Global South

On Sunday 12 August, Samir Amin died. With him went a generation of Egyptian Marxists who came of age in the time of Nasserism and departed with the world in tatters. Amin was born in 1931 in Cairo.

A critique of the capitalist world-system/imperialism, the ultra-right regimes and reactionary forces across the world, Amin had talked and written about strategies of transforming the world through political action and social interventions.

The editorial continued: “It provides us with an ideal starting point: a general view of international capitalism, identifying the crucial differences in the dynamic of accumulation at the centre and at the periphery: differences which promote develo

Samir Amin (1931-2018) was one of the world’s greatest radical thinkers – a “creative Marxist” who went from Communist activism in Nasser’s Egypt, to advising African socialist leaders like Julius Nyerere to being a leading figure in the World Social Forum.

I won’t say we knew each other well, never living in the same town nor even, very often, on the same continent; instead we tended to meet more by chance and then much too briefly.

He was trenchant in his defence of the working class and peasantry, full of energy and ideas and he was engaged with not only theory and concepts but with people and those downtrodden by capitalism.

Samir Amin (3 September 1931-12 August 2018) was a visionary: someone with his own very strong ideas of what the future should be like, and consumed by the need to mobilise people to work for bringing about such a future.

Ben Norton: The world-renowned political economist Samir Amin passed away on the 12th of August at age 86. He left behind a radical legacy that profoundly influenced the globe.

Samir Amin walks along peoples struggling against exploitation, against imperialism in countries. Samir Amin transcends all borders capital creates to divide peoples struggling against exploiters, against all divisive politics, against all sectarian ideologies, which serve imperialism.

After a privileged youth in Egypt as the child of two medical practitioners, Amin attended university in Paris where his PhD offered a scathing Marxist analysis of South-to-North “unequal exchange.” Amin returned to his homeland, but after testing the limits of Nasser’s Arab nationalism – as an a