Rethinking Samir Amin’s legacy and the case for a political organization of the global justice movement

Abstract

A case is made here for the desirability and viability of the late Samir Amin's call for a new International. However, the project to forge a political organization of the global justice movement must in the first instance draw lessons from the limitations of the recent network structure of new social movements, notably the World Social Forum, and rectify the failures of the old internationals of left-wing cadres. The actualization of such a radical idea also needs to observe the realpolitik of class formation and class struggle under conditions of the imperialistic globalization of capitalism today. Envisioned as a plural and participatory learning organization, the new International's progression should be evolutionary and its strategic engagements have to balance the imperatives of political realism with the ideals of democratic values.

The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies

“…Such unifying tendencies are directed at constructing a Gramscian counter-hegemonic bloc that encompasses political forces in formal power structures, in the form of progressive states or governments and political parties, and wider social forces including grassroots movements, trade unions, think tanks and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). On the other hand, explicit engagement with strategy by such scholaractivist forums as the Socialist Register (Panitch, Albo, & Chibber, 2012) and the Special Forum responding to the late Samir Amin's renewed call for a Fifth International (see Gills & Chase-Dunn, 2019), despite problematising the inherent methodological nationalism in the very notion of Internationale and addressing tensions between "horizontal" and "vertical" organisational forms, rarely transcend a hypothetical-normative, imperative tone in terms of what should be done (e.g., Álvarez & Chase-Dunn, 2019;Juego, 2019;Karatasli, 2019;Tyrala, 2019). As strategic objectives are formulated, however, the methodological-processual question of how to get there remains underexplored.…”