Samir Amin (Arabic: سمير أمين) (3 September 1931 – 12 August 2018) was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist,[1] political scientist and world-systems analyst.

[4] In 1947 Amin left for Paris where he obtained a second high school diploma with a specialization in elementary mathematics from the prestigious Lycée Henri IV.

In his autobiography Itinéraire intellectuel (1990) he wrote that in order to spend a substantial amount of time in "militant action" he could devote only a minimum to preparing for his university exams.

[4] After arriving in Paris, Amin joined the French Communist Party (PCF), but he later distanced himself from Soviet Marxism and associated himself for some time with Maoist circles.

After finishing his thesis, Amin went back to Cairo, where he worked from 1957 to 1960 as a research officer for the government's "Institution for Economic Management" where he worked on ensuring the state’s representation on the boards of directors of public sector companies while at the same time immersing himself in the very tense political climate linked to the nationalization of the Canal, the 1956 war and the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement.

[4] In 1960 Amin left for Paris where he worked for six months for the Department of Economic and Financial Studies - Service des Études Économiques et Financières (SEEF).

Although he abandoned working as a ‘bureaucrat’ after he left Mali, Samir Amin continued to act as an adviser for several governments, such as China, Vietnam, Algeria, Venezuela, and Bolivia.

Around the same time and with similar basic assumptions the so-called desarrollismo (CEPAL, Raúl Prebisch) emerged in Latin America, which was developed further a decade later in the discussion on ‘dependencia’ – and even later appeared Wallerstein’s ‘world system analysis’.

Samir Amin applied Marxism to a global level, using terms as ‘law of worldwide value’ and ‘super-exploitation’ to analyse the world-economy (see 2.1.1).

Thus, he called for the ‘periphery’ to ‘delink’ from the world economy, creating ‘autocentric’ development (see 2.2) and rejecting the ‘Eurocentrism’ inherent to Modernisation Theory (see 2.3).

The requirements of profitability stand against the striving of the working people to determine their own fate (rights of workers as well as democracy were enforced against capitalist logic); 2.

[3] While they use a widely similar scientific vocabulary, Amin rejected, for example, the notion of a semi-periphery and was against the theorization of capitalism as cyclical (as by Nikolai Kondratiev) or any kind of retrojection., thus holding a minority position among the World System theorists.

Reasons are, according to Amin, that while free trade and relatively open borders allow multinationals to move to where they can find the cheapest labour, governments keep promoting the interests of ‘their’ corporations over those of other countries and restricting the mobility of labor.

This situation is perpetuated by the existence of a massive global reserve army located primarily in the periphery, while at the same time these countries are more structurally dependent, and their governments tend to oppress social movements which would win increased wages.

Further, the core countries keep monopolies on technology, control of financial flows, military power, ideological and media production, and access to natural resources (see 2.1.2).

Amin adds that the current phase is dominated by generalized, financialized, and globalized oligopolies located primarily in the triad of USA, Europe, and Japan.

This belief led Samir Amin to assign significant importance to the project adopted by the Asian–African countries at the Bandoeng (Indonesia) Conference in 1955.

Rather, he observed the emergence of a ‘comprador bourgeoisie’, who benefited from the integration of their respective countries into the asymmetrically structured capitalist world market.

Regarding the project of an auto-centered new beginning (the decoupling) he hoped instead for social movements, which is why he was committed to numerous non-governmental organizations until the end.

[citation needed] For Amin, Eurocentrism is not only a worldview but a global project, homogenising the world on a European model under the pretext of ‘catching-up’.

At a 1981 talk in Tokyo, Amin praised Pol Pot's work as "one of the major successes of the struggle for socialism in our era" and as necessary against "expansionism" from the Soviet Union or from Vietnam.

[11] Some scholars, such as Marxist anthropologist Kathleen Gough, have noted that Khmer Rouge activists in Paris in the 1950s already held ideas of eliminating counter-revolutionaries and organizing a party center whose decisions could not be questioned.

Here I would make the first priority the construction of a Paris – Berlin – Moscow political and strategic alliance, extended if possible to Beijing and Delhi … to build military strength at a level required by the challenge of the United States... [E]ven the United States pales beside their traditional capacities in the military arena.

The American challenge, and Washington’s criminal designs, make such a course necessary … The creation of a front against hegemonism is the number one priority today, as the creation of an anti-Nazi alliance was … yesterday … A rapprochement between the large portions of Eurasia (Europe, Russia, China and India) involving the rest of the Old World … is necessary and possible, and would put an end once and for all to Washington’s plans to extend the Monroe Doctrine to the entire planet.

[15]Hence, Europe must end its “Atlanticist option” and take the course of the “Eurasian rapprochement” with Russia, China, India and the rest of Asia and Africa.

Islamist militants are not actually interested in the discussion of dogmas which form religion, but on the contrary are concerned about the ritual assertion of membership in the community.

This importance attributed to culture allows political Islam to obscure from every sphere of life the realistic social dichotomy between the working classes and the global capitalist system which oppresses and exploits them.

[18] Political Islam has also always found consent in the bourgeoisie of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, as the latter abandoned an anti-imperialist perspective and substituted it for an anti-western stance, which only creates an acceptable impasse of cultures and therefore doesn't represent any obstacle to the developing imperialist control over the world system.

[citation needed] Hence, political Islam aligns itself in general with capitalism and imperialism, without providing the working classes with an effective and non-reactionary method of struggle against their exploitation.

[19] It is important to note, however, that Amin was careful to distinguish his analysis of political Islam from islamophobia, thus remaining sensitive to the anti-Muslim attitudes that currently affect Western Society.