Samir Amin wrote in 2016 that: “Partial awareness emerges from particular struggles, for example, from the struggles of peasants or women for the defense of human commons or the struggle for respect of popular sovereignty. The progress of the convergence of these particular types of awareness would make it possible to advance towards the formulation of new ways to surpass capitalism. But note…increased awareness will not happen through successive adaptations to the requirements of capitalist accumulation, but through awareness of the necessity of breaking with those requirements. The most enlightened segments of the movement should not isolate themselves by brandishing their disdain for others. Rather, they should involve themselves in all struggles in order to help the others to advance their understanding.” According to John Bellamy Foster in his Monthly Review article titled, Samir Amin at 80: An Introduction and Tribute, Amin’s work, as wide-ranging as it is, can be succinctly described in terms of the dual designation of the The Law of Value and Historical Materialism. For Amin, this basic division of Marxist theory is not to be denied. However, what makes Amin’s work vital and innovative is his insistence that the economic laws of capitalism, summed up by the law of value, are subordinate to the laws of historical materialism. Economic science, while indispensable, cannot explain at the highest level of abstraction, as in mathematical equations, the full reality of capitalism and imperialism, since it cannot account either for the historical origins of the system itself, or for the nature of the class struggle. Nor indeed can it present in a strictly determinant fashion the contemporary historical manifestation of the law of value, expressed as the theory of “globalized value,” which requires recognition of such factors as monopoly power and unequal exchange. At best we can see value relations as historically “transformed” in ways that are less determinant than in the abstract models based on a freely competitive economy, but which are still subject to meaningful political-economic analysis. The rise of monopoly capital and imperialism from the late nineteenth century on consolidated a system of “apartheid on a world scale” dividing the affluent countries of the North from those of the South. Today, Africa World Now Project will present a 2013 lecture that Samir Amin gave at School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London as part of the series "Samir Amin: Six Decades of Development Debate" Samir Amin was born in Cairo in 1931 and was educated at the Lycee Francais there. He gained a Ph.D. in Political Economy in Paris (1957), as well as degrees from the Institut de Statistiques and from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques. He then returned home where he was attached to the planning bodies of Nasser's regime. He left Egypt in 1960 to work with the Ministry of Planning of the newly independent Mali (1960-1963), and following this, he commenced an academic career. He has held the position of full professor in France since 1966 and was for ten years (1970-1980) the director of the U.N. African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (in Dakar). Since 1980 he was directing the African Office of the Third World Forum, an international non-governmental association for research and debate. He is author of many books, which include, but are not limited to, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment; Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism; Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure; The People's Spring: The Future of the Arab Revolution