Renowned political economist Samir Amin, engaged in a unique lifelong effort both to narrate and affect the human condition on a global scale, brings his analysis up to the present—the world of 2013. The key events of our times—financial crisis, the emerging nations, globalization, financialization, political Islam, Euro–zone implosion—are related in a coherent, historically-based account.
Changes in contemporary capitalism require an updating of definitions and analysis of social classes, class struggles, political parties, social movements and the ideological forms in which they express their modes of action in the transformation of societies. Amin meets this challenge and lays bare the reality of monopoly capitalism in its general, global form. Ultimately, Amin demonstrates that this system is not viable and that the implosion in progress is unavoidable. Whether humanity will rise to the challenge of building a more humane global order free of the contradictions of capital, however, is yet to be seen.
What People Are Saying
"With The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism, Samir Amin brilliantly analyzes the financial collapse, the debt crisis, the rise of political Islam, and more. He has once again looked into the near future and laid a knowledge base for developing a strategy of resistance to global capitalism and Western imperialism. The text echoes Amin’s 1992 book, Empire of Chaos, in its prescience. In between Chaos and Implosion, his more than a dozen other books have documented the period of capitalist development following the fall of the Socialist states and the first Gulf War to the present progressively vicious form of finance capitalism and endless U.S. imperialist wars, along with the pauperization of the peoples of the South." Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, author, This Land: Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014)
"What is splendid in Amin’s writing … is his lucidity of expression, his clear consistency of approach, and, above all his absolutely unwavering condemnation of the ravages of capital and of bourgeois ideology in all its forms … Amin remains an essential point of reference, and an inspiration." Bill Bowring, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books