Raj Patel

What do you do when you decide at the age of seven that the world is an unfair place and you need to try and change it? Raj Patel’s career has been dedicated to ending inequality. From studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, London School of Economics and Cornell, to learning about the inner workings of the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank as an intern, Raj was always going to be an activist. His writing about capitalism and contemporary politics is globally influential, and he continues to look for ways to change the political and economic systems that we live in.

Edwina Throsby: From the Sydney Opera House, this is It’s a Long Story. A podcast that uncovers the lives and stories behind the ideas.

Raj Patel: The work that I’ve been doing has always been work of amplification. My job is to fade into the background so that activists take the space that I’ve been fighting to hold.

ET: Raj Patel, welcome to It's a Long Story at the Sydney Opera House.

RP: Thank you, Edwina.

ET: You were born into a family that owned a corner shop in Golders Green in North London. What sort of community was that that you grew up in?

RP: It was a community of—I mean my earliest memories are of my family, of my extended family. My father was able to make a real go of the corner shop, and then brought over brother by brother from India, and a sister as well, and so I remember—some of my earliest memories are about having these big family gatherings with my dad's extended family.

ET: So what were your parents like? Your father was a store kid. What kind of person was he?

RP: I mean they're both whip-smart. They're really very, very intelligent and inquisitive, and you know, when I was growing up, like my dad, I have this thing where like I need something on all the time. You know, I just want information. And so he always had the radio on and the TV on and a bunch of other thing, and he was always reading and listening, and neither of them went terribly far. I mean my dad didn't make it into secondary school, and my mum made it just now to secondary school, but both of them are incredibly intelligent, really have an insatiable appetite to learn about the world, and they still do. You know, right now, wherever, you know, whatever time it is, there's definitely a telly and a radio on in our house.

ET: Why was it that they weren't able to pursue formal education?

RP: Well, poverty, and also just, you know, a broken family on my mother's side, and so it was just very hard for them to make it into secondary school or beyond.

ET: Did them growing up in poverty influence the way that they raised their own children?

RP: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean for them, they were deeply sad that they weren't able to use, you know, and learn from the university, and so for us, you know, my brother and I were tutored and given absolutely as much encouragement as we could to do well at school.

ET: You've written that—and I'm quoting you here—“First-born sons of British-Asian families aren't so much raised as fated, and as a child, I become quite comfortable being a little prince.” How do remember being treated? When you wrote that, what were you remembering?

RP: I mean I guess it was just the sort of honour and privilege of patriarchy. I mean what I was remembering was being able to, you know, to be pushed to the front of a queue where there's, you know, food to be shared at a wedding or something like that, and you know, it's like oh, it's him, whereas my brother never got that. And you know, when I remember my relationship with him, it was entirely unfair, and although pangs of that may have occurred to me at the time and certainly in reflection, now that I think about the desperate injustice of that, let alone, you know, how I sat in the community of my other cousins—

ET: Does your brother carry any resentments around that?

RP: He would be foolish not to, but you know, for as much emphasis that was given to the building of our, you know, academic abilities, emotional conversational ability still remained fairly undeveloped.

ET: Do you think that that's culturally British?

RP: I mean it's the perfect storm of British reticence and, you know, sort of Hindu inability to talk about anything emotional.

ET: You've described yourself as an atheist Hindu.

RP: There's a book that some friends from college gave me called Am I a Hindu?, and the answer is yes. It doesn't matter who you are reading the book. The answer is you're probably a Hindu, because it's such an ill-specified religion that, you know, either you're born into it or you are and you just don't know it, and that, you know, the sort of cultural histories of, you know, reading comic books about Hindu heroes and going to one temple after another, clean up. That's fairly indelible, I think, and so in so far as it's common to talk about someone being culturally Jewish, I think it's fair enough to say that I'm culturally Hindu, and though I also find it an abhorrent religion, and the more I, you know, read about it, the more I think it's desperately troubling, everything from the caste-based violence that accompanies it to the fact that you never hear anyone talk—you know, you hear about liberation theology, liberation Christianity. There's no such thing as liberation Hinduism because that would run counter to some of the very basic tenets of how the religion is currently structured. And so, you know, if you want liberation Hinduism, you have to look to organisations and religions like Sikhism, for example, which has very much a sort of social justice mission, but within Hinduism, there's not much that resonates with anything that I see myself as being in the world.

ET: Well, there isn't a huge impetus within the Hindu sort of framework for revolution when you're sort of waiting for the next life to be rewarded.

RP: Right. I mean dharma is precisely about finding what it is that your purpose is, and it turns out that your purpose is what other people tell you it is and, you know, has everything to do with where you're born and how it is that you fit within a fairly well ordained hierarchy, and as someone who doesn't like hierarchy very much, that stinks.

ET: You've spoken a lot about an event in your childhood on a family trip to India where you're in a car and a girl who was begging, a little girl who was begging, was knocking at the window, and in that moment, you became aware for the first time, really, that there was this sort of injustice, that you and your brother in the car were lucky children who weren't hungry, and this girl outside, for completely random and incomprehensible reasons—

RP: Yeah.

ET: —was far, far less fortunate. Was that followed by—was that a moment of revelation? You've spoken about it a lot.

RP: I've been reading a lot about how it is that activists have conversion experiences, I mean, well, how anyone has a conversion experience. The French philosopher Alain Badiou has this very interesting relationship with the figure of Saint Paul, for example. I mean how is that you can have this moment where it's like oh, my God, now I see that light. What's that like, and how is it that you can share that? But for me, from the inside, it didn't feel like, you know, the clouds parted and a ray of light shone down by any means. What it felt like was oh, this is not okay and it's continuing not to be okay, and it stuck with me, and insofar as something sticks with you, that, it seems to me, is what it's like to have an experience of conversion. It's not that all of sudden, you're lifted. It's just you can't rid of something. Something sits in your mind and it doesn't go. And so for me, the experience of that translated into, well, all right, we came back from India, and then a few days later, school started, and so I was renting out my toys at Kindergarten, and yeah, we got 50p or a pound or something, and we managed to send that off to famine relief. And it was that experience of like oh, yeah, well, this is okay. You know this is a start to making change and, you know, we'd watch the news and see where the famine stops. It turns out that the 50p to family relief doesn't do a whole lot, though of course that's not to say you shouldn't do it. It's just for me, it was the experience of the sensation we all have of that's not fair, and it just doesn't go away, and then, you know, the rest of my life is figuring out what to do with that.

ET: Yeah. I mean but, you know, it's not just “that's not fair”. It's “that's not fair and I might be able to do something about it”.

RP: Well, it's that's not fair and I can't not do something about it because it's not something that's going away. So you know, in a sense, it is that's—it's not a burden. It's just, you know, if we had to use sort of cliched terms, it would be like a meme or a sort of mind worm or something. It just doesn't get out of your head.

[Music interlude]

ET:  So can you trace a direct line from, you know, that kind of childhood moment recognition of injustice through to the way that your career evolved, your decision to study economics?

RP: I mean I think so, just because I—and I was looking from that time onwards to see, well, all right, what's making this fairness or this unfairness go away, and whether that was, you know, raising money for charity or volunteering.. Then when my academic abilities kind of blossomed when I was 11, then all of a sudden, I was able to sort of match the inclination with the ability, and I wanted to see what worked, and so I was interested in the social milieu in Britain at the time, which was about Thatcherism, and I was interested in who it is people were pushing back against what seemed to be palpably unfair about Thatcherism, and that meant, you know, going on the street protests and everything from the campaign for nuclear disarmament. CND was a very big part of what it was to resist the creep of militarism and injustice and Britain's participation in it, to groups that were exploring socialism and were particularly fighting fascists. Social experiments had their corollaries in other things I was looking at, and I was like oh, great. So the discipline that seems to encompass all of this is economics, and in the end, I was admitted to Oxford to study philosophy, politics, and economics. And before I got there, I changed my mind, and I said well, actually, bigger than all of these things is mathematics, and since I was good enough to be able to talk my way into the mathematics programme there, I did that instead and then realised, A, I wasn't as good as I thought I was, but A, although, you know, economics often aspires to a condition of maths, it doesn't get you anywhere in solving some of the most intractable social problems. You know, there are those who might beg to differ now in the era of big data who would be able to throw their data sets and say well, look at what it is that we're able to see about the world through mathematics, but I was developing not just an intellectual toolkit, but also a theory of change. How is it that the world actually changes? And increasingly, it seemed to me that the way the world changed was not through experts producing equations so much as people fighting in the streets, and that's why, you know, I shifted back to doing—

ET: PPE.

RP: —PPE, and particularly around philosophy, because it wasn't just about fighting in the streets, but I was still looking for that big systemic change, and so I ended up studying a lot of Spinoza, which is something I'm coming back to now because it seems that there are some very deep connexions between humans and the rest of the web of life that Spinosa was kind of first on the scene to be able of theorise in some interesting ways. And I'm excited to be able to, you know, come full circle, as it were, from this mathematical understanding through Spinoza back to where I am now.

ET: So let's get back to teenage activist Raj. As you are finding your sort of political compass, if you like, and navigating all of that, were your parents supportive of this emerging radical? What were their politics?

RP: My parents are conservative, and nonetheless, they were excited that I was thinking for myself, and they understood the sort of charitable impulse, because good conservatives do. They understand how charity works, and where I was heading was understanding that crumbs from the table are not going to cut it, and the way that they parsed what I was doing was to see it as charity, and the way that I understood it was as social change. But even now, I mean we disagree violently on politics, particularly around Hinduism, but they appreciate that, you know, where I'm coming from is a place that looks at systemic change and probably, you know, that they, in their quieter moments, might admit that systemic change is probably what's necessary.

ET: And presumably, too, as a teenager, it really honed your arguing skills if you were required to defend your position.

RP: Yeah. It certainly did, but more I think it was about—you know, I mean it's that hormonal cocktail of youthful rebellion, you know, and sort of finding out that actually taking these unpopular positions with one's parents wins the affections of, you know, them over there at the girls' school. So you know, I mean there was nothing pure about those, about this intellectual journey, at all, but nonetheless, I mean it helped to be able to have them both to push against, but also to recognise that no matter what I thought, they would still love me. I'm imagining I'm going to have that wrought on me by my family as well when, you know, my kids become stockbrokers or something.

ET: You've spoken a lot about an event in your childhood on a family trip to India where you're in a car and a girl who was begging, a little girl who was begging, was knocking at the window, and in that moment, you became aware for the first time, really, that there was this sort of injustice, that you and your brother in the car were lucky children who weren't hungry, and this girl outside, for completely random and incomprehensible reasons—

RP: Yeah.

ET: —was far, far less fortunate. Was that followed by—was that a moment of revelation? You've spoken about it a lot.

RP: I've been reading a lot about how it is that activists have conversion experiences, I mean, well, how anyone has a conversion experience. The French philosopher Alain Badiou has this very interesting relationship with the figure of Saint Paul, for example. I mean how is that you can have this moment where it's like oh, my God, now I see that light. What's that like, and how is it that you can share that? But for me, from the inside, it didn't feel like, you know, the clouds parted and a ray of light shone down by any means. What it felt like was oh, this is not okay and it's continuing not to be okay, and it stuck with me, and insofar as something sticks with you, that, it seems to me, is what it's like to have an experience of conversion. It's not that all of sudden, you're lifted. It's just you can't rid of something. Something sits in your mind and it doesn't go. And so for me, the experience of that translated into, well, all right, we came back from India, and then a few days later, school started, and so I was renting out my toys at Kindergarten, and yeah, we got 50p or a pound or something, and we managed to send that off to famine relief. And it was that experience of like oh, yeah, well, this is okay. You know this is a start to making change and, you know, we'd watch the news and see where the famine stops. It turns out that the 50p to family relief doesn't do a whole lot, though of course that's not to say you shouldn't do it. It's just for me, it was the experience of the sensation we all have of that's not fair, and it just doesn't go away, and then, you know, the rest of my life is figuring out what to do with that.

ET: Yeah. I mean but, you know, it's not just “that's not fair”. It's “that's not fair and I might be able to do something about it”.

RP: Well, it's that's not fair and I can't not do something about it because it's not something that's going away. So you know, in a sense, it is that's—it's not a burden. It's just, you know, if we had to use sort of cliched terms, it would be like a meme or a sort of mind worm or something. It just doesn't get out of your head.

[Music interlude]

ET:  So can you trace a direct line from, you know, that kind of childhood moment recognition of injustice through to the way that your career evolved, your decision to study economics?

RP: I mean I think so, just because I—and I was looking from that time onwards to see, well, all right, what's making this fairness or this unfairness go away, and whether that was, you know, raising money for charity or volunteering.. Then when my academic abilities kind of blossomed when I was 11, then all of a sudden, I was able to sort of match the inclination with the ability, and I wanted to see what worked, and so I was interested in the social milieu in Britain at the time, which was about Thatcherism, and I was interested in who it is people were pushing back against what seemed to be palpably unfair about Thatcherism, and that meant, you know, going on the street protests and everything from the campaign for nuclear disarmament. CND was a very big part of what it was to resist the creep of militarism and injustice and Britain's participation in it, to groups that were exploring socialism and were particularly fighting fascists. Social experiments had their corollaries in other things I was looking at, and I was like oh, great. So the discipline that seems to encompass all of this is economics, and in the end, I was admitted to Oxford to study philosophy, politics, and economics. And before I got there, I changed my mind, and I said well, actually, bigger than all of these things is mathematics, and since I was good enough to be able to talk my way into the mathematics programme there, I did that instead and then realised, A, I wasn't as good as I thought I was, but A, although, you know, economics often aspires to a condition of maths, it doesn't get you anywhere in solving some of the most intractable social problems. You know, there are those who might beg to differ now in the era of big data who would be able to throw their data sets and say well, look at what it is that we're able to see about the world through mathematics, but I was developing not just an intellectual toolkit, but also a theory of change. How is it that the world actually changes? And increasingly, it seemed to me that the way the world changed was not through experts producing equations so much as people fighting in the streets, and that's why, you know, I shifted back to doing—

ET: PPE.

RP: —PPE, and particularly around philosophy, because it wasn't just about fighting in the streets, but I was still looking for that big systemic change, and so I ended up studying a lot of Spinoza, which is something I'm coming back to now because it seems that there are some very deep connexions between humans and the rest of the web of life that Spinosa was kind of first on the scene to be able of theorise in some interesting ways. And I'm excited to be able to, you know, come full circle, as it were, from this mathematical understanding through Spinoza back to where I am now.

ET: So let's get back to teenage activist Raj. As you are finding your sort of political compass, if you like, and navigating all of that, were your parents supportive of this emerging radical? What were their politics?

RP: My parents are conservative, and nonetheless, they were excited that I was thinking for myself, and they understood the sort of charitable impulse, because good conservatives do. They understand how charity works, and where I was heading was understanding that crumbs from the table are not going to cut it, and the way that they parsed what I was doing was to see it as charity, and the way that I understood it was as social change. But even now, I mean we disagree violently on politics, particularly around Hinduism, but they appreciate that, you know, where I'm coming from is a place that looks at systemic change and probably, you know, that they, in their quieter moments, might admit that systemic change is probably what's necessary.

ET: And presumably, too, as a teenager, it really honed your arguing skills if you were required to defend your position.

RP: Yeah. It certainly did, but more I think it was about—you know, I mean it's that hormonal cocktail of youthful rebellion, you know, and sort of finding out that actually taking these unpopular positions with one's parents wins the affections of, you know, them over there at the girls' school. So you know, I mean there was nothing pure about those, about this intellectual journey, at all, but nonetheless, I mean it helped to be able to have them both to push against, but also to recognise that no matter what I thought, they would still love me. I'm imagining I'm going to have that wrought on me by my family as well when, you know, my kids become stockbrokers or something.