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 | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Picador
Binding: Paperback
Released: 2008-06-24
Sales Rank: 93
ISBN: 0312427999
Edition: 1st
Cover
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 2008-08-15 - A Wake Up Call
This is one of those books that makes you wonder when your brain went on vacation. I've been aware of corporatization and globalization for many years, but this book really helped me connect the dots. If you thought the neocons were conspiring against you, you were right. Read this book, then get angry and get even.
 2008-08-15 - Which country was the "evil empire"?
The Shock Doctrine answers many questions I have raised in recent years. Naomi Klein creates a seamless narrative of the deliberate destruction of freedoms in countries all around the world, and lays the blame squarely on Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Though it is entirely possible that not every instance she describes can be directly attibuted to the abuses of Friedmanism - and I would have preferred even more documentation - the pattern is clear as she sets it out.
This book is well written and well researched. It has changed my thinking about the history of the United States, and it makes me wonder whether we (the U.S.) hasn't done as much if not more damage to our "friends" (including Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Poland, Russia, South Korea, and others) than the former Soviet Union did to its satellites.
When did our government decide that only economic freedom was important, and that political freedom could be suppressed indefinitely?
Before Milton Friedman it was the United Fruit Company and many other meddling U.S. corporations who changed history by manipulating U.S. foreign policy. Friedman found a way to make himself look like a hero (he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) when he may rank right up there with a few infamous tyrants I might name.
 2008-08-15 - The Triumph of Desire over Reason
In 1981, after the ruthless dictator Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist Salvador Allende, free-market ideologue Friedrich von Hayek was interviewed by the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. Hayek approved of Pinochet's brutal rule, saying "Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism." It is this (my example, not hers) and related opinions of free-marketers that draw the ire of Naomi Klein in this history of market liberalization attempts around the world in the past several decades. The Chilean case is among the more egregious attempts to thwart popular will, as the University of Chicago economics department, inspired by the anti-government diatribes of Milton Friedman, intentionally set up a situation in Chile where free market principles could be imposed rapidly and completely (this is the Shock Doctrine in title of Klein's book) upon the subdued masses.
Another horrible example of the Shock Doctrine is the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) catechism that a country in the throes of crisis must slash social welfare spending before it can be given financial aid. Just this week, a report in the New Scientist (26 July 2008) showed that the result of IMF policies, there is a strong positive association between IMF aid and the incidence of childhood tuberculosis, a sensitive bellwether of general public health and well-being.
Of course, these human rights violations of free-marketers pale before the gulags and mass starvations that mark the ministrations of the communist central planners, but Klein is certainly not of that ilk. She reveals her own sympathies towards the end of the book, when she remarks that "Democratic socialism, meaning not only socialist parties brought to power through elections but also democratically run workplaces and land holdings, has worked in many regions, from Scandinavia to the thriving and historic cooperative economy in Italy's Emilia Romagna region. It was a version of this combination of democracy and socialism that Allende was attempting to bring to Chile between 19870 and 1973." (p.569)
Klein maintains that this form of democratic socialism is vastly generalizable, which accounts for the deep fear the free-marketers have of popular social initiatives. "Shock resistance," she writes, "has spread to many other former shock victims---Chile, Bolivia, China, Lebanon. And as people shed the collective fear that was first instilled with tanks and cattle prods, with sudden flights of capital and brutal cutbacks, many are demanding more democracy and more control over markets. These demands represent the greatest threat of all to Friedman's legacy, because they challenge his most central: that capitalism and freedom are part of the same individual project." (p. 565)
It would be nice if this were the case, but it most certainly is not. First, right wing free-marketers are a small group of ideologues that are treated with bemused contempt by serious students of economic policy. Milton Friedman was a brilliant economist, but he free-market rantings in his later years were simply embarrassing. There is absolutely no future in free-market economics, and it is not taught in any respectable economics department, including the University of Chicago. The modern economy is inevitably, and deeply, government regulated, and the welfare state, which redistributes huge sums from the more to the less well off, is not threatened anywhere. The IMF is indeed practically Neanderthal in its ideology and behavior, but most economists, and indeed whole governments, are hostile to its ambitions.
On the other hand, it would be nice if Klein's alternative were generally viable. Thomas Jefferson's vision of forty acres and a mule would be vindicated, albeit in a more socially organized manner. But it is not. Worker's control is a great dream (I dreamed it myself for many years), but it founders on the reality of capital diversification, which the worker-owned firm cannot handle. Cooperative land holding is just a myth, pure and simple, and always has been, throughout human history.
Like many progressives, Klein's instincts are anti-market (although even her precious cooperatives are marketing cooperatives, after all). It is a plain-faced fact that poor countries that have attempted to compete in the world market place rather than shelter themselves from it have done quite well, China and India being the most prominent. The idea that socialist cooperatives might outcompete capitalist firms has little going for it. Perhaps a country with mountainous oil revenues can play at sounding anti-capitalist (e.g., contemporary Venezuela), but the future of prosperity in virtually all poor countries depends on developing markets and state institutions that support markets in a synergistic and democratic manner. It is up to us to dirty our hands (and hearts?) to help them attain this, rather than remaining pure but ineffectual, fighting for a socialist world that, far from struggling to be born, simply cannot exist.
2008-08-13 - The Shock Doctrine
This book is a life-changing work that offers a far-reaching lens through which to understand world events over the last half century and into the 21st.
 2008-08-13 - Just Way Out There
This was probably the one book I bought, in which, I felt like I was reading a teleplay of the X-Files. Klein's thesis is that the free-market is created by a process of shocks. For example the 9/11 attacks enabled Bush to enact a series of free-market reforms that benefited a select few.
What Klein doesn't see, is that Americans, are under the impression that the free-market is good, and that way before the 9/11 attacks free-market reforms were put through by numerous adminstrations. Klein seems to think that people are unaware of this, but they are not, they are just as guilty as the corporations she lacerates.
The one book that gives a comphrensive non-nutcase view of the free-market is Mindful Economics. This book is so much better than Kleins. I just wish that more people were aware that there is a Left, of which I am a member, that doesn't see collusion under every rock, so please if you must read this book, do so with the aformentioned warning.
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