Our Economic System Needs a Re-Write

When greed trumps need
Author: Capitalism needs a rewrite
By BRUCE ERSKINE Business Reporter
The Chronicle Herald
Tue. Feb 2 - 4:53 AM


Raj Patel: ‘Modern capitalism is the anti-market.’ (ANDREA ISMERT)





RAJ PATEL, author of The Value of Nothing, a critique of the market-driven capitalist system that came crashing down in 2008, is all for markets.

"I love markets," said the author, academic and social activist who wrote the best selling Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System, in an interview from Toronto on Monday.

"We need venues for exchange and co-operation and trust," he said.

"The trouble is that modern capitalism is the anti-market. . . . It enables a few people to concentrate a great deal of power and to shove onto the rest of the world not only the consequences of their ill-advised risks but also the certainties of the ways in which they exploit nature, exploit labour — and in particular women’s labour — and kick into the future questions around environmental sustainability that our children are going to have to suffer."

A London, England, native who recently became a U.S. citizen, Mr. Patel, 38, holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a doctorate in development sociology from Cornell University.

A visiting scholar in the Center for African Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked for the World Bank and consulted for the United Nations, Mr. Patel will speak at Saint Mary’s University on Thursday as part of the university’s annual International Week, which is focusing this year on food security.

Through a wealth of historical data, some familiar and some obscure, The Value of Nothing traces the development of a capitalist system characterized by markets that are driven by profit rather than by need.

"The flaw at the heart of markets is essentially the idea that profit and corporations should govern the valuation of things and that everyone else should stand aside," he said.

Mr. Patel said the way to correct that situation, and the ills it has visited upon the world, is through more democratic control of markets as has been practised by La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement founded in 1993 by a number of American and European farmer groups that he cites at length in his book.

"The solution is to exercise more democratic control over markets by regulating, constraining and debating what it is that should be markets in the first place and allowing markets to proceed only after we’ve figured ways of living within our economic means and living with the consequences of our actions," he said.

Mr. Patel acknowledged that changing the current entrenched paradigm won’t be easy, but he sees encouraging examples of new market thinking all around.

"I’m certainly seeing a distrust of authority," he said, citing the anger in Canada about Stephen Harper’s unilateral decision to suspend Parliament.

He pointed to grassroots efforts to deal with the issue of hunger in North America as an example of new market thinking.

"In North America now, there are nearly 100 food policy councils where city officials and community activists and farmers and small businesses are getting together to figure out how to banish hunger," said Mr. Patel, who noted that one in six Americans goes hungry despite that country’s wealth.

"I’m realistic about the balance of power right now but I also see in this network of social movements that’s happening around the world real constructive solutions and the real force of organizing that I think is quite exciting."

( berskine@herald.ca)

‘The flaw at the heart of markets is essentially the idea that profit and corporations should govern the valuation of things and that everyone else should stand aside.’

RAJ PATELAuthor