There are two novels that can transform a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: THE LORD OF THE RINGS and ATLAS SHRUGGED. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.
The opening paragraph of Patel's 10th chapter pretty much sums up both the author's tone and attitude toward his subject. His subject? The cover states it clearly: "How to reshape market society and redefine democracy." An ambitious assignment, but Patel certainly creates the need.
Patel's argument comes at us in two parts. First he shows us how the market society evolved and how that evolution has been to society's detriment. In the second part he makes a mild case for civil disobedience as one way to bring about the change we need to redefine democracy and offers a number of real life examples of how this "revolution" is currently working.
As I was reading this book I couldn't help but think what would happen to me if I lived during the McCarthy era. Just an admission that I had read this essay would be proof of commie status. Patel isn't completely dismissing the notion of free markets, he is just showing that the free market as it currently exists, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
The problem is that we have lived with this fact for so long that it is impossible to conceive of any other form a market could take, like for instance a Commons in the old european and early colonial sense. Nothing gives witness to this more than our reaction to the recent financial crisis. Obama and his financial experts have, according to Patel, applied the right kind of Keynesian band aids to halt the bleeding, but they haven't addressed the larger problem that markets just don't work the way the text books say they do.
One side, the neo-cons, of economic theorizing comes from Gary Becker, a protege of Milton Friedman and the whole Chicago school thing. His method involves three assumptions. One, everyone is a maximizing creature trying to amass as much stuff with as little effort as possible. Second, this maximizing Everyman does his maximizing in a market place along with all the other maximizing Everymen. Third, all these maximizing Everymen have the same preferences regardless of background.
The thing is, as I understand it, if all of us in the marketplace were indeed the rapacious maximizers that Becker theorizes the market place would work just fine. The problem is we aren't like that, but there is one "creature" in our society who is: the corporation.
Becker's views (Milton Friedman's views) have been in vogue for decades, at least since Ronald Reagan and supply side economics discredited Keynes, so is it any wonder that things seem to be stacked to favor the interests of corporations over the interests of democracy (the people) in today's market society?
Corporations, at least the way they seem to be structured, favor short-term profits over long term ethical considerations. What a shocker. For instance, Larry Summer (or is it Summers?), Obama's main economic advisor and former head of the World Bank, once wrote an inter-office memo at the World Bank wondering if it wouldn't be more efficient to take toxic waste from nuclear storage facilities and dump it off the coast of Somalia rather than wrangle over dumping it in our country. As a banker he was simply trying to be efficient (it was cheaper to dump in Somalia by a factor of 100). He didn't consider ethics or the fact that the toxic waste has in fact washed ashore in Somalia, costing much more money in clean-up and providing Somalian Pirates with a rationale for their war on international shipping.
As a further example, if the industrialized world calculated the real cost of the pollutants they spew into the atmosphere and all the ecological damage their raging consumerism causes, they would discover that their debt to the Third World dwarfs the debt owed by poor countries to rich ones. One study put the actual value at $47 trillion.
This skewed approach to value and cost began with the enclosing of the Commons. In other words, the owning of property is not an inherent condition of society. Communities used to revolve around a Commons. The Commons provided food, game, water, community, a place to be, the list goes on and on. It is when the Commons became a commodity, became owned rather than shared, that other things became commodities as well. Poor people who couldn't own their share of the commons had no choice but to sell their labor and pay rent, thus two new commodities joined the market place, and on and on.
Patel suggests that modern day capitalism has been built on the back and the lives of women because women were the last individuals to hold on to the Commons. They were the ones tending the gardens and forging a community. As the Commons started turning into private property, the persecution of witches grew. It was no coincidence that witches tended to be discovered on land where the transition from a Commons to a commodity was taking place. Since 1990, 22,000 women have been executed as witches. Almost all of those executions have happened in lands, like Zambia, where the Commons was and is in the process of being turned over for tourism.
Finally, Patel is saying that even though property and food and labor and everything else is for sale, has become a commodity, we all should have the right to have rights. Seems like a ridiculously simple statement, but it's not. At the very least, we should have the right to stay put. Even those homeless people who get displaced from every inner city whenever a big event like an Olympics or a Democratic Convention comes into town have a right to stay put, even if it does look bad on CNN and might dismay the local Chamber of Commerce. Isn't amazing that one of the agencies fighting home foreclosures and evictions, ACORN, has been under withering attack from the right-wing corporate apologists because a spy found one representative who gave potential homeowners tips on how to play the system to get approval! How awful, God knows corporations would never do something like play the system.
Like I said, Patel certainly makes a case for change. In the second part he lets us know that redefining democracy for the twenty-first century will require us all to become Athenians in a sense. Athens didn't have elections. Citizens took turns governing and administering. This required that everyone be responsible to everyone else by keeping informed, volunteering, giving, debating, caring.
I guess I'm just getting beaten down by all the noise generated by the media, but I don't see a lot of responsible leadership, let alone responsible citizenship, on the horizon. On the other hand, Patel does offer a number of exciting examples of people creating their own politics and taking back power. The movement is slow and piecemeal because it seems so astronomically hard, but it bodes well for the DISTANT future.
Patel, when discussing the difficulty ahead, tells a joke about a "wandering traveler who asks the fool how best to get to the city. The fool replies: 'I wouldn't start from here if I were you.'"
Patel's book is thoughtful, readable, and teaches a lot about economics. It is a nice essay to have under your belt.
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