Above photo: Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and other participants pose for a photo prior to the opening of the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, Oct. 24, 2024. At center is Chinese President Xi Jinping. Alexander Nemenov / Pool Photo via AP.
It is almost universally recognized today that we are living in a multipolar world, symbolized by the continuing decline of U.S. hegemony; the economic stagnation of the imperial triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan; and the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). But the historical and theoretical significance of this is in dispute. The foremost theorist of multipolarity was Samir Amin, through his concept of “delinking,” which he developed throughout his career. For Amin, the struggle against imperialism required a delinking from the law of value on the world level centered in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, and its replacement by a more “polycentric” or “multipolar” world order, in which nations in the periphery of the system could reorient their economies toward their own nation-based value systems, thereby meeting their own internal developmental needs. This would then allow them to move away from the current “disarticulated” development under imperialism toward a more “autocentric,” or self-directed, development (Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World [London: Zed Books, 1990], 62–67; Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism [London: Zed Books, 2003], 131; Samir Amin, The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013], 143).
Amin’s notion of delinking has often been misconstrued as an argument for economic autarky, something he strongly rejected. Rather, delinking is conceived in his analysis as a relational category directed at a complex and changing historical reality. It does not mean withdrawal from the world economy, which he said would be like moving “to the moon,” but rather finding a way to sever connections with the main mechanisms of imperial dominance. This takes on complementary meanings at different levels. At the level of the nation, particularly in the periphery of the capitalist world-system, it stands for the “unavoidable” struggle to subordinate “outside relations to the logic of internal development,” requiring a break with the imperialist system, and, for its full development, a revolutionary movement toward socialism. At the regional level, it means building on elements of shared geography, history, culture, and trade in order to form “regional unions.” At the worldwide level, it signifies the creation of a new set of rules and institutions to guide the world economy and to replace those of imperial hegemony (Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization [London: Zed Books, 2014], 40; Samir Amin interviewed by the Tricontinental Institute, “Globalization and Its Alternative: An Interview with Samir Amin [Part 3],” Socialist Economist, February 2019, socialisteconomist.com).
“The challenges with which the construction of a real multipolar world is confronted,” Amin wrote in Monthly Review in 2006, “are more serious than many ‘alterglobalists’ think. In the short term, it is a matter of derailing Washington’s military plan. This is the condition that must be addressed in order to provide the degree of freedom necessary and without which any social and democratic progress and any advance in the construction of a multipolar system will remain extremely vulnerable.” At the center of the system, the United States/NATO has utilized its overwhelming destructive power to intervene militarily with the aim of carrying out regime change in all states seriously engaged at any level in delinking, viewing “even the slightest desire to open up some margin of autonomy in the system” as “anathema.” The struggle over delinking and the creation of a polycentric world, according to Amin, is essentially one over the “five monopolies” of the imperial triad with respect to military, finance, natural resources, technology, and communications (Samir Amin, “Beyond Liberal Globalization,” Monthly Review 58, no. 7 [December 2006]: 48; Samir Amin, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016], 107; Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, 4–5).
The world struggle to delink from core capital also has a key class dimension for Amin. In the Global South, this takes the form of a popular revolution against compradorization of their societies, in which ruling elements are aligned with multinational capital. In the Global North, it means a revolt against the authoritarian rule of monopoly capital over their own societies (Amin, The Long Revolution of the Global South [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019], 401–2).
Following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States/NATO sought to create a unipolar military order dominating the world, accelerating the use of force in a series of wars and military interventions, while coupling this with economic sanctions based on its financial power. Nevertheless, the continuing economic weakening of the triad, which is mired in long-term economic stagnation, destabilizing financialization, and deindustrialization, has meant that the United States and its allies have been unable to prevent a more polycentric world from emerging. Most threatening of all to Washington is the challenge of Beijing and the emerging economies of the Global South to the U.S.-dominated rules-based imperial order: the set of hegemonic international organizations, trade agreements, and military alliances represented by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (although the WTO has now been effectively undermined by Washington in response to its loss of control), and U.S.-dominated military blocs and alliances. Key in this respect is the growing potential threat that the BRICS represent to the hegemony of the dollar, the source of Washington’s global financial power.
The actual process of delinking and the emergence of a multipolar world order has been anything but smooth or free of contradictions. Amin wrote separate analyses of the conditions of delinking in China, Russia, the Arab world, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as examining the possibilities of Europe delinking from its U.S. overlord. In the case of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), delinking grew out of the Chinese Revolution in 1949, and the U.S. counterrevolution against it. Even with the opening up of the Chinese economy to the world market and the privatization of much of its economy, the PRC remained in control of its financial institutions, communications, technology, natural resources, and agriculture (with the land still collectively owned by village communities). It has retained a large state sector, giving it considerable autonomy over the strategic aspects of economy and society. These conditions allowed it to pursue, almost uniquely in our time, as Amin stated, its own “sovereign project” (Aijaz Ahmad, introduction to Samir Amin, Only People Make Their Own History [New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019], 27–28; Samir Amin, “China 2013,” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 [March 2013], 14–33).
Other countries have delinked partially and not always effectively from what Amin called the “collective imperialism of the triad” under varying conditions. Ironically, some were pushed further in that direction by sanctions imposed by Washington aimed at regime change. In some cases, such as Cuba and Venezuela, this was part of a socialist-oriented break with the system. Post-Soviet Russia, ruled by a capitalist oligarchy, was compelled to delink due to NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion aimed at regime change in Moscow, manifested in the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine. In Iran, delinking was the result of an Islamic Revolution of 1979, which overthrew the dictatorship of the Shah imposed by Washington (Amin, The Long Revolution of the Global South, 202–3, 409).
Without exception, all nations that have sought autonomy from the imperial system, regardless of the form this took, have been designated as enemies of the triad and targeted for regime change. Nevertheless, the erosion of the imperialist world-system is accelerating. Today’s BRICS grouping, now expanded under BRICS+ to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates, is certainly not anticapitalist, or even progressive in terms of national politics or class relations. But it represents a powerful economic bloc emanating from the Global South, unified by the common desire to achieve a degree of independence and nonalignment in relation to the imperialist core of the world economy. Such struggles for autonomy—insofar as they are genuine—are everywhere rooted in popular forces and aspirations.
From this brief sketch, it should be clear that Amin’s theory of delinking anticipated many of the parameters of the emerging multipolar world. However, his reading of the struggle against imperialism in this respect has been disputed recently by thinkers on the left for whom “imperialism” is increasingly portrayed in terms of interimperialist conflict between competing capitalist powers, as represented by the United States, Europe, and Japan, on the one hand, and China, Russia, and “subimperialist” powers, on the other. An example of this is a recent article in Spectre by Promise Li, a frequent contributor to The Nation and a member of the virulently anti-PRC Lausan Collective, titled “Against Multipolar Imperialism.” Li’s article strongly criticizes “Amin and other left-wing advocates of multipolarity.” Declaring that the “left-wing defense of multipolarity has become the implicitly political framework for most Western antiwar organizations,” Li goes on to contend that “the refusal to actively resist the authoritarian tendencies of regimes like China, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Iran, structurally prohibits us [the left] from organizing against imperialism as a global system.” Consequently, “the mainstays of the antiwar left are forced into a position” of being “unable to offer positive support to democratic movements in other regimes as they grow closer to capitalist economic integration.” Li quotes a 1979 critique of Amin by Iraqi leftist Muhammed Ja’far, which stated: “It is only possible to understand national formation as the social counterpart of the capitalist mode of economic production” (Promise Li, “Against Multipolar Imperialism,” Spectre, January 6, 2023, spectrejournal.com; Mohammad Ja’far, “National Formation in the Arab Region: A Critique of Samir Amin [1979],” Libcom, October 27, 2013, libcom.org).
In Li’s argument, democracy, authoritarianism, and development are to be judged primarily in terms of the dominant Western ideology. Democracy is directly, even exclusively, associated with “capitalist economic integration,” and all “national formations” have their origins in and develop through capitalism. This is in sharp conflict with Amin’s analysis in his now classic book, Eurocentrism. Li concludes his criticism of Amin and of the notion of a polycentric world by stating there is a need for the left to “resist this new instantiation of multipolar imperialism,” the theoretical basis of which he identifies directly with Amin himself (Samir Amin, Eurocentrism [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989, 2009]).
Despite such criticisms, Amin’s concept of delinking is inescapable—if we are to understand the forces currently generating a multipolar world order. Resistance to imperialism takes many forms, which can be seen today in the irrepressible struggles by the Palestinian people to survive by any means necessary in the face of Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. Tel Aviv’s unending atrocities are backed up at every point by the imperial White House in Washington, which has hurried to provide Israel with the necessary weapons of extermination for its war on the people of Gaza. In the face of such extreme levels of oppression, there can be no question that anti-imperialism and the building of a polycentric world constitutes, as Amin never tired of observing, the only possible path to a universal socialism of the peoples.