Samir Amin: A Tribute to a Fighter against Global Capitalism

By Horace Campbell 
Pambazuka News
September 8, 2011

‘We are thus at the point where in order to open up a new field for the expansion of capital (modernization of agricultural production) it would be necessary to destroy - in human terms - entire societies. Twenty million efficient producers (fifty million human beings including their families) on one side and five billion excluded on the other. The constructive dimension of this operation represents no more than one drop of water in the ocean of destruction that it requires. 

I can only conclude that capitalism has entered its declining senile phase; the logic which governs the system is no longer able to assure the simple survival of half of humanity. Capitalism has become barbaric, directly calling for genocide. It is now more necessary than ever to substitute for it other logics of development with a superior rationality.’
- Samir Amin, ‘Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World’, p. 34

With these words Samir Amin was pointing to the choices before humanity. These were either one of expropriation of small farmers and later genocidal destruction or one where there was transformation of relations between humans. In the second and preferable alternative, humans would struggle to transcend capitalism to the point where there would be a new impetus for agricultural transformation where agriculture and forestry will provide for the wellbeing of billions of humans on planet earth. While acknowledging that the future transformation of agriculture was a ‘complex and multi-dimensional problem’ for humans, Samir Amin recognised that this task of transforming agriculture required new political alliances to break the present international division of labour.

This vision is one where in the bio-economy of the 21st century, agriculture and forestry will ‘become new and lasting motors of the economy’ and a major source of new employment. Samir Amin was offering a vision of a new global system that integrated humans rather than excluding them.

Read more HERE.