Samir Amin
This is the first volume of the autobiography of Samir Amin, who, born in Cairo in 1931, became a world-renowned Marxist economist, intellectual, and revolutionary. In candid, illuminating detail, Amin describes his childhood and his parents, an Egyptian father and French mother, both medical doctors. We learn of his school days and studies at the Lycée Français in Port Saïd, and later his attempts to master political science, mathematics, statistics, and economics at the University of Paris. Amin’s doctoral thesis, which he defended in 1957, was groundbreaking. It analyzed economic underdevelopment and development, not as successive stages, but as two sides of the same coin: the globalized expansion of capitalism; accumulation on a world scale. Dedicated to Marx’s concept of changing the world and not just interpreting it, Samir Amin lays out his methods of theoretical reflection alongside accounts of militant action. This dual devotion is, of course, the reason why his analyses of the stark realities confronting the world’s poor have had such a lasting, international impact. Amin also brilliantly recounts the stages of his ongoing dialogue with popular movements in Africa, the Arab World, and Asia, struggling for a better future. Eloquently translated from the French by James Membrez, this is a fascinating read, original and filled with enlightenment as well as useful lessons.