Capitalism and Imperialism
Furthermore, he believes that capitalism and imperialism are intimately linked at all stages of their development. Contrary to Lenin, who argued that imperialism was a specific stage in the development of capitalism, Samir Amin asserts that capitalism is imperialist by nature and that, consequently, imperialism is a much more ancient phenomenon, from the conquest of the Americas during the sixteenth century to the move to monopoly capitalism.
Imperialism is according to him not in the least a recent phenomenon linked to monopoly capitalism as at the end of the nineteenth century. For him, the world expansion of capitalism is associated with a polarization at all stages of its development. In other words, the polarization between Cores and Peripheries is a phenomenon inherent in historical capitalism. With this statement, he admits nonetheless that capitalism and imperialism have gone through different phases with their own specificities. The forms of the Cores-Peripheries polarization, as well as the forms of expression of imperialism, have thus changed and evolved— but always towards an aggravation of the polarization and not towards its mitigation.Nowadays, Samir Amin states that we are witnessing the transformation of capitalism into a capitalism of generalized monopolies and the concomitant transformation of imperialism into a collective imperialism personified by the triad of the United States, Japan, and the European Union and by their (military, economic and financial) tools such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
This triad enjoys the monopoly of five advantages (weapons of mass destruction; mass communication systems; monetary and financial systems; technologies; and access to natural resources) that it wishes to keep at any cost. For this reason, it has engaged in the militarization of the world in order to avoid losing these monopolies. Wars of aggression against the populations of the Middle East, threats against other sovereign states, NATO interventions under the guidance of the United States army, the alleged war on terror, the campaign led by the United States to establish the headquarters of AFRICOM in Africa, are all examples of this will of collective imperialism to use force in order to preserve its hegemony, which is today greatly threatened by the rise of the so-called ‘emerging’ states.
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