Is the Notion of Human Development Capitalocentric?

The very concept of human development as it is used today in the mainstream neoclassical economic and, also in practice (as it is used by UNDP to construct Human Development Index) is based upon Amartya Sen’s capability approach. And hence, it also incorporates Sen’s notion of Development as freedom. The question is which freedom. We know in a capitalistic economic space a human being is generally envisaged as direct producer that is, he/she is the creator of discretionary wealth in terms of creating surplus value for the sake of productive capitalists and for capital accumulation thereby. In the neoliberal space such direct producers are to be homo economicus—the term which was used first in the nineteenth century by some political economists in the context of the works of John Stuart Mill. To be homo economicus the economic man must be self-sufficiently efficient meaning capable of producing surplus value (the term used here in Marxian sense) given his/her level of education and skill, a certain basic quality of health and in the process he/she is supposed to take care of his/her well-being meaning capable of improving his/her quality of life—the “quality” of which is erected on the basis of his/her ability to satisfy his/her own self-interest (as is propounded by Adam Smith). Here, the connotation of human development is very much based upon certain basic conditions of market economy where market is constructed as panacea of all ills in the society including the development of individual human being in the capitalist society. In this paper an attempt is made to disinter the concept of human development from a class-focused Marxist framework as developed by Resnick and Wolff in 1987 in their seminal work Knowledge and Class. In doing this there is an endeavour to have a take on Sen’s concept of (human) development as freedom and strive to find out how the very idea of human development as it is today used in the official circle (UNDP and like) all over the world is guided by capitalocentric logic.