Letting go of Amartya Sen (a brief explanation)

If you studied politics at York, then your early political enlightenment probably involved a massive dollop of Amartya Sen. I always used to say that you could pass any exam, so long as you said ‘neo-liberalism is rubbish’ and threw in something about Sen.

 

On first encounter, as a young student, Sen seems like a breath of fresh air, shaking up the notion that the poor simply have less wealth than the rich. From Sen’s perspective, an individual who suffers poverty or disadvantage lacks the capacity to aspire or to achieve; opportunities are closed to her in virtue of her social or environmental circumstances.

 

The idea that to develop is to increase the freedoms, or life-choices, available to the worst-off is an appealing one, and one that informed much of my development theorising over the years. I still hold that a recognition that the poor lack social capital as well as material goods is vital to a solid conception of poverty and underdevelopment.

 

However, the point at which Sen and I must now part ways here: Sen’s theory suggests that development means reducing obstacles that prevent some people from having the opportunity or capacity to achieve the kinds of things they aspire to. I object that this individualistic approach to poverty reduction does not address the relational nature of poverty, or the injustice of hierarchical social and labour structures in which power and capital are inherently unequal.

 

By ‘poverty is relational’ I mean that to be poor is not to simply fall below a quantifiable level of material or even social goods, but to be in a disadvantageous relationship to others; there is only poverty if there is wealth. For Sen, development is about levelling the playing field so that everyone has the tools at their disposal to have a chance of achieving their heterogenous goals. Whilst this is fairer than a situation where some have many and varied opportunities and others have very little hope of agency in the shape of their lives, it does not change the fact that in a capitalist, patriarchal structure there will always be some who are better off than others.

 

At it’s core, capitalist structure requires that some sell their labour a low wage and others profit from those people’s labour. In a patriarchal structure, women are poor in relation to men, as their unpaid labour is needed to reproduce the household. Sen’s approach allows some people the opportunity to change their position in relations of wealth and poverty, power and disempowerment, but he does not challenge the structures that mean wealth and power cannot be attained by all, simultaneously.

 

A real development vision would seek to reduce relational poverty, not simply increase ability for persons to change their positions within unequal relations.

 

So, Sen, I have to let you go. Whist it is brilliant that you ushered into the mainstream a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be poor, it is not enough to address the agency of individuals without addressing the context of injustice within which they operate.