Raj Patel | |
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Born | 1972 (age 51–52) [1] London, England [1] |
Occupation | Economist, writer |
Nationality | British, person of Indian origin |
Education | University of Oxford London School of Economics Cornell University [2] |
Notable works | The Value of Nothing Stuffed and Starved ; (with Jason Moore) A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet |
Website | |
rajpatel |
Rajeev [2] "Raj" Patel (born 1972) is a British academic, journalist, activist and writer [3] who has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the United States for extended periods. He has been referred to as "the rock star of social justice writing." [4]
Born to a mother from Kenya and a father from Fiji, [5] [6] [7] he grew up in Golders Green in north-west London where his family ran a corner shop. [8]
Patel received a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), from Oxford, and a master's degree from the London School of Economics, and gained his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2002. [3] [9]
As part of his academic training, Patel worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations. [3] He has since become an outspoken public critic of all of these organisations, and reports having been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against his former employers. [3] [5] [10]
Patel is an educator and academic. He has written articles and books. He is possibly best known for his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. [11] In 2009, he published The Value of Nothing [12] which was on The New York Times best-seller list during February 2010. [13] [14] In 2017, he published, with co-author Jason W. Moore , A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press).
He has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin. Patel is listed as a Research Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs of the University of Texas at Austin. [2]
Patel was one of many organizers in the 1999 protests in Seattle, Washington, and has organised in support of food sovereignty. [15] More recently he has resided and worked extensively in Zimbabwe and in South Africa. He was refused a visa extension by the Mugabe regime for his political involvement with the pro-democracy movement. He is associated through his work on food with the Via Campesina movement, and through his work on urban poverty and resistance with Abahlali baseMjondolo [16] and the now defunct Landless Peoples Movement in South Africa. [7]
Patel has written a number of criticisms of various aspects of the policies and research methods of the World Bank [17] [18] and was a co-editor, with Christopher Brooke, of the online leftist webzine The Voice of the Turtle.
In 2012, he appeared in the National Film Board of Canada documentary Payback , based on Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth , which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. [19] He appears in the documentary film A Place at the Table which opened in the US on 1 March 2013. [20]
In 2007 he was invited to give the keynote address at the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo graduation ceremony. He administers the organisation's website. [21] In 2008 he was asked to testify on the global food crisis before the House Financial Services Committee in the USA. [3] In 2009 he joined the advisory board of Corporate Accountability International's Value the Meal campaign. [22]
In January 2010 some adherents of Share International, following an announcement by Benjamin Creme, concluded that Patel could be the Maitreya. [23] Patel denied being the Maitreya. [23]
Patel is a libertarian socialist and has described himself as "someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies." [24] In his book The Value of Nothing he praised the grassroots participatory democracy practised in the Zapatista Councils of Good Government in southern Mexico and has advocated similar decentralist models of economic democracy and confederal administration as templates to go by for social justice movements in the global north. He described himself in 2010 as "not a communist [or socialist] ... just open minded". [25] [26]
Nonetheless, the analysis of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, published seven years later, locates its concept of "cheapness" within a Marxist framework. According to the authors, "Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can count only dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible. For capitalism, this means that the whole system thrives when powerful states and capitalists can reorganize global nature, invest as little as they can, and receive as much food, work, energy, and raw materials with as little disruption as possible." [27] This extrapolates a key formulation by Marx: “The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities.” [28]
What we should be a little taken aback by is, not that corporations are miscreants, but that there are markets in food at all. Why are there markets in food? Why is there a global market in anything? I mean global markets in food are very weird.
Patel became a US citizen on 7 January 2010. [30] [31]
In an interview with The New Yorker's Lauren Collins, he said he considers himself an atheist Hindu. [32]
Ernest Wamba dia Wamba was a prominent Congolese academic and political theorist who became a commander of the Kisangani faction of the rebel Rally for Congolese Democracy during the Second Congo War.
Cato Manor is a settlement located 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) from the city centre of Durban, South Africa.
Sam Gindin is a Canadian intellectual and activist known for his expertise on the labour movement and the economics of the automobile industry.
Abahlali baseMjondolo is a socialist shack dwellers' movement in South Africa which primarily campaigns for land, housing and dignity, to democratise society from below and against xenophobia.
Nigel Gibson is a British activist, a scholar specialising in philosophy and author whose work has focussed, in particular, on Frantz Fanon. Edward Said described Gibson's work as "rigorous and subtle". He has been described as a leading figure in Fanon scholarship.
Sibusiso Innocent Zikode is the president of the South African shack dwellers' movement, which he co-founded with others in 2005. Abahlali baseMjondolo claims to have an audited paid up membership of over 115 000 across South Africa. His politics have been described as 'anti-capitalist'. According to the Mail & Guardian "Under his stewardship, ABM has made steady gains for housing rights."
Kennedy Road is an informal settlement in Durban (eThekwini), in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Formed in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the settlement was mentioned by the African National Congress (ANC) after the end of apartheid but amenities were not improved. The site is mostly not connected to sanitation or electricity. Dissatisfaction with local councillors led to 2005 protests including a road blockade, out of which the shack dwellers movemment Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) formed. In 2009, an AbM meeting was attacked resulting in two deaths and a court case. More recently, the municipality has improved facilities and promised to relocate inhabitants.
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System is a non-fiction book written by Raj Patel. It was published in 2008 by Melville House Publishing. Stuffed and Starved looks at the inequities of the world food system from the beginning to the end of the conventional food chain, from producers to manufacturers and distributors to consumers.
No Land! No House! No Vote! is the name of a campaign by a number of poor people's movements in South Africa that calls for the boycotting of the vote and a general rejection of party politics and vote banking. The name is meant to imply that if government does not deliver on issues important to affected communities these movements will not vote.
Rubin Phillip is bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Natal. The great-grandchild of indentured labourers from Andhra Pradesh, Phillip is the first person of Indian heritage in South Africa to hold the position of Bishop of Natal. He grew up in Clairwood, a suburb of Durban with a large concentration of people of Indian descent, in a non-religious household, but converted to Christianity. He was a noted anti-apartheid activist and spent three years under house arrest in the 1970s and was banned in 1973. He was enthroned as bishop in February 2000.
The KwaZulu-Natal Elimination and Prevention of Re-emergence of Slums Act, 2007 was a provincial law dealing with land tenure and evictions in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
Zodwa Nsibande was the General Secretary of the Abahlali baseMjondolo youth league in 2009. She was critical of the impact of the FIFA 2010 World Cup on shack dwellers in Durban.
The Right to the City is a concept and slogan that emphasizes the need for inclusivity, accessibility, and democracy in urban spaces. The idea was first articulated by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la Ville, in which he argued that urban space should not be solely controlled by market forces, such as commodification and capitalism but should be shaped and governed by the citizens who inhabit it.
The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy is a book by Raj Patel about the economic crisis and its effect on consumers. It was published in 2010.
The attack on Kennedy Road in Durban, South Africa, occurred on 26 September 2009. A mob of men armed with bush knives, guns and bottles entered the Kennedy Road informal settlement searching for leaders of the shackdwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM). They looted shacks and threatened residents, before attacking a hall where a youth meeting was happening. Two people were killed and around a thousand were displaced. In the aftermath, AbM representatives such as S'bu Zikode went into hiding and thirteen AbM members were arrested.
The Constitution of South Africa protects all basic political freedoms. However, there have been many incidents of political repression, dating back to at least 2002, as well as threats of future repression in violation of this constitution leading some analysts, civil society organisations and popular movements to conclude that there is a new climate of political repression or a decline in political tolerance.
There have been many political assassinations in post-apartheid South Africa. In 2013 it was reported that there had been more than 450 political assassinations in the province of KwaZulu-Natal since the end of apartheid in 1994. In July 2013 the Daily Maverick reported that there had been "59 political murders in the last five years". In August 2016 it was reported that there had been at least twenty political assassinations in the run up to the local government elections on the 3rd of August that year, most of them in KwaZulu-Natal.
In March 2013 around a thousand people occupied a piece of land in Cato Crest, Durban and named it Marikana after the Marikana miners' strike. Mayor James Nxumalo blamed the occupation on migrants from the Eastern Cape. He was strongly criticised for this by the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo who said that "The City Hall is red with blood".
Ayanda Ngila (1992–2022), was a land activist, a prominent leader in the shack dweller's movement Abahlali baseMjondolo and deputy chairperson of its eKhenana Commune. He was assassinated on 8 March 2022.
Lindokuhle Mnguni was a land activist and a prominent leader in the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. He was chairperson of the movement's youth league as well as the chairperson of the eKhenana Commune. He was a leader of eKhenana's food sovereignty project which sought to make the commune more self-sustaining and independent. He was assassinated on 8 August 2022.
Me, I'm not a socialist, I'm just open-minded. But I think that we need to look at solutions that have happened in the past for us adequately to be able to come up with better ideas for the future, because this one, the ideas we have right now, really aren't working.
Patel grew up a "God-fearing Hindu," but now calls himself an "atheist Hindu."