Samir Amin back when he was young, hip, and anti-imperialist.

Although the strength of marxism has always resided in the fact that its method stands over and above its specific adherents, it is still disappointing when important marxist theorists, or more importantly a communist organization, fails in their fidelity to the method. A knee-jerk reaction is to denounce this betrayal, and the entire history of those involved in this betrayal, as if they had nothing worthwhile to offer (this is being done, here and there, with the evaporated Peoples War in Nepal as if it is irrevocably tainted by the current revisionism of the party that had once led the revolution), and I myself have made this mistake more than once.The betrayal I am talking about here, however, concerns Samir Amin's recent analysis of Mali that came as a shock to both myself and others. As faithful readers of this blog will probably be aware, I have been highly influenced by Amin's anti-imperialist political economy and his creative application of marxism that has affected my own understanding of the world. Indeed, although Amin is not an avowed marxist-leninist-maoist, it is partially because of his work inandthat I ended up gravitating towards maoism. Moreover, his ability to explain the labour theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and other concepts of marxist political economy that I had otherwise found difficult to grasp with my training in philosophy has helped me grow intellectually and I often find myself returning to his work in the 1960s-1980s in order to make sense of difficult problematics. Indeed, in my last entry regarding Charlie Post's review of Cope'sI cited Amin, as I often tend to do, without even realizing, at that time, that he had just published his rather disappointing article on the French intervention in Mali.In any case, Amin now follows Gilbert Achcar and other marxist academics into the mire of pseudo anti-imperialism . And though it is worth noting that Amin, unlike Achcar and far lesser lights , rejected the NATO intervention in Libya as well as the US-backed anti-Assad forces in Syria, it still does not excuse his descent into imperialist justification in the case of Mali. Perhaps Amin's betrayal is even more tragic than the previous betrayals of others; he is arguably the most important living theorist of imperialism and should know better.I have no doubt that Amin, always thorough in his assessment of particular social contexts, has accurately described the situation in Mali in the aforecited article. The problem, however, is that he makes a leap in logic in deriving French imperialist intervention from the state that he has described. He never made this leap when examining Afghanistan or Iraq: this discrepancy is significant, a glaring contradiction. In fact it is such a contradiction that it almost seems absurd for him to declare that the forces of Political Islam in Mali are a "major ally of the triad" on hand while arguing, on the other, that a member of one part of the triad should have the right to invade Mali in order to counter this potential imperialist ally.This article is filled with so many contradictions, qualifications, and nuances, that Amin's demand for French imperialist intervention is actually incoherent. The incoherence is so obvious, in fact, that my first instinct upon reading this piece was to assume it was written by someone other than Amin––until now, he has been an extremely coherent thinker. The fact that he claims that French intervention will not bring liberation, that he says both "yes and no" to this intervention, but still sides with it in the end is a rather muddled assessment. His entire logic for intervention, which he admits won't really be, rests on shaky foundations: Political Islam is the "real" agent of imperialism, and the French are doing it alone without NATO. So the reactionary ideology of oppressed peoples, regardless of this ideology's fidelity in the last instance to imperialism, is somehow worse than an imperialist nation's "humanitarian" intervention which even Amin recognizes will not bring liberation? And the French are more progressive than the US when they unilaterally intercede? Oh, he gives reasons and speaks of the importance of re-establishing an independent Mali, but the justification for French imperialist intervention is still the conclusion of a false syllogism.What is most surprising is the fact that Amin––who has a long history of supporting anti-colonial movements in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia––refuses to speak of France's colonial history. For France's involvement in Mali now seems like an echo of French colonial policy, a desire to avidly return to the business of controlling and maintaining all of those colonies it lost decades ago. This possible ideological investment, something Amin would never have ignored in the past, is absent from his analysis and we must wonder why he has spirited it away.Until now I was under the impression that someone like Samir Amin, who has demonstrated in the past his understanding of the mechanics of imperialism, would never fall into the trap of endorsing imperial intervention. Perhaps the fact of his past understanding has conditioned the incoherence of his endorsement because he lacks a theoretical framework capable of providing a thorough defense of his betrayal. And in this sense, just as we can read marxism against Marx, we can probably read Amin's previous works on imperialism against Amin in this particular instance––I have a hard time believing that the Amin who wrotewould like the Amin who wrote this article.And this should tell us, yet again, that no one within the marxist tradition is free from lapsing into erroneous political commitments simply because they are marxist––no matter how important their contributions to the marxist canon might be. The individual marxists stand beneath marxism itself, just as every important scientist stands beneath the truth process of hir discipline. Individual humans commit errors and will commit errors; we cannot assume that a single theorist, no matter how important, is ever worthy to be treated as an idol. Every idol is brought low by the method of historical materialism, even its initiators.But this should not be cause for distress or even panicked attempts to write these failures out of our theoretical canon. After all, Marx and Engels failed repeatedly––as did Lenin, as did Mao––and we still uphold their contributions. Those of us who proclaim fidelity to this tradition do not excise Marx from history, or argue that all of his contributions are garbage, simply because of his failure to analyze India and other colonial situations correctly. What we do understand, however, is that there is always the possibility that every marxist theorist, and every important communist movement, can potentially fail and that this failure, more than anything else, teaches us something about the messiness of social relations.Amin's bizarre capitulation to imperialist logic should remind us of the fact that we are all capable of capitulation: some of us might become liberals, some might become reactionaries, and some might attempt to disguise are capitulation (like Amin and others) as proper "marxism". This is a humbling reminder. Even still, this does not invalidate anything and everything we have done before the moment of capitulation.I recall that when I was a child, within the interesting Christian/Socialist hybrid circles my family was involved, encountering people who claimed that people who claimed that the denunciation of religious faith meant that one was never faithful to begin with: "If you become an atheist," was the argument, "Then you never really believed in God in the first place." Because, after all, people whobelieve in God would never abandon God because they would know, in the Platonic sense,! A similar mystified logic operates within communist circles: "if you abandon communist principles, then you never were ancommunist and all of your work to the present must be seen as suspect." But this is not a material or dialectical assessment; it is an absolutistjudgment.As historical materialists we should not treat fidelity to the communist project as a matter of absolute faith but a commitment that can always be undermined by the weight of bourgeois ideology. So in this context, while I think that Amin's recent betrayal of his own commitments in the case of Mali is significant, I do not think this invalidates his contribution to historical materialist theory. It might be that he has now reached the end of his ability to contribute, it might be that he is capable of his correcting his errors, it might be that (like so many pompous academics) he will simply pretend he never wrote that article and return to the everyday business of academic marxism. Whatever the case it means this: his current assessment of Mali is a betrayal, a capitulation to imperialism, and we must wonder why so many marxist intellectuals are losing themselves in this wilderness of pseudo anti-imperialism.And also... I really hope someone will beat the sense back into me if I ever betray my political principles!