Samir Amin

Samir Amin was born in 1931, in Egypt, and largely educated in France. He has written extensively since the 1960s on issues of underdevelopment in the Third World and imperialism in books such as Accumulation on a World Scale and Unequal Development. He is currently director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal.

On the back cover of his latest book, The Liberal Virus: permanent war and the Americanization of the world, he is lauded as "a revolutionary socialist". But if, as a onetime Maoist, he ever deserved that accolade, he certainly has abandoned any pretence to such a claim today.

He greeted the final document of the World Social Forum in 2002 because it stated that "what is needed is regulation of capitalism, where one must take into account the social interests of the labouring classes and the people."

But Amin is more than just a reformist who, in the past, has placed rather too much hope in the radical, or even revolutionary, credentials of Third World politicians to resist imperialism. Like a number of other academics, he has reacted to the new US foreign policy after 9/11 by throwing in his lot with European imperialism, particularly France and Germany, and urging Chirac to take the lead in a new popular front against the "neo-Nazi" menace of the Bush administration: "Forming an anti-hegemonist front is today the very first priority, just as forming an anti-nazi allliance was yesterday's." (p95)

Amin would like the global justice movement to strive for a "politically independent Europe, free from alignment with the Americans". (p91) While he thinks this may...

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