I am reading a book called ‘The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism’ (2013) by Samir Amin, the famous world-systems analyst. His models of center-periphery were cited by Deleuze and Guatarri. Today Amir continues in his socialist world systems direction. He opens this book with some pages of schematic macroeconomics, and this is the kind of crude statistical knowledge usually missing from socialist political economy. Then he introduces a concept of emergence, and analyzes national economies into the categories of the emergent and the non-emergent. This rhetorical angle distinguishes between the peripheral countries which are on acceptable paths (where something is emerging), from those countries which are going nowhere. This is a promising analysis, because the concept of emergence is so well developed in philosophy and science, and so it could really revitalize socialist macroeconomics. Of course Amir rejects the statistical way that banks and development agencies define “emerging economies”. He redefines this simply as having an autonomous, indigenous manufacturing base, whereas manufacturing in non-emergent countries has dependencies, which make it merely outsource contracting from the central economies. He begins with the Middle East, and does an analysis of the three most important economies in the region – Turkey, Iran and Egypt. He explains how these three countries were emergent at various times in the past, but are not so today. He says Ataturk and Nasir brought their countries into an emergent condition with autonomous manufacturing, as did early Iranian socialism, but that these projects were defeated by England, who forced the Middle-East to adopt radical Islam. This introduces a strong psychological aspect into political economy which I quite appreciate. It was out of narcissistic defense that England opposed nationalism in the Middle East, and forced the depoliticization of the Arab world which resulted in today’s political Islam. Then he goes on to describe how the Chinese economy today is emergent, because its manufacturing reflects patterns of land distribution which began in the Taiping uprisings of the 1860’s. This form of historical analysis puts my mind in the mode of Hegelian speculation. It seems to be an analysis of the emergence of the objective spirit or Sittleichkeit. I would connect this analysis to the recent surge in bio-Hegelian theories of emergence. In my opinion, socialist political-economy has always taken its materialism too literally, and mistakenly adopted crudely physical concepts of matter. Historical materialism has been a terrible intellectual straight jacket. Much of the writing today seems to be a Pataphysics of Geist. The question of the actual material base remains important, but now we are discovering the virtual spirits that possess it.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:34:16 +0000
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