Reading Samir Amin
By Seth Sandronsky
October 27, 2014
The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism and Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory, Monthly Review Press, 2013
Want political economy that soberly unpacks power and wealth? Read two recent books by Samir Amin who defines the system’s current stage as “generalized-monopoly capitalism.” His study of it reveals what standard economics conceals and distorts.
The two books under review study the economy within the parameters of social change. Amin takes a Marxist, historic view of the system’s “grow or die” imperatives in developed and emerging nations. Marx, however, lived and wrote during the Industrial Revolution. For Amin, the old German’s analysis of value, central to that critique of emerging capitalism, is necessary, but not sufficient.
Amin fleshes out the concept of surplus and value theory in global monopoly capitalism. It “is the result of growth in the productivity of social labor exceeding the price paid for labor power,” he writes. This process polarizes societies among and between rich and poor nations. We see this growing more extreme over time.
Competition between firms, within the working-class, and, of course, labor and capital, looms large under generalized monopoly capitalism now as was the case 150 years ago. To this end, Amin expands concepts such as “socially necessary labor time” that Marx developed from critiquing David Ricardo and Adam Smith, the political economists who analyzed the system to justify it…
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