Zulu
3rd April 2012, 23:07
Anyone know about this guy, Samir Amin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samir_Amin)?
At the bottom of the Wikipedia page there are some links to full articles by him, and although he criticizes the Bolsheviks (which, of course, is not right in my books) they still contain a lot of interesting points. For instance:
"The argument advanced by the promoters of this model of “community development” appears to be both pragmatic (“do something for the dispossessed and the victims, who are gathered together in these communities”) and democratic (“the communities are eager to assert themselves as such”). No doubt a lot of universalist talk has been and still is pure rhetoric, calling for no strategy for effective action to change the world, which would obviously mean considering concrete forms of struggle against the oppression suffered by this or that particular group. Agreed. But the oppression in question cannot be abolished if at the same time we give it a framework within which it can reproduce itself, even if in a milder form.
The attachment that members of an oppressed community may feel for their own culture of oppression, much as we may respect the feeling in the abstract, is nevertheless the product of the crisis of democracy. It is because the effectiveness, the credibility, and the legitimacy of democracy have eroded that human beings take refuge in the illusion of a particular identity that could protect them. Then we find on the agenda culturalism, that is, the assertion that each of these communities (religious, ethnic, sexual, or other) has its own irreducible values (that is, values that have no universal significance). Culturalism, as I have said elsewhere, is not a complement to democracy, a means of applying it concretely, but on the contrary a contradiction to it."
...
Culturalism has been successful to the degree that democratic management of diversity has failed. By culturalism I mean the affirmation that the differences in question are “primordial,” that they should be given “priority” (over class differences, for example), and sometimes even that they are “transhistorical,” that is, based on historical invariables. (This last is often the case with religious culturalisms, which easily slide toward obscurantism and fanaticism.)
To sort out this tangle of demands based on identity, I would propose what I think is an essential criterion. Those movements whose demands are connected with the fight against social exploitation and for greater democracy in every domain are progressive. On the contrary, those that present themselves as having “no social program” (because that is supposed to be unimportant!) and as being “not hostile to globalization” (because that too is unimportant!)—a fortiori, those that declare themselves foreign to the concept of democracy (which is accused of being a “Western” notion)—are openly reactionary and serve the ends of dominant capital to perfection. Dominant capital knows this, by the way, and supports their demands (even when the media take advantage of their barbarous content to denounce the peoples who are its victims!), using, and sometimes manipulating, these movements.
Samir Amin, Imperialism and Globalization, 2001
http://monthlyreview.org/2001/06/01/imperialism-and-globalization
.
At the bottom of the Wikipedia page there are some links to full articles by him, and although he criticizes the Bolsheviks (which, of course, is not right in my books) they still contain a lot of interesting points. For instance:
"The argument advanced by the promoters of this model of “community development” appears to be both pragmatic (“do something for the dispossessed and the victims, who are gathered together in these communities”) and democratic (“the communities are eager to assert themselves as such”). No doubt a lot of universalist talk has been and still is pure rhetoric, calling for no strategy for effective action to change the world, which would obviously mean considering concrete forms of struggle against the oppression suffered by this or that particular group. Agreed. But the oppression in question cannot be abolished if at the same time we give it a framework within which it can reproduce itself, even if in a milder form.
The attachment that members of an oppressed community may feel for their own culture of oppression, much as we may respect the feeling in the abstract, is nevertheless the product of the crisis of democracy. It is because the effectiveness, the credibility, and the legitimacy of democracy have eroded that human beings take refuge in the illusion of a particular identity that could protect them. Then we find on the agenda culturalism, that is, the assertion that each of these communities (religious, ethnic, sexual, or other) has its own irreducible values (that is, values that have no universal significance). Culturalism, as I have said elsewhere, is not a complement to democracy, a means of applying it concretely, but on the contrary a contradiction to it."
...
Culturalism has been successful to the degree that democratic management of diversity has failed. By culturalism I mean the affirmation that the differences in question are “primordial,” that they should be given “priority” (over class differences, for example), and sometimes even that they are “transhistorical,” that is, based on historical invariables. (This last is often the case with religious culturalisms, which easily slide toward obscurantism and fanaticism.)
To sort out this tangle of demands based on identity, I would propose what I think is an essential criterion. Those movements whose demands are connected with the fight against social exploitation and for greater democracy in every domain are progressive. On the contrary, those that present themselves as having “no social program” (because that is supposed to be unimportant!) and as being “not hostile to globalization” (because that too is unimportant!)—a fortiori, those that declare themselves foreign to the concept of democracy (which is accused of being a “Western” notion)—are openly reactionary and serve the ends of dominant capital to perfection. Dominant capital knows this, by the way, and supports their demands (even when the media take advantage of their barbarous content to denounce the peoples who are its victims!), using, and sometimes manipulating, these movements.
Samir Amin, Imperialism and Globalization, 2001
http://monthlyreview.org/2001/06/01/imperialism-and-globalization
.