Samir Amin is one of the world's most profound thinkers about the
changing nature of capitalism, North-South relations and issues of
development. Here he provides us with a powerful understanding of the
new and very different era that capitalism has now entered with the
collapse of the Soviet model, the triumph of unfettered market forces
and accelerating globalization. His analysis spans the increasingly
differentiated regions of the South and the former Eastern bloc
countries, as well as Western Europe. He integrates his economic
arguments about the nature of the crisis with political arguments based
on his vision of human history not as simply determined by material
realities, but as the product of social responses to those realities.
His innovative analysis of the rise of ethnicity and fundamentalism as
consequences of the failure of the ruling classes in the South to alter
the unequal terms of globalization is particularly compelling, as is his
deconstruction of the Bretton Woods institutions - notably the IMF and
the World Bank - as managerial mechanisms protecting the profitability
of capital. Looking to the longer term, Amin rejects a passive
acceptance of the inevitability of globalization in its present
polarizing form, or the simple-minded equation of development with
expansion of the market. Instead, he argues for each society being
allowed to negotiate the terms of its interdependence with the rest of
the global economy in order that essential national developments can be
pursued in a pluralistic world.
