This book brings together a collection of essays by progressive global activists in response to Samir Amin’s call for a new global organization of progressive workers and peoples. Amin’s proposal is applauded, criticized and reformulated by these scholar-activists who are all proponents of ways forward toward a more egalitarian world society.
Samir Amin, a leading scholar and co-founder of the world-system tradition, died on August 12, 2018. Just before his death, he published, along with close allies, a call for ‘workers and the people’ to establish a ‘fifth international’ to coordinate support for progressive movements. Amin, an Egyptian economist, was an intrepid intellectual and organizer of popular movements whose scholar activism provided inspiration to the global justice movement. The essays in this volume are by other prominent scholar activists who praise, critique and reconfigure Amin’s proposal in order to help humanity confront the contemporary crisis of global capitalism and move toward a more egalitarian global society.
The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal, Globalizations.
1. In search of unity: a new politics of solidarity and action for confronting the crisis of global capitalism Barry Gills and Christopher Chase-Dunn 2. Climate justice and sustained transnational mobilization Paul Almeida 3. Samir Amin and the challenges of socialist transformation in senile capitalism Carlos Eduardo Martins 4. The twenty-first century revolutions and internationalism: a world historical perspective Sahan Savas Karatasli 5. On Samir Amin’s call for a Fifth International Valentine M. Moghadam 6. The rational kernel within Samir Amin’s mythological shell: the idea of a democratic and pluralist world political party Heikki Patomäki 7. World revolution or socialism, community by community, in the Anthropocene? Leslie Sklair 8. Race-class-gender articulation and the Fifth International Biko Agozino 9. Forging a diagonal instrument for the global left: the vessel Rebecca Álvarez and Christopher Chase-Dunn 10. Truncated 21st-century trajectories of progressive international solidarity Patrick Bond 11. What is to be done? The importance of Samir Amin’s answer Radhika Desai 12. The fifth International: international or global? Owen Worth 13. Carrying on Samir Amin’s legacy Boris Kagarlitsky 14. Sweeping the world clean of capitalism: Samir Amin, Abdullah Ocalan and the world of autonomous regions Andrej Grubacic 15. Needed: a new international for a just transition and against fascism Francine Mestrum 16. Capital has an Internationale and it is going fascist: time for an international of the global popular classes William I. Robinson 17. On heeding the lessons of the past and adapting them to the present: a strategy for an effective Fifth International Michael Tyrala 18. Eurocentrism, state-centrism and sexual self-determination in the construction of a global democratic organization Teivo Teivainen 19. Rethinking Samir Amin’s legacy and the case for a political organization of the global justice movement Bonn Juego 20. Building a new international is necessary and urgent Carlos Serrano Ferreira 21. The kick off Mamdouh Habashi
Barry Gills is Editor in Chief of Globalizations journal and Founding Editor of the Rethinking Globalizations book series (Routledge). He is a member of the Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT), and the Peoples Sovereignty Network. Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside, USA. He is the author of Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present (with Bruce Lerro) and Global Struggles and Social Change (with Paul Almeida).
