Bigger than Ben Hur

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2007

This book is a real tour de force (466 pages of text) and at the same time highly problematical. I found myself deeply absorbed in the detail of Klein's narratives and having to pull myself back and say 'hey, wait a minute!' all the time. In one way it tells nothing new - the theme is that free markets are incompatible with democracy (one passing reference to Polanyi on p. 23) and that crises and disasters represent opportunities for capital and indeed are necessary to keep the system going (no references at all to Marx's economic theory, frequent use of the term "creative destruction" but not one reference to Schumpeter). In another way it leaves out some important parts of the story - the Asian crisis of the late '90s was apparently based on nothing more than a rumour. No, actually there was a material disaster - an unsustainable economy that was going to crash anyway. China is made to fit the story, though I don't really think it does. The lacunae or misinterpretations of some of the cases made me wonder how strong her case was for places I know little about (Bolivia and Argentina, for example). Mind you, this is likely to be a problem for any work as ambitious as this one is - going from the Pinochet coup in Chile to the Asian tsunami, Katrina and Iraq.

Bits I liked or just found interesting:

"Disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between destruction and creation, between hurting and healing." (p. 47)

Friedman as the architect of 'shock therapy', his enthusiasm for Nixon's election (and disappointment with his domestic economic policy though - cf Krugman). "Democracy had been inhospitable to the Chicago Boys in Chile; dictatorship would prove an easier fit." (p. 63)

The Chicago Boys... believed in a form of capitalism that is purist by its very nature. Theirs is a system based entirely on a belief in 'balance' and 'order' and the need to be free of interferences and 'distortions' in order to succeed. Because of these traits, a regime committed to the faithful appplication of this ideal cannot accept the presence of competing or tempering worldviews. In order for the ideal to be achieved, it requires a monopoly on ideology; otherwise, according to the central theory, the economic signals become distorted and the entire system is thrown out of balance. (pp. 102-03)

Torture as 'curing' (pp. 111-14). Idea of society as having gangrene or cancer which must be excised.

The decoupling of 'human rights' from the systematic reasons for these abuses which was the need to 'cure' the cancer of democratic ideals in order to serve the interests of capital better.

Simone de Beauvoir quoted: "There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all pervasive system." Klein says: "there is no humane way to rule people against their will" (p. 126)

Thatcher showed that it could be done in a 'democracy' by creating a crisis. Crisis as opportunity.
Friedman 1982: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." Or Allan Meltzer: "Ideas are alternatives waiting on a crisis to serve as the catalyst of change. Friedman's model of influence was to legitimize ideas, to make them bearable, and worth trying when the opportunity comes." Klein adds: "Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones - gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply." (p. 140)

The hollowing out of the state through sub-contracting and privatization of the state itself. Klein argues that this was the real Rumsfeld-Cheney program from the start and they chose Iraq for their most thoroughgoing experiment because it was in an already-weakened condition through sanctions.

"Political cleansing" (p. 330) and "disaster apartheid" - the discarding of 25 to 60 per cent of the population, the creation of Green Zones all over the world - gated communities that leave the masses to survive as best they can in the Red Zones. The Israeli Apartheid Wall as just the latest and most sophisticated of these, creating a whole "gated country."

New reasons for the breakdown of Oslo. While most sources attribute the sheer viciousness of Israeli policy in recent years to a continuation of aggression that began in 1948 together with unremitting US support, Klein argues that the destruction of Oslo was made possible by the application of the 'shock doctine' to the FSU, leading to a mass emigration of Jews and, indeed, many with the most tenuous of claims to Jewishness trying to escape from the sudden, sharp increase in poverty. Former Soviet Jews now account for 14% of the Israeli population and many of them have not only fuelled the settlement movement in the West Bank, but also replaced Palestinian cheap labour within Israel - thus facilitating the "closure". The dramatic rise of "security exports" as the mainstay of the Israeli economy - they trebled between 1992 and 2006 (p. 436).

In general, the depressing idea that 'security' has replaced 'peace' as the desirable state of affairs.

The dramatic widening of inequality (together with increasing poverty) in Argentina, Israel and the US in the past 20 years (p. 444). Overseas parallels with Krugman's data on the US. Same in the new ex-Soviet kleptocracy of Boris Yeltsin (where some people went from zero to billionaire in the space of a decade and average life expectancy fell by 10 years). Speaking of which, she produces the stunning (to me) statistic that 46 per cent of the population of New Mexico is functionally illiterate.