A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist (review)

Samir Amin needs no introduction. A prolific author, he has occasionally been repetitious in his presentation but he always remains apposite and, to the mind of this particular left-thinking academic, accurate, prescient, and to the point. The world he sees and analyzes is one misshapen by the “logic” of capital and of Western imperialism and he brings the sharp tools of an economist, albeit a buoyantly heterodox one, to exploring this reality. Indeed, in the face of capitalism’s present “globalizing” mission he has come to suggest the need for Africans and others to “de-link” from the centers of the present unipolar world economic system and to seek left, even socialist, paths of their own devising in order to realize their development aspirations.

But this is not, in fact, a review of Amin’s broader corpus of work nor even a reflection on his own intellectual trajectory in arriving at the conclusions he has. For he has explored the latter theme most ably himself in a volume that should be seen both as essential reading and as a virtual bookend to the present one, his excellent Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Itinerary (Monthly Review Press, 1994). With A Life Looking Forward we have instead a more personal book of memoir and self-reflection, albeit one that is, not surprisingly, never innocent of a self-conscious political grounding in his own chief intellectual and practical preoccupations and their evolution over the years of his diverse vocational and geographical locations.

For Amin never loses touch for a moment with just where he is situated within the realm of global contestation, both vis-à-vis an expansive and bullying global capitalism and, “at home,” within the left itself. We begin, in fascinating fashion, with Amin’s own childhood. He was fortunate in both his parents and his grandparents: his father was the intellectual heir of strong family heritage of Egyptian resistance to imperial overlordship; his mother quite self-consciously traced her own French roots back to the earliest revolutionary days in her own country. He was equally fortunate in his milieu: the Port Said of his youth is evoked here as a vibrant and exciting place, charged both with nationalist/anti-imperialist ideas and debate, and with socialist ones, too. All this provided a strong springboard for an inspirational autobiography that continues to unfold.

But soon young Samir is off to Paris, where active involvement in a global communist and anti-imperialist milieu continued to shape him, as it had begun to do in Egypt itself. We are treated to a tour—in Paris and elsewhere—of friends and comrades from the global anti-imperialist left, with Amin’s life full of the active debates of the 1950s (presented at first hand, as it were) about radical possibilities, past, present, and future. We also see Amin acquiring the diverse skills of a radical economist, not least from active participation (despite his growing skepticism about the overall thrust of Nasser’s project of the time) in the post-Suez Egyptian planning secretariat and, more academically, in France itself. Also charted is his waning enthusiasm for the Soviet line, a sympathy with Mao’s theory (if not his practice) of what is necessary for real change, and the emergence of his own distinctly radical and markedly independent and reflective perspective on what would be required to see the “poorest of the poor” make real advances.

The latter half of the book finds him pursuing this progressive itinerary in West Africa, firmly located within both U.N. and local milieus: planning in Mali, teaching both in France and in West Africa, and administering research and training institutes like IDEP and CODESRIA in Dakar. The time so spent was instrumental in his development: he continued thinking, teaching, and writing prolifically; he saw at close hand (and documents, coolly and clearly) the seamy machinations of global powers...