by DIMITRIS KONSTANTAKOPOULOS
Shortly before his death, in a series of writings, Samir Amin unfolded the two issues that were mainly of concern to him. The first was the non-subjection of China to financial globalization, that is, to the totalitarian power of world financial capital; also the non transformation of the Chinese land into merchandise. The second issue was the need to build a new, a “Fifth International.”
We had been in China together, invited to a congress on Marxism, at 2018, just before his death and I remember his immense anxiety about China and financial globalization. One day he woke me up and asked me to go urgently to his room, where he was interviewed on a Chinese television. He wanted me to talk also to them, to describe to the Chinese public what I had experienced in the former USSR, watching as a journalist the collapse of the Soviet regime and the restoration of capitalist relations of production and distribution in the ‘90s. He feared that Beijing might, in some turn of its so sui generis evolution, make a decisive turn towards capitalism and wanted to ”inoculate ” somehow the Chinese in advance.
Samir did not believe that the Chinese regime is a socialist one. “I will not say China is socialist, I will not say China is capitalist,” he said in a speech at a prestigious University of Peking. Sometimes he hoped, he thought, that there might be a way to state capitalism, state socialism and finally socialism. He wanted to keep open such a possibility.
China has made enormous concessions to capitalism. Still the power in China is not in the hands of its capitalist class and the economy remains a planned one. Samir believed that should China make the qualitative leap to capitalism the USSR has made in 1991, this would lead to a social catastrophe, reminiscent of the Yeltsin years in Russia and to the dismantling of China itself as it happened with the Soviet Union.
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