The Value of Nothing Stuffed and Starved; (with Jason Moore) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
Rajeev[2] "Raj" Patel (born 1972) is a British academic, journalist, activist and writer[3] who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United States for extended periods. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing."[4]
As part of his academic training, Patel worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations.[3] He has since become an outspoken public critic of all of these organisations, and reports having been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against his former employers.[3][5][10]
Raj Patel (r) confronts Glen Nayager of the South African Police at an Abahlali baseMjondolo protest in Durban.
Patel was one of many organizers in the 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington, and has organised in support of food sovereignty.[15] More recently he has resided and worked extensively in Zimbabwe and in South Africa. He was refused a visa extension by the Mugabe regime for his political involvement with the pro-democracy movement. He is associated through his work on food with the Via Campesina movement, and through his work on urban poverty and resistance with Abahlali baseMjondolo[16] and the now defunct Landless Peoples Movement in South Africa.[7]
Patel has written a number of criticisms of various aspects of the policies and research methods of the World Bank[17][18] and was a co-editor, with Christopher Brooke, of the online leftist webzine The Voice of the Turtle.
In 2007 he was invited to give the keynote address at the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo graduation ceremony. He administers the organisation's website.[21] In 2008 he was asked to testify on the global food crisis before the House Financial Services Committee in the USA.[3] In 2009 he joined the advisory board of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign.[22]
Nonetheless, the analysis of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, published seven years later, locates its concept of "cheapness" within a Marxist framework. According to the authors, "Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible."[27] This extrapolates a key formulation by Marx: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities.”[28]
Quotes
What we should be a little taken aback by is, not that corporations are miscreants, but that there are markets in food at all. Why are there markets in food? Why is there a global market in anything? I mean global markets in food are very weird.
^Patel, Raj (25 January 2010). "Raj Patel". Tavis Smiley. KCET. Archived from the original on 28 March 2010 – via PBS.org. Me, I'm not a socialist, I'm just open-minded. But I think that we need to look at solutions that have happened in the past for us adequately to be able to come up with better ideas for the future, because this one, the ideas we have right now, really aren't working.
^A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (U. of California Press, 2017), p. 21.
^Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Vintage, 1977), p. 777.
^Collins, Lauren (29 November 2010). "Are you the Messiah?". The New Yorker. Retrieved 29 July 2012. Patel grew up a "God-fearing Hindu," but now calls himself an "atheist Hindu."