Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine

[padraig (u.s.)]

I think that even if you come from the tribe you represent, your interests and the tribe's interests are very different.

this is a fair point. what I really meant is as it relates to the representative's own self-interest.

 

[vimothy]

Sorry padraig -- I've lost the thread a bit. What were we talking about?

 

[vimothy]

Josef -- well said.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Its a very British preoccupation, certainly... Class is understood very differently in the US and Europe. The British model is often very mystifying.

everyone here is "middle class" in some form or another unless you're like a Fortune 500 CEO or abjectly poor (there are of course quite a few more of the latter than the former). I don't mean that people actually are "middle class" but that that's what they identify as. "upper middle" or "lower middle" generally. I read an article a few months ago in my local newspaper about this very thing (yes it amazed me too, an American newspaper 1) still functioning & 2) writing about class), some study that was done at the local prestigious university (funnily enough the U of Chicago as it happens) about this very question where they asked people with a broad range of backgrounds/income levels what class they were. I remember being somewhat flummoxed that a single mother of five on both welfare & food stamps described herself as "lower middle class" - which I mean, if that makes her feel better then go for it - just that our tradition of working class pride - which was always I reckon more of a Euro import a homegrown American - is essentially nonexistant. of course as josef points out;

Actually, the opposite occurred, and the gradients of class are now far more complex and internally variegated then they were in Marx's own time. Unions today possess capital, and investments. But of course, you know all this.

which, & excuse my ignorance here if I'm wrong, was a major part of the post-WWII "bargain" between Capital & Labor was it not? e.g. "you don't strike & in return you'll get two cars & a house in the suburbs". of course that bargain left out MANY sectors of workers, namely anyone who wasn't in a union, but it neutralized pretty effectively the organized power of labor here & as well as splitting off unions from the rest of labor, a lot of workers are actively hostile towards unions, which is understandable as they generally don't really have too much to do with the interests of most workers. anyway imo this stuff all goes into the myth of everyone here being "middle class".

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Sorry padraig -- I've lost the thread a bit. What were we talking about?

representatives & what ties them to those they're representing. it's like 2 pages back.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

De Botton may even have a more sophisticated understanding of class than Marx and (some of) his followers. Max Weber certainly did: the need to work is also linked to status - its not just a question of providing basic economic amenities, but also of receiving a share of the social product, and the prestige that comes with it. If the worker is defined as someone possessing no status or social product at all (what Spivak calls the subaltern) we can pursue this question further. But this would entail talking about hard empirical facts - the condition, for example, of sex slaves - and of taking practical steps to combat that alienation. But this is not a topic that the intellectual advocates of the worker by and large wish to pursue, preferring to remain within the confines of their own status games and symbolic polemics against their intra-bourgeois enemies. Rendering the gesture of staging a claim on the basis of universal justice, I think, for this reason, a decoy.

yeah this is ace, really.

 

[vimothy]

Speaking as a mother

Speaking on behalf of any abstract category is problematic. "Work" is meant to be understood, as suggested, in a binary Marxist sense: the workers work, the owners of capital lap it up. But who are these workers? As soon as you look at them in any detail, the categories collapse into one another. The claim to seek universal justice (as opposed to practicing mere philosophy) really involves another claim, which is in fact this taxonomy dividing us into workers and the owners of capital. Moreover, this effects of this claim produces benefits for the claimant(s) -- not necessarily monetary benefits, but then, there are other forms of capital...

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

also tbf I think you have to distinguish btwn academics & activists - there is of course some overlap. this is where you get, amongst other things, Naomi Klein, a journalist firmly on the activist side of things, getting excoriated (mostly fairly, it seems) for her shite grasp of the academic side.

not all advocates of the working class (or "related" issuess) are locked up in ivory towers. there's still people out there doing actual organizing & stuff. there's of course a trade-off pretty often between pragmatism & theory.

 

[vimothy]

To take a topical example, I was recently listening to a talk given by Gilles Keppel at the RSA. He was discussing the failure of multiculturalism as a policy in the UK. The problem, as he identified it, is that while the self-appointed figure-heads of supposedly distinct/discrete immigrant communities retain (or capture) the power to speak on their behalf, the rest of the community remains locked into this identity (as "Muslims", as "Bangladesh", and so on). The benefits to the community leaders in this relationship are quite clear, but the benefits to the community are less obvious.

 

[josef k.]

One figure, interestingly, who did pursue very concrete steps in the pragmatic direction suggested above was Michel Foucault, enemy of all abstract-universal intellectual partisans and the practice of speaking on behalf of others, who in 1971 organized the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), as a way to enable the voices of prisoners themselves to be heard. Other similar groups include organizations of sex workers like COSWAS in Taipei and SANS in Sweden. The enemy of these latter groups is often in the main liberal-feminist pressure groups, who, arguing on the basis that sex work is inherently exploitative and alienating, criminalize it, and therefore effect to expose actual workers to far worse conditions of labor. The politics of good intentions...

 

[vimothy]

I think that you can probably extend that analogy. There are lots of trade-offs. For instance, the imposition of tariffs on imports -- often proposed by western NGOs and unions -- from countries lacking in certain labour standards.

 

[crackerjack]

The Naomi Klein complex

Here you go Baboon, someone likes her

he complexity of Naomi Klein's portrayal of the rise of disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, has won its author the inaugural £50,000 Warwick prize for writing.

The biennial prize, run by Warwick University, is promising to be one of the most unusual prizes on the books calendar, not least because it will tackle a different theme every two years, with "complexity" chosen as its initial focus. Chair of judges and author of "weird fiction" China Miéville, praised The Shock Doctrine as a "brilliant, provocative, outstandingly written investigation into some of the great outrages of our time" which has "started many debates, and will start many more". The book charts Klein's four-year investigation into moments of collective crisis, such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, dubbing the ways in which they are exploited by global corporations "disaster capitalism".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/24/naomi-klein-warwick-prize

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The benefits to the community leaders in this relationship are quite clear, but the benefits to the community are less obvious.

exactly. I'd extend that out to to any community & its' leaders (self-appointed or not) - to a varying degree of course, those immigrant communities you're talking about are probably in especially precarious positions - & there are also individual exceptions but really you're giving people power & then asking them to exercise it magnanimously for the greater benefit.

this reminds me of the Irish (my people) coming to the U.S. in the 19th century - a lot of traditional avenues for advancement were denied to them so they quickly went into urban politics (see also black people here after Civil Rights, the flipside to the Panthers & that) & that's where you get Boss Tweed & James Michael Curley & all that. a fine example of a lot of this stuff - tribal representatives who don't necessarly reprent the interests of their charges but when they do it's usually cause of tribal ties or self-serving interests.

 

[josef k.]

Two quick points -

"Naomi Klein, a journalist firmly on the activist side of things, getting excoriated (mostly fairly, it seems) for her shite grasp of the academic side."

The problem with Klein seems to me not her lack of facility with academic matters, but a shoehorning rhetorical strategy which consists in painting her enemy - the doctrine of neo-liberalism - as a more-or-less evil monster, to be slain. I don't think this is the best way to organize against neo-liberalism, for the reason that it plunges the whole problematic into an (intellectual) combat between good and evil, which is highly misleading.

"I think that you can probably extend that analogy. There are lots of trade-offs. For instance, the imposition of tariffs on imports -- often proposed by western NGOs and unions -- from countries lacking in certain labour standards."

What is difficult is when political and economic trade-offs are being made for psychological reasons - solutions which (as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it) "feel good rather than are good." As with the example of the liberal denunciation of sex work, which is anchored by a certain set of moral values about what it is acceptable for people to do with their bodies, our bodies, bodies that we identify with. At what cost, this desire of the radical intelligentsia to continue to think of themselves as the instrument of the good?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

One figure, interestingly, who did pursue very concrete steps in the pragmatic direction suggested above was Michel Foucault, enemy of all abstract-universal intellectual partisans...

that's pretty cool actually I didn't know that about M. Foucalt.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

"Naomi Klein, a journalist firmly on the activist side of things, getting excoriated (mostly fairly, it seems) for her shite grasp of the academic side."

The problem with Klein seems to me not her lack of facility with academic matters, but a shoehorning rhetorical strategy which consists in painting her enemy - the doctrine of neo-liberalism - as a more-or-less evil monster, to be slain. I don't think this is the best way to organize against neo-liberalism, for the reason that it plunges the whole problematic into an (intellectual) combat between good and evil, which is highly misleading.

yeh but it's ever so much more compelling than reams & reams of boring, highly technical trade issues, isn't it. I dunno I think perhaps this is different on my side of the Atlantic too, where intellectuals have never really held the sway that they do in Europe (though even there not as much as 20 or 30 yrs ago right?) - Chomksy is a rare exception - I mean a book like The Shock Doctrine is going to be fodder for the Limbaughs & Hannitys and fodder in another way for their liberal counterparts. No one here really pays attentiont to abstract intellectual combats.

 

[john eden]

also tbf I think you have to distinguish btwn academics & activists - there is of course some overlap. this is where you get, amongst other things, Naomi Klein, a journalist firmly on the activist side of things, getting excoriated (mostly fairly, it seems) for her shite grasp of the academic side.

not all advocates of the working class (or "related" issuess) are locked up in ivory towers. there's still people out there doing actual organizing & stuff. there's of course a trade-off pretty often between pragmatism & theory.

I've not read her new book but it seems to me that she falls between two stools - there were some criticisms of No Logo from the activist community in terms of reporting things like Reclaim The Streets and J18 quite superficially. So she is shot by boths sides, heh heh.

I am very interested in this stuff about representation and will try to read back in due course. The stuff about "community leaders" and the muslim community (and their relationship with New Labour and the trots) is the subject of an interesting article in the current Aufheben (good english language mag out of Brighton, not online).

 

[josef k.]

Incidentally, the polemic against representation - understood in a deeper sense - was one of the main strands of post-structuralist philosophy, especially in the work of Deleuze and Foucault. The problem for them became one of presentation - of how things objectively work, rather than of what they might be said to be working for.

So, for instance, the question of architecture for Foucault-influenced critic would be how it works in space, how it arranges space, how it channels movement, whereas the question for a Marxist critic would be: What concealed forces does it form betray?

 

[vimothy]

"The possibility of metaphor is disappearing in every sphere."
Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil

 

[josef k.]

But the possibility of simile is increasing... as in the work of Roberto Bolano, for instance, where everything is always like, or as if, something else.

For instance:

“One night she met an ex-student of her husband's who recognized her at once as if in his university days he had been in love with her.” Or elsewhere: “And yes, in fact, they went to the lamb barbecue and their movements were measured and cautious as if they were three astronauts recently arrived on a planet about which nothing was known for sure.”

But to pursue simile, you need to drop the authorial pretense implied by metaphor - the authority of the author to pronounce on what "being" is...