Samir Amin: "Angriff auf Europa - Attack on Europe - Attaque contre l'Europe." - audio archiv

Episode Transcript
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Audioarchiv Team (00:08):
Welcome to audioarchiv, the channel for historical interviews with female writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.

Anmod (00:34):
Hello. According to Samir Amin, five monopolies determine global firstly the control of high-tech technologies.
Secondly, control over global resources, control over global financial flows, control of global communication.

(00:54):
Fifth, control over weapons of mass destruction.
Some countries like the United Kingdom, France, Israel, China, Russia, India, and others control some of these regionally.
So far, however, the USA exclusively controls all five areas globally.
And yet, challenges are arising from Europe.

(01:16):
Trump and Putin, who today doubts that they want to divide this Europe amongst themselves like
Hitler and Stalin did with Poland back in the day.
For the continent would be a politically and economically lucrative prize for both the US elites and Russian colonial ambitions.
On one hand, political rights, workers' rights, data protection rights, social rights, multicultural

(01:41):
and multisex rights would be eliminated, while on the other hand, the infrastructural advantages
as well as European innovation and purchasing power would deliberately transition into American or Russian ownership.
For the survival of European diversity as well as social and democratic rights, there is therefore

(02:01):
no other option but to radically and publicly oppose this conquest by Russian and American elites and their European allies.
With an uncertain outcome, however, already in 2003, the Egyptian philosopher Samir Amin predicted
increasing violence and the loss of human and social and other protective rights without resistance

(02:26):
against this new old world order sought by the USA and Russia.

Burgmer (02:32):
They use the term of really existing capitalism.
What do they mean by that exactly?

Samir Amin (02:39):
Yes, really existing capitalism cannot be defined in general precisely because it's really existing.
It's not theoretical, it's not imaginative, it's not the common characteristics of capitalism throughout the ages.
Capitalism today is very different from capitalism in Venice in the fourteenth century, but
capitalism is always at any of its stages, cannot be looked at as a market.

(03:04):
But, as I said, market plus state plus nation plus power etcetera.
And therefore, really existing capitalism has to be defined for each stage of its own development
with its particular characteristics which are interrelated and which create a global dynamism,
which is not exclusively the global dynamism of the market, but something much more complex.

(03:29):
Now, instead of looking into the various definitions of really existing capitalism in previous
ages, I will focus on what is really existing capitalism today because this is precisely the
danger that you indicated and the big danger, the dramatic danger in the present circumstances.

(03:49):
Precisely because of what I have said about the system becoming obsolete in the sense that its
destructive dimension overshadows the constructive dimension of it.
Precisely for that it needs more and more violence.
It's the system which is violent.
It's not the people who respond who are sometimes violent, but it's the system that is violent.

(04:15):
It needs to be more and more violent.
And it is precisely in that frame that the ruling class of the United States has chosen the
militarisation of globalisation as the unique possible tool to implement the project that is
contrary to what is being said, the market cannot by itself, by its own walking, create something acceptable.

(04:44):
And therefore the unacceptable must be forced upon the people through more and more violence.
And military violence is the supreme level of violence.
Now you see, I don't want to go too much into the details, but I'll focus on that side.
There are other sides of the question.
And I'm saying, the ruling class of the United States.

(05:06):
This policy which is expressed in a book of the new right in the United States about the project
of a twenty-first American century.
And they say in that book very clearly, brutally, we must use our military power to enforce
the system that we need full stop.

(05:28):
I mean, I have read this book and I had read it before and I've read it again on that opportunity. Mein Kampf.
It's exactly the same, the same simple logic at the time of Mein Kampf controlling Europe was
in the mind of the people, including Hitler controlling the world today. It's the world.
You replace Europe by the world and you get the same language.

(05:50):
Exactly the same, the same logic.
Now, that is a dementia project, but a dementia project is necessarily a criminal one.
It is bound to fail. Hitler failed.
The United States ruling class will fail. But at what costs?
The cost will be more gigantic, even than the cost that we had to pay for the defeat of the Nazis' project.

(06:16):
And this is what is being implemented today.
That is why it is so why the ruling class of the United States have chosen this dementia and
criminal project precisely because they are aware of the deficiencies of the United States,
economy and society that is assuming something which will never happen, a good global market,

(06:41):
a transparent just etcetera, etc.
Which means a global market with no states, no military power, no, etc. Etc.
Which, of course, will never happen assuming that the United States could not be hegemonic.
And this is what the Europeans or some Europeans, and I think particularly Germany and France,

have perfectly understood (07:04):
that the working of a global market would not necessarily benefit the United States.
Those deficiencies are reflected, as everybody knows, in the deficit, the growing deficit of the United States.
That is a society which has a zero rate of saving.
A zero rate is the only society in the world which has a zero rate of saving, which means that it is totally parasitic.

(07:31):
It cannot maintain its pattern with all the waste and injustice, its pattern without pumping
from the rest of the world, from the savings of others to compensate its non-saving.
And this is what is happening.
It has happened until now by, let's say, spontaneous or pseudo-spontaneous normal investments

(07:56):
of China, Japan, Europe and everybody else in dollars in the US.
The ruling class of the United States has understood that this is a very vulnerable position
and it will grow more vulnerable, more and more vulnerable.
And therefore they should replace it with a system of, let's say brutally, plunder and tribute,

(08:18):
not a system of market.
The target of that strategy is not the global market.
It's global plunder to the benefit exclusively of the United States.
And this is creating a growing, or at least the conditions for a growing contradiction between
the United States and all the rest of the world.

(08:40):
It will take different forms within Europe to speak of Europe.
There are those who would like this system to continue complete as it is, and accept the US
leadership, and accept, therefore, the plunder including of themselves that might be unfortunately
quite attractive in some places in Eastern Europe.

(09:03):
And it's the case there are those who would like to have the United States a little less arrogant
and accepting sharing the plunder of others.
It does exist in many countries everywhere in Europe, but there are those also perhaps, and
I would say I don't want to put labels, because I don't think that it is the right and the left.

(09:27):
There are such concepts within the right as it is and within the left as it is, electoral left,
say, in the present world.
And there are those who understand that this is not acceptable for themselves, and if not for
themselves, perhaps also for others.

(09:47):
And therefore, the reaction of Germany and France to the aggression of the United States in
Iraq is not just a good defence of legitimate defence of international law.
It's more than that they had perfectly understood that the target of the United States in Iraq is not democracy.

(10:12):
It's not at all that, and they were very good friends with Saddam Hussein.
At some point in time, Mr.
Saddam Hussein became enemy number one.
The same day he decided that Iraq should try to sell its oil in euros and not in dollars.
That is obvious, that the target is the plunder of Iraq and the plunder of oil and making it

(10:37):
impossible for the oil country to move towards participating in the market, but not through
and with using the dollar.
That is helping to compensate for the deficit of the US. That is the day.
And this is why this contradiction, I think, is going to grow.

(10:57):
The Iraqi war is a war against Europe.
First, that is in order to, through the military control of the oil wealth of the Middle East,
expanded Middle East with Central Asia, and so on, have a tool to compel the Europeans to accept
to align on the so-called leadership.

(11:20):
That is the plunder of the United States and replaces, therefore, the flow of capital with a
tribute extracted, but it simultaneously, of course, waged war against the Iraqi people, not against Saddam Hussein.
And it is a war against potentially all other peoples of the south in Manasse.

(11:40):
And it is clearly stated by the US strategists that their target is by establishing a continuous and strong military presence. In many places.
They have more than six hundred large military bases throughout the world to prepare for war. Prepare for war.
They say it against China, not against North Korea.

(12:03):
This is a code name for China and also against anybody else who would not accept being plundered.
This is the dimensional and criminal dimension so that I could conclude this by saying that
what is needed at the present stage is to defeat that project.
Defeating the US project of military control of the planet is the precondition for any alternative.

(12:31):
There will be no social progress anywhere stable, no democratic progress, also credible and
legitimate and having roots, gaining roots nowhere without prior defeating the US project of control.

Now it continues with the interview.
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Burgmer (13:00):
I would like to try once more to draw a comparison between colonialism, as it developed in earlier
times, and imperialism as a European project for the countries of the south.
Today, in the age of globalization, we have only one power that remains, namely the USA.

(13:23):
Can we say that it is the same colonialism, only that there is now just one power that remains
and is now turning colonialism into imperialism?

Samir Amin (13:34):
Yes, in a way we could say that.
Let’s say that we are in a situation where we have one colonial empire; it’s the world.
And one colonial power centre; it’s the US.
But this image, even if it’s not entirely wrong, is to a certain extent superficial and limited.

(13:57):
And I think that we ought to look more closely at the specific characteristics of present imperialism
compared to the imperialism of earlier stages.
Now on this point, I consider myself a Marxist, but I don’t believe that I have a good understanding
of Marxism, and those who disagree with me do not have a good understanding of Marxism.

(14:25):
But let me say that in my understanding, imperialism is not a stage.
Everybody knows Lenin’s title; the later stage of capitalism is not a later stage or a stage
of capitalism, but a permanent characteristic of capitalism in the sense that capitalism has

(14:45):
always been imperialist in that it has always built unequal development on a global level to
the benefit of the centres.
But that doesn’t mean that the pattern of that organisation has been the same throughout the
ages; from fourteen ninety-two, to put a date, the discovery, and then the start of the conquest of the Americas.

(15:11):
To today, it has moved, and the patterns of imperialism have been specific to each stage while
it’s very well known that from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred, to put two rough dates,
the three mercantilist centuries, where the logic was basically the logic of accumulation of

(15:31):
commercial merchant capital, which was one of the preconditions for the later industrial revolution
to the benefit of a number of areas in Atlantic Europe based on the building and exploitation of the Americas.
Now the second stage was, let’s say I would roughly put it at a century and a half from eighteen

(15:56):
hundred to after the Second World War, to the fifties, to put some date, nineteen fifties, a
century and a half where the centre-periphery was practically synonymous with the industrialised centres versus non-industrialised peripheries.

(16:17):
And that pattern of unequal division of labour and unequal benefits in terms of growth and income
per capita of the global growth to the benefit of the centres was accompanied by certain patterns of colonialism.

(16:38):
But, as you know, not everybody has colonies.
Germany was an important imperialist power since its constitution in eighteen seventy-one, with
no colonies or very few colonies.
So it's not a question of having colonies but colonies.
This pattern of colonies indeed was and gave an advantage, economic and political, to those

(17:02):
who have them in the global imperialist system of that time. Now we are moving.
We have moved already, and we are moving more into a new stage of imperialism in which the division
of labour, the definition of centre peripheries, is no more than non-industrialised areas.
They have moved into industrialisation, and in some cases, as in Eastern Asia, China, Southeast

(17:28):
Asia, India, but also a number of countries and more and more of the large countries of Latin
America, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and so on into industrialisation.
Now, the characteristic now of the division of labour is no more what I would have called for
the previous period the monopoly of industry.

(17:49):
Having the monopoly of industry now, it's no more the monopoly of industry, it's what I'm calling
the five new monopolies of the centres.
That is the control of technologies, high tech, of course, the control of access to natural
resources of the planet, not necessarily property but access, the control of finance, global

(18:14):
finance, the control of global communication, and finally the control of mass destruction armament.
These are the new monopolies.
And through it, there is a pattern which is being created of an equal division of labour where
you can have high growth in some areas of the South, and you have high growth in East Asia for instance.

(18:38):
Currently, but the centres keeping with those monopolies and this constitutes what I'm saying.
And this is a new characteristic of imperialism.
That imperialism is now the collective imperialism of the Triad.
That is, imperialism until now had to be conjugated in the plural.

(18:59):
There was not imperialism, there were imperialist powers.
And those imperialist powers, whether they had colonies or no colonies, were in continuous conflict
and violent conflict, a series of continuous wars.
There was French imperialism, British imperialism, German imperialism, American imperialism, Japanese imperialism.

(19:22):
Each centre was an imperialism by itself and imperialism as the common ground of all of them. Today.
We have something which I call the collective imperialism of the triad.
This is a qualitative change.
It's a qualitative change due to a higher level of concentration of capital.
I'm referring here to the dominant segment of capital, not small capitalists everywhere, including

(19:47):
in the most developed countries, but the dominant globalised capital.
What is called in common language, a little vulgar transnationals, the big transnationals, the
monopoly capital as at the time of Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, were basically national.
They were constituted on the basis, started on the basis of a national market, and then they

(20:13):
went to conquer parts of the global market.
It is being said that up to the fifties of this century, a new big company, transnational, needed
to establish itself and to be successful, a potential market of one hundred million buyers that
roughly corresponded to a big country or a big country plus some others around now to be constituted

(20:39):
an Internet is typical of that you need a market, a potential market of six hundred million buyers.
When you say six hundred million buyers, you mean the world, because the world is six billion and only ten percent.
You mean not Europe, not the United States.
You have to add Europe, the United States, Japan, and parts and bits here and there.

(21:00):
This is the new collective imperialism doesn't mean that there are no contradictions, but the
contradiction is not at the level, in my opinion, of the conflict between the transnationalized
capital of various countries, because they have a very high level of awareness of their common
interest in the management of the world.

(21:23):
But the contradiction is at another level the people, of course, but beyond even there are,
what should must be called, national interests, even in the frame of capitalism, which are linked
to the existence of peoples, nations, states, etcetera, and the contradiction at the level of political culture.

(21:44):
The political culture, and this is obvious, now more than ever, of the United States for instance,
and of Europe, has a variety of political culture.
But there are some tendencies which are common to a certain extent, which are quite different.
Now it is at that level that you have the growing contradictions, not at the level of conflict

(22:07):
within the economic interests narrow sense of dominant capital that is of transnationals within the triad.

Burgmer (22:15):
To what extent is this transnational capitalism not a capitalism that breaks all these boundaries
and thereby makes a new world society possible?

Samir Amin (22:36):
Is that there will be dimensions of social life, and particularly of economic life, which are
going to be more and more globalised in a negative and positive sense.
But there are other dimensions which will not be globalised at the same level of strength, not

(22:57):
because of remnants of the past, but because of the other dimensions of social reality.
And I'm thinking particularly of not nations as ethnicities or not religions as communal groups
within a nation or on the surface of the globe. But political cultures.

(23:18):
Political cultures are the product of history, how a people in a particular region, whether
homogeneous, ethnically, religiously or not, have reacted to and responded to the challenge
of the expansion of capitalism.
It has created a political culture.

(23:38):
And I do not think at all that the destruction of those political cultures to the benefit of
deepening the economic dimension of globalization is something positive.
And this is not what is happening; this is what capital would like to happen but is unable to enforce.
People are resisting in the sense that the destruction of this is one of the destructive dimensions

that I mentioned from the start (24:03):
the destruction of, let's call them, nations with their own
political and historical culture, including language.
It's not by pure chance that we are compelled to speak in English, that we are speaking in English
while I am Egyptian and you are German.
And we are not using either one or the other of our languages.

(24:27):
And we are using that language that is being resisted.
And I think that in Europe there is a strong resistance to it, very strong, with its positive and negative aspects.
It's positive that Europeans can have a common dream of Europe, but they do not want to achieve
it by completely sacrificing their own specificities, cultural positive specificities.

(24:53):
They would not decide that we will have one Europe with one language and would choose, for instance,
English or German as Hitler was thinking, or French as Napoleon perhaps was thinking, but would
feel the need to adjust to that contradiction.
And that also applies to any other part of the world.

(25:15):
And capitalists will be unable to respond to that challenge.
It can manipulate, does manipulate it in a variety of ways.
I think in Europe it is manipulating it, addressing sometimes a naive segment of the European people, particularly the young.
Oh, we are fed up with nations and we are Europeans in their actual behaviour.

(25:40):
They don't behave, because what does it mean to be European?
It cannot negate being German, French, Polish or any other.
But it manipulates it in that way by saying that, oh, anything which is national is negative.
I don't think that this is true.
It's very dangerous to say so. And if.
And there are proofs, there are signals in Europe, if the left, for instance, along with the,

(26:06):
let's say, civilised right, not the ultra right, would agree on a consensus to attack the state
as they currently negate the role of the state on the one hand and also develop an anti-national rhetoric.
They will create a room for the ultra right.

(26:27):
And this is what is happening?
You have national populist responses.
It's not the good response, it's a horrible response.
But it means that the system is manipulating that question.
And that is very dangerous.
If we look at other parts of the world, the south, we find not only the south elsewhere.

(26:50):
Also we find a variety of manipulations of that contradiction, either by manipulating again so-called religious fundamentalism.
I call them para-religious movements, because they are not theologies, they are political movements,
which use religion and not only Islam.

(27:10):
You have that with Hinduism and you have a rightist government of a Hindu political party in India.
You have very close to Muslim systems of power in many Muslim countries or ethnicities.
And you had that played out in the most destructive way, not only in Africa, but also in Europe.

(27:33):
Look at Yugoslavia, look at the former Soviet Union, etc. Etc.
And that is the manipulation of a real contradiction, because capitalism is unable to solve
it, to solve it correctly, and therefore can only manipulate it.
We need to develop another strategy, a strategy which does not negate the nation, the state

(28:00):
and conceive the democratization at all levels, from local to national to global, but not negating the national level.

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Samir Amin: "Angriff auf Europa - Attack on Europe - Attaque contre l'Europe."

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