Amilcar Cabral was an African Marxist who led an uprising against Portuguese rule. Amartya Sen is a Professor of useless shite. To Lawrence Hamilton- a White South African Professor of useless shite- they are similar. Sen led the guerilla resistance to the Colonial rule of Nicholas Maugham- the Viceroy of India who is pretending to be a dusky fellow named Narendra Modi. Sen was assassinated by Partha Dasgupta and his half-brother became President of the People's Republic of India till he was toppled by a coup. Later there was a Civil War after which he was invited back to be President but, after a brief visit, he decided he would rather remain in the West. True, Amartya Sen does not have a half-brother and he wasn't assassinated by Meade's son-in-law but, essentially, he and that Amilcar dude are very similar- right?
Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another.
Amilcar's rivals resisted him by killing him. Sadly, this meant his half-brother took over for a few years before he was chased away. Later, after a Civil War, the half-brother was invited back but refused to stir from Portugal because it is still ruled by White people. I suppose one could say that Sen too prefers Harvard to Howrah. Who can blame him?
That is resistance. What is it that we want to destroy in our land?
Prosperity. The guy was a Marxist.
The colonial domination of the tugas [Portuguese colonialists]. Only that? No. At the same time, we don't want any other type of colonial domination in our land – any other type of foreign domination whatsoever. … We want … to destroy everything that would be an obstacle to the progress … and liberty of our people. At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability.
– Amílcar Cabral (1969 [2016]: 76–77)
Under his brother's leftist policies, his country soon sank into dire poverty and political instability. Fortunately, the coup which toppled him permitted Cape Verde to go its own way. Its per capita income is about 3,300 dollars. Guinea Bissau is less than 700
It is arguable that what is missing in all this [utilitarian and Rawlsian] framework is some notion of ‘basic capabilities’: a person being able to do certain basic things.
This was not missing from the Utilitarian, the Rawlsian, the Marxist or even the Gandhian framework. This is because people have always been able to do certain basic things. Even Sen was capable of wiping his own bottom. True, Rawls didn't say to him that Justice as Fairness permitted him to wipe his own butt but this was because Rawls was RACIST. Also he had a penis. Penises cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
The ability to move about is the relevant one here, but one can consider others, e.g., the ability to meet one's nutritional requirements,
by eating food. Why did Rawls not mention that people had the capability to eat food, take a dump and then wipe their own butts? The answer is because he was a RACIST! He didn't want brown people to eat food or wipe their own butts.
the wherewithal to be clothed and sheltered, the power to participate in the social life of the community.– Amartya Sen (1980: 218)
Rawls hoped that starving brown people with unwiped bums would be excluded from social life. He was a very wicked man. Amartya Sen often tried to assassinate him. Sadly Nicholas Maugham- the Viceroy of India- sent troops to protect Rawls.
Much mainstream political theory and development studies has tended to be too parochial, abstract and cautious to be of practical help in orienting agents in politics,
especially Bengalis who may not know that they can eat food to gain nutrition and that they can wipe their butts after taking a dump. This is because John Rawls did not explain this to them. Rawls was an evil RACIST. Also he had a dick and thus was probably a RAPIST.
to help us judge what is a good or a bad idea and to decide how best to get from a particular here and now to a more prized future. By comparing the ideas of Amílcar Cabral and Amartya Sen, that is, by comparing all-too-often ignored arguments drawn from resistance to colonisation in Africa
that resistance made things worse. That is why Amilcar's brother didn't want to get back there.
with a series of famous moves made against hegemonic political and economic theories,
like those of Dr. Manmohan Singh or Narendra Modi
this article reveals and defends a more valuable mode of political thinking for development.
which consists of pretending that people need to have their capability to wipe their own butts nurtured in a truly inclusive, diverse, equitable and vacuous manner.
It is more valuable, as it is action-guiding and thus more practically relevant.
The fact that shooting Amilcar caused him to be less of a nuisance was indeed action-guiding.
This is because it is more realist, comparative and focussed on how to bring about change.
What change has Sen brought about? He couldn't harm India because he was actually stupider and more useless than Sukhomoy Chakroborty. Anyway, he had to leave the country because he ran off with his best friend's wife. The Whites may have petted this brown monkey but he wasn't giving them any policy advise. What impressed them was his insistence that Rawls should have made it clear that people could gain nutrition by eating food. Failure to make explicit mention of such basic capabilities could cause trillions of brown people to starve to death.
Sen's path-breaking work has been transformative for multiple disciplines, not least development studies.
Nonsense! It was already shit before he waded in.
Yet, reading Sen's ideas alongside Cabral's, as I do here, reveals important omissions and assumptions that undermine the intended realism of Sen's thought and thus its practicability for development studies.
This is because Sen failed to kill off private enterprise in India. Also Nicholas Maugham remains the Viceroy of that country. It was he who sent troops to defend Rawls from Sen's guerilla army.
This comparison is also important as it draws on figures, ideas and problems that come from outside the geographical confines of Europe.
Cambridge and Oxford and the LSE are within the geographical confines of Europe. Sen spent longer teaching there than in India though, quite sensibly, he prefers Harvard which pays better.
It therefore broadens the discursive frame for thinking politically as espoused by post-colonial thought and decolonial activism, and it gives us new and better insights into how political theory and development studies can become more realist and utopian.
By shooting people and destroying the economy.
It simultaneously grounds political thinking in specific, local political challenges
i.e. killing people
(particularly when change is necessary to overcome domination) and enables theorists from the Global North and Global South to see beyond their own horizons of what is possible and (seemingly) impossible (Hountondji 1997).
Boko Haram should set up franchises in Europe.
The radical realism that emerges from this comparison would demonstrate bolder ambition as regards political change, resistance to domination and fighting for freedom.
Till other freedom-fighters assassinate you.
Cabral and Sen give us exemplary access into this mode of thinking:
why not add Caligula and Donald Duck?
their work is directed towards improving the lives and possibilities of those whom Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’,
If Imperialism made darkies wretched, Marxism made them more wretched yet.
the impoverished millions ravaged by famine, colonial and post-colonial brutalities and civil discord (Fanon 1961; see also Cabral 1979; and Sen 1973, 1981, 1999).
Fanon's Martinique had the sense to remain French. Its per capita income is about 25,500 dollars. This is some 2000 dollars more than Portugal.
Cabral undertook this at the helm of arguably Africa's most successful military anti-colonial revolutionary struggle, the Guinea and Cabo Verde liberation movement, Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) (Borges 2019).
But the outcome of that struggle was that Guinea-Bissau became poorer and more violent.
Sen too has become a global icon both as a highly successful economist
Manmohan is a successful economist. Sen is a Professor of vacuous shite.
and philosopher and in the development of new techniques of analysis and measurement that have been adopted by, amongst others, the United Nations (UN).
The UN is useless.
They are also both students and scholars of a period of great change in Africa and South Asia.2
Sen is alive. Cabral died long ago. He isn't studying shit.
One of their main intellectual and political influences was what one might call the ‘high-tide’ of Marxism as an alternative to capitalism and as a spur for revolutionary (and other forms of) change: Cabral in Lisbon and across Africa; Sen in Delhi, London and Oxford.
Hilarious! Sen taught some stupid shit at DSE. Nobody thought he was a fucking Naxal! Morishima, at the LSE, was a Marxist. Sen wasn't. Back then you had to know Kantorovich and Pontyragin etc. to qualify as a Marxist. Having been Maurice Dobb's pal cut no ice.
And despite this then prevalent, firm (and sometimes dogmatic) theoretical framework, neither allowed it to be the only prism through which they viewed and understood ‘reality’, as discussed in greater detail below.
Fuck had Sen to do with reality? No one heard a peep out of him during or after the Emergency. There was some story that he and Pranab Bardhan were invited to talk to Jyoti Basu in the Nineties. Nothing came of it. India has plenty of card carrying Communist professors. Sen was too stupid to be worth recruiting.
Crucially and relatedly, they both place capability and freedom at the heart of everything they espouse, not some etiolated liberal view of freedom as non-interference, but a richer, more substantive account of real freedom as effective power (Hamilton 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2019).
Cabral's effective power consisted of killing people. Sen has and had no effective power. Manmohan did. P.N Dhar did. Even Sukhamoy- cretin though he was- had a big office. Sen was never anything but a pedant.
This is the substance of the first of this article's epigraphs, which is the goal towards which Cabral's resistance to colonial domination is directed.
But we know what the Cabrals did to Guinea-Bissau- viz. fuck it over in perpetuity.
And, as suggested by the article's second epigraph, Cabral's ethics mirror Sen's.
Coz Sen's ethics feature massacring peopel- right?
Although Cabral and Sen begin from similar ethical positions and concerns with development more generally,
No. Cabral was an agronomist. Sen was a pedant.
the extent to which they remain sensitive to context and diagnosis explains a subsequent divergence, or so I shall argue. Cabral remains resolutely realist (action-guiding) in his theoretical moves: he emphasises the importance of local, practical knowledge about and for resistance in a specific context.
Nonsense! Cabral was an agent of the Warsaw pact and Cuba. They helped him fight the Portuguese who, truth be told, were poor and weak.
Sen, on the other hand, despite an emphasis on theoretical incompleteness and a ‘comparative’ critique of John Rawls on justice, cleaves to a set of universal theories or axiomatic positions that can – he assumes – guide action in every context.
Only if that action consists of doing nothing till 'impartial observers' from the Planet Pluto have been consulted after which, of course, we must evaluate the evaluation of the evaluation of the evalulation of the freedom of the freedom of the freedom of the capability of the capability of the capability of the evaluation you are engaged on. Also, Rawls Sahib should kindly tell his students that they can eat food to gain nourishment. Also, what was that bit about wiping bums? Does Adam Smith do it for you or do you have to pray to Kali Marks? It is easy to confuse the two. As Tagore said to Kabir, 'how wipe my bum hole? Khela hobe, bum bum bhole'
He remains wedded to universal accounts of reason and impartiality based on his arguments for capability expansion via social choice, public reason and rational deliberation.
How else will people understand they have the capacity to eat food and thus gain nutrition? Did Viceroy Sahib explain it to starving Bengalis in 1943? No! He was a mean fellow. That is why Tagore said to Gandhi, 'Bum bum bhole. Khela hobe.'
In short, Cabral provides a telling example of how resistance is central to overcoming injustice (in his case, that of colonial rule)
so as to impose greater injustice by killing lots of darkies.
and how to forge change on the ground for development;
by killing lots of darkies and preventing any fucking development.
while Sen submits a much more consensual view of politics in which resistance is conspicuous by its absence,
Indeed. Sen's failure to beat and sodomize Rawls drew unfavorable comment from several senior academics. Joan Robinson was far more forthcoming in that regard.
despite arguably constituting the core of a new way of rethinking development via capabilities analysis and goals driven by, amongst other things, ‘public action’.
Like nurturing the capability to feed themselves and thus gain nourishment in a wide class of merchant bankers through public actions featuring Tagore saying 'bum bum bhole' to Emperor Akbar.
The main point of this comparison is that the differences in Cabral's and Sen's contexts, goals, language and thought are shown to be as important as the similarities.
After this, we will compare Caligula and Donald Duck.
This is no surprise.
Due to they is darkies.
They may posit a similar account of the development of human capacities and powers, but, for example, they have markedly different views on political change.
No. Both thought it should be for the worse otherwise that would be like Fascism- right?
Some may think it awkward or unfair to compare the ideas of a university academic with those of a revolutionary activist.
But both were darkies! How is it unfair to compare gorillas and chimpanzees?
Cabral was fundamentally action-oriented and steeped in practical revolutionary work, whereas Sen is unequivocally a theorist.
But both wanted the economy to turn to shit. Also, did I mention they were darkies?
It may be unfair, but it is nonetheless illuminating, partly because it is disruptive of how we think about these silos: real action versus theory in thinking about politics.
Plenty of economists have theories but also take political actions- at least in Sen's part of the world. Ashok Mitra is an example. Sadly, he did not butcher any Congress supporters and then mix their blood in rice and force their mother to eat it with the result that she went stark raving mad. Like I said, economists are useless.
In any case, Cabral was no ordinary revolutionary engaged in armed resistance to colonial rule. Although his primary objective was to mobilise his compatriots for the radical realisation of his ideas, he was also an accomplished theorist and poet.
Thankfully some of them radically realized their idea that his body would be improved by having lots of bullet holes in it.
And Sen is no ordinary theorist: extraordinarily huge volumes of theoretical contributions to many fields in economics, philosophy and beyond;
every sentence of which is vacuous, stupid, shite
and he was a man of action – he has been actively involved in a whole array of practical achievements, with the World Bank and the UN at a global level, in Europe, the United States and India more specifically, changing how many practise development.
He sat on committees which achieved nothing. Manmohan achieved much. Had Sen not been so utterly useless he could have made something of Nalanda which Manmohan appointed him Chancellor of.
The comparison may be jarring for some, but that is, in part, the point: to disrupt the distinctions that provide succor to theorists of politics and development, namely, that theory cannot (and thus should not) be forced out of context, history, partial political positions and (potential) conflict.
What is the point of disrupting the distinction charitable people might make between you and a raving lunatic? Still, I have to admit, Hamilton has a point. All dem darkies look alike. You might think that's Obama but it turns out to be Osama. Also he has tits.
To assume that it can only be legitimate and persuasive if it adopts universal axiomatic positions and arguments based on reason, impartiality and the like is, I shall argue, to misunderstand one of the points of political theory:
which is that killing lots of lots of people can get you appointed President for life, unless someone shoots you first.
to use context, history, language, theoretical abstraction, moral suasion,
fellatio, terrorism, money from Drug Cartels
amongst other things, to convince your fellow citizens to think and act in one way as opposed to another, that is, to guide and inform action in a particular context and time – or, in other words, to bring about change.
Like Mamta's 'poriborton'. The change involves beating the shit out of Commies rather than the other way round.
Bringing these differences out by means of a comparison between Cabral and Sen on development and capability (Section 2),
Cabral thought people already knew that they had the capability to gain nourishment by eating tasty food. This was because he hadn't taught a course alongside Rawls and Arrow and thus was educationally backward.
freedom (Section 3),
Cabral didn't think of development as freedom because he knew development was economic whereas freedom was political.
resistance (Section 4)
Cabral thought this could be done by shooting people. Sen thinks that freedom as the development of the capability to think that freedom as the development of the capability to think that freedom as the development of the capability to think that development is the freedom of the capability to think. Either that or the other way around.
and political change (Section 5) helps to identify a distinction between realistic political theory and realism in political theory, where the latter cannot proceed without utopianism.
unless it wants to avoid a Pol Pot type 'Year Zero'.
Especially when significant change is necessary,
or significance is a necessary change or necessity is the significance of the change that it itself requires so as to escape its own horizon as the sodomization of cats by dogs while the ghost of Nigel Mandela stands by saying 'bum bum bhole' to Donald Duck.
politics is not the art of the possible,
nor the fart of the incompossible
but the art of the impossible,
because the fart of the incompossible constituted itself as the horizon of its own self-sodomization
and this is as true of change in politics in general as it is of change in development.
In other words, it isn't true at all. This crazy South African is either playing an elaborate prank on us darkies or else his country is going down the tubes faster than our brokers warned us of.
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