He is an Egyptian political author. He currently lives in Dakar, Senegal. He is born September 3, 1931 … After finishing his thesis, Amin went back to Cairo, where he was from 1957 to 1960 manager of Études de l’Organisme de Développement Économique. Subsequently Amin left Cairo, to become advisor in the Ministry of Planning in Bamako (Mali) from 1960 to 1963. In 1963 he was offered a fellowship at the Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP). Until 1970 he worked there as well as being a professor at the university of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris (of Paris VIII, Vincennes). In 1970 he became a chief of the IDEP, which he managed until 1980. In 1980 Amin left the IDEP and became a director of the Third World Forum in Dakar. (full text).
… Amin argues for a globalization based on the needs of the periphery, not the center, and for “de-linking” development from capital investment … (full text).
He says: ”History has proven that capitalism, like all social systems, is able at each stage of its expansion to overcome its own permanent contradictions, but not without worsening the violence with which they will be experienced by succeeding generations. This is not at all foreign to the Marxian spirit, which I express in the proposition that the human enterprise remains underdetermined, that it is not foreclosed by some necessity that is tied to the development of either the productive forces or any other metasocial force. More than ever humanity is confronted with two choices: to let itself be led by capitalism’s unfolding logic to a fate of collective suicide or, on the contrary, to give birth to the enormous human possibilities carried by that world-haunting spectre of communism ». (full text).
Samir Amin – Egypt
Listen to this video: Mangoro Dja. Entrevista Samir Amin, 8.51 minutes (in french with spanish subtitles);
Read: U.S. Imperialism, Europe, and the Middle East, November 2004.
… This commitment to reflection, debate, and self-critique continues to flourish, as exemplified by the rich reader/sourcebook ‘A Political Programme for the World Social Forum WSF‘. Compiled recently by Jai Sen and others at the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement (CACIM), the volume serves as a framework for ongoing dialogue about the Bamako Agreement, itself an ambitious attempt to articulate a political platform for the WSF spearheaded by Samir Amin and the World Forum for Alternative (WFA) … (full text).
Find: his articles on Google Scholar.
… Four positions emerged, beginning with a “top-down” albeit very eloquent analysis by Samir Amin and Francois Houtart made originally in January 2006 – the Bamako Appeal (download this 329 pdf-text) – just before the polycentric WSF. The Appeal calls for an explicitly political program as an alternative to neoliberal globalization … (full text).
Read: Imperialism and Globalization, June 2001.
He says also: (Question: What is the significance of this U.S.-led war against Iraq?), « This war is not just against Iraq, not even just against the Arab peoples, or against the people of the region. It is also not a war against Muslims. It is a war against mankind. It is one of a long series of U.S.-planned wars, part of an overall criminal project. This project seeks to establish U.S. military control over the whole planet. This project, and the philosophy that sustains it, developed some years ago, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It dates back to the 1980s, when the ideology of neo-liberalism attained supremacy, symbolised by the rise of Thatcherism in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. At the same time, the power of the Soviet Union was declining. The neo-liberal plan, to assume control on a planetary scale, was at that time written by people like Zbignew Brezinski. They said that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. would be the sole and unique hegemonic power. This plan gave itself about 20 years to establish total control over the rest of the world. The idea was to prevent any other country or society – particularly the major countries – from becoming independent actors in the global system ». (full text).
Find him also on the spanish wikipedia.
Read: Samir Amin, BIOGRAPHY, INTERVIEW;
His publications and pdf-downloads:
Economic Globalism and Political Universalism, Conflicting Issues, a 21 pages pdf text;
from Google-Books: this text, Maldevelopment, Anatomy of a Global Failure, 252 pages, 1990;
The Liberal Virus examines the ways in which the American model is being imposed on the world, and outlines its economic and political consequences. It shows how both citizenship and class consciousness are diluted in « low-intensity democracy » and argues instead for democratization as an ongoing process—of fundamental importance for human progress—rather than a fixed constitutional formula designed to support the logic of capital accumulation. (full text).
Read: The Driftages of Modernity, the Case of Africa and the Arab World.
And he says: « To destroy the conquests of the working classes, to dismantle the systems of social security and employment protection, to return to poverty wages, to bring certain of the peripheral countries back to their outmoded status as providers of raw materials while limiting the opportunities of those who have become relatively industrialized by imposing the status of subcontractor on their productive systems, and to speed up the squandering of the resources of the planet: such is the program of the currently dominant forces. This permanently reactionary utopia expresses the deepest desire of the gluttons whose arrogant self-affirmation bursts out all over at historical moments like our present one ». (full text).
Read: The First Babu Memorial Lecture delivered by Samir Amin on September 22nd 1997, London.
He has written more than 30 books including Imperialism & Unequal Development, Specters of Capitalism: A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions, Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder and The Liberal Virus. His memoirs were published in October of 2006. Find all on wikipedia.
Lire: Le contrôle militaire de la planète, par Samir Amin, 17 février 2003 (voir plus bas de la page pour trouver le texte français).
links:
Pan-African Classics, May 21, 2007;
Anti-globalization: The Global Fight for Local Autonomy;