Beyond Hegemony, Beyond Illusion: Samir Amin, Multipolarity, and the Unfinished Road to Socialism

Multipolarity Seized from the Diplomats

Samir Amin wrote Beyond US Hegemony? in 2006, when Washington still strutted across the wreckage of Iraq as though military destruction were proof of historical supremacy. The Soviet Union had disappeared, the national-popular projects of the South had been driven into retreat, and the United States claimed the authority to decide which governments could exist, which economies could develop, and which peoples would be bombed until they learned the proper meaning of freedom. Liberal critics objected to the arrogance. Amin attacked the system that produced it.

He did not arrive at this argument through the fashionable geopolitics of the moment. Decades of work on unequal development, imperialist polarization, delinking, and the Bandung project had already taught him that world order cannot be read from the balance sheets of states alone. Beyond US Hegemony? applies that accumulated arsenal to the political terrain left behind by the defeat of the twentieth century’s first revolutionary and national-liberation wave. Its question is not simply whether American supremacy can decline, but whether the opening created by that decline can revive the movement beyond capitalism.

Amin’s opening declaration leaves no room for diplomatic fog: “I do want to see the construction of a multipolar world,” and that means “the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet.” Multipolarity begins here not as a polite adjustment to global governance but as the political defeat of a ruling class attempting to convert military supremacy into permanent planetary command. Amin calls that project “criminal by its very nature” because it drags humanity into “wars without end” while suffocating social and democratic advance in both South and North.

Washington’s wars are not unfortunate excesses committed by an otherwise legitimate world manager. The project itself is criminal because military control is not an emergency instrument added to US hegemony from outside. It is the means by which that hegemony is imposed. Bases, sanctions, intelligence networks, military commands, obedient alliances, and periodic bombardment form the armed architecture of an economic order that cannot secure universal consent. When exploitation ceases to look natural, empire arrives to explain it with missiles.

Amin therefore refuses to let “multipolarity” become another phrase exchanged among ministers at international conferences. Some advocates merely want Europe and Japan to receive a larger share in managing world affairs. Others would admit China, Russia, India, Brazil, and selected Southern states into an expanded concert of powers. Amin calls this a “quite inadequate conception of multipolarity.” It may distribute rank among more governments, but it offers no necessary relief to the workers, peasants, and colonized peoples whose labor sustains the system.

A capitalist world with several command centers can preserve the hierarchy between core and periphery. One state may gain greater room to bargain while its miners remain dispossessed, its peasants driven from the land, and its public wealth transferred to domestic capital. A Southern bourgeoisie may resent Washington’s monopoly without objecting to monopoly itself. The oppressed do not become sovereign because their rulers receive a better chair at the table.

Amin’s alternative demands “a radical revision of ‘North–South relations’, in all their dimensions.” Here multipolarity ceases to be diplomatic geometry and becomes a challenge to capitalist polarization. The world system did not distribute wealth and power unevenly by accident. Its centers accumulated their advantages through conquest, slavery, colonialism, unequal exchange, technological monopoly, financial control, and the repeated destruction of independent development in the periphery. Any serious multipolar project must attack those relations rather than diversify their management.

The colonial contradiction is therefore built into Amin’s definition. He does not begin with sovereign states entering an equal market and later falling into unfortunate inequality. He begins with a capitalist world system produced through the conquest of the Americas, the slave trade, colonial assaults upon Asia and Africa, and the reduction of peripheral economies to functions dictated by accumulation elsewhere. National liberation and socialist revolution altered that arrangement because oppressed peoples seized enough political power to force industrialization, public development, land reform, and revised terms of engagement upon imperialism. Capital adapted, reorganized its monopolies, and returned under the respectable names of liberalization, adjustment, and globalization.

This history separates Amin from liberal anti-war criticism. Liberalism can condemn a reckless invasion while preserving the economic order that makes coercion necessary. It imagines a responsible empire governed by treaties, expert consultation, and better manners. Amin sees no peaceful administration of a system whose ordinary operation concentrates productive power in a few centers while reproducing dependence elsewhere. Washington does not merely violate the rules. The rules themselves were written upon five centuries of unequal power.

Nor does Amin retreat into a nationalist fantasy of sealed economies. He identifies himself with “alter-globalization,” not opposition to every form of global connection. Production, technology, ecology, finance, migration, and war already bind humanity together. No people can escape the world system by pretending it does not exist. The political task is to reconstruct those relations on foundations other than liberal capitalism: sovereignty without isolation, cooperation without subordination, and internationalism without imperial command.

That distinction gives the book its strategic tension. Defeating Washington’s project is an immediate necessity, but it does not determine what will replace it. Anti-hegemonic struggle can open political space while leaving its social content undecided. A new pole may defend sovereignty, obstruct war, and weaken imperial monopoly while preserving exploitation within its own borders. These contradictions do not make resistance to US command secondary. They make class analysis indispensable.

Amin’s intervention is directed against two evasions. Imperial liberalism presents US supremacy as an imperfect defense of order. Elite multipolarism mistakes a redistribution of influence among states for the emancipation of peoples. Against both, Amin places the North–South contradiction at the center. The worth of a new world order must be measured not by the number of flags represented at the summit but by whether the structures producing polarization are being dismantled.

Beyond US Hegemony? begins, then, with a breach rather than a finished blueprint. Washington’s military project must be defeated because it blocks independent paths of social development. Yet the opening created by that defeat will remain contested. Capital will attempt to reorganize itself through new centers, alliances, and hierarchies. The peoples of the world must use the rupture to recover sovereignty, transform property relations, and press beyond the logic of accumulation that continually regenerates imperialism.

Multipolarity is not the promised land. It is the terrain upon which the struggle for another world can be reopened. To understand what may emerge from that terrain, Amin turns from the slogan to the machinery beneath it: the collective imperial structure binding the United States, Europe, and Japan together while placing Washington’s military power at its head.

The Machinery of Collective Empire and the Poles That Might Break It

Amin’s multipolar world cannot be understood until the machinery standing against it is named. The enemy is not the United States acting alone, nor a loose collection of jealous national capitals preparing to resume the old nineteenth-century competition. It is a system of collective imperialism in which the ruling classes of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan share an interest in preserving the global hierarchy while disputing how its spoils, costs, and responsibilities should be divided. Their quarrels are real. Their common war against the peoples of the South is more fundamental.

Washington occupies the commanding position because it possesses the military apparatus capable of enforcing the whole arrangement. Amin describes the project of the US ruling class with unusual precision: neutralize Europe and Japan, subordinate the former Soviet space, seize command of the Middle East and its oil, prevent China and other major Southern states from forming autonomous regional blocs, and abandon or destroy those regions considered strategically useless. The program amounts to “extend[ing] to the whole planet the Monroe doctrine,” under which US national interests override the sovereignty of everyone else.

The Monroe Doctrine began as Washington’s claim to police the Western Hemisphere. Its globalization turns the planet into an enlarged security perimeter. Military commands divide the earth into administrative zones; governments are sorted by usefulness; preventive war becomes an ordinary instrument of rule. International law remains available for disciplining weaker states but disappears whenever it obstructs the empire. The same power that lectures humanity about borders reserves the right to cross any border it chooses.

Military force does not float above the economy. It compensates for weaknesses within it. Amin rejects the mythology of an all-powerful productive colossus whose economic superiority naturally entitles it to political command. By the beginning of the century, the United States sustained enormous trade deficits and depended upon capital inflows from Europe, Japan, China, oil-producing states, and the comprador classes of the South. “The world produces while North America consumes,” he writes. The arrangement survives because Washington can compel others to finance its deficits while military power guarantees privileged access to resources and protects the continued drainage of tribute.

This formulation cuts through liberal economics’ favorite bedtime story. Wealth does not flow toward the United States because every investor independently recognizes the superior virtue of the American businessman. It is drawn into a structure upheld by the dollar, debt service, financial markets, political coercion, and military supremacy. The ruling class praises competition while keeping aircraft carriers nearby in case the market reaches an incorrect conclusion.

The relationship between Washington and its allies is therefore neither equality nor simple occupation. Europe and Japan retain enormous productive power, monopolies, financial institutions, and imperial interests of their own. They benefit from the subordination of the South and participate in imposing it. Yet they accept a military structure whose final authority lies in Washington. Amin’s concept of collective imperialism names this unity without pretending away the contradictions inside it.

NATO, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the institutions of the European Union perform different functions within the same order. NATO supplies coercive integration. The WTO converts the interests of dominant capital into universal commercial law. The IMF turns debt crisis into a lever for privatization, austerity, and surrender of national policy. Brussels binds Europe to neoliberal rules while its ruling classes proclaim a sovereignty they decline to exercise. Amin notes that NATO, the WTO, and European institutions jointly manage an “essentially asymmetrical system,” even as rivalry between Europe and the United States continues within that management.

European capital wants greater room to maneuver without breaking the structure from which it profits. French and German rulers may resent Washington’s unilateralism, compete over markets, or imagine a more autonomous continental strategy. But no independent Europe can be built while its political class remains committed to Atlanticism, neoliberal discipline, and the defeat of popular forces at home. Under those conditions, European autonomy remains a speech delivered beneath an American security umbrella.

Japan occupies a narrower position. Its productive and technological strength never matured after the Second World War into an independent geopolitical project. The US military presence, the regional security order, and the interests of Japanese capital tied it to the American pole. Amin does not confuse economic weight with sovereign strategy. A pole requires more than factories and reserves. It requires the political capacity to act outside rules written by the hegemon.

The possible challengers beyond the triad carry different histories and social foundations. They cannot be poured into one convenient category called “rising powers.” China emerged from a socialist revolution, preserved a state capable of directing development, and retained land and public-property relations unavailable to ordinary capitalist states. Russia entered the new century after restoration had dismantled much of its industrial and social structure. India inherited the contradictory legacy of anti-colonial independence, national planning, and a bourgeois order increasingly reconciled to global capital. Each could obstruct US command. None could be understood apart from the class forces governing its autonomy.

Amin’s Russia chapter makes this distinction brutally clear. The post-Soviet oligarchy enriched itself through oil rent, the cannibalization of privatized industry, and commissions earned by opening the country to imports. He calls it a comprador bourgeoisie because its accumulation depended upon national decline. The imperial objective was to reduce Russia and the former Soviet republics to “minor deindustrialized and therefore powerless peripheries”—to Latin-Americanize the Soviet East.

Russia’s size, military inheritance, scientific base, and state traditions complicated that project, but they did not erase the devastation of restoration. Capitalist reintegration transformed a potential autonomous pole into a terrain of struggle between comprador accumulation, state reconstruction, and popular interests largely excluded from power. Sovereignty might be recovered partially from foreign command without restoring the socialist property relations that once gave it a different class foundation.

China poses another contradiction. Amin recognizes its revolutionary inheritance and capacity to resist direct subordination, yet fears that market reform may dissolve the social foundations from which that autonomy arose. The central question is not whether trade, private accumulation, or foreign investment exist. It is whether they subordinate the state and national development to global capital or remain constrained within a longer transition whose direction is still contested. Property, planning, land, and political command—not market presence alone—determine the answer.

India demonstrates the limits of political independence without a decisive break from bourgeois development. The Nehru period enlarged industrial capacity, defended a measure of nonalignment, and strengthened national sovereignty. Yet the state never displaced the ruling classes capable of redirecting that project toward liberalization and closer integration with imperial capital. India could become more powerful within the interstate system while remaining internally organized around deep class, caste, and regional inequality. National weight does not by itself produce national-popular power.

Amin returns repeatedly to Bandung because it represented the last broad attempt by Southern states to renegotiate the terms of the world system collectively. Bandung did not abolish capitalism, and its governments carried sharply different class projects. Still, their common front constrained imperial freedom of action, supported decolonization, and created room for national development. Its defeat left the South fragmented and exposed to debt discipline, structural adjustment, and bilateral coercion.

The disappearance of that common project is central to Amin’s account of the unipolar moment. By 2006, the Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement no longer functioned as an active counter-project. Europe had retreated further into Atlanticism. China defended its own national course without yet organizing a wider transformation of the system. The United States occupied the whole stage because the forces capable of limiting it had been broken apart.

Amin nevertheless refuses to separate the short-term defeat of Washington from the long-term construction of another world. “The short-term task” of frustrating the American project and “the long-term task” of building multipolarity overlap. Social and democratic advances made now weaken US command because they enlarge the capacity of peoples and states to refuse it. Waiting for the empire to decline before organizing popular power would merely guarantee that domestic ruling classes inherit the opening.

Collective imperialism is held together by armies, institutions, capital flows, and shared class interests. It can be fractured by sovereign resistance, contradictions within the triad, and coordinated initiatives from the South. But identifying where the structure may crack does not tell us which class will widen the fracture or what social order will follow. Amin’s next contribution lies precisely there: in a method for judging the contradictory formations moving onto the field and the historical possibilities buried inside them.

Contradiction as Method

Amin does not approach world politics as a contest among colored blocks on a map. Conventional geopolitics treats states as unified actors possessing permanent national interests, then quietly identifies those interests with the ambitions of ruling classes. The factory owner, the landless worker, the general, and the peasant are bundled beneath one flag and marched toward the same destiny. Class struggle disappears, geography becomes fate, and empire passes itself off as strategy.

Amin begins elsewhere. “All countries, in both core and periphery, are beset with social contradictions,” he writes, and neither their domestic order nor their place in the world can be understood as the expression of a single national will. Even where rulers manufacture consensus, “rulers and ruled do not necessarily have the same perception” of the problems before them or the sacrifices demanded in response. His method places “the emphasis on the contradictions” because contradiction reveals which historical paths remain open and which social forces might carry them.

Europe is therefore not simply Europe. It is a field of struggle between Atlantic capital, states seeking room to maneuver, and popular classes whose interests require a break with neoliberalism and war. China cannot be reduced to export figures or private wealth; it carries the institutions of socialist revolution, the pressures of market reform, public command, class differentiation, and struggle over the direction of development. Russia contains the wreckage of restoration, oligarchic accumulation, recovered state power, and popular demands excluded from command. The South is no diplomatic personality speaking with one voice. It is divided between peoples seeking control over development and ruling blocs seeking improved terms for their own accumulation.

Contradiction, for Amin, is not a courteous acknowledgment that political life is complicated. It is the movement of history itself. A society does not become intelligible once it receives a label—capitalist, socialist, national, peripheral, democratic. The analyst must still identify the property relations beneath the label, the forces struggling within them, the pressures imposed from the world system, and the direction in which those forces are attempting to move.

This method rests upon Amin’s conception of capitalism as a world system rather than a collection of national economies passing through the same stages at different speeds. Core and periphery do not occupy separate rungs on one universal ladder. They are produced together through unequal accumulation. The wealth of the center is not proof that it arrived first at a destination awaiting everyone else. It is inseparable from relations that block the majority of humanity from traveling the same road.

From this follows one of Amin’s decisive formulations: “imperialism is not a stage of capitalism but the permanent feature of its global expansion.” Imperialism does not arise only when finance merges with industrial monopoly, when armies cross borders, or when one state annexes another. Those are changing forms of a deeper relation. Capitalist expansion has continuously produced polarization between centers that command accumulation and peripheries compelled to serve it.

This insight protects historical materialism from the recurring fantasy of a post-imperial capitalism. Industrialization in parts of the South did not abolish the hierarchy; dominant capital reorganized its control through monopolies over technology, finance, natural resources, communications, and weapons. Formal decolonization did not dissolve imperial power; it shifted the battlefield toward debt, trade rules, military alliances, comprador classes, and strategic knowledge. Resistance forces the system to change its instruments. It does not persuade capital to abandon domination.

Amin’s periodization is therefore neither mechanical nor nostalgic. Successive phases of capitalist globalization emerge through struggle. National liberation movements and socialist revolutions forced the postwar system to concede industrialization, public planning, land reform, sovereignty, and altered terms of exchange. These were not gifts from enlightened capital. Organized peoples and revolutionary states imposed them by making the old imperial arrangement impossible to preserve at its former cost.

History does not unfold according to a railway timetable left behind by Marx. Structural pressures create possibilities and limits; they do not choose political strategy. Capitalism produces crisis and dispossession without automatically producing socialist consciousness. Imperial decline creates openings without appointing the class that will occupy them. Revolution breaks the old order but inherits scarcity, uneven development, external siege, administrative weakness, and class struggle in altered form.

This is why Amin refuses both the anti-communist obituary and the devotional portrait of the Soviet experience. October opened a breach in the capitalist world system and transformed the horizon of colonized humanity. It demonstrated that a peripheral society could break from imperial command, reorganize property, industrialize outside capitalist ownership, and materially support liberation movements. The Soviet collapse cannot erase those achievements or prove that capitalism constitutes humanity’s natural condition.

Yet revolution created a transition, not a finished social order. The new state confronted encirclement, devastation, backwardness, and the need to develop productive forces under hostile world conditions. Popular initiative, bureaucratic command, socialist tendencies, state interests, and pressures toward restoration existed in conflict. To classify the entire experience as either pure socialism or disguised capitalism would replace historical investigation with a factional password.

Amin increasingly developed this insight into a theory of the long transition between capitalism and socialism. Revolutionary advance does not abolish the old relations in one stroke, and restoration does not always erase every institution, memory, and material achievement produced by revolution. China’s reforms, Russia’s collapse and partial recovery, and the persistence of socialist aspirations after defeat all forced the question beyond linear stages. Transitions contain reversals, survivals, renewed advances, and struggles whose outcomes are not settled merely because one tendency has gained ground.

His conception of socialism supplies the standard by which such movement must be judged. Collective choices, Amin argues, cannot arise spontaneously from isolated individual decisions, as liberal ideology pretends. They must be “collectively worked out through the deepening of democracy” and directed toward “an ever greater affirmation of equality.” Socialism therefore joins emancipation, equality, and democratic control over political and economic life. It cannot be reduced to state ownership alone, but neither can it exist where private capital commands production while democracy is confined to selecting which servants will administer its rule.

The formulation cuts against two evasions. Liberalism identifies the market with freedom even though the worker enters it deprived of productive property and compelled to sell labor in order to live. Bureaucratic substitution identifies state command with collective power even where workers and peasants exercise little control over planning, administration, or political direction. Market choice is not social sovereignty. State ownership becomes socialist only through the movement toward popular command.

The tension is sharpest in post-revolutionary states. Such states may defend public property, land reform, social provision, national development, and sovereignty against imperial assault. Their survival matters because defeat rarely liberates workers from administrative deformation. It delivers land, resources, and public wealth to foreign capital and its domestic clients. Amin therefore refuses the Western left’s old sport of demanding perfection from besieged revolutions while imperialism is permitted its ordinary massacres.

Defense cannot become exemption from analysis. Institutions built to shield a revolution may narrow participation, harden administrative privilege, or substitute the apparatus for the political activity of the people. A revolution survives historically not only by defending its borders but by reproducing the social forces capable of carrying it forward. Otherwise the fortress remains standing while the political life inside it withers.

Sovereignty carries the same contradiction. Liberal globalization denounces national sovereignty as an archaic obstruction to universal law, while imperial states extend their own sovereignty through sanctions, military commands, financial institutions, and extraterritorial claims. Washington crosses oceans to defend its “security interests”; a targeted country is condemned for defending its territory. Imperial universalism means one set of borders for the armed and another for the bombed.

But a flag does not settle the class question. Sovereignty may protect public development, or it may cover the accounts of a comprador bourgeoisie. Amin’s movement toward the sovereign popular project sharpens the distinction: political independence becomes progressive when it enables control over land, finance, industry, food systems, natural resources, and the priorities of development. Sovereignty acquires revolutionary content when it enlarges the capacity of workers and peasants to transform society and shields that transformation from imperial veto.

This approach also explains Amin’s hostility to theories announcing the disappearance of labor, the state, and older forms of class domination. Networks, cognitive capitalism, governance, and civil society are often presented as though changes in form abolished exploitation. Amin returns to the stubborn material fact that “capital continues to employ labour,” not the reverse. Technology reorganizes production; finance reorganizes accumulation; neither reverses the social relation through which capital controls the conditions of life.

Knowledge itself enters the struggle. Categories such as development, efficiency, investment, competitiveness, and modernization already contain judgments about whose needs matter and whose sacrifices can be dismissed as costs. Mainstream economics begins from the market and encounters exploitation as an unfortunate side effect. Amin begins from the social relation: who controls production, who appropriates the surplus, and how the world system organizes unequal access to the means of development.

His knowledge is militant without becoming careless. It is militant because it takes the emancipation of workers and colonized peoples as its standpoint. It remains analytical because commitment does not reduce the need for evidence; it raises the cost of error. A ruling-class analyst who misreads a contradiction may recommend a bad investment. A revolutionary movement that misreads class power can march people into defeat.

Amin’s method refuses to confuse what exists with what must continue to exist. Collective imperialism is powerful but divided. Comprador blocs dominate much of the South but cannot permanently stabilize societies whose majorities they exclude. Revolutionary and post-revolutionary states carry bureaucratic and restorative dangers without surrendering every socialist possibility. Capitalist globalization appears universal while generating resistance to the conditions it imposes.

The decisive question is whether Amin’s concrete judgments remain as dialectical as the method he constructed—and how his later work revised conclusions first posed too sharply in 2006. That cannot be answered by admiring the framework or scoring predictions from a safe historical distance. It requires following the contradictions through the text, through Amin’s own development, and through the struggles that returned his arguments to history.

Where the Argument Splits Open—and Amin Sharpens the Blade

A revolutionary text earns respect not by surviving criticism untouched but by producing criticism equal to its own method. Amin teaches the reader to distrust fixed labels, examine contending class forces, and distinguish an opening in history from the social power that may occupy it. That method exposes several places where Beyond US Hegemony? reaches conclusions its own evidence does not fully sustain. Yet these fractures cannot be treated as Amin’s final word. China, revolutionary sovereignty, national-popular alliances, and international organization became problems through which his theory continued to develop after 2006.

China presents the sharpest contradiction. Amin argues that “the real project of the Chinese ruling class is capitalist in nature” and describes market socialism as a gradual route toward establishing capitalism’s fundamental institutions. Unlike the Soviet ruling bloc, which embraced restoration through disavowal and shock therapy, the Chinese leadership would move cautiously, preserving revolutionary language while reducing the friction of transition. Amin traces the growth of private capital, regional inequality, export dependence, new middle classes, and alliances among state officials, wealthy entrepreneurs, prosperous peasants, and overseas Chinese capital.

Yet the chapter refuses to obey that verdict. Amin concedes that the people remain attached to socialist values, “first and foremost, equality,” and to concrete revolutionary gains, especially equal access to land. He asks whether the ruling class can complete the capitalist transition, what form Chinese capitalism would assume, and whether popular resistance might block it. These are not decorative qualifications. They acknowledge that restoration remains incomplete, that the revolutionary inheritance retains material force, and that the outcome depends upon struggle rather than a decision already settled above society.

A capitalist tendency may grow inside a socialist transition without yet commanding the whole formation. Private accumulation can expand while public ownership controls strategic sectors. Markets can organize large portions of exchange while planning directs investment. A bourgeois layer can acquire wealth without possessing the unrestricted political power required to remake the state in its image. None of this guarantees socialist advance. It does prevent the presence of capital from being mistaken for capital’s final conquest.

The land question is decisive because Amin makes it so. Equal peasant access to land is not revolutionary decoration hanging above an otherwise conventional capitalist economy. It blocks the restoration of landlord power, limits the commodification of the countryside, and preserves a material achievement of revolution for hundreds of millions. If destroying this right would mark a decisive advance toward capitalism, its persistence must count against declaring the transition complete. One cannot identify the threshold and then pronounce the crossing before the feet arrive.

The contradiction visible in 2006 later compelled Amin to sharpen his own position. His subsequent analysis of China placed greater weight upon planning, public ownership, control of finance, the collective character of land, and the state’s capacity to subordinate external integration to national development. China ceased to appear as a society simply walking down a predetermined capitalist road. It appeared instead as an unresolved long transition in which socialist and capitalist tendencies struggled over the use of markets, the structure of property, and the direction of the state.

This development does not cancel the warning contained in Beyond US Hegemony?. Capital does not need to seize everything at once. It accumulates wealth, administrative allies, technical authority, cultural prestige, and political leverage. It pressures planning toward profitability and turns inequality into a constituency for further inequality. But Amin’s mature method requires the analyst to examine whether those forces have subordinated public command or remain politically constrained within a project whose revolutionary foundations have not been dismantled.

The Western left offers two shortcuts around this work. One camp sees private firms and announces capitalism before finishing the evidence. Another sees a red flag and declares every policy socialist by definition. Amin’s developing framework rejects both. The concrete test concerns which class forces command the state, which property relations organize the decisive sectors, whether markets serve an articulated development strategy or dictate it, whether land and finance remain shielded from unrestricted capitalist control, and whether popular forces retain the capacity to fight over the direction of society.

A second fracture appears in the relationship between revolutionary states and popular power. Amin rightly refuses the imperial demand that socialist states dismantle their defenses to prove their democratic virtue. Revolutions inherit poverty, devastated infrastructure, administrative weakness, hostile borders, sabotage, sanctions, and military encirclement. Defending such states is not worship of bureaucracy. Imperial victory rarely liberates workers from administrative deformation. It delivers public property, land, resources, and sovereignty to foreign capital and its domestic clients.

Still, the survival of the apparatus cannot become a substitute for the political activity that gave the revolution life. Armies defend territory. Ministries administer production. Planning agencies allocate investment. None can permanently replace the conscious participation of workers and peasants in deciding what is produced, how the surplus is used, and which contradictions receive priority. A revolution reduced to administration may preserve its shell while weakening the forces capable of renewing its content.

Amin’s definition of socialism as emancipation, equality, and democratic management keeps that contradiction open. Siege is real. Bureaucratization is real. Revolutionary strategy must defend the state against imperial destruction while expanding the forms of popular initiative necessary to prevent defense from hardening into permanent substitution. The fortress must survive, but the people cannot be asked to remain spectators inside it.

The same problem enters Amin’s national-popular alliances. He argues that comprador blocs in the periphery unite dependent industrialists, technocrats, bureaucrats, sections of the middle class, and wealthier peasants while excluding working-class and peasant majorities. Their narrow social foundation produces unstable cycles of shallow democracy, authoritarian reaction, religious fundamentalism, and communal fragmentation. Against them, he proposes national popular-democratic blocs capable of subordinating external relations to domestic transformation.

The orientation is indispensable, but the alliance contains its own class struggle. A national-popular front may unite workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, sections of the petty bourgeoisie, patriotic officers, and portions of national capital against imperial domination. These forces do not cease carrying different futures merely because they share an immediate enemy. The bourgeois component seeks protected national accumulation. The popular classes require land, public ownership, social provision, and command over the surplus. Unity against imperialism cannot abolish the fight over what independence will become.

India exposes the danger. The Nehru project enlarged sovereignty, built public industry, and created room for nonalignment, yet left the commanding political bloc within a bourgeois order. Its achievements were real; so were the limits that later enabled liberalization. A communist strategy that rejects every broad national front leaves imperialism facing a divided opposition. One that dissolves itself into the national bourgeoisie eventually discovers that its temporary ally has kept the state, the property, and the police.

Amin’s later concept of the sovereign popular project gives greater precision to this problem. Sovereignty must be constructed through industrial autonomy, food security, control of natural resources, public direction of finance, social equality, and democratization rooted in popular struggle. The national project becomes progressive not because a government declares independence but because the exploited classes gain the material capacity to determine what independence is for.

The advance is considerable. Amin no longer leaves the social content of sovereignty suspended between diplomatic autonomy and national development. Yet the institutional problem remains: how do workers and peasants acquire and retain command inside a necessarily broad alliance? The answer cannot rest upon the goodwill of patriotic state managers. Popular forces require independent parties, unions, peasant organizations, political education, and institutions of mass participation capable of defending the common front while fighting over its direction.

Amin’s treatment of Africa makes the stakes harsher. Formal independence produced flags and governments without dismantling the structures colonialism had built. Export dependence, externally oriented infrastructure, fragmented markets, debt, weak industrial capacity, and ruling classes formed through colonial administration narrowed the basis for autonomous development. Governments invoked unity while preserving economic machines designed for extraction.

These failures cannot be explained through betrayal alone. Africa’s national-popular projects confronted a world system organized to deny them finance, technology, industrial depth, and military security on sovereign terms. But external constraint does not erase class responsibility. Where ruling groups converted public office into private accumulation, disciplined workers for foreign creditors, or substituted ceremonial Pan-Africanism for regional economic construction, they reproduced the peripheralization they claimed to oppose. Amin’s analysis is strongest when imperial structure and domestic class formation remain locked together.

This is also why South Africa mattered in his map of the continent. Its industrial base, working class, regional weight, and revolutionary history gave it the capacity to become a weak link in imperial domination. Yet that capacity could serve African reconstruction only if political liberation broke the power of monopoly capital rather than merely transferring administrative authority to a new governing stratum. A regional pole organized around mineral conglomerates and financial power would reproduce domination beneath an African flag.

The contradiction extends to interstate multipolarity. Bandung demonstrated the power of coordinated Southern governments. It supported decolonization, defended sovereignty, enlarged diplomatic space, and imposed limits upon imperial freedom of action. Its members nevertheless carried sharply different class projects, from revolutionary and national-radical governments to conservative states seeking bargaining room without transforming their societies.

That contradiction explains both Bandung’s achievements and its limits. Governments can coordinate votes, establish institutions, negotiate commodity agreements, resist sanctions, and obstruct aggression. Their capacity matters. But a coalition of states may defend peasant agriculture, or it may defend competitive agribusiness. Amin illustrates the difference through the Southern grouping formed at the 2003 WTO meeting in Cancún. Brazil, South Africa, India, and China challenged the arrogance of the United States and Europe, yet the export interests of Brazilian and South African latifundia did not coincide with the food-security needs of the South’s peasant majorities.

A Southern front becomes progressive when its program reflects the needs of the classes whose labor and resources imperialism exploits. Diplomatic resistance may weaken Northern monopoly while leaving domestic landowners, mining capital, financiers, and industrialists untouched. The answer is not to dismiss sovereignty as bourgeois theater. It is to bind sovereignty to land reform, public control of strategic resources, food security, industrialization, labor power, and democratic direction from below.

Amin’s call for “solidarity among the peoples of the South” already reaches beyond interstate coordination. Peoples do not become a political force by appearing in the final paragraph of a summit declaration. Workers require unions capable of confronting domestic and transnational capital. Peasants require organizations defending land and food systems. Oppressed nations, women, and dispossessed communities require institutions through which their struggles shape the national project rather than decorate it. Without such organization, the state negotiates in the name of the people while the people wait outside.

Late in his life, Amin named the organizational deficit more directly through his call for an International of Workers and Peoples. The proposal recognized that neither government summits nor loose movement forums could unite the scattered fronts of resistance into a strategic force. Interstate cooperation could defend sovereignty and widen the breach in imperial command. Only organized peoples could determine what entered through it.

The advance does not complete the bridge. An International cannot be conjured by proclamation, nor can organizations with different histories, class bases, and political lines be assembled through revolutionary vocabulary alone. The unresolved question concerns the structure, discipline, program, and democratic life through which such an International might coordinate struggle without reproducing either state diplomacy or powerless networking.

The same material limit shadows Amin’s proposals for reforming the United Nations. He is right that international law and the UN once offered weaker states limited protection and a terrain where the victories of decolonization could register politically. He is also right that neoliberal globalization threw popular sovereignty, social justice, and development “overboard,” producing an “empire of chaos” in which military force increasingly displaced lawful equality among states.

But institutions cannot rise above the balance of forces governing them. Reforming representation, defending legal sovereignty, democratizing economic management, and restraining unilateral war would strengthen the struggle against empire. None will be granted because the proposal is rational. A different United Nations requires a different world balance, built by sovereign states and organized peoples before it can be written into a charter.

The fractures inside Beyond US Hegemony? therefore became sites of Amin’s own development. China pushed him toward a more open theory of socialist transition. The limits of formal sovereignty produced the sovereign popular project. The distance between Bandung diplomacy and popular internationalism produced the call for an International of Workers and Peoples. What remained unfinished was no longer the diagnosis of these problems, but the concrete organization of popular command.

The strategic question survives in sharper form: how does anti-hegemonic power become socialist power? Amin identifies the imperial structure, the possible alliances, the need for sovereignty, and the social content any emancipatory project must acquire. His later work strengthens the map without abolishing the danger that states, bureaucracies, and national bourgeoisies may occupy the breach before workers and peasants can organize themselves to rule. History would test not only the judgments made in 2006, but the theoretical weapons Amin forged from their contradictions.

History Returns the Book to the Battlefield

Amin did not offer prophecy. He offered criteria. The two decades following Beyond US Hegemony? matter less as a scoreboard of correct predictions than as a test of an argument still developing after 2006. Europe, China, Russia, and the emerging institutions of the South did not wait politely inside the categories first assigned to them. Their contradictions forced Amin to refine his analysis of socialist transition, sovereign development, and the difference between emergence and mere insertion into global capitalism. History must therefore test the movement of his theory, not freeze one book beneath glass.

Europe provides the least ambiguous verdict. “Either Europe will be a left Europe,” Amin warned, “or it will not be Europe at all.” He did not mean that every European government had to become socialist before the continent could act independently. He identified the class condition of autonomy. European capital benefited from collective imperialism, while the popular classes bore the costs of neoliberal discipline, militarization, and subordination to a security structure commanded from across the Atlantic. Only a political bloc prepared to confront both domestic capital and Atlanticism could construct an independent pole.

History has confirmed the warning more brutally than Amin expected. The European Union accumulated regulatory authority, commercial weight, common institutions, and a currency without acquiring strategic independence. NATO remained the military center of the continent, expanded eastward, and pushed the costs of American strategy deeper into European budgets, industry, infrastructure, and technology policy. At the 2025 Hague Summit, alliance members committed themselves to directing 5 percent of gross domestic product toward defense and security-related requirements by 2035, including 3.5 percent for core military expenditure and another 1.5 percent for infrastructure, industrial capacity, networks, and civil preparedness.

This is not Europe escaping Washington. It is American strategic command being socialized through European states. Schools, hospitals, housing, wages, and ecological reconstruction now compete against military targets negotiated inside an alliance whose commanding architecture Europe has never controlled. The ruling classes call this sovereignty because admitting subordination would spoil the summit photographs.

Amin’s conclusion stands. Without a continental left capable of breaking neoliberal and military discipline, the machinery of integration strengthened Atlantic command rather than loosening it. Europe may quarrel with the United States over trade, technology, burden-sharing, or tactics. Rivalry inside collective imperialism has not become a rupture from it. Europe possesses the material weight of a pole while lacking the political bloc capable of using that weight independently.

China requires a different measure. The 2006 book saw a socialist revolution subjected to expanding markets, private accumulation, foreign investment, inequality, and the formation of bourgeois interests within and around the state. Amin’s warning remains indispensable. Restoration need not arrive aboard foreign tanks. Capital can gather strength through wealth, policy, culture, technical authority, and alliances inside institutions inherited from revolution.

Yet Amin’s later work no longer treated those tendencies as proof that capitalist restoration had already won. He placed the struggle within a long transition whose direction had to be judged through planning, public ownership, land, finance, national autonomy, and political command. China’s rise could represent capitalist insertion, genuine emergence, or a contradictory socialist project using markets while attempting to keep capital subordinated. The determining question was no longer whether capitalist relations existed, but whether they had conquered the commanding institutions of development.

The historical evidence supports that mature formulation. China’s Fifteenth Five-Year Plan, approved in March 2026, remains a national program directing industrial development, technological self-reliance, infrastructure, social policy, national defense, and the composition of investment. It calls for strengthening state-owned enterprises and concentrating public capital in national security, strategic industries, public services, technological innovation, and the commanding heights of the economy. It also expands market mechanisms and affirms multiple forms of ownership.

The contradiction has deepened rather than disappeared. Private firms possess substantial wealth. Market relations organize wide areas of economic life. Inequality creates social forces with an interest in extending the power of capital. But these forces operate within a system where the state still plans nationally, commands decisive public assets, directs strategic investment, and reserves the authority to discipline both private and public enterprises according to political priorities. The document does not read like capital delivering instructions to its executive committee. It reads like a political center attempting to prevent markets from becoming sovereign.

The rural threshold Amin regarded as decisive also remains uncrossed. The plan protects the land-contracting, homestead-use, and collective-income rights of peasants who migrate to cities while maintaining permanent farmland protections and public control over land-use planning. Market pressures continue, but unrestricted private ownership has not replaced the revolutionary settlement that blocked the return of landlord power.

China therefore neither disproves Amin nor confirms the more final judgment reached in parts of the 2006 chapter. It vindicates the framework he later developed. The country remains a socialist state engaged in a long transition, using markets and carrying the inequalities those markets generate while retaining institutional means capable of subordinating capital to national planning. That outcome is neither pure nor guaranteed. Capital continues to accumulate pressure. Socialist direction continues to depend upon political struggle, public command, and the defense of material gains rooted in revolution.

Russia poses another form of transition. In 2006 Amin feared that restoration would reduce the former Soviet space to raw-material exports, imported manufactures, oligarchic plunder, and political impotence. Russia could become little more than an “exporter of raw materials,” its industrial and scientific inheritance devoured by a bourgeoisie whose enrichment depended upon national decline.

Much of that danger materialized. Restoration dismantled socialist property, transferred public wealth to oligarchs, and tied accumulation heavily to hydrocarbons and mineral exports. But Russia did not remain the powerless periphery anticipated by Washington. The state recovered strategic capacity, resisted complete incorporation into the Atlantic order, and redirected trade under pressure rather than collapsing beneath sanctions. By 2024, Asia and Oceania received 85 percent of Russian coal exports and 63 percent of its crude-oil exports, with China and India becoming the leading destinations for Russian crude.

The customer changed faster than the economic structure. Russia remained a leading exporter of oil, gas, and coal, while commodity revenues retained immense weight. Sanctions exposed vulnerabilities produced by dependence upon hydrocarbons, shipping, insurance, financial channels, and imported technology.

Amin’s later analysis of Russia absorbed this divergence between restoration and recovered sovereignty. Russia was neither returning automatically to socialism nor remaining a comprador appendage of the West. It had reopened national space by resisting Atlantic subordination while leaving the class foundations of oligarchic capitalism largely intact. In the language of the long transition, restoration had produced a massive reversal without erasing every state capacity, social memory, and possibility of renewed movement.

The result is contradictory but materially significant. A sovereign capitalist Russia capable of obstructing US military command alters the global balance and enlarges room for other states under imperial pressure. That achievement does not abolish oligarchic ownership or commodity dependence. A pipeline can finance resistance; it cannot by itself reorganize the class foundation of society. The unresolved question is whether recovered sovereignty can generate social forces capable of moving beyond restoration rather than simply administering it from a stronger state.

The fourth test lies in BRICS and the wider institutional reawakening of the South. In 2006, the Bandung project had been defeated, the Non-Aligned Movement had lost much of its strategic force, and no Southern institution could seriously loosen the North Atlantic monopoly over development finance, emergency liquidity, or international economic governance. Amin placed the reconstruction of coordinated Southern initiative among the indispensable conditions of multipolarity.

His later distinction between emergence and lumpendevelopment provides the proper standard. Emergence cannot be measured by growth rates, skyscrapers, exports, or a larger share of world trade. A country may grow while remaining subordinated to foreign technology, finance, commodity markets, and transnational capital. Genuine emergence requires sovereign command over development and a social project capable of directing productive transformation toward popular need. Interstate cooperation matters because it can enlarge that possibility. It cannot supply the missing class project from outside.

BRICS has changed the terrain. The bloc expanded beyond its original five members, while the New Development Bank and Contingent Reserve Arrangement created mechanisms for development lending and emergency support outside institutions controlled by the North Atlantic powers. By early 2025, the NDB had approved 96 projects worth $32.8 billion, with authorized capital of $100 billion. The reserve arrangement added another $100 billion in pledged resources.

Its cooperation now covers finance, trade, infrastructure, technology, climate policy, taxation, and reform of international institutions. The bloc’s 2025 declarations called for greater Southern representation in the United Nations and IMF, stronger support for the NDB, changes to the WTO, improved coordination among creditors and debtors, expanded local-currency instruments, and deeper economic cooperation among member states.

These are not ceremonial adjustments. A development loan that does not arrive chained to privatization, austerity, and foreign ownership changes the bargaining position of a Southern state. Local-currency settlement and alternative financial channels weaken Washington’s power to convert the dollar into a borderless police weapon. Infrastructure built outside Western veto can enlarge the productive basis for autonomous development.

But BRICS remains a field of struggle rather than the institutional form of a sovereign popular project. Its members contain different property systems, class blocs, development strategies, and foreign-policy traditions. Some seek transformation of the existing order; others seek better standing within it. Their declarations endorse inclusive growth and Southern cooperation while their economies remain entangled with private finance, commodity competition, domestic inequality, and transnational capital. The bloc has expanded consultative and people-to-people structures, but consultation does not amount to popular command over development.

BRICS therefore confirms the renewed capacity of the South to construct institutions, coordinate resistance, and weaken imperial monopoly. Whether that capacity becomes genuine emergence depends upon what happens within the member states. Development finance may support public infrastructure, industrial sovereignty, and social need, or it may underwrite another round of extraction. Multipolar institutions create room. Sovereign popular projects determine what that room is used for.

History returns four related judgments. Europe confirms Amin’s analysis of collective imperialism: without a left rupture, integration deepens Atlantic command. China validates his mature theory of an unresolved socialist transition more than the premature closure found in parts of the 2006 chapter. Russia demonstrates that restoration can coexist with recovered anti-hegemonic sovereignty while leaving the movement beyond capitalism blocked. BRICS vindicates his call for renewed Southern initiative but also his warning that emergence cannot be separated from the class content of development.

The unipolar order has cracked without producing a settled emancipated world. New centers, financial institutions, trading networks, and political alignments now restrict Washington’s freedom of action. Their direction remains contested because the weakening of imperial command does not decide who will inherit the opening. Amin’s map survives not because every provisional judgment endured untouched, but because he kept revising the criteria by which the emerging world had to be judged: sovereignty from whom, development for which classes, and multipolarity toward what social order?

Multipolarity Is Terrain; Socialism Is the Verdict

Beyond US Hegemony? endures because Amin never confuses the decline of one empire with the liberation of humanity. He understood that Washington’s military project could be defeated without capitalism being defeated, that new centers of power could emerge without ending polarization, and that Southern governments could resist imperial command while preserving exploitation at home. The book’s revolutionary value lies in this refusal of easy conclusions. Multipolarity can weaken the jailer. It does not automatically open the cells.

Amin’s first enduring contribution is his concept of collective imperialism. The United States does not dominate a world of equally sovereign capitalist rivals. It commands a hierarchy whose principal Northern powers share an interest in monopolizing finance, technology, resources, communications, and military force. Europe and Japan bargain within that system, profit from it, and occasionally resent the price of American leadership. Their disputes do not erase the common class interest binding the triad against the peoples of the South.

This insight remains indispensable because the mythology of inter-imperialist equality conceals the actual chain of command. Every commercial dispute between Washington and Brussels is presented as evidence that the Atlantic bloc is dissolving. Every complaint over military spending becomes a rebellion. Yet when the hierarchy is threatened, the institutions of collective imperialism close ranks. Competition occurs inside the fortress; the walls remain directed outward.

Amin’s second contribution is the restoration of the colonial contradiction to the center of capitalist analysis. The world system does not merely contain rich and poor countries. It produces centers capable of monopolizing development and peripheries compelled to surrender labor, resources, markets, and strategic autonomy. Colonial conquest created this structure. Debt, unequal exchange, technological control, sanctions, and military coercion reproduce it under formally postcolonial conditions.

That argument rescues anti-imperialism from moral protest. Imperialism is not objectionable only because war is cruel or intervention violates national etiquette. It is the political and military form of a system whose accumulation depends upon unequal development. The empire cannot be persuaded to behave responsibly while preserving the relations that require enforcement. A kinder guard still guards the prison.

His third contribution is delinking. Amin never proposed autarky or a retreat from world exchange. Delinking means refusing to subordinate domestic development to the priorities of global capital. It begins when a people determines what to produce, how to use its surplus, which technologies to develop, and which international relations serve its social project. The decisive rupture is not separation from the world but the end of the world market’s right to issue commands.

Delinking therefore joins national sovereignty to class power. A state may nationalize rhetoric while privatizing the economy. It may denounce foreign interference while disciplining workers for domestic capital. It may trade with new partners while exporting the same raw materials under the same unequal social relations. Amin’s mature concept of the sovereign popular project closes these escape routes. Sovereignty becomes emancipatory only when workers, peasants, and the dispossessed gain command over land, finance, industry, food systems, natural resources, and the priorities of development.

This development marks one of the most important movements in Amin’s thought. Beyond US Hegemony? identifies the need for autonomous poles and national-popular alliances. His later work gives their social content greater precision. Industrial sovereignty without food sovereignty leaves a nation exposed. Financial sovereignty without public control leaves capital in command. Political independence without democratization transfers the flag while preserving the hierarchy beneath it.

The sovereign popular project also provides a sharper standard for judging the states emerging from the wreckage of unipolarity. Their value cannot be measured solely by whether Washington dislikes them. Resistance to imperialism matters because it protects political space, resources, institutions, and the possibility of independent development. But anti-hegemonic action becomes historically transformative only when that protected space is used to alter property relations and enlarge popular control.

This distinction guards against two symmetrical errors. The imperial left dismisses every targeted state that fails to satisfy its abstract model of socialism, thereby treating defeat by Washington as politically neutral. Campism performs the opposite trick, converting every conflict with Washington into proof of socialist character. Amin arms us against both. The first abandons sovereignty to empire. The second abandons class analysis to diplomacy.

China demonstrates why Amin’s developing framework matters more than any frozen judgment from 2006. The growth of markets, private capital, inequality, and bourgeois interests created real restorative pressures. Yet public ownership, planning, collective land, financial command, and the political authority of a state produced by socialist revolution prevented those pressures from settling the question. Amin’s later theory of the long transition better captures this struggle than any formula announcing either completed restoration or guaranteed socialist advance.

The same method clarifies Russia. The destruction of Soviet property relations produced oligarchic capitalism and commodity dependence. Russia’s recovery of strategic sovereignty nevertheless frustrated the imperial project of reducing the former Soviet space to a collection of powerless peripheries. That resistance changes the international balance. It does not by itself reverse restoration. National recovery opens a road; the class struggle determines where it leads.

BRICS and the renewed cooperation of the South carry a similar ambiguity. Alternative banks, local-currency mechanisms, trade networks, and diplomatic coordination can weaken the institutional monopoly of the North Atlantic powers. They can provide targeted states with room to maneuver and reduce the reach of financial coercion. These are material gains, not summit theater. But an institution becomes popular neither by adopting the language of the South nor by expanding its membership.

Amin’s distinction between emergence and lumpendevelopment supplies the test. Growth that deepens commodity dependence, enriches domestic monopolies, destroys peasant agriculture, and subjects labor to global value chains is not liberation. Genuine emergence requires the sovereign transformation of productive capacity according to a popular project. A new lender may loosen the old creditor’s grip. It cannot decide whose needs development will serve.

Amin’s fourth enduring contribution is his insistence that socialism must unite equality, emancipation, and democratic direction. State ownership creates possibilities unavailable under private command, but ownership alone does not complete the transition. Planning may coordinate social development, yet planning administered above the people can harden into bureaucratic substitution. Markets may be used tactically, yet markets accumulate social forces that will eventually demand political power. Every institutional form must therefore be judged by the movement of class power through it.

This is where Amin remains most useful to revolutionaries confronting the failures of both liberal capitalism and administrative socialism. Liberalism grants the worker political equality in the voting booth and economic subordination everywhere else. Bureaucracy may abolish the capitalist owner while denying workers effective command over production and the surplus. Amin refuses the choice between bourgeois democracy and socialism without popular power. Human emancipation requires the socialization of economic decision-making and the deepening of democracy beyond the limits imposed by property.

His fifth contribution is strategic rather than merely analytical: national liberation and socialist transformation belong to one process, though they do not occur automatically together. In the periphery, the struggle against imperialism creates alliances broader than the working class alone. Peasants, oppressed nations, patriotic intellectuals, sections of the petty bourgeoisie, and even portions of national capital may enter the front. The alliance is necessary because imperial domination cannot be defeated by issuing class credentials at the door.

Yet the united front contains contending futures. National capital wants room to accumulate. Workers and peasants require control over the conditions of accumulation itself. The revolutionary task is neither to reject the alliance nor to kneel before its bourgeois wing. Popular forces must preserve their independent organization, political education, program, and capacity to fight over the direction of the state. Without such organization, “national-popular” becomes an adjective attached to somebody else’s power.

Amin’s later call for an International of Workers and Peoples extends this logic beyond national borders. Collective imperialism coordinates armies, banks, corporations, intelligence agencies, media systems, and political institutions on a world scale. Resistance remains divided among states, movements, unions, peasant organizations, parties, and liberation struggles with unequal resources and divergent strategies. A world system cannot be defeated by isolated heroism.

The call identifies the necessity but does not finish the construction. What organizational form can unite revolutionary states and movements without turning popular internationalism into state diplomacy? How can strategic discipline coexist with ideological struggle and democratic initiative? How can organizations rooted in different social formations coordinate without allowing the strongest to command the rest? Amin leaves these questions open because history had not yet produced the answer.

That incompleteness should not be concealed with ceremonial praise. The unresolved organizational problem is the central weakness running through the project. Amin identifies the need for sovereign popular blocs, renewed Bandung, democratic planning, and an International of Workers and Peoples. He provides fewer concrete mechanisms through which workers and peasants might acquire durable command inside these formations. The missing bridge lies between political orientation and institutional power.

No theoretical text can manufacture that bridge in advance of struggle. Still, revolutionaries must name its materials. Independent working-class parties, militant unions, peasant organizations, popular assemblies, political education, cooperative and public institutions, disciplined international coordination, and forms of accountability capable of restraining both capital and bureaucracy are not organizational accessories. They are the means by which sovereignty becomes popular and transition continues moving toward socialism.

This unresolved question also defines the danger of the present multipolar opening. US hegemony is weakening, but capital has not lost its ability to reorganize. Domestic bourgeoisies can redirect anti-imperialist sentiment into protected accumulation. State managers can transform emergency authority into permanent privilege. New financial institutions can reproduce extraction under less humiliating terms. A world freed from Washington’s monopoly may still become a world divided among several centers of capitalist command.

Revolutionaries should welcome every material defeat imposed upon the imperial structure. Sanctions circumvented, invasions deterred, national assets recovered, development projects financed outside Western control, and Southern institutions strengthened—all enlarge the terrain upon which peoples can struggle. To dismiss these gains because they do not immediately abolish capitalism is infantile. To treat them as socialism already achieved is worse: it disarms the forces required to push them further.

Amin’s strategic verdict can therefore be stated without reducing it to a slogan. The defeat of US hegemony is necessary because no emancipatory project can mature beneath permanent military encirclement and financial veto. Multipolarity is necessary because it fractures the concentration of power that allows one imperial center to discipline the planet. Sovereign popular projects are necessary because interstate plurality alone leaves capitalist polarization intact. Socialism remains necessary because only the organized power of workers and oppressed peoples can abolish the social relation that continually reproduces empire.

The sequence matters. Anti-hegemonic struggle opens space. Sovereignty protects it. Popular organization determines its class content. Socialist transition reorganizes property and power. Internationalism prevents national advance from collapsing into competition among states. Remove any link and the movement is diverted: resistance without transformation, sovereignty without the people, socialism without democracy, or internationalism without organized power.

Beyond US Hegemony? should therefore be read neither as a sacred forecast nor as an obsolete map of the unipolar moment. It is a transitional work inside Amin’s own long march toward a fuller theory of imperialism, emergence, sovereign popular development, and socialist transition. Its contradictions became material for later clarification. Its strongest concepts survived because Amin treated theory as a weapon to be sharpened by defeat, resistance, and renewed struggle.

The book leaves the reader with no excuse for political laziness. Washington’s decline will not perform our work. China, Russia, BRICS, or any collection of Southern states cannot substitute for organized peoples. Nor can workers and colonized nations afford the imperial luxury of standing aside until every resisting government satisfies a seminar room’s definition of purity. The task is to defend every breach in imperial command while fighting to place the forces of labor, land, and liberation in control of what enters through it.

Multipolarity is terrain. Sovereignty is a weapon. The sovereign popular project gives that weapon a class hand. Socialism determines where the struggle must go. Amin’s lasting achievement was to keep these distinctions together when liberals separated peace from imperialism, nationalists separated sovereignty from class, and sections of the left separated socialist aspiration from the material battles through which it must advance.

The page closes, but the argument remains on the battlefield. The old hegemon is wounded. New powers are rising. The peoples of the world have returned as historical actors, though not yet with the organization equal to their numbers or their suffering. The future will not be decided by how many poles appear on the map. It will be decided by who commands them, whose labor sustains them, and whether the exploited finally seize the power to reorganize the world they already produce.