Capitalism in the Age of Globalization by Samir Amin

Author:Samir Amin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Current Management of the Crisis and its Alternatives

The management of the political and social systems – whether local (national) or on a global scale – by the single virtue of the market – is a utopia. It is almost amusing to observe that at the very moment that ‘the end of ideologies’ is proclaimed, the dominant system is attempting to impose a pure ideology, expressed in the most extreme primitive form!

This is because the dominant forces in a time of lasting structural crisis like ours are not looking for a way out at all, but only for a means of managing the crisis. Discourse proposing long-term solutions in the interest of all – such as the Brandt Report, for example – which sets off from the principle that ‘we are all in the same boat’, is naive because it does not correspond to the way capitalism functions today. In reality the dominant forces generally give priority to the tactic of crisis management. In pursuing this they lay the greatest possible weight of the crisis on the shoulders of the weakest partners – the peripheries of the South and the East – with a view to alleviating the consequences of the crisis in the developed centres and ensuring that they do not in their turn become dramatic. This has worked against finding a solution. The new language of the dominant ideological apparatuses bears witness to these short-term preoccupations. Nowadays one hears of ‘governance’, meaning to say the ‘governability’ of a situation which is difficult to manage because it is in itself naturally explosive.

A function of this way of thinking is the disintegration of the peripheral states. These states are the fag-end of the world system, vulnerable in the extreme, open to world market forces and without the means to control them, so that they bear the maximum burden of the global crisis. This disastrous policy is interwoven with contradictions which are difficult to resolve. Permanent disorder manifests itself in regression and violence, and then the theory of (military) ‘low-intensity conflict’ management comes to the aid of the dominant powers as a means of managing these contradictions.

The methods employed are blatant manipulations: manipulations of ethnicity (or of religious fundamentalism), and of democracy, by means of selective interventions, according to the circumstances. This system would seem to rest on the basis of ‘one law for the rich and another for the poor’: here one intervenes on behalf of the people, there one maintains silence; here one imposes ‘free’ elections, there one defends a brutal dictatorship. The powers hope to get their way by domesticating the media by legitimizing interventions or maintaining a total silence when faced with more embarrassing situations. Political naivety is also mobilized to this end: the ‘humanitarian organizations’, for example, allow themselves to be made use of by the powers, just as in the past the missionaries – often armed with the best of subjective intentions – accompanied colonial conquest. Once again reality has shown that the interventions of

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