Tag Archives | Samir Amin

Samir Amin did not believe that the Chinese regime is a socialist one. “I will not say China is socialist, I will not say China is capitalist,” he said in a speech at a prestigious University of Peking.

Shortly before his death, in a series of writings, Samir Amin unfolded the two issues that mainly concerned him. The first was China’s refusal to succumb to financial globalization, that is, to the totalitarian power of global financial capital; the second was the need to build a “Fifth International.”

Watch John Bellamy Foster speak about Samir Amin, a visionary scholar who dedicated his life to challenging dominant paradigms such as Eurocentrism.

With the publication of Orientalism in 1978, Edward Said would become one of the most influential scholars of our era. The book transformed the study of the history of the modern world, as it offered insights into how racist discourses created and maintained European empires.

If you really want decolonisation, go beyond cultural criticism to the deep structural insights of economist Samir Amin.

Samir Amin’s life and work left behind many important legacies, which can continue to enrich us if only we recognise them adequately. He brought an indefatigable ‘optimism of the will’ to complex processes of political, social and economic change, involving an energy that was not deterred at all by the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that his razor-sharp mind could generate.

“Increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements.” —Samir Amin

In the five essays presented in October 1917, renowned radical political economist, Samir Amin, pushes far beyond the immediate necessity of emphasizing the historical weight of October, and launches, into an ambitiously broad analysis of the trajectory of twenty first-century socialism.