Unity on the Global Left

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.

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).