Was Sen a Marxist?

No. He was careful to appear too stupid to be worth recruiting by the Communist Party. However, as a 'useless idiot' of a fellow traveler, it wasn't worth their while to attack him either.  

In his review of Sen's memoir, Bangladeshi economist Rehman Sobhan- who knew Sen well as an undergraduate in Cambridge- suggests that Sen was more of an orthodox Marxist than he is now willing to admit.

Sobhan writes- 

Amartya’s transition from Presidency College to Trinity College, Cambridge proceeded quite seamlessly.

Because the Communists had entrenched themselves in both places. 

He arrived with a formidable reputation, but in his first year, he maintained a rather shadowy presence at Cambridge claiming, as he later told me, that he was still rather shy (rather difficult to imagine from his later years) as befits a middle-class Bengali boy for whom English was still a third language, after Bengali and Sanskrit.

Sen can't speak Sanskrit. Few can. It is not a living language. However, it would be strange for a student of Presidency College not to speak English quite well. Moreover, his father had done his PhD in London.  His grandfather was a Judge. 

All this changed quite dramatically at the end of his first year. However, during his first year, Amartya apparently kept himself quite engaged as a student at Trinity. He had managed to impress his Director of Studies, Piero Sraffa

a Communist fellow traveler- he visited Red China in 1954- though he never joined any political party. Back in the Twenties, believing the Italian Communist party to be weak, he believed it should form a united front with the bourgeoisie against the Fascists. His friend Gramsci disagreed.  

and his much-favoured mentor, Maurice Dobb,

Who joined the British Communist party in 1922. He probably helped recruit spies like Kim Philby.  

who both remained strong influences on his thinking over the course of his professional life. Legend has it that at their first encounter, Dobb enquired from Amartya as to whether he had read Samuelson.

Samuelson was intellectually on the Left though this was not always apparent. He predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake America because central planning was more efficient. However, in the early Fifties, it wasn't clear whether he was a 'reformist' or a genuine fellow traveler.  

The young man retorted, ‘Do you mean Principles of Economics or the more advanced work, Foundations of Economics’.

The latter assumes there is no Knightian Uncertainty. But, in that case, there is no need for ordinary people to learn language or use markets or have recourse to any other type of coordinating device. The maths says there is a superior solution which mathematicians can calculate and the Police can enforce. 

He may have added that he had also read the works of Arrow

Arrow-Debreu has no Knightian Uncertainty.  

which few of his teachers in Cambridge, including Dobb, had possibly read and other works of an advanced nature not expected from a newcomer from India to the economics tripos at Cambridge.

The problem here is that rather than teach math to economists (who are stupider than physicists) you could just get a Frank Ramsey or a Von Neumann to flesh out any particular economic model.  

Involvement with the Cambridge Majlis
At the end of our first year at Cambridge, this would be the end of May 1954, the exam results put up on the notice boards outside the Convocation Hall in Kings Parade reported that Amartya and Sam Brittain had both obtained a First Class in the BA prelim exam for the economics tripos.

Birttain and his brother would have great influence over UK (and in Leon's case, European) economic policy. Sen & Co's influence over Indian economic policy was entirely mischievous.  

The Cambridge Majlis was a talking shop for South Asians. What ideology did Sen favor in its debates?

 In a debate organised by the Majlis with the Cambridge Conservative Society, we invited them to engage in a debate on ‘This House Rejects SEATO’. Progressive-minded Pakistanis and Indians were strongly opposed to the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) unleashed by John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State under the Eisenhower administration where he sought to dragoon states in the Middle East and South East Asia into military pacts designed to confront the USSR and China.

Had India joined, China would not have attacked in '62.  

Pakistan was thereby enrolled into the Baghdad Pact, centred in the Middle East, as well as SEATO, the subject matter of our debate.

Which is why Pakistan thought it could beat India in 1965 

For the debate, we fielded Amartya, Iftikhar, who Amartya ranked as the best debater he ever heard, and myself to bat for the Majlis. In my memory, we inflicted a good thrashing on the conservatives who were no match for Amartya’s strong economic arguments against the pact and Ifthikar’s brilliant eloquence.

There was no economic argument against the pact. The question was whether darkies should hand over their new-found freedom to White people in the Kremlin or whether they should get Uncle Sam to pay to make them more prosperous and powerful.

Amartya and Ifthikar, along with Sadiq al-Mahdi, later Prime Minister of Sudan, were subsequently drawn into another debate to oppose the motion that ‘This House Fears China’ with the Oxford Majlis in which Kamal Hossain, its President, Kaiser Morshed (later, Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh) and myself supported the motion. Those who did not fear China carried the day. I presume Amartya still does not fear China, nor did I then or now.

China isn't claiming territory from Bangladesh.  

Amartya was also very helpful in persuading a close family friend from his Santiniketan days, P. C. Mahalanobis, then the inspirational founder of the Indian Statistical Institute and a Member of the Indian Planning Commission to come down to Cambridge to address the Majlis on India’s Second Five-Year Plan.

Which was a disaster because it quickly ran out of money. Plans don't matter. Budgets do.  

The plan was reportedly to be based on what came to be known as the Mahalanobis–Feldman model which sought to prioritise investment in heavy industry as the route for both increasing self-reliance for the Indian economy and internalising the growth process through access to a domestic capital goods industry.

The Sen-Dobb thesis was that we should freeze the real wages of the worker and confiscate the surplus so as to put up more loss-making steel plants. Sen hadn't noticed that Indians needed to eat more so as to be more productive.  

Feldman was the Soviet economist who supposedly provided the growth model underlying a similar strategy for the USSR.

Starve the people while handing over cash to GE and GM to build big factories in your country. Shoot anybody who protests. 

Again, I recollect that Amartya did not challenge Mahalanobis either at the seminar or when we entertained him to tea later,

doing so would have destroyed his career prospects back in India 

as to the prioritisation of heavy industry over investments in health and education, as he may have done, in line with his contemporary emphasis on human development.

After moving to the UK- which he had to do because he ran off with his best friend's wife- he realized that, being a darkie, he needed to pose as a Mother Theresa type figure.  

Debates on Development Strategy
I am not sure how far Amartya was in those days a believer in the importance of accelerating and internalising economic growth in developing countries such as India or even Pakistan.

Look up the Sen-Dobb thesis. It is hilariously Stalinist.  

He did not express himself too clearly on what might have been a preferred development strategy for India.

In 1959 he explained that 'Fascists' might be able to raise growth and living standards. But that would be a bad thing because Fascists are often very religious or moral people.  

He does, however, write in his memoir of his disagreements with Joan Robinson who we both greatly admired.

She would later become a propagandist for Mao's Cultural Revolution. But, having lived in India, she was initially quite sensible.  

Robinson in those days strongly argued that the primary development strategy for developing countries should be to prioritise economic growth over distribution.

To be fair, land redistribution backed with Cooperative Banks, Seed and Fertilizer corporations etc. would have raised growth- as would unleashing the 'wage-good' sector.  

She had questioned the Sri Lankan government’s emphasis on larger investments in healthcare and education

but they had low labor costs in such Service industries. They could defeat 'Baumol Cost disease' and export high value adding services to their giant neighbor. Sadly, their Government feared the Burgers in the Army and thus weakened the military with the result that they had big Trotskyite, and later Tamil, insurrections.  

while its economic development remained low and growth rates were poor.

Sadly, Cambridge educated nutters like Bandarnaike and his more rabidly Socialist wife soon destroyed the prosperity of that Edenic isle.  

Joan Robinson made these observations about development priorities at another seminar organised during my Presidency of the Majlis to which we had invited her along with a Left-oriented Hungarian economist from Balliol College, Oxford, Thomas Balogh

a nutter who wanted to nationalize everything. Wilson made him a peer.  

as well as my former supervisor, P. T. Bauer, also a Hungarian, to discuss issues of development policy.

Michael Polanyi was superior to either.  

Amartya, in his memoir, appears to hold Bauer, a person of strong right-wing views, who was eventually elevated to a peerage by Margaret Thatcher, in high esteem, recognising him as one of the best development economists of his time.

All development economists were shit. Sen rightly praises those like Hirschman & Bauer who said so. He too, after all, was supposed to be in that dispiriting line of work. The truth is development is about Tardean mimetics- imitate those who are doing better than you. Sadly, some States can only imitate evil gangster regimes. If so, emigrate and pose as a Mother Theresa. 

We had hoped to witness an academic slugfest between two eminent protagonists, but were greatly disappointed when Bauer declined to participate in the Majlis seminar on the grounds that Balogh was not an economist, but a politician!

Fair point.  

Balogh, in the 1960s, served as an economic advisor, along with Nicholas Kaldor, to the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who elevated both of them to the House of Lords. At the seminar, I again do not recollect if Amartya or Lal Jayawardena from Sri Lanka too strongly disagreed with Robinson on her views on growth strategy or Sri Lanka’s development priorities.

Even at Cambridge, the safer course is to do apple polishing for teechur.  

Amartya goes on to write in his memoir that Robinson’s disregard for giving attention to human development was one of the grounds for his academic disagreement with her.

He is lying. At the time, the Leftist Indian wanted to do to the kisan and mazdoor what Stalin had done to the kulak and the Trade Unionist. The problem was that, in India, the Army jawan was the son of a kulak. Also he enjoyed killing Commies. As in Indonesia, Hindu and Muslim could unite to slaughter the Reds. 

His other differences with her arose over what she regarded as her definitive work, Accumulation of Capital.

Rosa Luxembourg had written a book with that title. Joan's book is slow witted shite. Capitalists consume nothing. Workers save nothing. It occurs to me that Joan and Dobb were aware of some work by Soviet economists like Strumilin. Perhaps Joan hoped that the Kremlin would read her silly book and blow a lot of kisses her way. 

Amartya does not, however, spell out in his memoir the sources of his disagreements with the arguments laid out in the Accumulation of Capital.

He was following her lead in his 'Choice of Technique'. Indians need to polish apples to get ahead.  

Interestingly, in his second and final year as an undergraduate, Amartya had sought out Robinson to be one of his supervisors. At that time she was already drafting chapters of Accumulation of Capital. Quite exceptionally for a student, as part of Robinson’s weekly supervision with Amartya, she invested him with the task of reading and commenting on each chapter she had written of her book.

Don't say the fellow hasn't paid his dues!  

Regrettable for his readers, Amartya does not say anything about the nature of his comments at that time.

The only fitting comment would have been a vigorous fart.  

I too had reached out to Robinson in my third and final year at Cambridge to supervise me. There was little chance that she would deem me worthy of commenting on her work which by this time was reaching its finishing stages.

Robinson had a soft spot for dusky youth. It was the Mem Sahib in her.  

Ideological Conflicts within the Cambridge Economics Faculty
Whatever may have been Amartya’s academic disagreement with Robinson then or later, she held Amartya in great esteem and affection from the time he entered Cambridge to her final days on earth. Amartya reciprocated this affection. As part of this relationship, Robinson perceived Amartya as an ally in the then-ongoing struggle in the economics profession between the Keynesian school of thinking, which projected a more interventionist role for the state in the management of the economy, and what was then identified as neo-classical economics which argued for a more laissez faire perspective on economic issues. According to Amartya, this academic conflict acquired the dimensions of an ideological divide at the Cambridge University economics faculty where the two schools of thought were barely on talking terms. The Keynesians were led by Professor R. F. Kahn, a direct student and disciple of Keynes, and included Robinson as well as Kaldor.

Under the Bretton Woods strait-jacket the Keynesians would prevail- at the price of periodic exchange rate crises and massive industrial unrest (caused by cost push inflation) which would be resolved by 'beer and sandwiches' at number 10. This eventually led to Ted Heath imposing a State of Emergency. Sadly, unlike Indira, he wasn't able to jail all and sundry. His chief Civil Servant had a nervous breakdown and stripped naked and rolled around on the carpet screaming about a Communist conspiracy.  

It was not clear who constituted the right-wing or how strongly they adhered to neo-classical orthodoxy. Amartya identifies Professor Denis Robertson,

who coined the term 'liquidity trap' 

a collaborator of Keynes whose early writings were indistinguishable from Keynes’s famous work on the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, as part of the conservative camp.

The two had become estranged by about 1937 

The camp may have included the likes of Mike Farrel, another of my supervisors and Harry Johnson, an international trade specialist, a mentor of our Cambridge colleague, Jagdish Bhagwati. Amartya again does not spell out the sources of Robertson’s disagreement with the Keynesians beyond observing that he was not particularly bothered by issues of distributive justice.

The World War had caused massive redistribution. Thankfully, immigrants turned up in large numbers thus turning the working class away from a 'distributive justice' which would disproportionally benefit darkies. 

Amartya does however write with great affection about Robertson’s rather laconic humour.
The conflict between the neo-classicals and Keynesians at Cambridge acquired more serious dimensions when Professor James Meade (he later emerged as the father-in-law of another distinguished Bengali economist, Partha Dasgupta, the son of a mentor of Amartya, Professor Amiya Dasgupta), was elected to a Professorship at Cambridge. Robinson and Kaldor had also been contenders for the Professorship as both had remained Readers at Cambridge for a number of years prior to the arrival of Meade. After some years, Meade was joined the faculty by another distinguished economist, Frank Hahn who shared Meade’s presumably neo-classical perspective on economics which further sharpened the ideological divide within the Cambridge faculty.

Perhaps that's what drove Joan towards Mao.  

For Robinson, this essentially academic conflict tended to be politicised and she wanted to draw Amartya into these battles as a partisan on the side of the Keynesians.

But Sen knew no macro.  

Amartya was no votary of neo-classical thinking, but did not have such hard and fast positions on those academic debates and was happy to discuss issues. He found that the depth of the divide provided little scope for debate within the Cambridge faculty. He found this retreat from public reasoning rather stultifying and came to appreciate the more open discourse in the common rooms of Harvard, MIT and Stanford where conflicting schools of thought could argue over their differences, unlike in Cambridge.

The difference is that the Brits were aware that the Commies had established a base in Cambridge and were recruiting spies. Two of the 'Cambridge Five'- Maclean and Burgess- fled to the Soviet Union in 1951.  

Amartya’s Distancing from Cambridge
A further part of Amartya’s intellectual distancing from his alma mater originated in the reluctance of the economics faculty at Cambridge to let him lecture on his emerging favourite topic of social choice.

This is because Britain had actual democratic social choice. Also, they knew that India was a shithole. Being lectured to by a darkie on democracy was taking affirmative action too far.  

In Cambridge, the faculty, headed by R. F. Kahn, viewed social choice theory as an offshoot of welfare economics which was then regarded as a ‘non-subject’ by the Cambridge faculty, in spite of the fact that one of its pioneers, R. C. Pigou, had been one of the stars of the Cambridge faculty and a long time Fellow of Kings College.

This is because England had had representative institutions for centuries. It was obvious that voters don't vote on every issue under the Sun. They chose between two or three political parties which then form administrations and try to figure of 'ways and means' of fulfilling their manifesto pledges.  

No one at Cambridge had so far worked on social choice theory or demonstrated any interest in the subject. It was only after some persuasion that Kahn gave Amartya permission to give a course of eight lectures on the subject of social choice. It was perhaps this reluctance to address a subject on which Amartya attached great importance that contributed to Amartya’s distancing from the faculty where he had forged his reputation as an economist.

But there is no evidence that non-Leftists rated him. That was the problem. Moreover the working class kept voting Tory. Also, they were starting to resent colored immigrants.  

He had been elected a Prize Fellow at Trinity College, a four-year appointment, as far back as 1958 when he was just 25 years old and he had also been appointed an Assistant Lecturer at the Economics faculty. He could have stayed on at Cambridge, where with his record of quality publications, his impressive teaching skills as well as his proximity to some of the leading figures in the faculty, he could have moved up the ladder to a professorship.

He really was a first rate teacher. However, in India, he could rise much more rapidly through the Planning Commission. His grandfather had been a Judge and his father held high official positions. Instead of shivering in a bed-sit in England, he could return to a big bungalow and chauffer driven car in India.  Obviously, this would involve pretending to be a Socialist but if you have lots of servants that is a small price to pay. 

Whilst Amartya writes of his discomfort with the Economics faculty at Cambridge, he comments on some of the enduring influences exercised over his thinking and subsequent academic trajectory. The two whom he recognises as his most significant mentors were Dobb and particularly Sraffa.

So, he was a Communist in all but name. This would give him a leg-up back in India. 

Amartya had been a great admirer of Dobb’s work from his Presidency days, on account of his Marxist perspective on economics and particularly appreciated his theoretical writings on the subject.

I suppose Sen needed to blind himself to the 'Socialist calculation debate'. Assume information is ubiquitous and costless. That way Marxism aint silly. But, your assumption also means that nobody needs to learn language or study anything or do any research.  

He could thereby engage in long discussions and present papers to Dobb that he had written. Dobb invariably read these carefully and provided extensive comments.

Because Sen was 'talent'. Ten years from now he might be unfurling the Red Flag from the roof of the Viceroy's Palace.  

Less fortunate souls such as myself

at that time the author was Pakistani. Beefy Pathans and Punjabis enjoyed slaughtering Reds. Also, them Muslims believe in God. That's so not cool.  

could only access Dobb through his course of lectures on the economic history paper in part I of the tripos, in which he lectured on the USSR economy.

Did he mention it was a slave state which workers wanted to escape from? 

His famous work on Soviet economic development was enormously educational for me and served as source material when I began my teaching career at the economics department at Dhaka University in 1957 with lectures to first-year students on the economic history of the USSR and the USA.

Socialism is very good. Without it, we can't have a really big famine in Bangladesh.  

Amartya who, in his Cambridge days, also used to cite Dobb for references on development in the USSR, in later years became more critical of this work for overstating the economic performance of the Soviet Union.

He denied there had been any famine under Stalin. 

Piero Sraffa, Amartya’s Director of Studies at Trinity, did not publish a great deal but had a really creative mind which deeply influenced Amartya’s understanding of philosophy, economics and politics.

He was utterly useless. If Frank Ramsey had lived, Econ at Cambridge might not have turned to shit. On the other hand, in the 'war between the two Cambridges', it was discovered that Samuelson was even more stupid than Sraffa. 

He writes in his memoir that, ‘between 1958 and 1963 they had long walks after lunch nearly every day where they appeared to have discussed everything under the sun’. It appears that such long walks, first with his grandfather KMS and with Sraffa played an integral role in Amartya’s learning process.

He should walk with Rahul. He would learn so much! 

In his walks with Sraffa he learnt about his teacher’s early association in the 1920’s with Antonio Gramsci in Italy, Sraffa’s home, where Sraffa wrote regularly in a Left-wing journal, L’Ordine Nuovo, edited by Gramsci and eventually joined its editorial board. Because of persecution by the Fascists, led by Mussolini, Sraffa left Italy for England at the end of the 1920s by which time he had become an important figure in the Italian Left. Gramsci was not so fortunate; he was imprisoned by Mussolini and eventually murdered while in prison.
Antonio Gramsci even today remains an inspirational ideologue for Left intellectuals around the world, but few people know of Sraffa’s links with Gramsci and the Italian Left.

Sen's second wife was related to both Sraffa and Gramsci. Sadly, after the Italians killed Mussolini they showed zero enthusiasm for Gramscian 'workers' control' of factories.  

Sraffa, notwithstanding his limited publications, influenced Amartya’s thinking in both economics and philosophy where Sraffa had also been an intellectual associate and critic of the famous philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein who was his colleague at Trinity College for many years.

It was Ramsey who showed there could be no such thing as an atomic proposition (though he seems to have reneged). Had he lived, he would have taken Cambridge down a Pragmatic path. Interestingly, Tarski rediscovered Pierce during the Thirties. Arrow was Tarski's student. Sadly, this didn't save him from the 'intensional fallacy'.  

Among the many issues, Amartya discussed with Sraffa was the issue of the position of the Left on freedom and democracy where Sraffa apparently had disagreements with Gramsci which may have influenced his decision to not directly join the Italian Communist Party.

Sraffa was Jewish. He told Gramsci that there was a lot of anti-Semitism lurking under the surface in Italy. Gramsci did not believe him. It is said Sraffa cared greatly for his mother and her extended family. The Black Shirts would have had no compunction beating them so as to avenge themselves on a Jewish egghead. 

Sraffa accorded Amartya the ultimate recognition for his maturing into an economist of consequence by inviting him, along with Dobb, to read and comment on each of the chapters of one of his forthcoming rare publication, Production of Commodities by Commodities, which was then nearing completion.

Sraffa had been educated by Marginalists rather than 'Walrasian' followers of Pareto and Baroni.  Furthermore, as Gramsci pointed out there was a neo-Kantian, idealistic, aspect to him which made it difficult to overcome his bourgeois-liberal democratic instincts. 

It should be mentioned that Sraffa's thesis was on inflation. He opposed deflationary policies on distributional grounds. Sraffa became acquainted with Keynes in the early Twenties. Such was his brilliance and detailed knowledge of Italian banking that Keynes published his article in the Economic Journal. Interestingly, a Bank which had financed the Fascists nevertheless failed. Re-reading Sraffa from the perspective of the typical London stock-broker, the message was clear. The Black Shirts must win. They must beat up the Reds in the streets. One consequence was that Sraffa was refused entry to England in 1923 and deported as an undesirable alien. It was only after Labor came to power in 1924, that Sraffa was allowed back into the country. 

In a subsequent article, also published by Keynes, Sraffa targeted a particular Bank. Mussolini had come to power and put pressure on his father. The Bank too threatened a law suit. It was at this point that Sraffa says he had to cut off times with the Communists, greatly to his parents' pleasure. This also meant he could hold academic appointments in Italy. Sadly, this meant that he moved away from Monetary theory and Banking to a 'fundamental' critique of Marshallian marginalism. Bizarrely, this meant he plumped for 'constant returns' which would later be a feature of his imbecilic 'production of commodities'. The problem here is that if everybody behaves as if constant returns apply, average cost will be higher because of inefficient scale. This will hit the bottom line and thus market cap. Indeed, speculators may price this in- unless 'animal spirits' are too strong. In either event, even if accountancy cost does not change 'opportunity cost' of funds does. That is what economists and investors need to be looking at. Sraffa himself made a killing by buying Japanese bonds during the War. As a successful speculator he understood opportunity cost. Sadly, as an economist, he chose to be blind to it. 

Sraffa's most important article came out in 1926- ‘The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions'. Essentially, he was saying monopolistic competition will be more like monopoly than perfect competition. What he missed was there would be more excess capacity- i.e. higher opportunity cost. The solution would be more product differentiation till one or two producers gain economies of scale and the rest are confined to a 'competitive fringe'. This would also explain 'duality'. 

What did Amartya imbibe from Sraffa? I think Sraffa's fundamental belief that there must be some sort of Kantian theory of value floating around waiting to be discovered which would have political implications. There were plenty of such theories- Gandhian, Fascist, Stalinist etc. Sadly, they were all shite. 

It may be that Sraffa, more than Dobbs or Robinson or even Arrow or Rawls, was Sen's true Guru. This is because Sraffa wrote little and, precisely because he was so scrupulous, what he wrote was meaningless. Sen wrote a lot precisely because he was unscrupulous- though, no doubt, his work too was meaningless. 

To conclude- was Sen a Marxist? No. He was nothing. That is the secret of success in a useless profession.