The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

IT’S NOT every author who can command an audience of 1,000 for a book launch. That’s what Naomi Klein got at Friends House in London on May 19. But then it’s not every author who acquires near-guru status for her critiques of global capitalism, first with No Logo in 2000 and then, last year, in The Shock Doctrine which has just been published in paperback.

Klein has argued that an alternative to global capitalism hasn’t yet succeeded not because of a lack of ideas – universal healthcare, a living wage, co-operatives and accountable public services – but because we’ve lost confidence and accepted those ideas have been tried and found wanting.

The optimism generated by the Seattle World Trade Organisation protests in 1999 and the Porto Alegre World Social Forum in 2001, where No Logo was embraced as one of the anti-globalisation movement’s central documents, is gone.

Klein, though, is still full of brio despite a barrage of attacks since the hardback publication of The Shock Doctrine. By linking the recent history of global capitalism to shock therapy, she hits home with a graphic portrayal of the obscene extremes to which capitalism will go to protect and extend its domain. She has developed the theory of disaster capitalism, a strategy which depends on desperate measures being implemented while a disoriented people take their collective eye off the ball.

The story starts with the CIA’s overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile and the despicable Pinochet régime’s campaign of terror against the people which was legitimised by the absurd economic nostrums of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of economics.

His debilitating influence was so pervasive it reached beyond Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Boris Yeltsin, where democracy lost out to the market, and to Communist China, where workers’ demands for a more equitable economic system were crushed in the massacre of Tiananmen Square. To Solidarity in Poland and post-apartheid South Africa where hopes of a socialist democracy foundered on a Friedmanite prescription of privatisation, low wages and impoverished welfare services; private affluence for  the few amidst general public squalor.

Klein’s route map stretches all the way to the Asian tsunami: in Sri Lanka reconstruction loans were tied to clearing away the old beach settlements and replacing them with tourist hotels, leaving the displaced people in abject poverty.

But it’s Klein’s analysis of Iraq that hits hardest. While Americans looked the other way, seduced by the idea of a “war on terror” – how can you fight a war against an abstract noun? – they created a city state (the “green zone”) with security and other public services handed over to Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater. In the laboratory of Iraq, she argues, capitalism has extended its writ from the privatisation of natural resources to the privatisation of that most essential of the functions of the state – security. So the hardline Republican right has at last realised its American dream of emasculating the state.

Throughout, her metaphor is torture, her enlightenment coming when she linked CIA-funded psychiatric ECT experiments at McGill University in Montreal to techniques that found their ultimate expression at Abu Ghraib.

Neo-liberalism has sought to rebrand capitalism, using democracy as camouflage, while undermining real democracy at every turn. Do neo-liberals really believe their endeavours improve others’ lives or are they simply greedy? Klein amused her listeners with her tale of an “anti-anxiety” remedy. The Republicans sought to counter the Obama phenomenon in this year’s US presidential race with a party slogan, “the change you deserve”, only to discover that copyright in this belonged to a pharmaceutical company publicising a drug for treating depression – yes, a kind of shock treatment.

Klein’s alternatives are at the embryonic stage. She cites the fragile consensus evolving in Latin America, characterised by a rejection of unrestrained monetarism and the election of leftist governments. She finds hope in Evo Morales’ resistance to the proposed secession by copper-rich Santa Cruz from Bolivia and the insistence by Rafael Correa in Ecuador that foreign investors share profits with local people. He has also introduced the idea of “ecological debt” by which Ecuador would be paid not to exploit its natural resources.

Too idealistic? Well, in the face of the cynicism of capitalist democracy, perhaps some faith in the power of resistance is needed. After all, as the meeting’s organisers – War on Want and Hands Off Iraqi Oil – reminded us, the fact that the US has still not privatised Iraq’s oil shows the limits of military might.

Just how prescient Klein has been was shown in Burma, where the junta prioritised a constitutional referendum to safeguard its power and plans to redevelop the Irrawaddy Delta while millions needed help. She may not have forced a rethink, but she does help us to understand modern capitalism’s raison d’etre.

Jim Mallory