase: "Globalisation is only another word for
US domination." This American global strategy has five aims: 1) to
neutralise and subjugate the other partners in the Triad (Europe and Japan),
while minimising their ability to act outside the US's orbit; 2) to
establish military control over NATO while "Latin-Americanising" the
fragments of the former Soviet world; 3) to exert uncontested influence in
the Middle East, especially over its petroleum resources; 4) to dismantle
China, ensure the subordination of the other great nations (India, Brazil),
and prevent the constitution of regional blocs potentially capable of
negotiating the terms of globalisation; 5) to marginalise the regions of the
South that represent no strategic interest. 

The favoured instrument of this hegemony is therefore military, as the US's
highest-ranking representatives never tire of repeating ad nauseam. This
hegemony, which guarantees in turn that of the Triad over the world system,
therefore demands that America's allies accept to navigate in its wake.
Great Britain, Germany and Japan make no bones (not even cultural ones)
about this imperative. But this means that the speeches with which European
politicians water their audiences --regarding Europe's economic power --have
no real significance. By placing itself exclusively on the terrain of
mercantile squabbles, Europe, which has no political or social project of
its own, has lost before the race has even started. Washington knows this
well. 

The principal means in the service of the strategy chosen by Washington is
NATO, which explains why it has survived the collapse of the adversary that
constituted the organisation's raison d'ètre. NATO still speaks today in the
name of the "international community", thereby expressing its contempt for
the democratic principle that governs this said community through the UN.
Yet NATO acts only to serve Washington's aims --no more and no less --as the
history of the past decade, from the Gulf War to Kosovo, goes to show. 

The strategy employed by the Triad under US direction takes as its aim the
construction of a unipolar world organised along two complementary
principles: the unilateral dictatorship of dominant TNC capital, and the
unfurling of a US military empire, to which all nations must be compelled to
submit. No other project may be tolerated within this perspective, not even
the European project of subaltern NATO allies, and especially not a project
entailing some degree of autonomy, like China's, which must be broken by
force, if necessary. 

This vision of a unipolar world is being increasingly opposed by that of a
multipolar globalisation, the only strategy that would allow the different
regions of the world to achieve acceptable social development, and would
thereby foster social democratisation and the reduction of motives for
conflict. The hegemonistic strategy of the US and its NATO allies is today
the main enemy of social progress, democracy and peace. 

The 21st century will not be "America's century". It will be one of vast
conflicts, and the rise of social struggles that question the
disproportionate ambition of Washington and of capital. 

The crisis is exacerbating contradictions within the blocs of dominant
classes. These conflicts must take on increasingly acute international
dimensions, and therefore pit states and groups of states against each
other. One can already discern the first hints of a conflict between the US,
Japan, and their faithful Australian ally, on one hand, and China and the
other Asian countries, on the other. Nor is it difficult to envisage the
rebirth of a conflict between the US and Russia, if the latter manages to
extricate itself from the spiral Boris Yeltsin has dragged it into. And if
the European Left could free itself from its submission to the double
dictate of capital and Washington, it would be possible to imagine that the
new European strategy would be articulated on those of Russia, China, India
and the Third World in general, in the perspective of a necessary multipolar
construction effort. If this does not come about, the European project
itself will fade away. 

The central question, therefore, is how conflicts and social struggles (it
is important to differentiate between the two) will be articulated. Which
will triumph? Will social struggles be subordinated, enframed by conflicts
and therefore mastered by the dominant powers, even instrumentalised to the
benefit of these powers? Or will social struggles, on the contrary, conquer
their autonomy and force the major powers to conform to their exigencies? 

Of course, I do not imagine that the conflicts and struggles of the 21st
century will produce a remake of the 20th century. History does not repeat
itself according to a cyclical model. Today's societies are confronted by
new challenges on all levels. But precisely because the immanent
contradictions of capitalism are sharper at the end of the century than they
were at its beginning, and because the means of destruction are also far
greater than they were, the alternatives, for the 21st century more than
ever before, are "socialism or barbarism". 

Translated from the French by Pascale Ghazaleh 

Cartoon by Fathi 

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