Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine

Some things are very hard to understand

For instance, how Naomi Klein was able to feel good about Argentina in 2002:

The only time she has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002, when the political system had virtually disintegrated—during the time that she and Lewis were filming “The Take.” “That moment in Argentina was an incredible time because a vacuum opened up,” she says. “They had thrown out four Presidents in two weeks, and they had no idea what to do. Every institution was in crisis. The politicians were hiding in their homes. When they came out, housewives attacked them with brooms. And, walking around Buenos Aires at night, there were meetings on every other street corner. Every plaza where there was a streetlight, people were meeting under it and talking about what to do about the external debt, I swear to God. Groups of one hundred or five hundred people. And organizing buying groceries together because they could get cheaper prices, setting up barters because the currency was worthless. It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen.”

This is the same Argentina which had just collapsed into a severe economic crisis, with a more than doubling of the share of population in extreme poverty and a 10 percent decline in GDP. I wonder how many Argentines were feeling equally euphoric.

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vimothy said:

I've not read the book... ...But I am extremely allergic to Ms Klein.

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The only time she has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002, when the political system had virtually disintegrated—during the time that she and Lewis were filming “The Take.” “That moment in Argentina was an incredible time...

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I think you have missed the point of her comments.

Klein was celebrating the fact that those people affected by the crisis took direct action to help themselves. They developed popular institutions and developed solidarity and mutual aid in the process.

They started to create something better than the system which caused economic collapse.

Which is her point.

Presumably, what the Argentine people should have done was simply have passively waited until their government acted and meekly accepted whatever costs the ruling elite decided was required to get neo-liberalism going again?

I fail to see that would have been a good thing to do. Perhaps you could explain why it would have been?

So, please, it is obvious that Klein is NOT celebrating the economic crisis. She is celebrating the popular response to that crisis.

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The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

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droid said:

Id suggest that you take the criticism of those who have not even read (or skimmed!) her books

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vimothy said:

I don't have the time to read every book before deciding if it's worth reading. But based on your summary, I'd still say her thesis is simplistic and wrong.

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Naomi Klein is confused. She has written a tough attack on capitalism's capacity to insist that public policy be run wholly in its own interests and its conspiratorial capacity to capitalise on all forms of disaster and social distress to get its way. Fine. 'Disaster capitalism' is an insightful way of looking at how the free marketeers have spread the gospel. Sometimes you cheer her on, but nowhere does she concede that markets can have good results as well as bad. Nowhere does she explore what those circumstances may be and why economic freedom is so appealing to so many. And nowhere does she set out an alternative manifesto for running economies and societies.

In her delusional, Manichaean world view, privatisation, free markets, private property, consumer freedom, the profit motive and economic freedom are just other terms for corporate self-enrichment, denial of voice, limitation of citizenship, inequality and, sometimes, even torture. The discredited electro-shock psychological treatment of the Fifties, we learn, informed the thought system of the free marketeers; it is guilt by association and assertion rather than proof, a weaknesses of too much of the book.

Nothing good can ever come from globalisation, which is just more capitalism. Democracy, however, is a halcyon world of political and economic co-operation, citizen voice and engagement, with a freely arrived- at assertion of the common interest in which most think along the same lines as, say, Naomi Klein. She and free-market economist Milton Friedman, whom she has in her sights, are mirror images of each other in the absolutist categories in which they think.

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So The Shock Doctrine is a lost opportunity. It is hardly new that disasters and shocks are often triggers of change; her insight is to apply the thesis to turbo-capitalism and its ideologues. If Klein had been fairer, she would have had a smarter thesis that could genuinely have changed the intellectual climate. As it is, she will be dismissed by her critics as a confused ranter. We need critics of free-market fundamentalism to do better than that.

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vimothy said:

I guess you must mean the article Rodrik links to, which I did read, but not recently, not that it's really relevant. You called it reasonable -- if you have a summary in which Klein's work does not appear to be simplistic and wrong, please post it.

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droid said:

Ha.. well I was baiting you there a bit I admit. but Im afraid the onus is on you to prove her thesis 'simplistic and wrong' (but of course youd really have to read the book to do this).

You have asserted this is a fact with absolutely no evidence to back it up and you are now asking for me to disprove your assertion, a pretty ridiculous position really...

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droid said:

Look. Klein wasnt paid by a think tank to write this book and she doesnt work for a vested interest, so all Im really saying here is that you should read the book prior to dismissing it out of hand. Is that such a radical position?

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droid said:

"'the west' and its little helpers are an unremitting source of all that is wrong - facts are simply pieces of the jigsaw to be put into that framework."

But again - this opinion is based on what exactly? Have you actually read Chomsky (its a gross distortion in his case) or Klein or Seymour - or just their critics?

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