The idea that Marx developed concerning the strategy for transcending capitalism is closely related to his conception of the worldwide expansion of capitalism.
Here, Marx shared the excessive optimism of his time. He believed that capitalist expansion was irresistible and that it would rapidly suppress all vestiges of earlier modes of production, as well as the social, cultural, and political forms associated with them; in a word, that this expansion would homogenize global society on the basis of a generalized social polarization (bourgeoisie/proletariat), similar from one country to the next. This belief explains his vision of a worldwide workers' revolution and his hope for proletarian internationalism. Indeed, Marx envisioned the so-called socialist transition to a classless society (communism) as a relatively brief stage, which could be perfecdy mastered by the working classes.
Actually existing capitalism is nothing like this vision. The global expansion of capitalism has never made it its task to homogenize the planet. On the contrary, this expansion created a new polarization, subjecting social forms prior to capitalism at the periphery of the system to the demands of the reproduction of capital in the central formations. Reproducing and deepening this polarization stage by stage in its worldwide expansion, capitalism placed a revolution on the agenda that was not the world proletarian revolution: the revolution of the peoples who were victims of this expansion. This is a second expression of unequal development. The demand for a reexamination of capitalism, as was the case in the past for the tributary social forms, is expressed more intensely at the peripheries of the capitalist system than at its advanced centers.
In opposition to the unsatisfying eclecticism of bourgeois theory, the concept of international value could serve as the key concept of a non-Eurocentric universalist paradigm able to account for this immanent contradiction of capitalism.
In effect, the concept of international value explains the double polarization that characterizes capitalism: on the one hand in the unequal distribution of income on the world scale and on the other by the growing inequality in the distribution of income within the peripheral societies. This double aspect of national and social polarization is the real form of expression of the law of the accumulation of capital on the world scale. This polarization creates the conditions for the massive reproduction of capital at the global level, by reproducing the material conditions that allow for the functioning of the transnational class alliances that bind the peripheral ruling classes to imperialism.
Simultaneously, it reproduces qualitatively different social and political conditions at the centers and the peripheries. In the former case, this polarization brings about, as a result of the auto-centered character of the economy, an increase in the revenues from labor parallel to that of productivity, thereby assuring the continued functioning of the political consensus around electoral democracy. At the peripheries, this polarization separates the evolution of revenues from labor from the progress of productivity, thereby making democracy impossible. The transfer of value associated with this process of accumulation is made opaque by the price structure, which derives from the law of international value.
These conceptualizations remain widely rejected, a testimony, in my opinion, to the force of Eurocentric prejudice. For to concede the fecundity of these theses is to accept that development must take place by means of a rupture with everything that submission to the law of international value implies; in other words, it implies delinking. To accept this is to admit that development within the world capitalist system remains, for the peoples of the periphery, at an impasse.
-Samir Amin, Eurocentrism Pgs. 192-193