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Samir was born in Cairo in 1931 and was educated at the Lyce Franais there. He gained a Ph.D. degree in Political

Economy in Paris (1957) as well as degrees from the Institut de Statistiques and from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques.

He then returned home where he was attached to the Planning bodies of Nasser's regime. He left Egypt in 1960 to

work with the Ministry of Planning of the newly independent Mali (1960-63) and following this commenced an

academic career. He has held the position of full Professor in France since 1966 and was for ten years (1970-80) the

director of the UN African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (in Dakar). Since 1980 he has been

directing the African Office of the Third World Forum, an international non-governmental association for research anddebate. He is currently the President of the World Forum for Alternatives.

The main contributions of Samir Amin can be classified under four headings : (i) a critique of the theory and

expriences of development ; (ii) an alternative proposal for the analysis of the global system which he calls really

existing capitalism (iii) a re-reading of the history of social formations, and (iv) a reinterpretation of what he describes

as post capitalist societies.

Amin's critique of the theory of development goes back to his Ph.D. dissertation (1957) published later under the

title Accumulation on a WorldScale. Conventional theory presents a general view of the problem that might be

summed up in the simple proposition that underdevelopment is nothing more than delayed development. The

emerging conclusions advocate development policies focused on more thorough participation in the international

division of labour.Accumulationwas among the first texts to challenge this conventional wisdom. Bourgeoiseconomics finds attractive only the study of contingent interconnections resulting from the play of such strictly

economic phenomena as prices and incomes. Moreover, in this exercise it invariably posits a hypothetical system

close to the ideal type of capitalism. For that reason, an examination of bourgeois economic statements on

underdevelopment throws into exceedingly sharp relief the inadequacies and the narrow range of the conventional

science of economics. The limitations are most clearly visible in three areas of economic analysis : monetary

problems, the conjunctural state of the economy, and international relations. That is hardly an accident. The ebb and

flow of economic tides indicate that in proffering its hypothses of spontaneous, inluctable balance, bourgeois

economics turns a blind eye to the contradictory dynamics inherent in capitalist accumulation. As for the theories it

propounds on international exchanges, notably those of comparative advantage and the self-equilibrating balance of

external payments, they rise no higher than a vapid ideology of universel harmony between nations operating as

partners in the world capitalist system.

Such was the critical thrust developed in Accumulation. However, bourgeois economics aspires to the formulation of

a social philosophy asserting a broader idea : that in its spread, the market of commodities and production factors

creates maximal conditions for the satisfaction of all, thus constituting a rational process transcending history. This

claim stands on shaky ground. For the discipline of economics itself is nothing more than a pseudo-science, a

consequence of the economic alienation peculiar to capitalism. Economics is the result of that peculiarly capitalist

trait whereby phenomena generated by society seem to confront that same society as if they were natural laws

external to it. Thus linked to the illusion of a rationality beyond history, bourgeois socioeconomic philosophy is unable

to deal with the real history of societies.

Beyond this critique Amin offers an alternative methodology to deal with the analysis of global capitalism in two

books, Imperialism and UnequalDevelopmentand The Law of Value and Historical Materialism. According to him

there are two ways of looking at the social reality of our modern world. The first stresses the fundamental relationship

which defines the capitalist mode of production at its most abstract level and, from there, focuses on the allegedlyfundamental class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The second stresses the other dimension of

capitalist reality, its unequal development worldwide, and hence focuses its analysis on the consequences that

polarisation involves at every level, thus defining other issues in the political and social struggles that occupy the

forefront of the historical stage. In this analytical framework, the development of the periphery has always been the

history of a never-ending adjustment to the demands and constraints of dominant capital. The centres

restructure themselves and the peripheries are adjusted to these restructurings. Delinking is precisely reversing

this relation; that is, subordinating external relations to the logic of internal development.

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Polarization on a global level is thus the immanent product of the expansion of really existing capitalism. On the scale

of the world capitalist system, the law of value operates on the basis of a truncated market which integrates the

commerce of products and the movements of capital but excludes labour power from it. The worldwide law of value

then tends to standardise the prices of merchandises but not the remunerations of labour since its range of world

distribution is infinitely more open than that of the distribution of productivities. Even beyond the law of worldwide

value, unequal access to natural resources, technological monopolies, extra-economic mechanisms of political and

military domination - as well as the effects of the domination of life-styles, organisation and consumption - have vastlyincreased this polarization in every dimension.

In fact, the polarisation of wealth and power within the world capitalist system has passed through three stages. In the

17th and 18th centuries, thanks to the colonisation of America and its effects on the acceleration of the mercantilist

proto-capitalism of Atlantic Europe, that part of the world acquired for the first time a decisive superiority over the old

civilisations of the Orient which it prepared to attack, thus bringing a halt to their own proto-capitalist evolution (and

sometimes even precipitating rgressive involution). In the 19th century the industrial revolution and then imperialism

(in the classical Leninist sense of the term) accentuated this polarisation of wealth and power which became

expressed in the contrast between industrialized and non-industrialized countries. Amin proposes the thesis that the

structural crisis of our own epoch, starting in 1970, begins a new stage in world domination, (marked by new

technologies, new forms of worldwide finance capital and so on) which results not in a rduction but an aggravation of

polarisation. The peripheral industrialization of one part and the fourth-worldization of another part constitute the

new forms corresponding to this last stage of polarisation.

This polarisation has postponed the question of the eventual socialist transformation in the developed capitalist

societies, while in the periphery it bas required objectively envisaging a different development from the one that

would result - in these conditions - from its integration into the world capitalist system.

In this conceptual frame Amin has re-evaluated the various radical attempts at development which occurred

throughout the 1960s and 1970s in the Third World (what he calls the Bandung Era 1955-1975 ). The Bandung

project was defined by the following features : (i) a dtermination to develop productive forces and diversify

production (notably to industrialise) ; (ii) a dtermination to ensure that the national state should lead and control the

process ; (iii) the belief that technical models are neutral and can simply be reproduced ; (iv) the belief that

this process does not involve a popular initiative as a starting point but simply popular support for state actions ; (v)

the belief that this process is not fundamentally in contradiction with participation in the international division of labour

even if it involves temporary conflicts with the developed capitalist countries. Realization of this national bourgeois

project involved the hegemonic national bourgeois class, through its state, acquiring control in a number of areas, at

least of the following processes : (i) control of the reproduction of the labour force, which implies a relatively complete

and balanced development so that local agriculture can be, inter alia, in a position to provide the basic ingrdients of

that reproduction in reasonable quantities and at reasonable prices to ensure the valorisation of capital ; (ii) control of

national resources ; (iii) control of local markets and the capacity to break through into the world market in competitive

conditions ; (iv) control of the financial circuits making it possible to centralise the surplus and direct it to productive

uses; and (v) control of the technologies in use at the level of development of productive forces reached.

History has exposed the inadequacies and the fragility of the dream of the bourgeois nation-state in today's Third

World. For after the initial period of post-war prosperity, the world economy slid into crisis in the early 1970s.

Immediately the capitalist camp went on the offensive again and imposed the hard-nosed demands of thetransnationalization process on Third World societies. It turned their shattered state machinery into simple

transmission belts, and over the grave of the aborted bourgeois national-state, it erected the object of its own desire:

the comprador state (1990b).

Amin also developed a reading of history consistent with his concept of unequal development (1980). In his opinion

what separates capitalism from all the advanced societies preceding it is not only a quantitative difference of the

degree of development of productive forces. The diffrence is also qualitative. In capitalism, surplus value is obtained

through the economic mechanism of the law of value whereas in all earlier societies the extraction of the surplus took

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the form of a tribute imposed by non-economic means. The contrast between, on the one hand, the transparency of

economic phenomena in pre-capitalist societies and, on the other, its opaqueness through the law of value in

capitalism leads to a reversal of the hierarchy of authority. Whereas the economy directly commands the capitalist

dynamic (which is then expressed through the play of economic laws which seem to impose themselves on society

as laws of nature), a politico-ideological authority was dominant in earlier societies. Amin believes that Marx

emphasized precisely this reversal of relations between structure and superstructure and therefore emphasized the

essentiel character common to all advanced pre-capitalist forms (which Amin calls, for that reason, the tributarymode of production ) in contrast to capitalism. Unfortunately, the dominant currents of Marxism refused to consider

the superstructural dynamics (contenting themselves with a vague theory of the superstructure as a reflection of

the exigencies of the economic base), just as they refused to analyse the systems of pre-capitalist societies closely

bound by multiple relations - political, cultural (religious among others) and economic. This reduction of Marxism did

not predispose it to understand the transition to capitalism, while it inspired research in a false direction, namely that

of the possible succession of modes of production such as that of slavery-feudalism. Or by default, Marxism

became trapped in the mythological contrast of the two roads : the open Occidental way (slavery-feudalism-

capitalism) and the cul-de-sac of the Asiatic mode of production . Amin has rejected these theses and has tried to

demonstrate their Eurocentric character.

According to Amin, pre-capitalist societies are characterized by differentiation of the principal source or authority

because of what he has called the central or peripheral nature of the tributary society under considration.

The central or peripheral character in pre-capitalism can be found in the area of the dominant authority, that is

to say in the State (power) and in ideology (cultures, religions), whereas the central or peripheral character of

a capitalist formation is located in the area of the economy. In this sense, Amin has defined feudalism not as a

specific mode of production but as a specific - peripheral - form of tributary society. It was peripheral simply because

the centralisation of state power which defines central tributary society was embryonic: the absolute monarchies

(close to the advanced tributary model) appeared relatively late in Europe, precisely in the proto-capitalist phase of

the mercantilist transition. Amin has explained this peripheral character of feudalism by the proximity of the communal

phase among the barbarians from which medieval Europe developed. But this lag in Europe less advanced than the

Oriental tributaries - did not seem to have been a handicap in the acceleration of later development, but on the

contrary was an advantage because of the greater flexibility of the society which it encompassed.

Amin later developed his reflections on culture through a critique of Eurocentrism which he qualified as culturalism

, meaning that it is based on the hypothesis that the different cultures (European, Oriental) are characterized bytranshistorical invariants which determine developments ; these are not subject to the laws of general evolution.

There he tried to show the mythological character of these invariants, artificially constructed both to legitimize the

specific dynamic opened by European history (by the myths of Greek ancestry, by Christianophilia , by racism)

and to legitimize by contrast the supposed impasse of other societies.

It is also in this overall framework that Amin discusses the issues of socialism (1983, 1989b, 1990a). In his opinion,

Marx underestimated the centre-periphery polarisation in the worldwide process of capitalist expansion. Marx thought

that following industrial revolution, the capitalist system would take very little time to accomplish its universalizing

mission. Reality worked out differently.

According to Amin, the challenging of the capitalist order from revolts in its periphery compels a rethink of the whole

question of socialist transition towards the abolition of classes. The Marxist tradition remains handicapped by itsinitial theoretical vision of workers revolutions opening up (on the basis of advanced productive forces) a rapid

transition marked by popular democratic rule which should be considerably more democratic than the most

democratic of bourgeois states. Nevertheless, all the revolutions of our time (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba,

Yugoslavia and so on) that were unmistakably socialist in intent have been the result of the unequal development in

capitalist expansion. Global polarisation has thus been the historical force behind these types of revolutions by

the peoplesof the periphery. They have been anti-capitalist in the sense of opposing existing capitalist development

which has proved intolerable for the people. But that does not mean that these anti-capitalist revolutions are purely

socialist. By the force of circumstance, they have a complex nature. The expression of their specific and new

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contradictions which had not been imagined in the classical perspective of the socialist transition as conceived by

Marx, gives post-capitalist regimes their real content, which is that of a popular national construction in which the

socialist and capitalist forces and projects combine and conflict. This objective contradiction should be managed

through political democracy and a mixed economy. Instead it bas been managed through statism which negated its

very existence, thus reflecting the reconstruction of privileged class interests.

Today all societies are integrated into a global capitalist system ruled by the liberal utopia and therefore facing three

main similar challenges albeit in the frame of different concrete conditions. First the democratic issue : beyond

political democracy, will the social struggles succeed in giving it a progressive content and thus move towards the

social management of the economy ? Second the market issue : will societies simply accept the law of market or will

they succeed in regulating it through non bureaucratie social planning ? Third the globalisation issue : will each

society integrate the world economy simply on the basis of the rules of so called competitivity and therefore accept

eventually the peripherization of the majority of the nations, or will they succeed in mastering the opening of the

economics? Amin argues that the answers to these questions will depend on the outcome of the ongoing social

struggles (1997).

For Amin, the unilateral market solution can never put right unbearable social, political and international contrasts.

Critical thought is concerned precisely with identifying alternative social alliances which can provide escape routes

from the vicious circles of the market. Different routes are required by the various regions of the world, specificindividual policies cannot be derived from the unilateral rationality of the market. The imperatives of our time therefore

imply, the rebuilding of the world system on the basis of polycentrism. The various regions and countries should

coordinate their visions and subordinate their external relations to the constraints of their internal development. They

must not be tempted to adjust their internal development to the global expansion of capitalism.

The social alliances which define the content of the strategies for the various regions are necessarily different. Yet

these specific strategies should converge gradually towards a global socialist vision through a process which Amin

analyses as a long historical transition from global capitalism to global socialism, therefore different from the historical

Marxist concepts of the short transition and the building of socialism in separated countries. In that long transition the

fundamental tendencies associated with the globalized expansion of capitalism - that is, growing market alienation,

growing destruction of the natural basis for life and growing polarisation between centres and peripheries - should be

stopped. The positive transition to socialism will have started when the direction of the trends in these three areas will

have been reversed (1997, 1998).

Amin suffers no illusions as to whether Marxism is going through a crisis. For him whoever approaches historical

materialism as a method (not as a definitive theory forever scaled and delivered at the death of Marx, Lenin or Mao)

knows that the changing realities of life present a dynamic Marxism with a continuing series of challenges to creative

innovation. To renew its vitality Marxism has to meet these challenges. The penalty for failure is atrophy. Only

religious dogmatism, which is impervious to reality, is capable of seeing in an intellectual crisis nothing but threats to

its own certainties.