30 Facts About Samir Amin

Samir Amin was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist, political scientist and world-systems analyst.

Samir Amin is noted for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism in 1988 and considered a pioneer of Dependency Theory.

Samir Amin spent his childhood and youth in Port Said; there he attended a French high school, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalaureat.

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

Samir Amin gained a diploma in political science at Sciences Po before graduating in statistics at INSEE and in economics.

In 1960 Samir Amin left for Paris where he worked for six months for the Department of Economic and Financial Studies - Service des Etudes Economiques et Financieres.

Subsequently, Samir Amin left France, to become an adviser to the Ministry of Planning in Bamako under the presidency of Modibo Keita.

Samir Amin held that position from 1960 to 1963 working with prominent French economists such as Jean Benard and Charles Bettelheim.

In 1980 Samir Amin left the IDEP and became a director of the Third World Forum in Dakar.

Samir 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 a l'echelle mondiale.

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.

Samir Amin applied Marxism to a global level, using terms as 'law of worldwide value' and 'super-exploitation' to analyse the world-economy.

Samir 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'.

Resorting to the analyses of Marx, Polanyi and 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.

Samir Amin identifies himself as being a 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.

Samir Amin further believed that capitalism and imperialism were linked at all stages of their development.

Historically, Samir Amin differentiated three phases: Mercantilism, Expansion and Monopoly Capitalism.

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

Samir Amin further differentiated the existence of two historical phases of the development of monopoly capitalism: proper monopoly capitalism up to 1971, and oligopoly-finance capitalism after that.

Samir Amin argues for example that political Islam is chiefly a creature of imperialism.

Samir Amin forcefully stated that the emancipation of the so-called 'underdeveloped' countries can neither happen while respecting the logic of the globalized capitalist system nor within this system.

Samir Amin called for each country to delink from the world economy meaning to subordinate global relations to domestic development priorities, creating 'autocentric' development.

Samir Amin suggested that national states redistribute resources between sectors, and centralize and distribute the surplus.

Samir Amin argues that it is a mistake to view Europe as a historical centre of the world.

For Samir Amin, Eurocentrism is not only a worldview but a global project, homogenising the world on a European model under the pretext of 'catching-up'.

Fascism remains a permanent risk, because to Samir Amin it is an extreme version of Eurocentrism.

Samir Amin was long an influence on and supporter of the leaders of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, becoming acquainted with the Khmer Rouge's future leaders in post-World War II Paris, where Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and other Cambodian students were studying.

Khieu Samphan's doctoral thesis, which he finished in 1959, noted collaborations with Samir Amin and claimed to apply Samir Amin's theories to Cambodia.

Samir Amin continued to actively praise the Khmer Rouge into the 1980s.

At a 1981 talk in Tokyo, Samir 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.