Only People Make Their Own History. Samir Amin
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key intellectual of this interregnum, solving many riddles, speculating in various directions and always asking the right and difficult questions where he did not have the answers.
IV
Spending any time at all in Samir Amin’s company was very much like sharing a patch of sunshine in the midst of the grey and the dark. His physical frame was rather small and began giving away whiffs of frailty in the last years, and yet his movements remained agile, exuding enthusiasm, as if the body was forever electrified by reservoirs of political and intellectual energy. He was unfailingly warm, polite, courteous, extraordinarily receptive in his connection with others, with a demeanour brimming with old-world charm that seemed to belie the granite hardness of his convictions. The combined qualities of his personal culture were rather unique and he had a very distinctive personality, unlike anyone else’s that I have known, but he was by life-long habit basically a man in a group that served as both his social habitat and his political home. He was active and comfortable in many, many corners of the world, and political homes were thus variable, but there was always and everywhere a group for him to act and communicate with. Political belonging and a life of solidarities was something of an internalized second nature, though by no means free of conflicts large and small, as life neither of politics nor of the intellect can ever be free of dissentions or alignments. His mind was sharp and combative, and he had come to believe, with almost a child-like confidence, that he had managed to solve some of the great riddles of our time. Yet, in his dealings with others, he was genuinely and punctually humble.
Samir Amin was, in short, one of the rare diamond cutters of the age.
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Footnotes by the editors of Monthly Review have been marked as such (—Ed.). The rest of the notes are Samir Amin’s own.
1 I have tried to keep the main text of this Introduction smooth and free of digressions as much as possible. Some of the substantive points have been jettisoned therefore to the footnotes. Hence the number of footnotes as well as the fact that quite a few of them are quite lengthy.
2 Dependency theorists were of course more marxisant than Marxist. Like Amin, they too had borrowed Raúl Prebisch’s conception of the world system as a bipolar structure of unequal exchange between the centre (‘developed’) and periphery (‘underdeveloped’). For Prebisch, though, this was a distortion that could be corrected through fairer terms of trade, supplemented with protectionism and import substitution industrialization in the peripheries. For the dependentistas, as for Amin, this ‘underdevelopment’ was, however, not an inheritance from the precolonial past but a product of imperialism itself. The sharing of this premise would later bring Amin closer to them, particularly to Frank, and to the World System theorists, Wallerstein and Arrighi.
3 For instance, ‘Africa: Living on the Fringe’, Monthly Review, March 2002; ‘India: A Great Power?’, February 2005; ‘“Market Economy” or Oligopoly-Finance Capital’, April 2008; ‘The Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism & the Imperialist Rent’, July–August 2012; ‘The Kurdish Question Then & Now’, October 2016.
4 Samir Amin, Re-Reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary, Monthly Review Press, 1994.
5 This was somewhat analogous to Harry Magdoff’s undertaking in his Age of Imperialism (1969) to elucidate the functioning of imperialism in his own time in terms of the basic categories that Lenin had established in his famous pamphlet. Amin, however, was more interested in comprehending the structural changes that the capitalist mode itself undergoes in the age of empire and monopoly capital, as it expands out of its initial European enclaves to become a world system of exploitative inequality between classes as well as nations of the world.
6 Among countless studies of the phenomenon, one might just look at Stephen A. Marglin and Juliet B. Schor (eds), The Golden Age of Capitalism: Reinterpreting the Postwar Experience, Clarendon, 1990.
7 This is a revised and expanded version of his book of 1978, The Law of Value and Historical Materialism.
8 Samir Amin, A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist, Zed Books, 2006.
9 A Life Looking Forward, p. 5 (henceforth A Life).
10 From Being and Nothingness to Critique of Dialectical Reason, so to speak.
11 On the Arab side of these émigré equations in Paris, the rather maverick career of the illustrious Messali Hadj, the many turns in his convictions from the Marxist to the Arabo-Islamist, and the various organizations he spawned, is a good illustration of the complex connections between the migrant workers and political currents in their home countries.
12 Sartre wrote introductions to two of those books: Memmi’s, and Fanon’s later (last) book. In this trio of authors, Albert Memmi was different both in origin and later orientation. He was the son of Tunisian Jews, spoke a variant of Sephardic Arabic and French, became a well-known novelist in French who then left Tunisia after Independence and settled in France, eventually drifting into Zionism. In the book, though, Memmi’s positions are closer to the other two, especially to Fanonian positions, but he also reflects on his own contradictory position as a Jew of North African origin whose milieu in its culture and economic status was closer to that of Muslim North Africans but who had been taught by the colonizer to identify with the French and was given some privileges denied to the Muslim. ‘I was a half-breed of colonization,’ Memmi says in the Preface, as he identified with each side of this unbridgeable Colonizer-Colonized divide with different parts of his consciousness; the ‘double consciousness’ that Du Bois speaks of in his The Souls of Black Folk.
13 The invasion began at the end of October. A rare joint Soviet-American resolution at the Security Council halted the war, with the Soviet Union threatening use of nuclear weapons to protect Egypt and the U.S. President threatening to impose economic sanctions on his allies if they did not end the invasion and withdrew from Egypt. France and the U.K. complied faster, withdrawing in December that year but Israel held on until March 1957. Amin arrived in Cairo later that year.
14 The list of seven books during that short period includes L’Egypte Nasseriene (1964) which Amin wrote under the pseudonym Hassan Riad. Inexplicably, this book has never been translated into English—at least to my knowledge—even though Amin himself kept referring to it in his later writings. For my generation of the left outside the Arab world this book, alongside Anouar Abdel-Malek’s Egypt: Military Society: the Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser (French original 1962; expanded English version 1968, New York: Random House), and (to a considerably lesser extent) the shoddily translated and edited book of Mahmoud Hussein Class Conflict in Egypt, 1945–1970 (French edition 1971; English translation 1973, New York: Monthly Review Press) were the most significant book-length analyses of Nasserism. Interestingly, ‘Mahmoud Hussein’ was also a pseudonym—for the two Egyptian co-authors, Bahgat El-Nadi and Adel Rifaat.
15 Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, Boston: South End Press, 1980.
16 Among the founding members of NATO were the famous social democracies of Norway and Denmark as well as Salazar’s fascist Portugal. It remained somewhat dormant for two years, then came into its own in 1951 for executing a war not in the North Atlantic, its supposed security zone and area of operation, but in Korea.
17 Amin started his systematic analyses of U.S. imperialism per se well after giving final shape to his general theory of accumulation on the global scale which he published in 1970. One of the best books to appear at that point, though neglected at the time, was Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (New York, 1972), which gives a detailed account of the institutional structure erected for that strategy.
18 The historic Bandung Conference was held in April 1955 and became the foundational moment for the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Two months later, in June, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s