Beyond US Hegemony?: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World [Paperback]

Samir Amin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 8189654284 | ISBN-13: 978-8189654283 | Publication Date: July 11, 2006

Samir Amin rejects the notion that the current form of neoliberal capitalism is an inevitable future for humanity. He analyzes tendencies within the US, Europe and Japan, the rising powers of China and India, the likely future trajectory of post-Soviet Russia, and the developing world. He explores whether other hegemonic blocs may emerge to circumscribe American power, and force free market capitalism to adjust to demands other than its narrow central economic logic. He identifies the key global campaigns that he feels progressives should launch, and warns that there is no alternative to winning political power.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Samir Amin has been director of IDEP (the United Nations African Institute for Planning), director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and a co-founder of the World Forum for Alternatives.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Zed Books (July 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8189654284
• ISBN-13: 978-8189654283
• ASIN: 1842777092
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,159,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Samir Amin has a lot of POLitical POTentiale!!!!!!!!, May 24, 2011

By 

Aaron Crandall (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beyond US Hegemony?: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World (Paperback)

Samir Amin attended the Sorbonne in Paris receiving degrees in political science and economics. In his autobiography Itinéraire intellectuel (1990) he wrote that in order to spend a substantial amount of time in "militant action" he could devote only a minimum of time to preparing for his university exams. In Paris, Amin joined the French Communist Party (PCF), and associated himself for some time with Maoist circles. Like Samir Amin a young Pol Pot in Paris said, "I joined the progressive student movement. As I spent more of my time in radical activities, I did not attend many classes."

In 1957 Amin he presented his thesis, originally titled "The origins of underdevelopment - capitalist accumulation on a world scale". Samir Amin promoted the Dependency theory. Dependency theory predicated on the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. It is a central contention of dependency theory that poor states are impoverished and rich ones enriched by the way poor states are integrated into the "world system."

Many dependency theorists advocate social revolution as an effective means to the reduction of economic disparities in the world system.

Samir later advised Cambodian PHD candidate Khieu Samphan in his economic thesis entitled "Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development". Samphan advocated national self-reliance and generally sided with dependency theorists in blaming the wealthy, industrialized states for the poverty of the Third World.

Returning from Paris with his doctorate in 1959, Khieu held a faculty position at the University of Phnom Penh and started L'Observateur, a French-language leftist publication that was viewed with hostility by the government. Like Samir Amin, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were Maoists as well. His magazine was quite similar to what you'd hear at the World Social Forum directed by Samir Amin in Senegal. A bunch of young kids protesting all the injustices of the world. His first important conflict with the anti-Communist Cambodian government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk came the following year, when L'Observateur was banned and Samphan was arrested, forced to undress and photographed in public. Samphan fled to the northeast of Cambodia and joined the communists in the jungles of the Northeast of Cambodia.

Samphan became brother number 2 in and head of state of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Pol Pot and Samir Amin's protoge Khieu Samphan became head of state in Cambodia's Killing machine. As head of State of Communist Cambodia he did away with capitalism, emptied people from the cities, and ultimately oversaw the killing machine that murdered almost a third of the Cambodian population.

Samir Amin recently wrote a book entitled, "The world we wish to see: Revolutionary objectives of the 21st Century".

Even though Samir's protoge, the PHD economist Samphan, did away with Capitalism, freed the country from American Imperialism and destroyed the country of Cambodia Amin still cannot envision that Cambodian's are better off today working for $55 per month at garment factories than they are doing away with Capitalism and becoming slaves of State planners like Amin.

If you'd like to see what the world would look like if Samir Amin were in power look no further than the student he mentored who oversaw Cambodia's killing fields.
"I joined the revolution because I was sick of capitalism and privilege" - Huy Him executioner at Choeng Ek

"Any ideology which mentions love for the people in a class based system will lead us to endless tragedy and misery" - Comrade Duch, number two mathemetician in Cambodia, Physics, Maths teacher at Pedagocial institute and head of Tuol Sleng Security center. He oversaw the execution of some 17,000 capitalist enemies of the people.

"A capitalist is like a weed, if you cut it down it will grow right back up. A capitalist must be plucked out by the roots" - Pol pot. A child was the roots of a capitalist in Cambodia. Pol Pot was saying if you kill a capitalist and do not pull it out by the roots (kill the children of the capitalist) it will grow right back up.

"On April 17, 1975, after struggling determinedly for five years and making many sacrifices in the revolutionary war of national liberation against U.S. imperialism's war of aggression, the people of Kampuchea and their Revolutionary Army have totally and definitively liberated themselves from exploitation and oppression by imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and all the exploiting classes." Pol Pot