Samir Amin: 93 Years of a Global South Voice  

By Cícero Borba da Silveira*
From the MST website

Samir Amin (1931-2018) was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century. For over sixty years, he maintained a political activism that left us with an immense theoretical legacy. 

Trained as an economist, he worked in various fields as a professional and researcher. Throughout more than half a century of prolific production, his work consistently highlighted the need of Marxism for the struggle of peoples on the periphery of the capitalist system.

This Tuesday (03) marks the 93rd anniversary of his birth. His extensive body of work resulted in the publication of more than thirty books. Moreover, his efforts to communicate with workers’ movements worldwide led to numerous essays, articles, interviews, and more.

Ironically, a significant portion of his writings remains relatively unknown among Brazilian readers and social movements. 

Born in Cairo, Egypt, and educated in Paris, most of his works were written in French, with many also available in English and Spanish. The books available in Portuguese are few, with titles such as Os Desafios da Mundialização (2005), A Implosão do Capitalismo Contemporâneo (2018), O Eurocentrismo: Crítica de uma Ideologia (2021), and the series of essays compiled by Expressão Popular Publishing, Somente os Povos Fazem Sua Própria História (2020).

Amin’s main areas of study were the critique of political economy, the experiences of socialist transitions, and, most importantly, the relations between the center and periphery of the capitalist system, which he understood as a global system. His choice of study topics brought innovations to the Marxist field. However, his primary distinction comes from his analytical rigor combined with constant creativity, making him known as a defender of a living Marxism.

Samir Amin was a contemporary of a new generation of imperialism scholars, following the classics who witnessed the development of capitalism leading to the World Wars. Since the 1950s, he has produced analysis on the formation of the emerging new global order. During his time in the French Communist Party, before returning to Africa, he encountered a complex society, observing the national liberation struggles in the then French-dominated Indochina and Vietnam.

He also witnessed some of the most important revolutions of the century, such as the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and the Cuban Revolution a decade later. Samir had the insight to analyze the 20th century not only as a period of the Cold War, with two cohesive and rigid poles, but with attention to the struggles and organizations of peoples across the tricontinental world.

In Latin America, his thinking is linked to the Marxist dependency theory developed by André Gunder Frank, Vânia Bambirra, Theotônio dos Santos, Ruy Mauro Marini, among others. Since the late 1960s, these intellectuals have sought to analyze the role of Latin America in global economic and domination relations. They laid the groundwork for understanding that the solution to “underdevelopment” would not come through classical capitalist development, but rather by breaking free from the subordinate condition in which these countries had been placed.

In the African continent, starting from the same period, the world saw peoples of numerous countries engage in national liberation struggles, which fueled the emergence of new generations of intellectuals (Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon). Samir Amin was politically and professionally active in Egypt, Mali, Algeria, and Senegal. His intellectual capacity also made him known as an advisor to important revolutionary processes, such as the brief but significant Burkinabé Revolution of Thomas Sankara.

During this period, the world entered a new phase. In 1975, with the liberation of Vietnam, the era of colonial empires came to an end. Global dominance shifted to the United States, in a triad with Europe and Japan. Challenged by some socialist countries, this domination extended into military, political, and cultural dimensions. From then on, terms like globalization and neoliberalism began to dominate the news and politics. A global empire was organized with military command, political and financial institutions, sustained by a permanent war against any initiatives from the Global South seeking to advance their sovereignty.

The new workers’ experiences and the new capitalism stage updated issues that directed Samir efforts: What are the chances for a peripheral country to break away from relations of domination? Who is the subject of a socialist revolution in the periphery of the capitalist system?

Regarding the first question, Samir developed the concept of “disconnection,” proposing new theoretical tools to think about the transition to socialism. For the second question, he never adopted a mechanistic stance. He did not endorse the idea of the death of the peasantry as a revolutionary subject and remained attentive to the emergence and impact of social movements. His effort to build global channels for connecting these new organizations, with new actors mobilized by deep social transformations in their countries, is an example of this, as seen in the World Social Forums, organized with Samir’s participation in the early 2000s.

Another relevant aspect of his work is the focus on central categories of historical materialism, such as the transition between modes of production. In Class and Nation and later in Eurocentrism, Samir questions the traditional notions of transition between primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism—a concept central to communist and progressive national political programs around the world. His analysis seeks to unveil the Eurocentric aspects of this way of understanding the world and to overcome these limitations with a Marxist perspective.

Samir does not make such critiques in a casual way; by analyzing the global system, he aims to contribute with new analytical tools, such as the category of tributary mode of production. From this work, it seems that Samir’s thinking can help enhance the understanding of Eurocentrism in social sciences and historical science, especially in colonized societies, from their roots.

The troubles of peripheral capitalist societies persist, accompanied by increasingly alarming scales of war. However, we are moving towards the formation of a multipolar world, where the challenge to U.S. hegemony comes precisely from the periphery of the system it created.

Samir Amin was known for his studies of the Arab world, but in Africa, he is regarded as an African thinker. Perhaps it is time to recognize him for what he truly was: a voice of the Global South.

*From Levante Popular da Juventude and Instituto de Educação Josué de Castro.

**Edited by Solange Engelmann

Translated by Monique Brasil