 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmad and we are going to discuss the passing of a great Marxist and thinker, Samir Amin. Ajaz, you knew Samir well and we have met him on a number of occasions. You must have also had a much longer association with him. What do you think were Samir's major contributions that he made in his life? Yes, I met Samir over a period of 30 years or so occasionally here and there. I came to know him quite well. I think that before you get to his main contributions, it's very interesting to actually look at his origins so to speak. He went to college that year and became independent. 47? Yes. By then he had been a communist for six years officially. He had joined the Communist Party of Egypt and that year he went to France and then immediately joined the PCF. There is that and I'll come to that but even before that the family is very interesting. He comes from a Coptic upper middle class background from the side of the father. But from the side of the mother, his mother was French and she was very proud of the fact that her ancestors among the ancestors were Jacobins. Okay. According to somebody who was a member of the barbie of conspiracy. So communism in the family was 200 years old. Literally, I mean technically. They had ancestors in the commune. This is the sort of world he grew up in. revolutionary thought communism was sort of inherited idea for him. And those were the sort of centers of the Egyptian Communist Party grew up in that. Then going back to, you know, he goes to France, becomes part of the PCF. He is in college when the Chinese Revolution takes place. He is still finishing his university when the revolutionary struggles in Vietnam and Algeria take place and he's in Paris. Okay. And there are people from both countries and he is very much involved in all of that. And then the year before he finishes his PhD, he's still in Paris and comes the Khrushchev speech of disorganization. His world sort of falls apart because he had been a communist in the period when he started with the life, etc. And then comes the sinus of his spirit. So Maoism for him was actually aware out of this almost traumatic experience of having the Khrushchev speech and having to live with all of that. So it's a very interesting relationship with the whole of the third world, which he then continues to have all the rest of his life. And that's one thing. The other is therefore one has to really think of his contribution in the context in which he developed. The book that he eventually published in 1970, Accumulation on the World Scale, which was the breakthrough that's translated into English 1974, is actually a written up version for a book of his dissertation, which he had written in 1957. So this whole idea that capitalism is not a universal system, but a bipolar system in which there is never going to be a smooth worldwide expansion of capitalism. You will always have a capitalism in which so long as capitalism exists, in which as he wrote in that dissertation, the countries of the periphery will always have to submit themselves to a structural adjustment in accordance with the needs of the center. The term structural adjustment is actually there. So you do think IMF studied this documentally? So this is all before the publication of Monopoly Capital by Baran in Switzerland. It is all before world system theory. It is all before dependency theory and all of that. So basically he actually addressed imperialism and colonialism at the core of that. Right, from the start. And that was there because as a student, when he arrived in Paris, he fell straight into anti-colonial communist students from Africa, Vietnam, the Caribbean, you know, Singapore, Césaire, all of these people were part of the group he was in. And across the channel were people like, like Babu and so on from the British colonies. So he was a communist who was completely attuned to anti-imperialist movements from the beginning. The very interesting point that you're developing, would we say that those who went from the colonies to metropolitan centers, in some sense inherited the mantle of both that you had Marxism as developed in quote-unquote the metropolises, but also you had the legacy of the anti-colonial struggles and therefore a much more radical view of colonialism and imperialism? That is much more true of France than of Britain. Britain didn't have that much of a, you know, serious, they didn't have a serious communist party, they didn't have serious Marxist tradition, France did. And France was a country that was actually fighting wars. Colonial wars and that point of time. When these people were young, when they were students in Paris, Vietnam and Algeria, the wars were there. So as he goes to study economic history, the history that he wants to study is not the history that Marx narrates in the capital history of Europe, but to read the history of the colonies through Marx. That is the breakthrough. So Marxist lens see how capital behaves in the colonies. Marxist understanding of capitalism extended to a world scale. And to read the world, actually the capitalist mode of production, not pre-capitalism, which Marx had also studied. So choice of that object was completely new as a theoretical object. And the view of it as not, you know, this will gradually grow everywhere and every country will slowly and gradually become like Europe. But that because it took the colonial form, the imperialist form, it had to, the inherent to it was a bipolar nature of center and periphery and so on. And that remains his concern, the main concern theoretically speaking. His first he talks about this structural adjustment that the colonies always have to make. Then later on he starts talking about this bipolarity and so on. The concept of unequal exchange based on the idea that the wage, that the price that is given or the wage that is given to a worker in the peripheries with the same amount and same quality of labor is always much less than at the center. So the mode of exploitation and unequal exchange based on that. Later on the concept of the imperial rent, the concept of the law of value and the global scale and all that. It's actually just refinement of that particular argument. And in that he was well before whether the monthly review, school or dependency or world system. People like Emmanuel Ari Giri and all who came later. He was part of the Maoist world of Europe. He was in the leading Maoist group. So he came into world system much later than Wollich and so on. But Samir used to know very well from that the Maoist connection. And it's part of that enduring Maoism that for him imperialism is primary. Samir also apart from being a theoretician, par excellence who also dealt with political economy not economics, was also in his heart also an activist. And how do you see that as not only in his heart, not only in his heart. That's what he did. That's what he did. You know, and after the first couple of books, which were very rigorous and he writes about it. He has actually written two autobiographies, one intellectual autobiography and one more personal autobiography. After that, his books are not the sort of books that come out of western academia, you know, with thousands of footnotes and this, that and the other. And they're very repetitive and he's very aware that they're repetitive. So his writing itself, he thinks of his writings as part of his activism. And he said, there are certain basics that need to be repeated every day. He built a number of institutions. This morning I was thinking about him again. I remember Stuart Hall, Jamaican British Marxist intellectual, saying we were the organic intellectuals of the party that never came about. And I was thinking that, you know, that is part of what Samir's life was that what do you as an intellectual, as an activist intellectual. So that he was always on the move. He was going from he built in him any number of institutions which are very effective. He was he participated in any number of extremely important political movements, particularly in Africa, all over Africa. He spent most of his time getting involved in doing, you know, doing things which he connected with some kind of organization. I see him as part of what something I've been saying that with the defeat of the Soviet Union, with the dispersal fragmentation of the Soviet Union, you collapsed in the communist state system. We have entered into a period in which immense numbers of people are looking for a new revolutionary form. And all over the world, there are immense number of struggles, immense number of struggles, millions upon millions of people on the move, except that you don't have a secondary revolutionary form. So they all take an experimental form of struggle, various kinds of experiments are being done. And out of this will emerge some new revolutionary form. This is sort of a period of interval. And I think of Sameer as someone who is a very great intellectual in that process of experimenting with various kinds of activities at various levels, over all three continents of ours. So he's a very special person in that respect. And also a very warm human being. Extremely warm human being, extremely warm human being. And a very peculiar combination of at a certain level, he had a great confidence in what he had arrived at and how that should be worked and how people should be organized around that in a project. That confidence, which you may call arrogance or pride or whatever, went into an enormously humble sort of personality, extremely open to disagreements and all that. We loved contentions. Thank you Ajals, being with us, remembering a very good friend and a great mind. This is all the time we have for Newsclick today. Do keep watching Newsclick and visit our website.