The hidden legacy of Samir Amin: delinking’s ecological foundation

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the relationship between Samir Amin’s programme for delinking, smallholder agriculture, his theories of ecology, and the current of ecological dependency that developed out of North African dependency analysis. It argues that ecological forms of agriculture in fact underpinned the original case from which Amin derived delinking – the developmental model of Amin’s China. It goes on to show how collaborators and fellow travellers of Amin like Mohamed Dowidar, Fawzy Mansour and Slaheddine el-Amami advanced the case for smallholder-centred national development, and connects their investigations to Amin’s theoretical framework.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article examine la relation entre le programme de déconnexion de Samir Amin, les petits exploitants paysans, ses théories de l’écologie et le courant de dépendance écologique qui s’est développé à partir de l’analyse de la dépendance nord-africaine. Il soutient que les formes écologiques de l’agriculture ont en fait sous-tendu le cas original dont Amin a tiré le concept de déconnexion – le modèle de développement de la Chine d’Amin. Il montre ensuite comment des collaborateurs et compagnons de route d’Amin comme Mohamed Dowidar, Fawzy Mansour et Slaheddine el-Amami ont fait valoir l’argument en faveur d’un développement national centré sur les petits exploitants, et relie leurs recherches au cadre théorique d’Amin.

KEYWORDS:

• Samir Amin
• dependency theory
• Tunisia
• delinking
• agro-ecology

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Samir Amin
• théorie de la dépendance
• Tunisie
• déconnexion
• agro-écologie

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Martha Mundy for comments and editing on a working paper on which I draw here (Ajl 2019d), to three anonymous reviewers for ROAPE, and to the issue editors for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Amin writes, ‘On the other hand, inasmuch as it contributes to the consolidation of a productive model in which the interests of the privileged classes are determinant, such integration does deform development’ (Amin 1983, 33).

2 Clearly, some states with extremely varying degrees of internal political and social democracy have been able to endure and, in some ways, flourish even amidst severe external assault, and even after the fall of the USSR.

3 Interview with Ali Kadri, 19 June 2019.

4 The literature is huge. See, inter alia, Amin (1983); Fergany (1987); Ajl (2021).

5 See citations later in the essay, as well as Zaki (1987) and Kurzum (1997). The idea of self-reliant development was in circulation earlier as a descriptor for the Chinese model, in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and when Julius Nyerere used it in the Arusha Declaration.

6 I am currently researching the intellectual history of the connections between Amin’s work in Accumulation on a world scale, The Future of Maoism and delinking and the development of Arab dependency theory, Arab auto-centred development theory and Tunisian radical agronomy. For that reason, I generally do not make explicit statements about the genealogy of ideas. Initial findings, which I draw upon and rework in this essay, are in Ajl 2018 and 2019a.

7 For the most sophisticated statement of the role of super-exploitation in dependency, see Marini (1973).

8 For critique and discussion of the debate, see Samara (2005) and Ajl (2019b).

9 As Cope (2019, 37–87) shows, very often productivity is the same in the core and the periphery.

10 Amin also perhaps understated the extent to which the Chinese experience was based on an ideology of self-reliance at the local level. See, on this, Schmalzer (2016, 141–144).

11 Nor did he write of the opaque human health impacts of such agro-chemicals (Shattuck 2020).

12 For some of the history of Amin’s collaborations with Fawzy Mansour, see Amin (2006, 91, 202–203).

13 Luddites has entered the common language to dismiss people who are opposed to new technologies. However, the Luddite movement was a radical organisation of textile workers who demolished new textile machineries because they believed such technology was threatening their livelihoods.

14 On different interpretations of Prometheanism, see Galluzzo (2015).

15 On the modern after-effects of the Green Revolution, the reader can find no better primer than the 2018 documentary Couscous, by filmmaker Habib Ayeb.

16 I thank Nils McCune for bringing this work to my attention.

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Notes on contributors

Max Ajl

Max Ajl is a postdoctoral Talent fellow at Wageningen University and Research. He writes on Arab agrarian issues. His book A people's green new deal is forthcoming with Pluto in 2021.