Cancer and its treatment, however, were not allowed to stand in the way of the joys of the bookstalls on College Street and conversations with friends in the justly celebrated Indian Coffee House. Indeed, it is striking how regular classes and tutorials at Presidency College seem marginal in his remembrances compared to the impact of discussions over “Marx-obsessed” coffee with his student peers. Like most of his friends, he was very much on the left. Sen particularly enjoyed finding merit in Marx’s “labour theory of value” (“which appeared to many to be naïve and simplistic”) because, principally through reading Maurice Dobb’s 1937 classic, Political Economy and Capitalism, Sen learned early the importance of distinguishing “theories of labour value from a theory of price determination”. “Dobb,” says Sen, “argued that the labour theory of value” brings into focus Marx’s emphasis on labour as the key factor of production and was in fact “a factual description of a socio—economic relationship” which, says Sen, “reflects a particular—and important—perspective in which to see the relationship between different social agents—workers, capitalists and so on”. Moreover, in his scathing Critique of the Gotha Programme of Germany’s nascent Social Democratic Party, Marx ends by denouncing the SDP for seeing human beings “only as workers, and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored”. From that is, as Sen found, a short leap to the exhortation in the Communist Manifesto that Marx wrote in 1848 with its resounding call for “Workers of the World Unite”. Sen sees in that call that Marx ensured that “there is no obliteration of the fact that every worker is also a human being.” This, in Sen’s view, “clearly has a much greater relevance for the identity-based conflicts that so dominate the battles in our times”. And “this explains”, observes Sen, Marx’s “highly original concept of ‘objective illusions’ and ‘false consciousness’” that led seamlessly to Marx’s perception of the “workers’ lack of bargaining strength” and why they “do not receive the value of what they produce because of the way markets work” and “the huge inequalities in the ownership of the means of production”.

Dhaka

A Trip to Dhaka

Monkey Business

Amartya Sen: A Prologue to Greatness