Arguing that we're not nearly as selfish and self-serving as we'd like to believe, activist and academic Patel points to how we can weather the economic and ecological crises underway in The Value of Nothing.
Is the confluence of the economic crisis with the climate and food crises an auspicious moment for change?
This is one of the last moments ecologically where, if we make a profound change now, we will be able to leave a world to our children and grandchildren that is roughly familiar to what we have today. But there's nothing inevitable about us doing the right thing. The last time we went through a depression, the politics that came out were not at all progressive. Part of the motivation behind this book is to point out the dangers that lie in wait at a time like this, but also the solutions that are already being practiced, which we need to learn from in a hurry.
You describe a “countermovement” that seems more pragmatic and less rigid than neoliberalism.
It's ironic, right? The idea of the free market is that everyone can do whatever they like, and yet the dogma for the free market is profoundly centralized, whereas the movements that I point to have political principles about equality, inclusion, and human rights, [but] beyond that, the everyday politics of how to figure things out is done in a very democratic way. The Zapatistas have rotating citizens' courts that effectively act as a municipal council. They've been so successful in resolving disputes and dealing with economic planning that regular Mexicans will come to these courts because they're much fairer and more just than the Mexican legal system.
You distinguish between consumer-choice democracy and a more fully participatory version. What's the difference and how do we get more of the real thing in the U.S.?
We need to shun the idea that the only way we can shape the world is through our consumption choices. In terms of “the real thing,” I don't want to set up any imaginary perfect democracy because there's never been one. But in every courtroom in the U.S., 12 people deliberate the cases of their peers. You can see people actively engaged in building substantive change everywhere from communities of the homeless in New York to the farm workers of Immokalee, in Florida—who just had their salaries increased by 70% as a result of their organizing. As the book went to press, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics for her work on community governance. So the theory and the practice are very much alive in this country; it's one of the reasons that I'm applying to become an American citizen right now. If there's one country where it's possible to make these changes, and make democracy work best, it's going to be here.
