Samir Amin is one of the world's most profound thinkers about the changing nature of capitalism, North-South relations and issues of development. In this book, he provides us with a powerful understanding of the new and very different era which capitalism has now entered with the collapse of the Soviet model, the triumph of the market and accelerating globalization.
His sophisticated analysis brings within its ambit the increasingly differentiated regions of the South, the former Eastern bloc countries, as well as Western Europe. He also integrates his economic arguments about the nature of the crisis with political arguments based on his vision of human history not as simply determined by material realities, but as the product of social responses to those realities. His innovative analysis of the rise of ethnicity and fundamentalism as consequences of the failure of ruling classes in the South to alter the unequal terms of globalization is particularly compelling. And his deconstruction of the Bretton Woods institutions as the managerial mechanisms protecting the profitability of capital has profound implications for the likelihood of their being reformed in any meaningful way. Looking ahead, Amin rejects the apparent inevitability of globalization in its present polarising form, and instead asserts the need for each society to negotiate the terms of its inter-dependence with the rest of the global economy.

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