Tandon: Inconvenient political economist

READING and writing about Yashpal Tandon, the veteran Ugandan public intellectual, reveals a fundamental anti-philosophical habit of most philosophical thinkers.

It appears that the most influential philosophers in the world have been those that have not only questioned life and the world but have also queried philosophy itself.

Aristotle, the classical philosopher of politics, made a legend of himself by totally overturning the teachings of his teacher, Plato, who believed that poets and other imaginists were to be expelled from the Republic for their useless unrealism.

The poets in the radical Aristotelian view were more important than historians in their ability to use fiction and myth to teach about reality.

In his influential, Theses on Feuerbach in 1845, Karl Marx, the philosopher of class politics made a fundamentally anti-philosophical observation to the effect that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” and changing the world could only be achieved by the proletariat not brooding philosophers.

Even Christianity, perhaps the most influential religion and moral philosophy under the sun was fortified by and flourished on its fundamentally anti-Judaism ethics.

Much like the Egyptian political economist, Samir Amin, Yash Tandon boasts about the many decades he has spent in African political activism, political economy studies, policy studies and history. The reputation for intellectual prestige and academic rigour that the University of Makerere has today is owed to such scholars as Yash Tandon, Mahmood Mamdani, Ngugi wa Thiongo and a list of others, some of whom went on to be presidents and prime ministers of their countries.

Born in 1939 and educated in the 40s and the 50s Yash Tandon was thrown into the thickness of the African struggles for liberation from colonialism and imperialism. Although educated in the classic economic philosophy of Adam Smith at the London School of Economics, Yash Tandon’s influential economic and political philosophy radically overturns the foundational theses of classical economics and development studies.

The way Tandon has departed from the thinking of classical economics and has developed his anti-imperialist political and economic philosophy is the true way of the academic heretic and intellectual dissident.

In thinking and teaching that economic development can be measured on “growth” and the Gross Development Product (GDP), Yash Tandon believes that classical economists have tragically believed their own lie. The GPD of the United States of America for instance has registered much growth whenever America has gone to war in such countries as Iraq.

Good economists have not told the world just how much the US economy has flourished on the contracts its corporations have gained in the rebuilding projects that are taking place in Iraq and other countries that America and allies would have destroyed in the first place.

The USA economy also feeds fat on the international drug trade even as the country jails in huge numbers the small players in the dark industry of narcotics. Such things as “free trade” are in reality comical myths, Yash Tandon argues.

For Yash Tandon, true economic development in the Global South should be measured on the amount of political and economic resistance to imperialism and colonial domination. The true impact of coloniality in the Global South is felt in the deep and wide levels of underdevelopment that have reduced peoples of the countries of the Global South to “internal refugees” in their own motherlands.

To struggle for development in the Global South is therefore to resist imperialism and to do everything to secure liberation from ongoing colonial domination.

Economic Theories as Ideologies

The national interests of countries of the West have, over the decades, been the root of imperialism and colonialism. Adam Smith propounded the myth of “the invisible hand” of the market forces which hides the visible interests and agendas of imperialist countries whose wealth and power is built on the poverty and misery of colonies.

When Adam Smith wrote of the wealth of nations it was not all nations of the world he had in mind but Euro-American communities.

Even John Maynard Keynes’ apparently generous “general theory” that gave power to states in the control of economies was not removed from British national and imperial interests.

All economic theories, Yash Tandon insists, have “a racist dichotomy to their ideas — emancipatory when it came to Europe, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and apartheid South Africa, and imperialist when it came to the rest of the world.”

The colonial civilising mission and its language of developmentalism and modernisation was a meta-ideology that was mobilised and deployed to conceal imperialist economic and political agendas of the West in the Global South.

The Euro-American theories of economics and development are circulated around as undisputed universal truths when in actuality they are political ideologies in the service of Empire. Developmentalist and modernist language is used to embellish vulgar imperialism and to present it as medicine when it is the poison of the ages.

Coloniality of the Washington Consensus Tandon, deceitful, imperial and cruel.

What fundamentally is Development? Rebelliously, Yash Tandon rejects Western economic and development philosophy in totality as its underlying spirit is imperial, colonial and therefore predatory. Development as the satisfaction of basic material and social needs should be self-defined by those that seek to develop themselves and their communities, not forced down their throats as wisdom from overseas. Africans should develop themselves in a political and economic climate that is free of fear of exploitation, which gives them selfconfidence and allows them to use their own cultural and political wisdoms.

In light of the long history of slavery, colonialism, imperialism and apartheid in Africa, development begins fundamentally with resistance to external domination and insistence on the freedom of Africans to independently contemplate and chart their political and economic destiny.

For this to be achieved, Yash Tandon argues, the political and economic theories of African development should not be the same as those that have been formulated and circulated by Empire.

African efforts at economic and political development should be decolonised in a way that allows people to gain confidence in themselves, to be free of the fear of exploitation, to participate in decision making and above all to be liberated from colonial and imperial domination.

Development theory and political philosophy that come as gifts from the West to the rest must be rejected for the poison that they are. Much like Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Chinua Achebe, Yash Tandon is an African thinker who has taken advantage of his western education and travel in the planet to deeply understand the workings of Empire.

For that reason, he feels, reads, thinks and writes from the deep colonial and imperial wound.

Unlike western philosophy, such thinking cannot simply be the love of wisdom; it also has to be the wisdom of love and the courage to fight for liberation.

The wealth of Yash-Tandon’s political and economic thought is its anti-philosophical and philosophy, rebellious and dissident in form and content.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa:decoloniality2016@ gmail.com.