Samir Amin
Samir Amin was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist, political scientist and world-systems analyst. He is noted for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism in 1988 and considered a pioneer of dependency theory.
Biography
Amin was born in Cairo, the son of a French mother and an Egyptian father. He spent his childhood and youth in Port Said; there he attended a French high school, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalauréat.It was at high school that Amin was first politicized when, during the Second World War, Egyptian students were split between communists and nationalists; Amin belonged to the former group. By then Amin had already adopted a resolute stance against fascism and Nazism. While the upheaval against British domination in Egypt informed his politics, he rejected the idea that the enemy of their enemy, Nazi Germany, was the Egyptians' friend.
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. He gained a diploma in political science at Sciences Po before graduating in statistics at INSEE and also in economics.
In his autobiography Itinéraire intellectuel 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. The intellectual and the political struggle remained inseparable for Amin all throughout his life. Rather than explaining the world and its atrocities he meant to highlight and to be part of struggles aimed at changing the world.
After arriving in Paris, Amin joined the French Communist Party, but he later distanced himself from Soviet Marxism and associated himself for some time with Maoist circles. With other students he published a magazine entitled Étudiants Anticolonialistes. His ideas and political position were also strongly influenced by the 1955 Asian–African Bandung Conference and the nationalization of the Suez Canal. The latter even encouraged him to postpone his PhD thesis that was ready in June 1956 to take part in the political unrest.
In 1957 he presented his thesis, supervised by François Perroux among others, originally titled The origins of underdevelopment - capitalist accumulation on a world scale but retitled The structural effects of the international integration of precapitalist economies. A theoretical study of the mechanism which creates so-called underdeveloped economies.
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. His participation in the Communist Party that was clandestine at the time made for very difficult working conditions.
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.
Subsequently, Amin left France, to become an adviser to the Ministry of Planning in Bamako under the presidency of Modibo Keïta. He held that position from 1960 to 1963 working with prominent French economists such as Jean Bénard and Charles Bettelheim. With some scepticism Amin witnessed the growing emphasis on maximizing growth in order to "close the gap". 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.
In 1963 he was offered a fellowship at the UN's Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification in Dakar. Within the IDEP Amin created several institutions that eventually became independent entities. Among them one that later became the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, conceived on the model of the Latin American Council for Social Sciences.
Until 1970 he worked there as well as being a professor at the University of Poitiers, Dakar and Paris. In 1970 he became director 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. In Amin's life and thinking the three activities have been closely connected: work in economic management, teaching/research, and the political struggle.
"Samir Amin has been one of the most important and influential intellectuals of the Third World". Amin's theoretical pioneering role has been often overlooked because his thesis of 1957 was not published until 1970 in extended book form under the title L'accumulation à l'échelle mondiale.
Amin lived in Dakar until the end of July 2018. On July 31 he was, diagnosed with lung cancer, transferred to a hospital in Paris. Amin died on August 12 at the age of 86.
Political theory and strategy
Samir Amin is considered a pioneer of Dependency Theory and World System Theory, while he preferred to call himself part of the school of Global Historical Materialism, together with Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy. His key idea, presented as early as 1957 in his Ph.D. dissertation, was that so-called 'under-developed' economies should not be considered as independent units but as building blocks of a capitalist world economy. In this world economy, the 'poor' nations form the 'periphery', forced to a permanent structural adjustment with respect to the reproduction dynamics of the 'centres' of the world economy, that is, of the advanced capitalist industrial countries. Around the same time and with similar basic assumptions the so-called desarrollismo 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. At the same time his critique extended also to Soviet Marxism and its development program of 'catching up and overtaking'. Amin believed the countries of the 'periphery' would not be able to catch up in the context of a capitalist world-economy, because of the system's inherent polarization and certain monopolies held by the imperialist countries of the 'center'. Thus, he called for the 'periphery' to 'delink' from the world economy, creating 'autocentric' development and rejecting the 'Eurocentrism' inherent to Modernisation Theory.Global historical materialism
Resorting to the analyses of Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, and Fernand Braudel, the central starting point of Samir Amin's theories is a fundamental critique of capitalism, at the centre of which is the conflict structure of the world system. Amin states three fundamental contradictions of capitalist ideology: 1. The requirements of profitability stand against the striving of the working people to determine their own fate ; 2. The short-term rational economic calculus stands against long-term safeguarding of the future ; 3. The expansive dynamics of capitalism lead to polarizing spatial structures - the Center-Periphery Model.According to Amin, capitalism and its evolution can only be understood as a single integrated global system, composed of 'developed countries', which constitute the Center, and of 'underdeveloped countries', which are the Peripheries of the system. Development and underdevelopment consequently constitute both facets of the unique expansion of global capitalism. Underdeveloped countries should not be considered as 'lagging behind' because of the specific - social, cultural, or even geographic - characteristics of these so-called 'poor' countries. Underdevelopment is actually only the result of the forced permanent structural adjustment of these countries to the needs of the accumulation benefiting the system's Center countries.
Amin identified himself as part of the school of global historical materialism, in contrast to the two other strands of dependency theory, the so-called dependencia and the World Systems Theory. The dependencia school was a Latin American school associated with e. g. Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotônio dos Santos, and Raúl Prebisch. Prominent figures of the World Systems Theory were Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi. 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 or any kind of retrojection, thus holding a minority position among the World System theorists.
For Amin, the school of global historical materialism was Marxism understood as a global system. Within this framework, the Marxist law of value is central. Nevertheless, he insisted that the economic laws of capitalism, summed up by the law of value, are subordinate to the laws of historical materialism. In Amins understanding of these terms that is to say: economic science, while indispensable, cannot explain the full reality. Mainly because it cannot account either for the historical origins of the system itself, nor for outcomes of class struggle.
History is not ruled by the infallible unfolding of the law of pure economy. It is created by the societal reactions to these tendencies that express themselves in these laws and that determine the social conditions in whose framework these laws operate. The 'anti-systemic' forces impact and also influence real history as does the pure logic of the capitalist accumulation.
Law of worldwide value
Amin's theory of a global law of value describes a system of unequal exchange, in which the difference in the wages between labor forces in different nations is greater than the difference between their productivities. Amin talks of "imperial rents" accruing to the global corporations in the Center - elsewhere referred to as "global labor arbitrage".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. Accordingly, the periphery is not really connected to global labour markets, accumulation there is stagnant, and wages stay low. In contrast, in the centres accumulation is cumulative and wages increase in accordance with rising productivity. 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. This global dynamic Amin calls „development of underdevelopment". The aforementioned existence of a lower rate of exploitation of labor in the North and a higher rate of exploitation of labor in the South is further thought to constitute one of the main obstacles to the unity of the international working class.
According to Amin the "Global Law of Value" thus creates the "super-exploitation" of the periphery. Further, the core countries keep monopolies on technology, control of financial flows, military power, ideological and media production, and access to natural resources.