Samir Amin makes a really interesting argument about the transition from one mode of production to another.

For centuries people have been trying to explain the "European miracle," that is, how it is that beginning in the 16th century Europe embarked on a journey towards capitalism and modernity, while other parts of the world didn't make the same transition. As you know, explaining "modernization" was one of the founding problematics of sociology as a discipline - I've even heard it called by sociological writers the defining problematic. Other historical disciplines have formed around this problem, but in different ways.

Anthropology emerged as an attempt to explain the "primitive" peoples of the world who were being encountered by the Euro-North American colonialists and imperialists as they expanded across the world; these peoples, who were thought to have no history, were contrasted in a very radical way with the modernity of the West.

Orientalism was a discipline that dated to the same period, but its focus was on the high - but non-modern and non-capitalist civilizations like India and China.

These disciplines took a Eurocentric view, as did most others in Western society at the time. Eurocentrism still dominates. People seeing the world through the lens of this ideology try to locate the explanation of the "European miracle" in some aspect of European culture that made this 16th century take-off possible. Some say that it's something inherent in Christianity, for instance. Others say that it's because Europen thought descends from the rational and naturalistic philosophy that bloomed at a certain point in classical Greek civilization, even though 15 centuries separate these epochs and Europeans didn't rediscover classical Greek thought - with the exception of a few texts - until they were reintroduced to them by contact with Islamic civilization during the Crusades.

Samir Amin's explanation is quite different. He says that we must locate this change in the realm of the economic base. He says that Western European feudalism was in fact a peripheral form of the tributary mode of production typified by the Arab-Islamic world of the Middle Ages. The tributary ideology - which took an Islamic form - in the Islamic world was much more highly elaborated and intellectualized than in the West, and hence more inflexible. (He points out the irony of the fact that Islamic or "Sharia" law, as it is called, is today considered a hallmark of the Islamic world's primitivism, whereas it actually originated from a highly intellectual metaphysics.) The productive forces and productive relations of the Islamic tributary system were also much more elaborated and therefore inflexible than in Western Europe.

He says that a similar situation existed in the East. China's tributary system was the tributary system par excellence in that region, while Japanese, Korean etc. feudalism constitued a peripheral form, and their tributary ideologies, as a result, were less elaborated than the rigid tributary ideology of Confucionism in China.

Furthermore, within Europe itself, it was in the Mediterranean region that the most advanced economic and ideological forms were located. Italy, for example, had proto-capitalist city-state economies in some regions which were pioneers in trade and so on. It was, moreover, in the Mediterranean regions that the Catholic intellectual world was based. It was here that the Christian tributary ideology was most elaborate and inflexible. Compare the highly-systematized dogmas of the Mediterranean intellectual elite with the country religion of illiterate priests and peasants in Northern Europe at the time.

He argues that it was precisely because Western Europe had a peripheral tributary system that capitalism was able to take off there as opposed to the more advanced Islamic world, because when proto-capitalist relations emerged they weren't re-asorbed as they would be within much more centralized and powerful states of the Islamic world. And within Europe itself, it was in the Northern Atlantic region that capitalism took off - after a brief flourishing of the proto-capitalist forms in the Mediterranean region in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance periods. The Atlantic coast became the advanced guard of capitalist development and led Europe in the colonization of the world - which was an inherent component of the historical emergence of capitalism - of the birth of the capitalist world system.

If you look at Asia, something similar occurred in that, at a much later point, capitalism took off in the periperal area that was Japan, as opposed to China, as conventional wisdom might have thought more likely. By the early 20th century Japanese imperialism was attempting to colonize much of Asia. Japan imposed brutal colonial regimes on parts of China and on the Korean peninsula, for example, and it is in this context that socialist-oriented liberation movements emerged in Korea, China and the Philippines.

I think that Amin's thesis coincides with Lenin's concept of the "weakest link" and the Maoist assessment that the socialist revolutions will tend to emerge first in the peripheries of the world system, or the global "storm centers," as the Maoists put it.

Lenin and those around him had to explain why the first successful socialist revolution occured in Russia as opposed to the more advanced capitalist countries like Germany, Britain, France or the United States (note that by "successful" revolution I mean that they were successful in overthrowing the Czarist regime and taking state power; the question of the consolidation of workers' power is another matter). Marx and Engels had predicted that the socialist revolutions would occur precisely in the most advanced areas of the capitalist world system. Powerful movements did emerge in those countries, and even by 1871 - during Marx and Engel's own lifetime - the workers of Paris did in fact take control over the city for a brief time, in an historical episode known as the Paris Commune. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917 this expectation was essentially a dogama in the communist movements throughout the world. Socialist revolution was seen from a Eurocentric lens. But the first successful revolution refuted this expectation. Lenin and many around him concluded that the revolution happened in Russia because it was a weak link in the capitalist-imperialist chain. Russian society was semi-feudal and semi-capitalist/imperialist, unlike France and England, for example, which had gone over pretty fully to the capitalist mode of production. He concluded that because of Russia's peripheral status - though he didn't use that term - it was easier to overthrow the political regime there. Nevertheless, Lenin always thought up till his death in 1924 that socialist revolutions would follow quickly in the advanced capitalist countries.

The Maoists in China took the thesis of the weakest link even further, and proposed that it would be in places like China that the revolutions would be most likely to happen because of their peripehral status within the capitalist world system. They argued that China was semi-capitalist, semi-colonial and semi-feudal. These were ripe conditions for waging a struggle for state power.

The Maoists also rejected the Eurocentric prejudice of mainstream Marxism (which was in agreement with the mainstream of pro-capitalist thought in this regard) that capitalism would develop the same way all over the world, and that it would tend to have a homogenizing effect on all the different societies. The Maoists had a different view. They said that "uneven development" was an essential feature of capitalism. In other words, capitalist development on a world scale (and capitalism has always proceeded in terms of global expansion) necessitated that there would be a global polarization, in which some countries would develop industrially and would become quite wealthy, while the majority of the world would not. And the world's "underdeveloped" majority were principally in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Both mainstream Marxists and bourgeois intellectuals tended to think, on the other hand, that all the underdeveloped parts of the world - given enough time - would catch up with the advanced capitalist countries. This has never happened, and the polarization remains a key feature of the contemporary world.

The line that developed in the Chinese Communist Party was that because polarization is inherent to capitalism, it was necessary for the communists to take power in China because China's own bourgeoisie (their national bourgeoisie) were too weak to carry out a "bourgeois revolution" in the country, as had happened a long time ago in places like France and Germany. A bourgeois revolution was conceptualized as a combination of capitalist industrial development and the emergence of modern democratic political institutions, typified by the parliamentary systems of Europe or North America. Mainstream Marxism asserted that these developments had to take place before socialist revolution was possible. The Maoists, on the other hand, asserted that the revolution in Russia was game changing, because it meant that actual socialist power existed in the world. The revolutions that were to happen after that, therefore, had to be "new democratic" revolutions. This meant that only socialist revolution - i.e. a break with the capitalist-imperialist system - would allow for the carrying out of the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. Paradoxially, form the point of view of the Marxist mainstream, socialists would have to complete the tasks that the national bourgeoisie in China were unable to accoplish, while building the rudiments of a new socialist sytem.

Amin argues that this recognition was one of the most important contributions of Maoism. (http://www.monthlyreview.org/0906amin.htm)



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I forgot to mention that the Maoist notion that the peripheral parts of the world system constitute "storm zones" is also based on the recognition that people in these areas might be more likely to rebel because it is in these places that conditions are worst. The most brutal and forms of oppression and exploitation tend to occur in these parts of the world, precisely because of their position within the overall world system.