Author Description

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.