Salute to a giant African academic
Samir Amin was a fearless scholar whose ideas will long outlive him
Samir Amin’s celebrated life was perhaps among the most trying but also rewarding of his generation’s left intelligentsia. After his death in Paris on Sunday, a wider awareness of his extraordinary contribution to applied theory is rising.
Amin spent a privileged youth in Egypt as the child of two medics, and attended university in Paris where his PhD offered a scathing analysis of underdevelopment in low-income countries. He returned home, but having acquired a better understanding of the limits of Egypt’s thenpresident Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalism (and as an anti-Stalinist communist), Amin was forced into exile in 1960. He soon won credibility for his tireless United Nations economic planning duties in West Africa, especially Mali.
By 1970, he was appointed director of the UN’s Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (IDEP), based in Dakar, Senegal. He also found time to catalyse both a powerful Dakar-based nongovernmental organisation called Enda to drive development, as well as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (the continent’s main academic society with more than 4000 members). Both are still going strong today.
Still, within a decade, his progressive strategies had alienated the well-known Nigerian who led the UN Economic Commission on Africa, Adebayo Adedeji, and so he moved from IDEP a few blocks away to start the Third World Forum, an institute he led until his death. The Forum on World Alternatives was one of the offshoots. Thanks to Amin’s networking, the forum can claim centrality within early social movement contributions to global justice organising, five years before the World Social Forum came into being.
I visited Amin in Dakar six months ago, where his old-fashioned home office in a dilapidated bank building continued to buzz with new essays and draft books. He was as sharp as ever, though with far less confidence in statist counterhegemonic prospects and with an amplified hope for new waves of grassroots activism.
Amin’s best-known books, among the most cited from Africa, came at the height of dependency theory’s popularity during the 1970s: Unequal Development; Accumulation on a World Scale; Eurocentrism; and Imperialism and Unequal Development.
His 1990 book, Delinking, summed up why the still-young era of globalisation would further underdevelop Africa, and why a more self-reliant strategy would be necessary.
Langa Zita, the director of political education and training for the ANC in Gauteng, wrote a master’s thesis drawing mainly upon this book. Says Zita: “Amin reread the liberation movements not only from the standpoint of their slogans but also as an expression of the class tendencies that animated such movements. His ideas live. We will continue to draw our sustenance from those ideas as they empower [us] in our efforts to chart a path to socialism.”
Amin’s memoir, A Life Looking Forward, was published in 2006 and contains delightful tales about his youth and professional score-settling of a political-intellectual nature (as opposed to personalistic or sectarian), as well as profound appreciations offered to Isabella, his wife of 60 years. More recent books include Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism?; Global History: A View from the South; Capitalism in the Age of Globalization; and The Law of Worldwide Value. He was as ruthless a critic of extreme Islam and other religious movements as of neoliberal imperialism.
In one book, From Capitalism to Civilization (2010), he traced South Africa’s shameful historical role in world capitalism. On occasional visits to the country, Amin regularly expressed dissatisfaction with the post-liberation political economy. He believed that far too many concessions were made to capital, that Africa’s most capable industrial base was destroyed by excessive liberalisation, and that Pretoria was too willing to relegitimise Western power.
The main merit of Marxist analysis, Amin argued two years ago, is its “claim simultaneously to understand the world, our capitalist global world at each stage of its deployment, and provide the tools which make it possible for the working classes and the oppressed peoples, i.e. the victims of that system, to change it”.
Amin endorsed an epistemology not based on participatory action research but on conflict-seeking research: “Marxism does not separate theory from practice; Marxist praxis associates both. Marxists try to understand the world through the processes of action to change it. You do not understand first through a process of academic research developed in isolation and then eventually try to modify reality by making use of the theory. No. Marxist praxis is a process which involves simultaneously theory and practice, mobilising all ordinary people, the working classes and the oppressed nations. While you progress in your struggles, you understand better the reality that you are fighting against.”