Disorientation to Earth and World: Amin, Postcolonial Pessimism & the Political

• In Event: The Postcolonial Politics of Land

Abstract

Egyptian economist Samir Amin’s body of work offers one of the most extensive reflections on imperialism and underdevelopment in the third-world outside of German-American economic historian Andre Gunder Frank. While much of his corpus traces the origins of underdevelopment in imperialist economic and political logics through a particular meta focus on the ways in which the economic law of value on a global scale was made possible from value flows from the periphery (the third world) to the core (the first world), during the later part of his career Amin turned to post-1945 experiences of underdevelopment in the third world to offer a view from third-world agricultural labourers experiences of how economic dependency created an experience of distortion for subjects living in underdeveloped economies that are propped up by raw material extraction and exhaustion. Similar to Caribbean economists of the New World Group writing in the 1970s and 80s, Amin argued that small-holder agricultural practices are paramount to delinking and reorienting agricultural labourers—arguably the backbone of all third world economies—to the political.

This paper interrogates Amin’s account of distortion created at a meta scale—in third world economics—and at micro scale in the experiences of agricultural labourers experiences across the third world. By tracing the specific case studies Amin utilized throughout several of his writings on agricultural labour experiences in the third world, this paper argues that one preeminent element of political distortion is not only class alienation among third-world political and economic bourgeoise and agricultural laborers but distortion of what both classes assign to the value of land. Tracing Amin’s reflections on the value assigned to land in the third-world context, I offer a reading of how for Amin, the third-world must undergo a process of reorientation to land, value, and labour that centers awareness of ongoing finitude and fatigue of all people conscripted into the global political and economic structure as it currently stands. With fatigue of land and people operating as a specific form of political domination that results in disorientation of political sight, I argue that Amin offers smallholder political consciousness raising as a way to localize understandings of global processes, and show that such localization is foundational in the postcolonial era, for Amin, to a process of political reorientation.

Author

• Alexia R Alkadi-Barbaro, Cornell University