Review: The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

I've been busy with some family medical challenges (more on that later) but I recently made time to read and review Raj Patel's new book, The Value of Nothing, for The Globe and Mail. The review describes The Value of Nothing as a "challenging and important book" with a few caveats.

Patel's ability to synthesize ideas with first hand reporting and current affairs is excellent. The Value of Nothing addresses an epic set of themes, some of which happen to overlap with my own book, The Price of a Bargain. Patel's approach is fairly different – his is a book of ideas with some reporting, whereas mine is a book founded on reporting with some ideas – and I enjoyed learning more about topics and notions that I follow closely. As I write:

"Patel argues that our problem isn't just the size of our stimulus package, but a deep misapprehension about the relationship between society and economy that dates back well before the great crash of 2008. And, more to the point, it is our propensity to over-value destructive things – such as financial derivatives and crude oil – and under-value truly valuable things – such as sustainable food production, our global climate and other so-called externalities that market society has often neglected. This results not only in bad outcomes, but “indelible inequalities in power.” In other words, if today's quest to regain yesterday's growth fails under the stress of 21st-century challenges, it likely won't be Wall Street paying the price."

But there are some ideological ticks. Capitalism itself, suggests Patel, is the enemy: "there is nothing natural about buying and selling things for profit, and allowing markets to determine their value," he writes. Therefore solutions tainted by capitalism -- such as market mechanisms like carbon taxes -- are illegitimate. The real solution, according to Patel, are social movements who "are at the cutting edge of practical politics and economics, trying to create ways to control the world without owning it."  

I really do like Patel's work, and appreciate his efforts to refute the global economic system, but any mandate to "create ways to control the world without owning it" still sounds tremendously old-school: Maoism, or Leninism, or even America's Tea Party movement, all of whom reduce politics into a process of power control. To be fair, this is just one small passage in The Value of Nothing, but it underlines a much broader issue about about how one-dimensional, 19th-century assumptions about political change still dominate the new millenium. Specificially: the left is hardly alone in its inclination to describe politics as a process of struggle and capture, and progressives who champion new "ways to control the world" should be aware of the same ideological undercurrent within right-wing populism. I'm sure Patel and other smart radicals know the work of Michel Foucault or Antonio Gramsci, both of whom in their own ways convincingly argued that power isn't singular, nor is making change simply about wrenching control from enemies. 

But I argue that, looking closer, today's hard-line leftists and right-wing Tea Party activists may have more in common than they think: both espouse radical democracy, yet are frequently consumed (and diminished) by scapegoating enemies and strategizing control. And, most telling, both extremes suffer from vanguardism, the propensity to crusade as authoritative, last-defence voices against despotic powers while sometimes only having the slightest organic connection to the people or issues they represent. This isn't Patel's problem, to be fair -- indeed, he's a great authority on many subjects -- but there is some serious baggage that comes with being an unapologetic radical in the 21st century, if only because this language of struggle, control, and crusade is increasingly dominated by zealots and wingnuts. 

So while I agree with Patel that evangelical belief in unregulated markets is a big problem, the gleefully old-school radicalism that often defines The Value of Nothing is a bit of a problem too. Yesterday's political tropes are increasingly self-limiting. For example: where today's right-wing fringe is veering off into conspiracy theories, codified racism, and calls for armed resistance, many hard-left progressives stick to familiar struggles that tend to validate their political identity -- such as attempting to refute capitalism in the same way Karl Marx did in the 19th century -- and cede political advantage to those who can more directly speak to voter fears and frustrations. In fact, scapegoating bankers and the financial sector, as has become commonplace (thanks Obama!), and is not only fuelling America's Tea Party movement, but also may be distracting the rest of us on less obvious, but no less important, problems. As I write:

"Clearly, ideology is still the catnip of the global left, and this occasional weakness for portraying the world as a clash of malevolent ideas versus social movements often blinkers its proponents to over-focus on things that reflect a dialectical and neo-liberal bent, like the World Bank, American finance and Ayn Rand. Patel is hardly the worst offender on this point, but it does constrain his analysis. Simply put, free-market fundamentalism is an obvious factor, but it cannot explain the fullness of our crisis. Nor does it suitably explain major transformations like China's rise to power – which is literally rewriting the playbook on globalization and capitalism – or the mechanisms behind our deep dependence on affordable consumerism."

Thankfully, Patel provides some good insights as to why we don't see things more clearly. (“Seeing the world through markets not only distorts our sense of ourselves," he writes, "but projects our disability onto everyone else.”) This is a cutting edge question in the 21st century. As I often argue in my own work, our crisis -- spanning economy, environment and politics -- is not ultimately about lack of ingenuity, technology, or even spending. Ours is a crisis of view and valuation, something reflected in our ability to under-invest in climate change, while tolerating a unstable consumer economy that manufactures unemployment and rewards disruptive forms of commerce. Despite everything, Patel deserves much credit for successfully getting at the heart of this big issue. 

The review itself is actually much more positive than the political-theoretical discussions above might indicate. It's a compliment to Patel's work that big questions emerge from reading. You can read the review in full here.