Samir Amin
Based on Wikipedia: Samir Amin
In 1956, a young Egyptian economist had his doctoral thesis ready to submit. Then Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and the world caught fire. Samir Amin put down his dissertation and walked into the streets. The thesis could wait. History was happening.
This single decision captures something essential about Amin, who would go on to become one of the most influential economic thinkers of the twentieth century. For him, understanding the world was never separable from trying to change it. He didn't want to write elegant theories from an ivory tower. He wanted those theories to be weapons.
A Child of Empires
Amin was born in Cairo in 1931 to an unusual household. His mother was French, his father Egyptian—both medical doctors. He grew up in Port Said, that strange city perched at the northern entrance of the Suez Canal, where East met West in the most literal sense imaginable. Ships from every nation passed through. Empires collided. The very geography of his childhood was a lesson in global economics.
At his French high school during World War Two, Egyptian students split into two camps: communists and nationalists. Both groups opposed British colonial rule, but they disagreed about everything else. Young Amin joined the communists, and he made a choice that would define his thinking for the next seven decades.
The nationalists argued that the enemy of their enemy was their friend. Nazi Germany opposed Britain, so perhaps Nazi Germany deserved Egyptian support. Amin rejected this logic completely. Fascism was fascism. You didn't defeat one form of domination by embracing another.
This refusal to accept false binaries—this insistence on thinking beyond the obvious options—would become the hallmark of his intellectual career.
Paris and the Making of a Radical
In 1947, at sixteen, Amin left for Paris. Over the next decade, he accumulated credentials like a man building an arsenal. A second high school diploma from the prestigious Lycée Henri IV. A degree in political science from Sciences Po. Certification in statistics from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. Finally, a doctorate in economics.
But here's the thing: Amin later admitted he did the minimum required to pass his exams. His real education happened elsewhere—in communist party meetings, in late-night arguments, in the magazine he founded with fellow students called Étudiants Anticolonialistes, which translates simply as "Anticolonialist Students."
He joined the French Communist Party, but the relationship was always complicated. The party followed Moscow's line, and Amin was developing ideas that didn't fit neatly into Soviet orthodoxy. For a time he associated with Maoist circles. But ultimately, he belonged to no one's school but his own.
Two events in 1955 and 1956 crystallized his thinking. First came the Bandung Conference, where leaders from twenty-nine Asian and African nations gathered in Indonesia to declare their independence from both Cold War blocs. Then came the Suez Crisis, when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt after Nasser nationalized the canal. The old empires were dying. Something new was being born. Amin wanted to understand what that something was.
The Thesis That Changed Everything
When Amin finally submitted his doctoral dissertation in 1957, it carried a cumbersome title: "The structural effects of the international integration of precapitalist economies: A theoretical study of the mechanism which creates so-called underdeveloped economies." His supervisor, the distinguished economist François Perroux, had insisted on toning down the original title, which announced Amin's argument more directly: "The origins of underdevelopment—capitalist accumulation on a world scale."
The argument itself was explosive, though almost no one noticed at the time.
Conventional economic wisdom held that poor countries were simply behind rich ones on a universal path of development. Given enough time, investment, and good policy, they would catch up. Mexico would become Germany. Nigeria would become Japan. Development was a race, and the poor nations had merely started late.
Amin said this was nonsense.
Poor countries weren't behind. They were underneath. The global economy wasn't a race where everyone ran the same track. It was a structure, with wealthy nations at the center and poor nations at the periphery. And here was the crucial insight: the poverty of the periphery wasn't an accident or a lag. It was produced by the same system that created the wealth of the center.
Development and underdevelopment were two sides of the same coin.
How the System Actually Works
To understand Amin's thinking, imagine the global economy as a single machine. The wealthy industrialized nations—the United States, Western Europe, Japan—form what he called the "center." The rest of the world forms the "periphery."
Now, conventional economics assumes that trade between these regions benefits everyone. Capital flows to where it can earn the highest returns. Workers migrate to where wages are best. Eventually, everything equalizes.
Amin pointed out that this isn't what actually happens.
Capital does move freely. Multinational corporations shift production to wherever labor is cheapest. But workers don't move freely. Borders, immigration laws, and the simple impossibility of relocating billions of people keep workers trapped in their home countries. This creates what Amin called "unequal exchange."
Here's how it works. A worker in Bangladesh and a worker in Germany might produce goods of similar value. But the Bangladeshi worker earns a tiny fraction of the German worker's wage. The difference doesn't reflect their productivity—it reflects their bargaining power. The German worker benefits from a century of labor organizing, strong unions, and a government that responds to citizen pressure. The Bangladeshi worker faces a government that suppresses labor movements, partly to attract foreign investment.
The result? Massive wealth flows from periphery to center, disguised as normal market transactions. Amin called this "super-exploitation." The technical term he used was "imperial rents"—the extra profits that corporations in wealthy countries extract from the labor of poor countries.
And because the periphery can never accumulate enough capital to develop on its own terms, it remains dependent. Forever adjusting. Forever behind. This isn't a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed.
The Five Monopolies
As Amin refined his theory over the decades, he identified five monopolies that the wealthy nations maintain to preserve their dominance.
First: weapons of mass destruction. The center nations control the most devastating military technology, which they use to enforce their economic interests and punish any peripheral country that steps out of line.
Second: mass communication systems. The center produces the movies, the news, the internet platforms. It controls the stories that get told about why some nations are rich and others poor.
Third: monetary and financial systems. The dollar is the world's reserve currency. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank—both controlled by wealthy nations—set the terms on which poor countries can borrow and develop.
Fourth: technology. Patents, trade secrets, and the concentration of research capacity in wealthy nations mean that the periphery must buy its innovation from the center, on the center's terms.
Fifth: access to natural resources. Despite the fact that most resources are located in the periphery, center nations control who extracts them, how they're processed, and where the profits go.
Together, these five monopolies form what Amin called a system of "collective imperialism." The wealthy nations of what he termed "the triad"—North America, Western Europe, and Japan—work together through institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank to maintain their dominant position.
Delinking: The Radical Solution
If the global system is rigged against peripheral nations, what can they do about it?
Amin's answer was controversial: delinking.
Delinking doesn't mean total isolation. North Korea is not the model. Rather, delinking means rejecting the assumption that poor countries should shape their economies to serve the needs of rich ones. It means prioritizing domestic development over integration into global markets. It means being willing to say no to foreign investment that extracts more than it delivers.
Most importantly, delinking means psychological liberation—what Amin called rejecting "Eurocentrism." This is actually one of his most famous contributions. He popularized the term in his 1988 book of the same name.
Eurocentrism, as Amin defined it, is the assumption that European history is universal history. That the path Europe took—from feudalism to capitalism to liberal democracy—is the path everyone must follow. That European institutions, values, and economic models are the default, and everyone else is a deviation from the norm.
Amin argued this was both false and dangerous. Different societies could develop in different ways. There was no single path to prosperity. But as long as peripheral nations accepted European models as universal, they would remain trapped—trying to become something they were never designed to be, always measuring themselves against standards set by their exploiters.
The Practitioner
What made Amin unusual among radical economists was that he didn't just theorize. He practiced.
After completing his doctorate, he returned to Cairo and spent three years working in government economic planning. The experience was disillusioning—he saw how the state bureaucracy operated, how ideology crashed against practical constraints—but it gave him credibility that pure academics lacked.
In 1960, he moved to Mali, newly independent under the socialist president Modibo Keïta. For three years, Amin advised the Ministry of Planning, working alongside prominent French economists to help build a new nation's economy. He watched, with growing skepticism, as development experts insisted that the only path forward was maximizing growth to "close the gap" with wealthy nations.
The gap, Amin knew, could never be closed. Not because poor nations lacked ability or resources, but because the system was designed to maintain it.
He never worked as a government bureaucrat again. But he never stopped advising either. Over the following decades, he consulted for governments across the Global South: China, Vietnam, Algeria, Venezuela, Bolivia. He wasn't naive about the limitations of state power. But he believed that states, for all their flaws, remained the only institutions capable of standing up to global capital.
Building Institutions for the South
In 1963, Amin took a fellowship at the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning in Dakar, Senegal. He would spend most of the rest of his life in that city.
What Amin did in Dakar was remarkable. He built institutions. Within the African Institute, he created research centers and training programs that eventually spun off into independent organizations. Most notably, he helped establish the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, modeled on a similar Latin American organization.
Why does this matter? Because Amin understood that ideas don't spread by themselves. They need homes. They need journals, conferences, training programs, funding mechanisms. They need networks of scholars who can develop them, debate them, refine them, and transmit them to the next generation.
Amin wasn't just a thinker. He was an institution builder. And through those institutions, his ideas spread across Africa, Latin America, and Asia—anywhere people were trying to understand why their countries remained poor while working so hard.
The Debate Within the Left
Amin's relationship with other radical economists was complex. He's often grouped with "dependency theorists" and "world-systems analysts," but he preferred different terminology. He called his approach "global historical materialism."
The distinctions matter.
Dependency theory, developed primarily by Latin American scholars like Raúl Prebisch, Theotônio dos Santos, and Ruy Mauro Marini, focused on how poor countries were kept dependent on rich ones through trade patterns and capital flows. Amin shared this basic insight.
World-systems analysis, associated with the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi, took a longer historical view. It saw capitalism as a single world system that had been operating since the sixteenth century, cycling through periods of expansion and contraction, with different nations rising to hegemonic dominance and then declining.
Amin agreed with much of this framework. But he had crucial disagreements.
He rejected the concept of a "semi-periphery"—the idea that some countries occupy a middle position between center and periphery. For Amin, you were either exploiting or being exploited. There was no comfortable middle ground.
He also rejected the notion that capitalism moved in predictable cycles, as the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev had argued with his famous long waves of economic activity. Amin believed this kind of thinking encouraged passivity. If capitalism naturally cycles through boom and bust, you just have to wait for the next upturn. Amin wanted action, not waiting.
Most fundamentally, Amin insisted that economic laws alone couldn't explain history. This might seem like an odd position for an economist, but it was central to his thinking. Yes, capitalism has tendencies—toward concentration, exploitation, crisis. But those tendencies don't unfold automatically. They're always contested. Class struggle, social movements, political organization—these are what determine actual outcomes.
History is not ruled by the infallible unfolding of the law of pure economy. It is created by the societal reactions to these tendencies that express themselves in these laws and that determine the social conditions in whose framework these laws operate.
In other words: nothing is inevitable. We make our own history, even if not under conditions of our choosing.
Imperialism Old and New
One of Amin's most provocative arguments concerned imperialism. Vladimir Lenin had famously argued that imperialism was a specific stage in capitalism's development—a late stage, when competition between capitalists had produced monopolies that needed overseas markets and resources.
Amin disagreed. For him, capitalism and imperialism had been linked from the very beginning. The conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century wasn't a precursor to capitalism. It was capitalism—or at least, it was the violent process by which capitalism was constructed.
From that original moment of conquest, Amin traced three phases of imperialist development.
The mercantilist phase, from roughly 1500 to 1800, when European powers accumulated wealth through colonial plunder and the slave trade.
The expansionist phase, from 1800 to 1880, when industrial capitalism spread across Europe and began transforming the entire world into sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods.
The monopoly phase, from 1880 to the present, when large corporations came to dominate national economies and, increasingly, the global economy as a whole.
Within this monopoly phase, Amin identified a crucial turning point in 1971. That was the year the United States abandoned the gold standard, allowing the dollar to float freely. What followed was the rise of what Amin called "oligopoly-finance capitalism"—a system dominated by a handful of enormous corporations whose profits increasingly came from financial manipulation rather than actual production.
The Turn to Finance
Why did capitalism turn to finance? Amin's answer was blunt: because the real economy wasn't generating enough profits.
The years from 1945 to 1975—what the French call les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years—had been exceptional. Rapid economic growth. Rising wages. Expanding middle classes. But this wasn't the normal state of capitalism. It was an anomaly produced by the specific conditions of the postwar period: massive government spending, strong unions, the reconstruction of war-torn economies, the expansion of welfare states.
By the mid-1970s, those conditions were exhausted. Profits fell. Growth slowed. The wealthy nations faced what Amin called "stagnation"—not an immediate crisis, but a grinding inability to generate the returns that investors demanded.
The response was financialization. Instead of making things, corporations made money from money. They speculated on currencies, traded derivatives, engineered leveraged buyouts, extracted fees from every conceivable transaction. The financial sector exploded in size and importance.
For a while, this seemed to work. The 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s saw enormous fortunes created—at least on paper. But Amin warned that financialization was inherently unstable. You couldn't indefinitely create wealth from financial manipulation. Eventually, the gap between paper values and real values would become unsustainable.
He was writing this in the early 2000s. In 2008, the global financial system collapsed, exactly as he had predicted.
The Problem of the Working Class
Amin's analysis created an uncomfortable problem for traditional Marxists. If the global economy is structured to benefit workers in wealthy nations at the expense of workers in poor ones, what happens to international working-class solidarity?
Marx had called on workers of the world to unite. But Amin pointed out that workers in Germany and workers in Bangladesh have conflicting material interests. The cheap goods that keep Western living standards high depend on the super-exploitation of Southern labor. If Bangladeshi workers won decent wages, German workers would pay more for their clothing.
This doesn't mean solidarity is impossible. But it does mean solidarity requires wealthy-nation workers to recognize that their relative privilege comes at a cost to others—and to be willing to give some of it up. That's a harder political sell than simply uniting against a common enemy.
Amin never fully resolved this tension. But he refused to ignore it. Easy answers, he knew, are usually wrong answers.
The Long Goodbye
Amin remained active into his eighties, writing, lecturing, advising. In 1990, he published an intellectual autobiography titled Itinéraire intellectuel—intellectual itinerary—in which he reflected on a life spent trying to understand and change an unjust world.
He lived in Dakar until the very end of July 2018. Then, diagnosed with lung cancer, he was transferred to a hospital in Paris—the city where, seventy years earlier, he had first encountered the ideas that would shape his life.
He died on August 12, 2018, at the age of eighty-six.
The Legacy
Samir Amin's influence is hard to measure precisely because it was so diffuse. His ideas spread through institutions he built, through students he trained, through activists who read his books in translation. In the Global South, he's considered one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. In Western economics departments, he's barely known.
This asymmetry would not have surprised him. The center, after all, controls not just wealth and weapons but also the production of knowledge. What counts as "real" economics, what gets taught in prestigious universities, who gets cited and celebrated—all of this reflects the same power structures that Amin spent his life analyzing.
His ideas remain controversial. Many economists reject his framework entirely, arguing that global trade has lifted billions out of poverty and that poor countries' problems stem from bad governance, not structural exploitation. Others accept his diagnosis but reject his prescription, arguing that delinking would hurt the very people it's meant to help.
But Amin wasn't trying to win academic debates. He was trying to understand why some people are rich and others poor, and what, if anything, could be done about it. His answers were uncomfortable because they implicated everyone—including the comfortable Western liberals who consider themselves sympathetic to the poor.
Perhaps that's his most enduring contribution. Not any single theory, but a refusal to look away from inconvenient truths. An insistence that the global economy isn't natural or inevitable, but constructed—and can therefore be reconstructed. A reminder that understanding the world and changing it are not separate activities, but one and the same.
In 1956, Samir Amin put down his thesis and walked into the streets. The intellectual and the political struggle, he wrote, were always inseparable. They remained so until his death.