Samir Amin (1931-2018) Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin died on Sunday, August 12 in Paris, he was 86.He was one of the most outstanding Marxist thinkers of our time. His views on the "Third World'' saw him to attract large following in Africa, Asia and South America. Unlike many of his contemporaries he did not retreat from his radical thinking based on Marxism with the collapse of the former Soviet Union and also in general decline of socialist political movements around the world. His celebrated life was perhaps very challenging - even trying in many ways. He was active in progressive politics without ever holding any political office.
Samir Amin, a brilliant mind, earned the reputation of being the 'radical economist'. Macky Sall, President of Senegal, in a statement said "contemporary economic thought is losing one of its illustrious figures'' with the death of Samir Amin. Evo Morales, Bolivian President, said "the legacy of his ideals of social justice will be eternally acknowledged. Immortal''.
Samir Amin in many ways helped shape the modern critical intellectual thinking, research and discourses on the causes of underdevelopment as articulated within the "centre-periphery'' framework. A whole generation of scholars were inspired by his works to further our understanding of "dependency and underdevelopment''. He coined the term "eurocentrism'' to explain Europe's very preoccupation with its own histories and narratives. He was a ruthless critic of political Islam and other religious movements as also of neoliberalism. However, Amin in his analytical approach to political Islam was careful to distinguish between political Islam and Islamophobia which currently pervades the Western psyche at all levels.
Samir Amin was born of Egyptian-French parentage in 1931 in Cairo and was brought up in Port Said in Egypt where he attended a French school, the Lycee Fracais and obtained his French baccalaureate in 1947. From 1947 to 1957 he studied in Paris and earned a degree in politics in 1952 from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, followed by two other degrees - one in statistics from the Institut de Statistiques in 1956 and other in economics in 1957, and finally, a Ph.D. degree in Political Economy. Amin's Ph.D. thesis was written while he was active in the French Communist Party of which he was a member. Amin was also one of the founders of the Egyptian Communist Party in the 1940s. In his autobiography, Amin wrote that he could spend only a minimum of time to prepare for his university examinations as he was spending substantial amount of time in "militant action''. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the origins of underdevelopment which was subsequently elaborated in his seminal work Accumulation on a World Scale published in 1970.
Amin saw capitalism as a global system fundamentally based on dichotomy between the dominant centre (developed countries) and the dominated periphery (underdeveloped countries). He further elaborated such asymmetrical relations between the two by highlighting the logic of capital accumulation which was such that the periphery could never achieve the same status as the centre. He demonstrated how resources flowed from countries in the periphery to enrich countries of the centre through a process he described as 'imperialist rent'. This made Amin the forerunner in articulating the 'dependency theory'. His detailed discussions on the dependency theory were incorporated in books such as Accumulation on a World Scale (1970) and Unequal Development (1973) and others. He further elaborated the concept of "unequal exchange'' between North and South (the centre and the periphery) which systematically impoverished the South in many ways.
Amin further elaborated the nature of unequal relationship between the centre and the periphery in his book Capitalism in the age of globalization (1997).He argued that this unequal relationship between the centre and the periphery is characterised by the five monopolies which perpetuate underdevelopment in the periphery and help accumulate increased wealth at the centre and keep the global capitalistic system running. These monopolies include - control of technology; access to natural resources; finance; global media and communication, and the means of mass destruction. The real progress could only be achieved by the periphery by overturning these monopolies. The way to overturn this, he argued, is "delinking'' which is the refusal to subject the national development strategy to the imperatives of worldwide expansion by rejecting dictates of the centre. That would require development of specific policies and institutions to pursue developmental objectives of countries in the periphery. Delinking is the only way countries at the periphery can achieve genuine economic and social progress. Such delinking can be undertaken only by politically bold governments with mass support. The developmental models on offer by the West are a sure recipe to enable the West to perpetuate its neo-colonial domination.
Amin saw the spirit of the Bandung Conference as the manifestation of African and Asian nations' will to reconquer their sovereignty and complete their independence to pursue an independent development agenda for the benefit of their people and rejection of imperialist domination. He clearly visualised capitalism and imperialism as interdependent phenomena. One can not exist without the other. He also emphasised that capitalism as a system is fundamentally unstable and would move from one crisis to another.
Samir Amin had a rather very critical attitude towards mainstream economics which he considered as a discourse to legitimise the unrestricted predation of capital. He rejected the notion that economics is a pure science. In his long career as a radical economist he looked for solutions for national development from the left/Marxist perspective. After completion of his Ph.D., he returned to Egypt and worked for the Institution for Economic Management, a government institution, from 1957-60 before he was forced into exile. He moved to Mali and became an adviser to the Ministry of Planning from 1960-63. He was offered a fellowship at the African Institute for Development and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar, Senegal in 1963 and in 1970 he became the Director of IDEP, a position he continued until 1980. During this period, he also held academic position at the University of Poitiers in Dakar and Paris (Paris VIII, Vincennes). For the past 40 years, Amin was based in Dakar, Senegal. In 1980 he set up the Third World Forum and remained its director. He was instrumental in setting up the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) which has now become the pioneer institution for social science research in Africa. Amin wrote more than 30 books.
Some critics argued that the value of labour relative to labour productivity was lower in the centre than in the periphery, so super-exploitation of workers in the periphery was not possible. This argument essentially uses the theory of unequal exchange to disprove the effects of unequal exchange. Also, it was pointed out that often developed countries (the centre) make more profit investing in each other and saw poorer countries in Africa and other parts of the world as irrelevant. Therefore, there is no path of development other than working through the existing global economic system which Amin would call the global capitalist system. However, there are critics of the critique of Amin's works who defended Amin's position. As Michal Kalecki pointed out that a rise in the degree of monopoly within the metropole (the centre) gave rise to a greater squeeze on third world primary producing countries (the periphery). Kalecki's thesis also provides us with a window to examine the origin of unequal exchange.
As a Marxist Amin believed capitalism would eventually fail and prophesised that its neo-liberal phase of this epoch was coming to an end. He described himself as a "creative Marxist''; he would begin with Marx but not end with Marx. In the era of neo-liberal capitalism, he foresaw an unsustainable global economic system, with finance in dominance which would result in great inequality, a precarious labour moving from one job to another, destruction of the environment and dangers of political religion threatening the humanity. Yet he was optimistic about the future of humanity because other choices also lay before the humankind.
Muhammad Mahmood is an
independent economic
and political analyst.
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