Amin, Samir. Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder. (New York: Zed Books, 2004)
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Amin (born 1937), an enormously prolific economist, theorist, and devout leftist, was born in Egypt and has resided for many years in Senegal. His books are typically deceptively brief and both conceptually and theoretically dense. Liberal Virus (2004), and Obsolescent Capitalism (2003) are each critiques of American hegemony and expansions upon Capitalism in an Age of Globalization. Whereas Liberal Virus reads more as a kind of socialist manifesto – it is by far the shortest of his books here, and the least conceptually complicated – Obsolescent Capitalism is a careful and scathing warning of the humanitarian disasters that will unfold if the solitary goal of capital accumulation continues unabated as the driving force of the U.S. global agenda. In Liberal Virus Amin argues that European Enlightenment modernism was founded on liberal humanitarian ideals, to which Europe largely still subscribes. The U.S., on the other hand, has lost sight of the ideals of equality and is now driven by the interests of capital alone, making it a dangerous, violent, and inherently unjust global hegemon. Amin continues this line of thought in Obsolescent Capitalism, recapitulating some of his key assertions from previous books about the ways in which global inequality fuels ethnic conflict, and then pointing to two rarely cited Marxist contentions as important ways to interpret economics: first, Marx’s “commodity alienation” – a description of the way that workers are made to feel alienated from the products of their own labor – is a key reason that “under capitalism, economics sets itself up as a ‘science’, whose laws of motion impose themselves ‘like laws of nature’ upon modern societies…. [T]he fact that these laws are the product not of some transhistorical nature defining ‘human existence’ in the face of scarcity but of a stage in human history … is erased from the consciousness of society.”[1] Second, he points to Marx’s key contention that capitalism is inherently unstable and tends toward disequilibrium. Amin insists that our current modality of global expansion of free markets characterized by regional impositions of “austerity,” “structural adjustment,” and other euphemisms for stripping people of their livelihoods, is not a foregone conclusion but a result of the obfuscatory elements of the growth-led focus of contemporary economists. Briefly: it absolutely needn’t be so.
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