Samir Amin and the Imperial Core’s Five Monopolies
Quoted from Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (1997)
A country's position in the global hierarchy is defined by its capacity to compete in the world market. Recognizing this truism does not in any way imply sharing the bourgeois economist's view that this position is achieved as the result of rational measures—the said rationality being assessed by the yardstick of the so-called 'objective laws of the market'. On the contrary, I think that this competitiveness is a complex product of many economic, political and social factors. In this unequal fight the centres use what I call their 'five monopolies'. These monopolies constitute a challenge to social theory in its totality. They are:
(1) Technological monopoly. This requires huge expenditures that only a large and wealthy state can envisage. Without the support of the state, especially through military spending—something liberal discourse doesn't mention—most of these monopolies would not last.
(2) Financial control of worldwide financial markets. These monopolies have an unprecedented efficacy thanks to the liberalization of the rules governing their establishment. Not so long ago, the greater part of a nation's savings could circulate only within the largely national arena of its financial institutions. Today these savings are handled centrally by the institutions whose operations are worldwide. We are talking of finance capital: capital's most globalized component. Despite this, the logic of this globalization of finance could be called into question by a simple political decision to delink, even if delinking were limited to the domain of financial transfers. Moreover I think that the rules governing the free movement of finance capital have broken down. This system had been based in the past on the free floating of currencies on the market (according to the theory that money is a commodity like any other) with the dollar serving de facto as a universal currency.
Regarding money as a commodity, however, is a theory that is unscientific and the pre-eminent position of the dollar is only faute de mieux. A national currency cannot fulfil the functions of an international currency unless there is a surplus of exports in the country whose currency purports to serve as an international currency, thus underwriting structural adjustment in the other countries. This was the case with Great Britain in the late-nineteenth century. This is not the case of the United States today which actually finances its deficit by the borrowing which the rest of the world is forced to accept. Nor indeed is this the case with the competitors of the United States: Japan's surplus (that of Germany disappeared after reunification in 1991) is not sufficient to meet the financial needs occasioned by the structural adjustment of the others. Under these conditions financial globalization, far from being a 'natural' process, is an extremely fragile one. In the short run, it leads only to permanent instability rather than to the stability necessary for the efficient operation of the processes of adjustment.
(3) Monopolistic access to the planet's natural resources. The dangers of the reckless exploitation of these resources are now planet-wide. Capitalism, based on short-term rationality, cannot overcome these dangers posed by this reckless behaviour, and it therefore reinforces the monopolies of already developed countries. The much-vaunted environmental concern of these countries is simply not to let others be equally irresponsible.
(4) Media and communication monopolies. These not only lead to uniformity of culture but also open up new means of political manipulation. The expansion of the modern media market is already one of the major components in the erosion of democratic practices in the West itself.
(5) Monopolies over weapons of mass destruction. Held in check by the postwar bipolarity, this monopoly is again, as in 1945, the sole domain of the United States. While it may be true that nuclear proliferation risks getting out of control, it is still the only way of fighting this unacceptable US monopoly in the absence of democratic international control.
These five monopolies, taken as a whole, define the framework within which the law of globalized value operates. The law of value is the condensed expression of all these conditions, and not the expression of objective, 'pure' economic rationality. The conditioning of all of these processes annuls the impact of industrialization in the peripheries, devalues their productive work and overestimates the supposed value-added resulting from the activities of the new monopolies from which the centres profit. What results is a new hierarchy, more unequal than ever before, in the distribution of income on a world scale, subordinating the industries of the peripheries and reducing them to the role of subcontracting. This is the new foundation of polarization, presaging its future forms.
