The abstract noun Eurocentrism (French eurocentrisme, earlier europocentrisme) as the term for an ideology was coined in the 1970s by the Egyptian Marxian economist Samir Amin, then director of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Amin used the term in the context of a global, core-periphery or dependency model of capitalist development. English usage of Eurocentrism is recorded by 1979.
In his autobiography Itinéraire intellectuel (1990) he wrote that in order to spend a substantial amount of time in "militant action" he could devote only a minimum of time to preparing for his university exams.
After arriving in Paris, Amin joined the French Communist Party (PCF), but he later distanced himself from Soviet Marxism and associated himself for some time with Maoist circles. With other students he published a magazine entitled Étudiants Anticolonialistes. In 1957 he presented his thesis, supervised by François Perroux among others, originally titled The origins of underdevelopment – capitalist accumulation on a world scale but retitled The structural effects of the international integration of precapitalist economies. A theoretical study of the mechanism which creates so-called underdeveloped economies.
After finishing his thesis, Amin went back to Cairo, where he worked from 1957 to 1960 as a research officer for the government's "Institution for Economic Management". Subsequently, Amin left Cairo, to become an adviser to the Ministry of Planning in Bamako (Mali) from 1960 to 1963.
In 1963 he was offered a fellowship at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). Until 1970 he worked there as well as being a professor at the university of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris (of Paris VIII, Vincennes).
In 1970 he became director of the IDEP, which he managed until 1980. In 1980 Amin left the IDEP and became a director of the Third World Forum in Dakar.
As mentioned in this section of the blog World-As-Idea Amin has had a significant impact in shaping the Re:LODE picture of the globalized economic, political and ideological forces at work in a world where neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist and neo-liberal agendas are being enacted against the interests of the majority of the world's peoples.
What has modernity got to do with it?
For Re:LODE the concept and history of modernity is crucial to making connection between places on a global scale and with the diverse histories overlapping the different territories of the planet.
Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. A significant conceptual approach to redefining the relationship of the ancient Greek world to the European Renaissance is to define both the classical world and its history and the subsequent medieval cultural, intellectual and political ideas and structure of these European societies as "tributary". The medieval world was, in terms of the currency of ideas and conceptual approach, "classical", and political tribute was required to be visible and explicit in on form or another. The Renaissance was 'the rupture' with this mode of visible power relations. From the late middle ages the relations of power, production and consumption become less and less visible. Capitalism emerged from this context without a name, and, as a system, and was "unknowable" until the Enlightenment and the consequent emergence of modernity, and a modernity capable of being critical of modernity.
Anyone interested in the history of art will find this idea useful. As much as anything else it helps formulate the question: How do the visual arts present, or represent the relations of power within society? For an artist who seeks to create work that reveals the patterns of the various forces that shape modern life Amin has been an inspiration.
The original publication of Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism in 1988 was a much needed historical materialist rejoinder to post-structuralist and postcolonial critiques. … Amin not only demonstrated that he was in agreement with some of the postcolonial criticisms of Marxism, but was able to explain how historical materialism itself could provide even stronger critiques of the eurocentrism within its own tradition. … In these days, when it is still somewhat fashionable to dismiss the Enlightenment and modernity as eurocentric, the re-released and expanded Eurocentrism is very important. …. this version of Eurocentrism strongly and obviously embeds itself within the Marxist tradition, defending the reasons for an historical materialist approach (but one that is not eurocentric).—Joshua Moufawad-Paul, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
"Modernity arose in Europe, beginning in the Renaissance, as a break with the traditional culture . . . "So, Samir Amin writes in his preface to the re-publication of his seminal work Eurocentrism (2009), originally published as L'eurocentisme: Critique d'une idéologie (1988).
He continues:
"Modernity is constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively (i.e., societies), make their own history."Furthermore, he says:
Up until that time, in Europe and elsewhere, responsibility for history was attributed to God or supernatural forces. From that point on, reason is combined with emancipation under modernity, thus opening the way to democracy (which is modern by definition). The latter implies secularism, the separation of religion and the state, and on that basis, politics is formed.
Today, modernity is in crisis because the contradictions of globalized capitalism, unfolding in real societies, have become such that capitalism puts human civilization itself in danger. Capitalism has had its day. The destructive dimension that its development always included now prevails by far over the constructive one that characterized the progressive role it fulfilled in history.
The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system. Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the post-modernist discourse of irreducible "cultural specificities" (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures). As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values. This implies the economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.
In The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, I emphasized the extreme form taken by the ideology of contemporary capitalism, what I call the "liberal virus". The latter reduces the content of social organization to two and only two principles: liberty (mainly viewed as freedom of private enterprise) and property.
This reduction, which I analyze as being the product of the involution to which the ideology of modernity was subject in the historical formation of culture in the United States, is at the heart of the impasse that threatens to imprison civilization.Amin identifies two periods in history that have had a decisive impact on the formation of the modern world. The first of these periods involves the birth of modernity. It is the period of the Enlightenment . . .
(pages 7-9)
. . . and involves two propositions:
The first concerns the definition of modernity, which is the claim that human beings, individually and collectively, can and must make their own history. This marks a break with the dominant philosophy of all previous societies, both in Europe and elsewhere, based on the principle that God having created the universe and mankind, is the "legislator" of last resort. The ethical principles based on this divine legislation are, naturally, formulated by historical transcendental religions or philosophies, thereby opening the door to various interpretations, but then it remains subject to the duty of reconciling faith and reason. Under modernity, people are freed from this obligation, without necessarily losing interest in the question of faith.
"History , while it no longer operates as a force outside of humanity, must be explained by other laws": according to Samir Amin.
Reason is called on, once again, in the search for the objective determinants of the development of societies. The new freedom which modern humanity gives itself, therefore, remains subject to the constraints of what is thought to constitute the logic of social reproduction and the dynamics of the transformation of societies.
The second concerns the bourgeois character of modernity, as expressed by the thinking of the Enlightenment. the emergence of capitalism and the emergence of modernity constitute two facets of the one and the same reality.
Enlightenment thought offers us a concept of reason that is inextricably associated with that of emancipation. Yet, the emancipation in question is defined and limited by what capitalism requires and allows. The view expressed by the Enlightenment, nevertheless, proposes a concept of emancipating reason that claims to be transhistorical, whereas an examination of what is, in fact, is will demonstrate its strongly historical nature.
Adam Smith offers the most systematic fundamental expression of this view. Unfortunately he describes it as "utilitarianism", a questionable term, but understandable within the tradition of British empiricism. in this view of the human world, society is conceived as a collection of individuals, a view that breaks with the tradition of the estates of the Ancien Régime.
It is, therefore, indisputably an ideology that liberates the individual, again one of the dimensions of modernity. This individual, moreover, is naturally endowed with reason. The social order which must guarantee the triumph of this emancipating reason, and thus the happiness of human beings, is pictured as a system of "good institutions", to use the term in use up to now in American social thought. this system, in turn, is based on the separation of the political domain from the economic domain in social life. The "good institutions," which must ensure the management of political life through reason, are those of a democracy that guarantees the liberty and legal equality of individuals. In the management of economic life, reason demands that contractual freedom (in other words the market) be the basis of the relations of exchange and of organization of the division of labour between the individuals of which society is formed. The healthy working of the economy requires, in turn, the protection of property, henceforth considered a sacrosanct value in a "good society."
Emancipating reason is is expressed in the classical triplet: liberty, equality, and property. This slogan was adopted in the early revolutions of the United Provinces and the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, before being adopted more systematically by the American Revolution and then by the French Revolution in its first phase.
The constituent elements of this triplet are considered to be naturally and harmoniously complementary to each other. Up until now, the claim that the "market" equals "democracy" has remained a cornerstone of bourgeois ideology. The continual conflict between those in favor of extending democratic rights to all citizens, men and women, bourgeois and proletarians, propertied or propertyless, and the unconditional defenders of the market is straight away excluded from the debate.
(pages 13-15)
But if falsely egalitarian liberalism is offered insistently as an ideological alternative to the the disarray of present day society, it is because the front of the stage is no longer occupied by utilitarianism (from which so-called egalitarian liberalism is scarcely distinguishable), but by the excess represented by right-wing libertarian ideology (the extreme Right in fact). This ideology substitutes the couplet of liberty and property for the Enlightenment's triplet, definitively abandoning the idea of giving equality the status of a fundamental value. Friedrich von Hayek's version of this new extreme right-wing ideological formula revives that of its inventors, the nineteenth-century liberals (Claude Frédéric Bastiat and others) who are at the root of this excess, starting as they did from a clear aversion to the Enlightenment.The reality of the impact of right-wing libertarian ideology is present in the geographical and historical contexts of the LODE zones, and shapes much of the Re:LODE research activity.
(pages 16-17)
Samir Amin in the book Eurocentrism, referred to on this page, and in other ongoing work, applies the term "peripheries" to his analysis of the reasons for the large inequalities, across the board, between the "North" and the "South". Obviously a "periphery" has a relationship to a "centre", and Amin's take on both these terms acknowledges that while centres are clearly a positive product of history, the language associated with peripheries usually employs a negative terminology.
India, geographically speaking, is a sub-continent (negative terminology?) situated in the northern hemisphere of the planet, and yet nominally part of the "Global South" for the very positive reasons that the term Global South has been increasingly used, as the development of the term "highlights the uncomfortable reality of previous terms."
The Law of Worldwide Value (an update)
Samir Amin died on 12 August 2018, and following this sad news there were a number of obituaries that have found there way onto the world wide web. I have selected the quotation below from the In Memoriam by Prabhat Patnaik, Jayati Ghosh and C.P. Chandrasekhar, that identifies this particular aspect of his work:
Over his career Samir Amin creatively applied the Marxist method to understand what Marx had inadequately investigated in his incomplete life’s work—the mechanisms that ensured that development in the metropolitan centres of capitalism had as its counterpart the underdevelopment of the periphery, making generalised catch-up or convergence under capitalism an impossibility. To unravel those mechanisms he chose to extract the theory of value from a model of an abstract capitalist economy, and apply it to the concrete conditions of accumulation on a world scale. That led to the development-underdevelopment dichotomy. The Law of Worldwide Value, as one of his books was titled, was one which took account of the phenomenon of unequal exchange, deriving in the final analysis from the fact that a unit of (otherwise similar) labour power was valued less in the periphery then in the core advanced countries. That is, surplus extracted from Third World workers emerged not only because they contributed more to the value of the product they produced than the value of labour power itself, but because similar labour was valued less in the periphery than in the core. When that was taken into account, an explanation of why capitalist accumulation leads to development at the core and underdevelopment in the periphery emerges. Even those of Leftist persuasion who felt this formulation was not nuanced enough, had to accept that this was an idea that was potent, given historical experience and persisting international inequality. The burden of Amin’s argument was that historically evolved exploitative structures continue to reproduce this anomaly. Unless poor countries detached themselves from those structures, or the global system in which those structures were embedded was transcended, the development project within an integrated world economy was doomed to failure.Debates over terminology
Most scholars generally see the term Global South more favorably than its predecessors "Third World" or "Developing countries." Leigh Anne Duck, the coeditor of the journal Global South, has argued that the term is better suited to "resist hegemonic forces that threaten the autonomy and development of these countries." Other critics and scholars like Alvaro Mendez (co-founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science's Global South Unit) have applauded the "empowering aspects of the term," "the unprecedented upward trajectory of its usage," and its ability to "encourage a reconsideration of developed countries' relationship to the Global South." Finally, the growth in popularity of the term "marks a shift from a central focus on development and cultural difference" within the Global South and instead recognizes the importance of their geopolitical relations.
The first use of Global South in a contemporary political sense came about in 1969. Carl Oglesby writing the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal in a special issue on the Vietnam War, argued that centuries of US;
“dominance over the global south… have converged … to produce an intolerable social order.”Oglesby, Carl (1969). "Vietnamism has failed . . . The revolution can only be mauled, not defeated,". Commonweal. 90.
The term continued to gain traction and appeal throughout the second half of the 20th century. It appeared in less than two dozen publications in 2004, but in hundreds of publications by 2013. The emergence of the term is the result of a complex; "historical and social process, that illustrates how the term has been charged with various shades of meanings." Amin's terminology has analytic advantages though . . .
A paragraph in Amin's preface to the updated publication of Eurocentrism says that:
Modernity is the product of nascent capitalism and develops in close association with the worldwide expansion of the latter. The specific logic of the fundamental laws that govern the expansion of capitalism leads to a growing inequality and asymmetry on a global level. The societies at the peripheries are trapped in the impossibility of catching up with and becoming like the societies of the centers, today the triad of the United States, Europe and Japan. in turn, this distortion affects modernity, as it exists in the capitalist world, so that it assumes a truncated form at the periphery. The culture of capitalism is formed and develops by internalizing the requirements of this asymmetric reality. Universalist claims are systematically combined with culturalist arguments, in this case Eurocentric ones, which invalidate the possible significance of the former.So, when "the powers that be" make universalist claims . . .
(pages 7-8)
. . . don't you believe them!
We have seen in the chapter of Amin's Eurocentrism, MODERNITY, how he identifies the first period in the emergence of modernity with the Enlightenment, and he continues:
The second decisive period opens with Marx's criticism of the Enlightenment's bourgeois emancipating reason. this criticism begins a new chapter of modernity, which I call modernity critical of modernity.
"modernity critical of modernity"
Emancipating reason cannot ignore this second moment of its development, or more accurately the beginning of its reconstruction. After Marx, social thinking can no longer be what it was before."Sorority/fraternity" emptied of its meaning and substituted by a notion of "belonging to the nation".
Emancipating reason can no longer include its analyses and propositions under the triplet of liberty, equality and property. having sized up the insoluble conflict between the possession of capitalist property and the development of equality between human beings, emancipating reason can only delete the third term of the triplet and substitute for it the term fraternity (which is stronger than "solidarity," a term proposed by some today).
Fraternity, obviously, implies the abolition of capitalist property which is necessarily that of the few, a minority, the real dominating and exploiting bourgeois class, and which deprives the others, the majority, of access to the conditions of an equality worthy of the name. Fraternity implies, then, substituting a form of social property, exercised by, and on behalf of the whole social body, for the exclusive and excluding form of capitalist property. Integration through democracy would be substituted for the partial and naturally unequal integration carried out within the limits of respect for capitalist property relations.
As everyone knows well, Marx did not invent the slogan "liberty, equality, fraternity." the French Revolution, like all great revolutions, was ahead of its time and projected itself far ahead of its immediate demands. It was both a bourgeois revolution (and it later achieved stability on this basis) and a more advanced breakthrough, a popular revolution, and can be interpreted today as starting the socialist criticism of the bourgeois system. In a similar fashion, the two other great revolutions of modern times - the Russian and Chinese - envisaged a communist society far ahead of the immediate demands and possibilities of their societies.
(pages 17-18)
The replacement of the notion of the emancipation from inequality for all peoples by the concept of belonging to a nation helps to explain a great deal of the cultural, social and political turmoil happening along the LODE Line. Amin's description of the Bourgeois machinations in France during the course of the 19th century, identifies a process that leads, in the end, to the emptying "fraternity" of the actual quality of fraternity/sorority, and which is then substituted by a notion of "belonging to the nation" in place of the emancipation from inequality for all. This is what he says:
The popular property the French Revolution thought it could and must guarantee was that of millions of peasants and craftsmen. It declared that the market it protected must be authentically open and competitive, excluding monopolies and the profits they produced. but this popular property was already being threatened by the bourgeoisie, composed of the big entrepreneurs and capitalists, and symbolized by the famous "two hundred families" that owned the Bank of France. On its left, it was threatened by all the disinherited of the towns (insecure proletarians and paupers) and the country (poor and landless peasants). The convulsions of the French Revolution occupy the whole of the nineteenth century up to the very end, at which point the Republic was stabilized. It adopted the Revolution's slogan, but after having crushed the Paris Commune and emptied the term fraternity of its original content, replacing it with what can be expressed by the notion of belonging to the national community.
Bourgeois reason restored and placed back on its feet is not, and can no longer be, liberating. Moreover, it stands on only two feet: liberty and property. Henceforth, Bastiat and von Hayek, who show their open antipathy to any idea of giving the slightest importance to equality, are the real representatives of a degenerate reason, one which is foreign to the Enlightenment conception.
As long as this bourgeois reason, reduced to liberty and property, is the reason of American ideology, the retreat from and the abolition in thought of the French Revolution, and, of course, the Russian and the Chinese Revolutions, are nothing other than the expression of what is really meant by the Americanization of the world.Samin Amin ends his chapter on Modernity in his seminal work Eurocentrism with these powerful thoughts and questions:
(pages 18-19)
I do not know if the culturalist opponents of the real world and its evolutionary trends, understood as Americanization by some and Westernization by others, can be described as rational. Confronted by the threat of Americanization, some defend unique "cultural values," without throwing into question the general trends of the system, as if reality could be sliced like a salami, in order to keep a morsel for tomorrow. Others, having previously confused capitalism and the West and then forgotten the decisive reality of the former and replaced it with the gratuitous and false assertion of an eternal "West," think they can transfer the confrontation from the terrain of a constantly changing social reality to the heaven of an imaginary transhistorical cultural universe.
The heterodox mix of this hodgepodge - the pure economics of imaginary markets, falsely egalitarian liberalism, and transhistorical culturalist imaginings - pompously sets itself up as new thinking, so-called postmodernist thinking. Since the bourgeois modernist critique has been watered down and reason has given up its emancipatory role, has contemporary bourgeois thought become anything then but a system that has seen better days?
(Pages 20-21)
The argument as set out by Amin in Eurocentrism regarding "the impasse of capitalism".
Cultural life being the mode of organization for the utilization of use-values, the homogenization of these values by their submission to a generalized exchange-value tends to homogenize culture itself. The tendency toward homogenization is the necessary consequence not of the development of the forces of production, but of the capitalist content of this development. For the progress of forces of production in pre-capitalist societies did not imply the submission of use-value to exchange-value and, hence, was accompanied by a diversity of paths and methods of development. The capitalist mode implies the predominance of exchange-value and, hence, standardization. Capitalism's tendency to homogenize functions with an almost irresistible force at the level of industrial techniques of production, trends in consumption, lifestyle, and so on, with an attenuated power in the domains of ideology and politics. It has much less influence over language usage.De-linking
What position should be taken toward this tendency toward standardization? The historically irreversible , like the Gallicization of Occitania or the adoption of Coca-Cola by the Cuban people, cannot be regretted forever. But the question arises with respect to the future. Should the tendency of capitalism toward standardization be welcomed, the way progress of the forces of production is welcomed? Should it be defended, or at least never actively opposed, keeping in mind the reactionary character of the nineteenth-century movements that sought to destroy machinery? Is the only cause for regret that this process operates through the prism of class and is, as a result, ineffective? Should we conclude that socialism will move in the same direction, only more quickly and less painfully?
There have always been two co-existing responses to this question. In the first half of his life, Marx adopted a laudatory tone when describing the progress of the forces of production, the achievements of the bourgeoisie, and the tendency toward standardization that liberates people from the limited horizons of the village. But gradually doubts crept in, and the tone of his later writings is more varied. The dominant wing of the labour movement eulogised the “universal civilisation” under construction. A belief in the fusion of cultures (and even of languages) predominated in the Second International: think of Esperanto. This naive cosmopolitanism, effectively disproven by World War I, reappeared after the Second World War, when Americanization came to be seen as synonymous with progress or, at the very least, modernization.
However, any fundamental critique of capitalism requires a reappraisal of this mode of consumption and life, a product of the capitalist mode of production. Such a critique is not, moreover, as utopian as is often believed: the malaise from which Western civilisation suffers is ample testimony. For in fact, the tendency toward standardization implies a reinforcement of the adjustment of the superstructure to the demands of the capitalist infrastructure. This tendency diminishes the contradictions that drive the system forward and is, therefore reactionary. Spontaneous resistance to this standardization, thus, expresses a refusal to submit to the relationships of exploitation that underlie it.
Moreover, this tendency toward standardization collides with the limits imposed by unequal accumulation. This unequal accumulation accelerates tendencies toward homogenization at the centre, while it practically destroys them for the great mass of people at the periphery, who are unable to gain access to the modern mode of consumption, reserved for a small minority. For these people, who are often deprived of the elementary means of basic survival, the result is not simply malaise, but tragedy. Actually existing capitalism has , therefore, become a handicap to the progress of the forces of production on the world scale. For the mode of accumulation that it imposes on the periphery excludes the possibility of the periphery catching up. This is the major reason why capitalism has been objectively transcended on the world scale.
Nevertheless, whatever opinion one may have of this model of society and its internal contradictions, it retains great force. It has a powerful attraction in the West and japan, not only for the ruleing classes, but also for the workers, testifying to the hegemony of capitalist ideology over the society as a whole. The bourgeoisies of the Third World know no other goal; they imitate the Western model of consumption, while the schools in these countries reproduce the models of organization of labour that accompany Western technologies. But the peoples of the periphery have been victims of this expanding process of the homogenization of aspirations and values. The prodigious intensification of communication by the media, now global in scope, has both qualitatively and qualitatively modified the contradiction generated by the unequal expansion of capitalism. Yearning for access to Western models of consumption has come to penetrate large numbers of the popular masses. At the same time, capitalism has revealed itself to be ever more incapable of satisfying this yearning. Societies that have liberated themselves from submission to the demands of the global expansion of capitalism must deal with this new contradiction, which is only one expression of the conflict between the socialist and capitalist tendencies.
The impasse is, therefore not only ideological. It is real, the impasse of capitalism, and incapable of completing the work that it has placed on the agenda of history. The crisis of social thought, in its principal dimension, is above all a crisis of bourgeois thought, which refuses to recognzse that capitalism is not the “end of history.” the definitive and eternal expression of rationality. But this crisis is also an expression of the limits of Marxism, which, underestimating the dimensions of the inequality immanent in the worldwide expansion of capitalism, has devised a strategy of a socialist response to these contradictions that has proven to be impossible.
In order to truly understand this contradiction, the most explosive contradiction capitalism has engendered, the centres/peripheries polarization must be placed at the heart of the analysis and not at its margin.
But after a whole series of concessions, the forces of the Left and of socialism in the West have finally given up on giving the imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion the central place that it must occupy both in critical analysis and in the development of progressive strategies. In so doing, they have been won over to bourgeois ideology in its most essential aspects:
(pages 207-209)
Samir Amin had his ideas about ways for humanity to emancipate itself from the order of things that leads to grotesque states of inequality. Perhaps this quote from the aforementioned obituary succinctly states Amin's view:
In his view, imperialism, and the monopolisation of resources, finance and knowledge by the classes that dominated in the developed nations, had condemned the ‘bourgeois’ nationalist project to failure. An alternative was required. The emancipation of the Third World depended on its delinking from imperialism, and finally on the overthrow of the latter.
