In this post, we will examine two different approaches to Socialist pedagogy- that of Nirupam Sen, a teacher who became a Minister of Industry & that of Pranab Bardhan, an Economics Professor. The latter sort is inconsequential and requires 'generous funding' from American Foundations. The former, on the other hand, can be highly consequential but it does require forcibly feeding Mums with the blood of their slain sons mixed with rice. Neglecting this recipe can result in the cessation of Socialist pedagogy as has happened recently in Mamta's Bengal.
Obviously, neo-liberalism is deeply imbricated in this setback for Inequality Studies within a Subaltern or Catatonic context.
Firstly, we must understand that, in Bengal, Inequality is reduced when powerless people are killed or are forced to run away. West Bengal has shown how beating and killing people is part and parcel of a progressive ideology which can go on challenging the tyranny of chauvinist majoritarianism- unless of course its votaries have all been killed or have run away.
Sadly, not all countries have a province like West Bengal which can impart this valuable lesson. Thus West Bengali intellectuals can play an important role in the Global Economy. As a case in point, Pranab Bardhan writes in 3Quarks of his friend and colleague Sam Bowles- the son of Chester Bowles, a former ambassador to Nehru's India-
He says he was pretty average in his Delhi school, and there were some Indian kids who were smarter, and yet, he asked his mother one day, why were most Indians so poor?
The answer is 'because their Mummies and Daddies were very poor. Poverty, like wealth, is inherited. Running away from poor places and settling where there is a lot of wealth is one way to be less poor. This is more particularly true if the intellectuals in a very poor place believe that poverty can only be overcome by stealing and killing'.
(In his small Connecticut hometown where he had grown up there were only two people who were really poor, one was an alcoholic, the other had mental problems).
What Sam didn't see, in his small Connecticut hometown, was lots of Native Americans living miserable lives. This was because Sam's ancestors exterminated them- one way or another- centuries previously.
The same question kept on bugging him when about a decade later, after his undergraduate education at Yale, he started teaching in a school in northern Nigeria.
But the answer would have been very different there because the area was thinly populated and lacked a tax base- that's why the Brits had soldered Northern Nigeria to the more prosperous South. But this led to the terrible Biafra war. I suppose, Northern Nigeria too could have boomed if oil or some other precious resource had been found there.
The question that Sam and I posed in our research proposal to the MacArthur Foundation was why inequality, contrary to the impression created in traditional Economics as being necessary for the incentives for people to strive for economic prosperity,
This is not true. Inequality, in traditional economics, arises from differential factor endowment, higher disutility of work, or else the capture of an economic rent because of inelasticity caused by some impediment to factor mobility.
Inequality is not a precondition for 'people to strive for economic prosperity'. On the contrary- because of economies of scope and scale- a more equal income distribution allows real wage increases (i.e. prosperity) thanks to a virtuous circle by which the expansion of the market drives down costs thus raising real incomes and effective demand.
In a very unequal society it would be rational to just become a beggar. Why strive if the game is rigged against you?
can actually be quite harmful for the economy; in many important situations equity and efficiency can be complementary.
Efficiency is measurable. Are you making more but using less scarce resources? If so, efficiency has increased. Equity is not measurable because we don't really have any objective way of measuring 'disutility' from work. Is it inequitable that Bill Gates has lots more money than I have? Not really. I'm pretty content with my life and appreciate that what I do is not useful to Society whereas working to eradicate communicable diseases is very worthwhile indeed. But Gates get utility doing that worthwhile thing whereas I don't- because I know I'd just mess things up if I tried to be helpful.
In particular we spelled out the need for theoretical and empirical work in both rich and poor countries on four questions:
How do inequalities affect the efficiency and productivity of farms, firms, and other entities,
the answer is easy. The size of the market constrains choice of technique and the availability of economies of scope and scale.
and are there more efficient forms of governance that can be promoted?
Governance is a function of existing legal and institutional arrangements. Here, predictability is a desiderata. Promoting some different type of governance adds to uncertainty and could prove wholly mischievous- more particularly in a poor place with weak state capacity.
How does inequality affect cooperation in local communities, and thus have an impact on the local environment and other public goods, like neighborhood safety and other residential amenities, irrigation water, fisheries, forestry, and grazing lands?
The answer is ideographic- i.e. highly individual- it is not nomothetic or mathematical in any way.
How do economic disparities among citizens affect bargaining, policy making, and economic performance at a national level?
This is a question about the power of organized labor or consumer groups or the nature of political parties. This is an ideographic matter.
What principles can guide the design of efficient and politically viable policies to alleviate poverty and enhance economic opportunity for the less well-off?
Who cares? If some guy is alleviating poverty, praise him and imitate what he is doing. It doesn't matter if his principles are perverse or puritanical or paranoid.
Our network had economists, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists
i.e. useless shitheads
from different countries, looking at these questions from different angles.
They wasted their time.
Some of the economists in our group have now become quite well-known, like Thomas Piketty from Paris or the recent Nobel laureates like Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kramer from Cambridge, Mass.
Good for them. But did this help lift anybody out of poverty? Nope. Either poor people from rural areas got jobs in big factories and stopped having babies like crazy or poverty reproduced itself.
Our group funded some of the early work of Piketty in the tax archives in France,
The French are expert tax dodgers.
just as we funded a lot of the experimental work of those Nobel laureates in India, Kenya and elsewhere. (Esther was the youngest member of our group, she had not yet finished her Ph.D. at MIT when she joined). We also had well-known sociologists like Erik Olin Wright, anthropologists like Katherine Newman and political scientists like Adam Przeworski.
Alleviate poverty by getting useless academics grants to study shite.
The group was generously funded by the MacArthur Foundation for more than 10 years starting from the middle 1990’s, and administered by the Institute of International Studies in Berkeley.
Extreme poverty did fall globally but not because of these guys.
My own research work in this network was mainly of two kinds. One was the study of the impact of inequality on cooperation in management of irrigation water particularly in resolution of water conflicts among farmers
which doesn't impact inequality if the poorer farmers have babies like crazy whereas the richer ones don't so as to educate them to get the fuck away from agriculture+-
(both the theoretical and empirical work was published as some chapters in my 2004 book Scarcity, Conflicts and Cooperation published by MIT Press), and on some empirical projects on deforestation in the Himalayan foothills (in collaboration with Dilip Mookherjee).
Did this yield anything useful? No. The main finding was poor countries be as poor as shit. That's why they got shitty institutions. Being poor sucks ass big time.
This is a summary of their masterwork-
The institutional framework of an economy defines and constrains the opportunities of individuals, determines the business climate, and shapes the incentives and organizations for collective action on the part of communities;Special issues taken up include the institutions for securing property rights
The second kind was on the political economy of governance, in particular with respect to decentralization, in a large multi-year project with Dilip Mookherjee. We collected detailed survey and administrative data from 89 villages in West Bengal and analyzed them and published papers in journals both in India and abroad.
That's certainly one way to pass the time.
In 2006 Dilip and I edited a collection of essays on decentralization in different countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, titled Decentralization to Local Governments in Developing Countries: A Comparative Perspective, published by MIT Press.
There is little point comparing apples to oranges. China was the big success story here but their political system is very different. To be fair, this may not have been clear at the time.
As a political and institutional economist I had been interested in decentralization for a long time, as I was skeptical of the easy reliance of my leftist friends on the top-down or centralized state
Some states can and have extracted surpluses from the agricultural and traditional sector to fund modernization. However, this may cause famine.
(Among the major leftist political leaders in India a persistent advocate of decentralization was E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who was the Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957-59 and again in 1967-69. When I was in Kerala K.N. Raj introduced me to him, I did not have much chance to talk with him, but I had read several of his articles on decentralization). Yet, unlike some Gandhians and other communitarians I knew, I was wary also about the pitfalls of local governments and communities. Some of these conflicting issues needed detailed empirical work to resolve.
EMS's big idea was that decentralization should involve workers, capitalists and technologists to come together to figure out ways to raise productivity faster than wages. This would enable Kerala to overcome economic backwardness. Furthermore, if prostitutes, pandas, and police officers come together to solve the problem of pollution, poverty and international peace, then that too would be very nice.
I knew Dilip had been interested in theoretical issues of decentralization in the context of corporate governance of a firm.
Companies might actually pay for that sort of analysis.
I talked intensively with him to make him interested in issues of decentralization in the context of development governance.
Was there any 'development governance' in West Bengal? Thuggery and nepotism was what it was known for.
I consider it as some achievement on my part to persuade an accomplished theorist like Dilip to take the plunge in the messy matter of village data collection and analysis to glean insights on the pros and cons of decentralized development.
Sadly development requires more developed people actually turning up and setting up factories.
West Bengal at that time provided an appropriate locale for this research, as the ruling Left government in West Bengal had carried out some significant steps toward decentralized governance.
but even more significant steps towards gangsterism
With some local collaborators (particularly Sandip Mitra at the Indian Statistical Institute) we carried out large-scale village and household surveys in West Bengal, mainly to study the impact of elected village councils (panchayats) on land reforms and various types of anti-poverty programs, along with general agricultural performance.
Initially there might appear to be some impact. Then the thing proves a mirage.
Apart from our own research, for more than 10 years the 18-member MacArthur network gave me the opportunity to interact with some of the finest minds in social science,
i.e useless cretins
and to benefit from the extremely high quality and analytical rigor of the discussion.
Rigorously proving that poverty is correlated with not having any fucking money is a wonderful achievement.
There was quite a bit of differences of opinion, cogently argued and expressed, examined and dissected, but there was a degree of convergence on some passionate intellectual commitment to do something about the excruciating problems of inequality and social injustice in the world.
These guys think that publishing shite helps.
For me my work with Dilip in West Bengal was also in some sense a continuation of my earlier work there with Ashok Rudra when we had tried to understand the various land relations and institutions at the ground level on the basis of surveys of 110 sample villages. Even as the MacArthur projects ended, Dilip and I continued studying some of our sample villages. Altogether about 3 decades of detailed micro-level village survey data analysis had given me some understanding of the ground realities in West Bengal economy and polity.
Which rural West Bengalis already knew well enough. The place is an involuted shithole. Go research inequality in Amrika.
The Left government ruled West Bengal much of this period, continuously for 34 years (1977-2011)—
by beating its opponents or knifing them repeatedly
an unprecedented case in the world of a democratically elected communist party rule, over a size of population much larger than that of France or UK, at the state, district, municipal and village council levels.
Sadly, Mamta's goons beat the shit out of the Left's goons and now those guys are voting for the BJP. Bardhan may be surprised to learn that neither French nor British democracy features ruling party goons beating and raping and killing whomsoever they please.
To be frank, it was not really a communist party except in rhetoric and some Leninist methods of intra-party discipline and control;
Gulags? That would be cool.
on major policies it was trying at best to be a social democratic party.
by beating people.
On the basis of my perception of the ground realities and citing our survey data I
ran the fuck away to Amrika?
wrote often in the popular Bengali newspapers about things that the Left government was doing right,
so as to avoid beatings
and more often doing wrong or doing an inadequate job.
We must have more Shoshialishm!
The young people who were working in our village survey team often reported to me how they saw even in remote villages people at tea stalls were discussing my articles, with the newspaper pages open in front of them.
They were trying to figure out how to escape to Amrika and get rich doing poverty studies.
I personally knew many of the leaders in the government (including top Ministers), and needless to say the leading Left Party often bristled at my pieces.
Bristling is fine. Beating- not so fine.
(One Minister openly told me: “Our Party does not consider you a friend”; I told him that I was not keen on the Party’s friendship, but I wanted it to pay attention to what I was saying for its own good).
So Bardhan was an economist of international repute who 'personally knew' top ministers in the ruling party in his own Province. Did he enable them to do a better job? No. Thus either he himself or that party was useless.
Let me narrate now some of my intensive interactions with the Party particularly in the 1990’s and the decade after. Once in Kolkata in the early 1990’s I got a phone call from the personal secretary of the Chief Minister Jyoti Basu; he said that at that time it so happened that both Amartya Sen and myself were in Kolkata, so the Chief Minister wanted to take this opportunity to have a lengthy discussion with the two of us together.
Sen and Bardhan were even less in touch with reality than Basu.
We agreed and went one morning to a hotel room
how Capitalist!
where he and some Party leaders and Ministers were present in a small private gathering.
They were drinking imported liquor.
He said that after the fall of the Soviet Union they wanted to understand which way things were moving, and if and how their Party should change directions in the face of this storm.
The Soviet Union fell because the Party surrendered control of the economy. If the Left Front was to survive it must concentrate on beating people. Basu heeded the message.
Amartya-da wanted me to start.
If Basu must beat someone, let it be Bardhan.
I decided to take this opportunity to be quite blunt, particularly as the media were not there, and discussed the international situation rather cursorily, and concentrated on the kind of mistakes and wrong directions in my judgment they were taking in West Bengal. I spoke for almost an hour; the leaders were mostly silent, except for occasional interruptions by the Chief Minister, who pleasantly surprised me by mainly agreeing with me and even giving examples from his experience to supplement some of the points I was making.
Basu had brought in Sen & Bardhan so as to bully his own people. They got their revenge by refusing to let him become PM.
Then Amartya-da spoke, and after that general discussion followed. I was struck by the remarkable measure of agreement in the room or at least silence on the part of those who disagreed.
They were plotting their revenge. Basu had brought in two American Professors who were as stupid as fuck so as to humiliate his juniors.
The meeting went on, with a short lunch break, until late in the afternoon, when the Chief Minister excused himself as he had to go and give a public speech in a large gathering in the city center.
He had demoralized his juniors sufficiently. Now he would do what he most liked doing- viz. giving a bombastic speech.
Next morning I read the Chief Minister’s speech in the Party newspaper; it was full of the usual stale rhetoric and catechisms. I noted the gulf between their public front and the internal unsettled state of thinking. Later I also faced the same public front from other Ministers when I spoke in public panel discussions with them on different occasions.
Maybe Bengalis- not all of them politicians- don't really mean anything when they speak.
Another time an important Minister (Nirupam Sen,
In 1970 Sen had helped hack to death some members of a Congress supporting family. Then, the mother of the slain was forced to swallow rice mixed with the blood of her sons. She went mad. Sen rose to become Minister of Industry and Commerce. He and Comrade Buddha were behind the Nandigram and Singur projects which ultimately brought down the Left front. Sadly, TMC goons did not hack the fellow to death or mix his blood with rice for the delectation of his elderly Mummy. This shows Mamata's flawed understanding of Socialist ideology. Bardhan Sahib may kindly enlighten her in this matter.
who rose in the Party from the grassroots level
by mixing blood in the rice forcibly fed to mothers of sons he had obligingly hacked to death.
and whom I found out to be one of the most thoughtful among the leaders)
He very thoughtfully had a lot of farmers shot. About 300 women were raped. Why were they not forced to eat rice mixed with the blood of their slain family members? Neoliberalism is very pernicious. It is causing lack of attention to detail and improper ideological posture.
called me and said that he’d like to come over to my apartment in Kolkata and
hack Bardhan to death? That would have been cool.
privately discuss various controversial issues arising at that time out of land acquisition for building new industries. We had a good and candid discussion.
Bardhan's Mummy ran away just in case the discussion was a little too candid.
A few weeks later the Bengali newspaper where I used to write arranged for a long conversation between me and Nirupam Sen, and with only some small changes requested by Sen, they published the transcript. This was in 2009, and I could see that by then the days of the Left Party were numbered.
It is not enough to hack people to death. You must mix their blood in rice and force their Mums to eat it.
Nirupam Sen showed me some unpublished articles he had written on the issues we discussed—he said even if their Party were to be defeated in the next election he wanted to leave for posterity some evidence that he had thought through some things, just could not implement them.
His name will always be remembered for mixing blood in rice to forcibly feed the Mums of his victims. Such is the stuff of true Shoshialishishm.
One of the central contradictions I have repeatedly pointed out to the Party leaders was that they, and particularly their militant trade unions, were anti-capitalist in their ideology, and yet they had not shown in their programs and actions any viable positive alternative to capitalism.
So what? Previously they had been anti-British without offering any viable alternative to British rule- which is why many of Bardhan's relatives had to run away from East Bengal. It's not as though Mamta was offering a viable alternative to the Left Front either. It was simply a case of beating the erstwhile beaters.
For example, the Left in India have very few successful cases of running cooperatives or other such non-capitalist organizations like worker-owned or –managed firms or farms on any large scale.
But they were once very good at hacking people to death and then making the Mums of their victims eat rice mixed with the blood of their own sons.
Their usual slogans for nationalization and state take-overs of firms are not credible any more with a long history of state failures in business where there is competition, and in the case of some public monopolies the profits, if any, are often dissipated in different forms of political patronage distribution.
Bangladesh denationalized the textile industry and set up SEZs from about 1980 onward. West Bengal could have done the same thing. It did not bother. Bangladesh now has significantly higher per capita income and human development indices. Why didn't Bardhan point this out to the Left Front Ministers?
Successful management of some state firms under leftist rule would have improved their credibility and created useful examples for people to look up to.
Also, if Jyoti Basu had been able to levitate, people might have looked up to him.
After the Party was defeated in 2011, Dilip and I analyzed the reasons for the defeat from some data and opinion polls in our subsequent village surveys.
The Left Front goons were fighting among themselves rather than concentrating on beating everybody else. Sadly, due to neoliberal ideology, even where people were hacked to death, blood of victims was not being mixed with rice and lovingly, if forcibly, served to their grieving mothers.
I also wrote up a couple of pieces in the popular Bengali press. After the fall of the Soviet Union I had written an article in EPW titled “The Avoidable Tragedy of the Left in India”;
West Bengal's inability to avoid the Left was its great tragedy. Pity there was no General Ershad to denationalize industrial units and permit capitalist exploitation of female workers in textile factories, etc.
after their defeat in West Bengal I wrote up a sequel to the earlier article there. Now, of course, both the Left and the Liberals in India (along with assorted Gandhians) are facing an even more harrowing tragedy with the triumphal march of the marauding Right pushing the agenda of hateful sectarianism and tyranny.
But Bardhan's province is fully in the grip of Mamta's tyranny. No doubt, in Muslim majority districts, this is being replaced by a type of rule from which Bardhan's people have historically fled. But Bardhan has no objection to that at all.
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