When Sen presents a world of “unprecedented opulence” coexisting simultaneously with “remarkable deprivation” and “oppression” (xi), he seems almost to mystify the world as a quirky and curious place where good and evil, oddly, are neighbors, but he can't see any connection between the two. Are these rich and poor neighbors participants in the same social system? Is one a landlord that owns the whole neighborhood and the other a landless tenant? Sen seems almost too conspicuously to be dodging the question that equality-minded people might have put to him: Does the world’s “unprecedented opulence” have anything to do with oppression?
On the other hand, Sen’s book is a refreshingly different kind of book on development. When most economists seem to be stuck in measuring GDP to justify their free-market shock treatments, Sen is trying to prove that the urge to human freedom and social justice are still relevant to economics. He argues that “we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment” (xii); he criticizes the World Bank (from within its walls); he refuses the employment of “the authorities” (xiv) in favor of public participation and debate, and, eventually, democracy.
And so I feel like I am still split between two readings of Sen. He is taking the idea of sharing, translating it as ‘interchange’, and calling it a ‘market’, when ‘market’ (in its current state-sponsored forms) usually means something quite different from ‘sharing’. Through that re-definition of markets, and translating the urge for self-determination into the vocabulary and logic of the free market ('interchange'), Sen might be arguing for human freedom and against coercion. He might be using the language of 'free labor' to make a case for an economy of mutual aid, sharing, and equality. Or, operating within the constraints of free market logic, Sen may just be the kindest face that the violence of neoliberal economics can find for the process of consolidating wealth and maintaining aristocratic control of most people's lives by a few people. So far, Sen hasn’t been detailed enough for me to choose one reading over the other, so I’ll share the things I’m watching for as I read the rest of the book:
1) An attempt to grapple with what Marx calls “alienation.” If you replaced every instance of ‘freedom’ in the text with the word ‘alienation’, it would seem like a satire on the circular nature of free-market triumphalist logic. To take just one element of alienation, let’s look at page 28, where Sen describes “a system of free labor contract and unrestrained physical movement,” highlighting the irony of using Marx’s critique of slavery for a defense of capitalism. Of course Marx noticed the qualitative difference of being able to choose who you work for, but you can’t read Marx for long before picking up that there is down-side to ‘free labor.’ This is a section from a letter Marx wrote in 1853 about the enclosures in Great Britain that ‘freed up’ a large pool of available laborers by displacing people from their ancestral lands:
“My lady Countess resolved upon a radical economical reform, and determined upon transforming the whole tract of country into sheep-walks. From 1814 to 1820, these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically expelled and exterminated. All their villages were demolished and burned down, and all their fields converted into pasturage. British soldiers were commanded for this execution, and came to blows with the natives. An old woman refusing to quit her hut was burned in the flames of it. Thus my lady Countess appropriated to herself 794,000 acres of land, which from time immemorial had belonged to the clan. In the exuberance of her generosity she allotted to the expelled natives about 6,000 acres -- two acres per family. These 6,000 acres had been lying waste until then, and brought no revenue to the proprietors. The Countess was generous enough to sell the acre at 2s 6d on an average, to the clan-men who for centuries past had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the unrightfully appropriated clan-land she divided into 29 large sheep farms, each of them inhabited by one single family, mostly English farm-laborers; and in 1821 the 15,000 Gaels had already been superseded by 131,000 sheep.”
I recommend reading the entire letter, especially in response to Sen’s arguments about what Marxthought about the freeing of slaves in the United States’ Civil War: http://libcom.org/library/scottish-clearings-karl-marx
2) Ecology. At least in his introductory version of economic freedom, Sen writes about growth delinked from ecological reality; having more stuff and education and hospitals gives some freedoms, yes, but (to use another economic cliché) freedoms also have opportunity costs. I’ll be looking out in Sen for his take on the constraints of limited fossil fuels, only having so many trees to cut down before your forests can’t control flooding anymore, caution towards the material impact that industrialization has on our land base, or any concern about the freedom or subjectivity of other forms of life (i.e. the Yang-tze river dolphin, for whom the ‘freedoms’ of human economic growth through cheap hydroelectric power didn’t do much when it went extinct in 2006). Sen acknowledges briefly that “economic growth cannot sensibly be treated as an end in itself” (14) but it remains to be seen whether he sees growth as inevitably costly or not.
3) Education and hierarchy. Sen argues for local self-determination and autonomy, but he does so in the language of influencing “public decisions” and “participation” –potentially a weak substitute for actual political freedom. I’m waiting to see if he will acknowledge that the ‘freedom’ of public education, while significant, is still the freedom of obedience to a particular dialect and form of hierarchical discipline, which may have the opportunity cost of diminishing other educations and freedoms (think about children that spend fifteen years in public school doing composition, pledges of allegiance, and learning to think in terms of grades rather than learning how to plant and harvest, judge agricultural cycles, build their own homes, and other skills that might be considered ‘self-reliant’) Formal [modern] education may open up a variety of freedoms, but it can also itself be a “deprivation of elementary capabilities” (20), including the basic habits of making your own choices rather than following the authority of a teacher. On page 33, he notes that “participation requires knowledge and basic education skills, which might lead him to conclude that even his notions of autonomy through ‘participation’ require some submission to hierarchical authority, a serious problem for 'development as freedom'.
4) A fair assessment of the coercive elements of employment, beyond just the assertion that unemployment “leads to losses of self-reliance” ( 21). This seems a rather rosy view of employment, which, although ‘free’, also involves submission to a more powerful employer and a substitution of someone else’s priorities for your own. He points out that slavery constrains the free labor market, but there are plenty of other, less onerous constraints on selling your time and muscles, like ‘pride’ (a belief in personal freedom), a desire to rest, a preference for subsistence, a strike, etc.
5) Freedom and tradition. He casts the cultural arguments over cultural genocide as a conflict between ‘freedom’ and ‘tradition’ rather than a conflict between various traditions, including capitalism, that are (in many cases, violently) enforced. I’m watching out for his analysis of the state and how it enforces 'free market reforms' (through evictions, privatization, etc.) in later chapters.
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