Why has Amartya Sen stopped learning?

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Its been a long sabbatical and I am back to irritate you dear readers by asking unpleasant questions and making”snide” remarks. But here goes:

In a recent two-part article in The Telegraph, Kolkata published on December 29, 2008 and December 30, 2008, Nobel laureate Prof. Amartya Sen has argued, in my view rather weakly when compared to his usual rigorous arguments, that the “policy strategy of rapidly industrializing West Bengal….involving …the use of private investment in industries ….is basically correct.”

I claim that in these two essays, Prof Sen has argued rather weakly mainly because he has tended to focus more on presenting his own viewpoint while skirting or simply ignoring some of the more difficult issues that (a) have already been raised, and (b) can and should be raised but as far as I know have not yet been raised. But before I go into a discussion of these two types of issues that Prof Sen has chosen not to address, let me first discuss those aspects of his views with which I have no issues and are broadly in agreement with.

But even before I go into any long-winded arguments of my own, I think I owe my readers an apology about a mistaken identity. I somehow allowed myself to get confused about a blogger called Radical Hypocrite and another blogger called Radical Blogger. In a moment of intense excitement I came to the erroneous conclusion that these two bloggers are one and the same person. I have since been given to realize that these two bloggers are two different persons. While I am yet to get acquainted with the real person who calls himself/herself Radical Hypocrite, Radical Blogger happens to be Professor Kunal Chattopadhya of Jadavpur University, a self-professed Trotskyite. While this error on my part certainly calls for apologies to both these two bloggers for having mixed up their separate identities and treating them both as the same individual, I would like to assert that the thrust of my arguments in all my previous posts here, insofar as they deal with substantive issues, remain exactly the same. My only mistake was to attribute the views of Radical Hypocrite to Radical Blogger thinking they were the same person when in reality Radical Hypocrite is apparently a different person while Radical Blogger is another different person. Even then I still stick to my critique of the views of Radical Hypocrite and my critique of the views of Prof Kunal Chattopadhya alias Radical Blogger. I also apologize to Prof Chattopadhya for having attributed the views of Radical Hypocrite on the issue of “agriculture versus industry” to Prof Chattopadhya although I have got the impression that both these bloggers are critiques of the Left Front’s “neo-liberal” industrial strategy and both display agriculture fetishism to greater or lesser extent. In any case, my criticisms were directed at certain views rather than the persons holding them so that as far as I am concerned my criticisms of those views still stand and it does not quite matter which particular individual holds which particular view. But I apologize all the same for mistaking identities.

Coming now to Prof Sen’s essays. First, unlike me who devoted an entire post on what the learned professor has called the physiocratic agriculture-fetishism of those who have “a strong belief in the unparalleled – almost mystical – merits of agriculture” such as Radical Hypocrite, Prof Sen has dismissed their views simply by pointing out that their arguments were adequately rebutted about 200 years ago. While I, with my “poor man’s” learning, needed to ponderously point out Radical Hypocrite’s feudal nostalgia to rebut his arguments, the more erudite Prof Sen needed only two sentences with a mention of Thomas Hobbes thrown in to rebut those same arguments even more effectively than I did. So we need not dwell any further on those arguing for maintaining the holy sanctity of agricultural land, however, strong their arguments may otherwise seem, since there is absolutely no doubt that agriculture will have to give way to industrial development sooner than later and hence the conversion of agricultural land for industrial purposes is a historical inevitability that only feudal elements will try to stop, reverse or protest against.

My next major area of agreement with Prof Sen is with regard to his critique of the critiques of “neo-liberalism” to the extent that such criticism is restricted to the critique of “high theory” that claims state ownership as against private investment will ultimately lead to a hugely prosperous economy. I fully agree with Prof Sen when he points out that such critics of private investment and strong champions of State Ownership can hardly be called “Marxists since Marx had such strong respect for empirical information” and Prof Sen then goes on to provide the empirical information that drills far too many holes into the “high theory” that State Ownership is the panacea for all ills of mankind. He effectively rebuts any “comprehensive anti-privatization” philosophy while also rebutting any arguments about a “comprehensive pro-privatization position” to suggest that a mix of both private investment in industries and state investment in public goods such as “public education, healthcare, public transport, environmental protection,” etc is needed.

While agreeing with him fully that today there is enough empirical information to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that State Ownership does not lead to a qualitatively different and somehow better and more prosperous (from the point of view of the poor or the working classes) post-capitalist economy and, therefore, little scientific (read empirical) justification can be found to support the view of what Prof Sen calls the establishment Left (as also all others who are critiques of neo-liberal policies and advocate state ownership of some form or the other – that means not only the Stalinists but also the Trotskyites and Maoists) that state ownership and state investments in industry is the only way to counter the ill-effects of private investments and unfavorable market outcomes (for the poor and working classes), my disagreements start with his view that there is no alternative to private investment in industry. Of course, he does not clarify whether he thinks that there is no alternative to private investment in industry not only in the present context of West Bengal but also for all times to come not only in West Bengal but elsewhere in the world as well, I would like to argue that from the point of view of the poor and working classes there is a strong case for pushing forward an agenda of collectively owned “people’s” investment in both agriculture and industry in West Bengal and elsewhere in the world today to counter the ill-effects of private investment and unfavorable market outcomes. To be precise, I wish to argue that the truly Leftist alternative to private investments and neo-liberalism is not forms of state ownership but forms of collective ownership although there is no way that private investments in both agriculture and industry can be somehow stopped overnight and replaced by a policy of collective investments. Of course, social change does not take place overnight and even the typical view of capturing state power to implement state ownership, in the final analysis, is nothing but the mythological view that qualitative social change can somehow take place overnight, as it were, by the mere act of capturing state power.

Having said that, this post is really not about collective ownership. It is more about why people like Prof Sen have stopped searching for an alternative to private investment and market economics. As mentioned above while I have no disagreement with him with the view that empirical evidence has proved that state ownership or, more specifically, the model of “socialism” that the world has seen so far in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and elsewhere does not lead to any prosperous post-capitalist economic model from the point of view of the poor and working classes, why are people like Prof Sen trying to, in effect, push the view that since state ownership or “socialism” has proved to be an economic failure there is “therefore” no alternative to private investment and market capitalism? Why are people like Prof Sen trying to push the view that the poor and the working classes have to simply accept private ownership and market capitalism as the end of history?

While poor people like us with our limited learning do not have the temerity to actually argue with the likes of Prof Sen (who are we to try and argue with the intellectual Brahmins of this world and that too someone who has won a Nobel Prize to boot?) – I suppose we at least have the right to demand freedom from exploitation of our labor power that is inevitable in all forms of private ownership of means of production and market capitalism. And if Prof Sen condescends to at least grant us that right, what kind of future society does he suggest we should strive for to end the rule of private capital? That is, what kind of “high theory” does he suggest will lead us out of the darkness and death that private capitalism represents? Or, is he arguing that thinking of any and all alternatives to private capitalism is nothing but the kind of futile exercise that trying to build any “high theory” represents? Is he arguing that the entire baggage that Marxian thought represents need to be dumped?

Interestingly, these intellectual Brahmins claiming to be Leftists seem to be split into two groups. One group is represented by people such as Radical Blogger (Prof Kunal Chattopadhya), Arundhati Roy, Mahasweta Devi, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists and many other critiques of “neo-liberalism” who seem to have no other model of post-capitalism to suggest other than the failed model of state ownership and forms of “socialism” which we the poor and the working classes know from empirical evidence does not lead us to freedom from exploitation and disenfranchisement – that is we know that all these so-called champions of the poor are nothing but people who are trying to fool the poor into believing that following them will lead us to freedom.

The other group of intellectual Brahmins also claiming to be Leftists are represented by people like Prof Amartya Sen, Prof Amiya Bagchi and others who dismiss any search for alternatives to private market capitalism as also state ownership as nothing but “high theory” or “grand theory”. I know dear reader I have suddenly bunged Prof Amiya Bagchi into the discussion without first saying why his views also are being discussed here. Well, in a private discussion with him sometime back (quite a few years back in fact) when I had suggested that with the failure of the socialist experiment there is now a need to go back to the basics of historical materialism, to the drawing board as it were, and try to develop another hypothesis for a post-capitalist economic model, he, much in the same vein as Prof Sen, dismissed the suggestion as “grand theory” in a manner that such “grand theories” are not worthy of discussion.

The long and short of it is that as far as these “Leftist” intellectual Brahmins are concerned, the poor and the working classes are condemned to suffer either under private market capitalism, or, even worse exploitation and disenfranchisement under “socialism” which as we have seen during the last century is nothing but state capitalism. Not only that. When Dalits and “untouchables” such as yours truly try to meekly suggest that maybe there is a need to review the theoretical history behind the “socialist or state ownership” hypothesis and thereby try to come up with an alternative hypothesis for building a post-capitalist society free from the exploitation and disenfranchisement that both private market capitalism and “socialism or state ownership” represents and that there is also no need to completely dump Marx and the basic discoveries made by him and captured in the theoretical framework known as historical materialism (the discovery that human labor power can be exploited through wage labor under private ownership of means of production was made way back in antiquity and is the reason why it has been going on since the earliest days of private ownership – Marx only clarified some issues with regard to the mechanism of exploitation in commodity production while creating a scope for much confusion by trying to rigorously develop a Labor Theory of Value when it is axiomatic that human labor power creates all value) although there is certainly a need to review some of the views that have followed from applying it, they disdainfully dismiss us either to assert without any empirical basis at all the dogma of socialism and state ownership or that any attempt to review historical materialism and the formulation of socialism is nothing but “high theory” or “grand theory” and not worth discussing at all. In short they are telling us – the poor and the working classes – to just shut up and put up with private market capitalism or go on believing in the myth of socialism.

So, although one can understand the dogmatic approach of the power seekers – the Stalinists, Trotskyites, and Maoists – whose profession is to fool the poor and enjoy political power – my question is with regard to the academics such as Prof Sen and Prof Bagchi – why are these people refusing to learn from history and ask the right questions that will lead us to a post-capitalist economic model where there is no exploitation of human labor power? Why has Prof Amartya Sen, a self-proclaimed champion of arguments and democratic discussion, stopped arguing against the exploitation and disenfranchisement that is inevitable in private market capitalism? Why has he begun to believe in the end of history view? Why, oh why has he, the learned professor, stopped learning?

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Filed under Politics, collective ownership, communism, maoists, socialism

Tags: collective ownership, communism, maoists, Politics, socialism