Probing the free-market 'house of cards'

A year ago it appeared that the house of cards created by the financial elite had tumbled for the last time. Bastions of free-market ideology were pilloried for their blind devotion to complex mathematical models and a rather more selective blindness to human ‘externalities’. Capitalism seemed to have imploded in on itself, a victim of its own rapaciousness. We watched the anguished faces of the traders as they decoded the tragedies ahead from the strew of numbers flashing over their monitors. We watched supposed doyens like Alan Greenspan crumple in full view of a congressional committee and the world’s media. Greenspan’s apology amounted to this: he was mistaken. You would have thought that this unforgivable understatement would mark the epochal passing of the free market. Yet we have all just paid for the costliest kiss of life in history and it appears the cards have been picked up, ready to be dealt all over again.

Raj Patel’s second book, ‘The Value of Nothing’, exposes Western society’s collective and consumer-driven myopia as effectively as it refutes the fundamental principles of market ideology. Approximately the first half of the book is given over to the dissection and discarding of the principle tenets of global capitalism. Patel follows a well-trodden polemical path as he re-appropriates Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’, references J.M. Keynes and Karl Marx and continues to tick off all the old ‘landmarks’ – Iraq and Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan and each successive administration, Microsoft and McDonald's, George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs. Yet the author skilfully avoids rehashing the likes of Naomi Klein, Matt Taibbi or Joseph Stiglitz (although he cites all three) with his uniquely engaging metaphors and examples. It is hard to imagine a more disparate selection of reference points than Patel’s. Pop culture is jig-sawed into place alongside literary classics, hidden histories are used to expose modern lies and the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau share page space with Oscar Wilde, the The Price is Right TV show and a battle of wits between Volkswagen and Porsche. With some clever literary alchemy, the book's eclecticism keeps you turning its pages.

You might be sceptical at this point. As the likes of Borders (a major UK book retailer) close as casualties of the financial collapse, the bargain bins are engorged with similar diatribes. Where ‘The Value of Nothing’ might most successfully argue for a reprieve from the cut-price sticker gun is in its second half. Whilst the conclusions of previous authors tackling this subject often leave one wanting to book a place at a Swiss euthanasia clinic (John Gray is a fine exponent of the dystopian conclusion), Patel offers some rays of hope.

If ‘The Value of Nothing’ ended with its first act, the ‘dissection and discarding’ we mentioned earlier, then I would be writing a review of an excellently written, passionate and engaging piece that had earned its shelf space between hundreds of similar, excellently written, passionate and engaging treatise. Yet this is not the case. Patel chooses to bolt on a 50 per cent addendum that offers up alternative utopias to the status quo (mostly in the form of grassroots movements underway in the global South). Personally, I find Patel’s shift from assertion to hypothesis commendable and brave, but it is also the weaker part of the book. I feel the entrenchment of capitalism renders a simulacrum model of Second and Third World mobilisations as wishful thinking. Patel uses Bhutan as an example of globalisation's negative effects early in the book. Once the people of Bhutan were considered to be the happiest in the world indexically, yet the introduction of satellite television and the subsequent spillage of Western values on Bhutan’s indigenous people saw the country slip steadily down the happiness index. While both true and revealing, it would not make an attempt to remove the satellite dishes any easier, therefore, how can we apply this to the West where we have grown so used to such technologies we almost view their presence as inalienable.

It is, of course, unreasonable to criticise ‘The Value of Nothing’ for not offering a better solution to the world’s ills. Post-market society rhetoric will always be at its loudest post-financial collapse, as will a more widespread resurrection of Marxian dialogue. The dichotomy for a reviewer of ‘The Value of Nothing’ is that while the remedies Patel proffers seem at best naïve (Buddhist economics, anyone?), their sum total is the previously stated excellently written, passionate and engaging book. The founding fathers of economics all warned against the completely unfettered market. Keynes actively fought against it, and it is approaching 30 years since Stiglitz dismantled the ‘efficient market hypothesis’. Despite all this, the house of cards remains, at once towering higher, yet paradoxically more precarious than ever. ‘The Value of Nothing’ is not going to change that – indeed, I doubt any literature ever will (as compared to mass engagement and mobilisation) – but I cannot deny it will crystallise many readers' suspicions surrounding our market mania. And that cannot be a bad thing.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* 'The Value of Nothing' by Raj Patel (ISBN: 9781846272172, 2009) is published by Portobello Books, London.
* Jamie Pitman politics and economics student at Ruskin College, Oxford. In what seems like a previous life he was a docker and then a carpenter.