Happy birthday Samir Amin!

Your prodigious, insightful work on the nature of world capitalism, its origins and evolution, and on the long but necessary transition to socialism has educated, enlightened and inspired us over the last half a century. Truly you are one of the most original thinkers of the 20th and early 21st century. Your treatment of Eurocentricity and on the epistemological and philosophical consequences of the worldwide expansion of European capitalism has given us a frame of reference within which the cultural diversity of humanity is validated as an intrinsic part of authentic socialism.

I shall always remember the two years I spent in Dakar in the 1970s in your intellectual company, when I came to the the UN African Institute of Development and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar at your invitation. Thank you Samir for that privilege and opportunity to listen to your erudite lectures, delivered without notes and equally fluent in French, English and Arabic (and Spanish when necessary), and equally comfortable in neoclassical (from a critical standpoint, of course) and Marxist economic theory to the wonder of us all, faculty and students alike – and besides economics, in philosophy and political science. There are no disciplinary boundaries that you know.

It's a reason for celebration indeed to know that you have reached your 80th birthday in excellent physical and mental health … enjoy the feeling … and may you continue to put your enormous talents to the service of the working people of the world, as you have always done.