'Samir Amin was one of the grand intellectuals of our time. A distinguished theoretician, his life of political activism spanned well over six decades. . . . [His] ambition always was to retain theoretical rigour while also communicating with the largest possible number of readers—and activists in particular—through exposition in relatively direct prose. His readership, like his own political activism, was spread across countries and continents.' – Aijaz Ahmad Samir Amin's primary concern as an economist is the form that imperialism takes in the last hundred years—driven at first by capitalist monopolies and later by what he calls generalized monopolies of the imperialist Triad (United States, Europe and Japan). He shows how this new system not only amplifies capital accumulation, and thereby world poverty and pauperization, but also how it gives rise to fascism. Originally written for Monthly Review, the essays selected for this volume provide the most fundamental coordinates of Samir Amin's thoughts in the last decades of his life. His range is wide, moving from Chinese socialism to political Islam, from the weakened political power of the working class and peasantry in the world and the potential for a revived political movement towards socialism.

Introduction
The political economy of the twentieth century
World poverty, pauperization and capital accumulation
Political Islam in the service of imperialism
The trajectory of historical capitalism and Marxism's tricontinental vocation
China 2013
The return of fascism in contemporary capitalism
Contemporary imperialism
Reading capital, reading historical capitalisms
Revolution from north to south
Revolution or decadence? : thoughts on the transition between modes of production on the occasion of the Marx bicentennial
The communist manifesto, 170 years later.