“The Shock Doctrine”: Overrated Like Brett Farve, Antonio Negri, David Beckham, Apple Pie and Dane Cook
Naomi Klein is a fine writer. A writer of her skill could not be attacked by someone who can barely string together sentences into words. Thankfully, I am not questioning Klein’s literary competence, but rather her cognition (I’m not sure what’s more devastating for a writer/intellectual).
It may seem odd that with all the moronic rants by the CNBC reactionary squad, Glenn Beck and the rest of their sort, polluting our public airwaves that I would decide to discuss one of the left’s most articulate spokespersons. Someone who is a best-seller and garners media attention through writing books attacking corporate power and neoliberal ideology is a friend of mine. Hell, Naomi Klein even has enough star power to can get a famous director to make a free short-film to promote her book. Yet finishing the Shock Doctrine, a book I started when it was released all those months ago, I can’t ignore the overall lightness of her arguments. The whole premise of the Shock Doctrine is unimpressive and sensationalist.
Klein is no ordinary mainstream political writer, she has deep family roots in the left (then again, so did most of the neocons, right?) and her methodology is familiar. Klein’s grandfather was a communist who was fired by Disney for his labor organizing efforts, her mother was a progressive film director and her father resisted the Vietnam War by moving to Canada. Even though she is outwardly “just” a social democrat and not an avowed socialist her basic thought is grounded in a materialist analysis (it reeks of Marxism, in a good way).
With No Logo, Klein had the good fortune of releasing her book at a time when the mainstream media was, thanks to the mobilization of popular forces in Seattle, starting to notice the resistance to corporate globalization that had been slowly fermenting for years. No Logo chronicles the “branding” phenomenon and connects it to the struggles of global justice movement (read: anti-globalization). It’s interesting, lucid and accessible. A far cry from what progressive intellectuals normally churn out. Klein was inspired by, but doesn’t come close to matching the power of the Situationists or the Frankfurt School. But it would be absurd to fault her for that. No Logo and its sequel Fences and Windows have their shortcomings, but they are worth reading and discussing.
Her latest work The Shock Doctrine is far more problematic.
The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin, the United States (for example in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina), and the privatization of Iraq’s economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority not because they were democratically popular, but because they were pushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters or upheavals. It is implied that some of these shocks, such as the Falklands war, may have been created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in the wake of the crisis.
Throughout the piece Klein draws graphic parallels between Ewen Cameron use of electroconvulsive therapy and economic shock therapy. She vilifies the late Milton Friedman and bases much of her premise on a quote from Friedman in which he said he saw the wake of Katrina as a chance to push through the reforms he advocated. “This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the education system.” As Jonathan Chait writes, in a magazine the real left stopped reading a longtime ago:
Klein repeatedly implies that there is something immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda without explaining why this is so. After all, Friedman wanted to overhaul the New Orleans public education system because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that vouchers would work better. If you thought your house was horribly designed, and a tornado flattened it, would you rebuild it exactly as before?
Obviously one of the problems with what Chait has to say is that the public school system in New Orleans did not belong to Freidman, just like Chile wasn’t “his house either.” Yet Klein paints this kind of behavior as something that is BOTH new (the subtitle of the book is the “rise of disaster capitalism”) and only used by the neoconservative movement.
What did the Social Democrats do in Vienna after World War I? What did Lenin and Trotsky do in Russia amidst famine and war? What did the great Rosa Luxemburg die doing? What did FDR do during the Great Depression? And what must we do whenever Friedmanite policies lead to an economic crisis? The use of “shocks” to advance political projects has nothing to do with ideology. It’s true that additions to the social safety net are easier to market than slashes, but throughout the history of the political left skilled men and women have made the best of bad situations. How can the erudite Klein be blissfully ignorant of this? She can’t be. She is just being dishonest.
Chicago School economic policies have caused gross inequalities and don’t have a great track record in the developing world, there is no doubt of this, and at times people on the political right, like some of their colleagues on the political left have supported autocracy, at least on a temporary basis, in the name of their economic ideals and the “greater good”. When chronicling Pinochet, Klein at times makes it seem like dictatorship is a main part of the neoliberal project for the third world, while any Marxist would tell you bourgeois class rule is more stable and profitable in a liberal democracy.
There is enough ammunition in her topic of course to write a scathing attack on neoliberal economic policies, on the effects of a slashed social safety net and on the use of US foreign policy to protect capital. So why has Klein decided to take graphic detours into Ewen Cameron’s “shock treatments” and gone through pains to make Milton Friedman out to be some sort of Satanist responsible for any capitalist dictatorship in the past few decades (in much the same way that right-wingers boogeyman Karl Marx)? Maybe because it got her book lots of attention and caused it to sell lots of copies? Am I too cynical? Just like No Logo, The Shock Doctrine is published and copyrighted by a multinational corporation that has a pretty logo. I’m not faulting her for this, I would rather as many people as possible read about the neoliberalism, I’m just acknowledging it.
Naomi Klein is a prolific author, a genuine progressive and an ardent anti-imperialist; for this I salute her. The Shock Doctrine isn’t a bad read, I have and will continue to still recommend it to my liberal and unpoliticized friends. The real failures of free market orthodoxy and the US support for human rights abuses in countries subscribing to neoliberal orthodoxy are documented here. But for most progressives there is nothing really new or exciting here. Any left-wing academic could have written about the horrors of neoliberalism, Klein just happened to put some wrappers on it that reek of sensationalism. This true horror story is scary enough that we don’t have to insert any melodramatic plot twists into it.
Maybe it’s just me, but The Shock Doctrine just seems light—just like many of the “new” analyses from the alter-globalization movement. We don’t need someone to invent a “multitude” to carry out historic tasks, we can do fine with an international proletariat. We don’t need a yarn chronicling “the rise of disaster capitalism”, we already know about the tendencies of capital. And we really don’t need to read too deeply into The Shock Doctrine or give Naomi Klein too much undeserved respect as a theorist.
PS:
To fans of apple pie: I sincerely apologize . To fans of Dane Cook: You can read?
You really do make an excellent point that the left has also used great social change/unrest to its advantage to push through its own political program. However, I think the appropriate rebuttal is the argument that the left was REACTIVE to crises while the right has been PROACTIVE. It seems to me that her book was a tale of how the right worked to create crises in order to push through their agenda. Her discussion of electro-shock therapy served as a methaphor (and a good one I thought) to explain why societies allow for drastic policy change in times of crises. All in all, I think the Shock Doctrine did offer something new to the body of literature on political sociology and modernization. At the very least, it probably woke a few of us up to what was going on.
Hurricane Katrina wasn’t conjured up by the great wizard Milton
Friedman. It destroyed a system that he saw as failing and he said it
would be a good idea to implement what he thought was a better
solution. Especially in her interviews Klein harped on this one
Friedman quote— seems a bit ridiculous to me.
nice piece. thanks for posting about it at the lbo list.
Bhaskar Sunkara is in the company of Doug Henwood and other very serious left types in disliking The Shock Doctrine. I tend to agree with Flavio Hickel that any readable critique of neoliberalism is welcome and will do more good than harm. I gave Empire a quick gander and it soared way over my head. As for apple pie, it is delicious … you must eat it.
I just read his review:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Shock.html
It saids what I wanted to say but was too lazy to say.
My initial response to Empire: “does this book have a subject??”
Synergy! I am doing on online book discussion on The Shock Doctrine this month at work. I’d appreciate it if y’all could contribute to the discussion there as well. Here’s the link: http://brooklynbooktalk.blogspot.com/
I think your arguments come off way too harsh, especially since you have no direct analysis of her audience in a general sense. Although, I do understand where you are coming from.
I agree with Andrew B. and Flavio: the criticism here are a bit harsh and the importance of the book can not be understated. The Shock Doctrine brought radical politics and a fair critique of capitalism to many readers who may otherwise not be exposed to such beliefs. Outside of our lefty circles, many people don’t understand the extent of US intervention in Latin America to how our right-wing operates.
I also think the comparisons to FDR and the Russian Revolution miss Klein’s thesis. Klein wrote that the right-wing uses disasters to wipe clean and experiment with new ideas. FDR used the great depression to advance a progressive agenda – but only with the help of social movements. But he did not have a clean slate: he had a coalition that limited universal aspects of his reform and a Supreme Court that shut down many of his programs.
The Russian Revolution and the Communist takeover happened after a civil war. Yes, the the Soviet Communist Party did create a totally new system. But they did so only after years of struggle against the Tsar, right-wing republicans, and other left-wing forces. They didn’t use a disaster to assume power.
David, I consider myself someone not too hard to convince. I’ve moved from an aversion to the Democratic Party to a DSA/YDS consensus view and from some sort of incoherent ultra-leftism to a democratic socialist view probably indistinguishable from yours. But on this I’m not convinced, and I’ll do my best to convince you too
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You say, “The Shock Doctrine brought radical politics and fair critique of capitalism to many readers who may otherwise not be exposed to such beliefs.”
My problem is that Klein’s politics and her critique are muddled and that she is not attacking capitalism, but rather one variant of capitalism in favor of another variant for the developing world. Like I said, I still recommend the books, but with significant reservations.
One thing I don’t understand is what Klein is suggesting as an alternative; she seems to fawn for the failed policies that the Chicago School replaced.
The “neoliberal” right wing responded to hyper-inflation and a system of capitalism in countries that bred Peronist corporatism, corruption, bureaucracy and political repression.
They smashed through the failed import-substitution model and they allowed fettered productive forces to grow in a lot of these countries. This angered not only progressive forces, but also large segments of the ruling-class including the national industrial bourgeois that benefited from the old system.
The transition was chaotic and bloody—but a transition of some type was needed and the left was unable to present alternatives, except in Chile where maybe one could have developed, but in most places the choices were between 1) the post-war Keynesian model and 2) Soviet style statism. With both systems in disarray, the right-wing neoliberals had a program and replaced one type of capitalism with another more vibrant and natural form. Inflation was crushed, and wealth increased, but so did inequality and poverty.
Now, in the 21st century, we are fixing the problems of inequality and poverty, in Latin America, and Klein ends optimistic mentioning Bolivia, Venezuela and the rise of the left throughout the continent.
For whatever reason she is not attacking “capitalism”, but rather the reforms made to the import-subtitution model. Reforms needed to be made to develop the productive forces in the region…just like we need to struggle today to make the development more even and universally shared, but I’m glad we’re not stuck in the mud of Peronist capitalism anymore.
> As far as Lenin goes, he achieved power in a coup and the structures of the CP, structures of force and coercion, managed to keep Communists in power. Same as any right-wing coup. The only difference is that in Russia there was supposed to be an international revolution that would negate the state’s raison d‘être.
“Klein wrote that the right-wing uses disasters to wipe clean and experiment with new ideas. FDR used the great depression to advance a progressive agenda – but only with the help of social movements.”
> Klein also focuses on the rise of Thatcherism in England. She focuses merely on the fact that Thatcher used the Falkland Islands War to drum up an extreme form of nationalism that would enable her to crush the unions and push a right-wing economic agenda.
Let me quote Henwood, he puts it perfectly:
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“As Stuart Hall wrote during the early days of Thatcherism, she was able to tap into genuine popular resentment of union “excesses” and gain support for a huge anti-working class offensive. (If you doubt that a critique of the intrusiveness and tedium of the welfare state had popular resonance in Britain, listen to some Kinks songs from the 1970s.) Ditto talk about crime, standards, national prestige, discipline, family values—many of them irrelevant or even antithetical to her radical market agenda—the standard fare of what Hall called “authoritarian populism.”
Neoliberalism, a word that Klein uses a lot, has consistently gained electoral victories in the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India. Not all the practitioners belonged to right-wing parties: names like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Paul Keating, and Roger Douglas come to mind. Clinton and Blair barely appear in the book, and Keating and Douglas not at all.
Both Keating and Douglas enginered the neoliberal restructuring of their countries while serving as finance ministers during the 1980s—Keating in Australia and Douglas in New Zeland—as members of Labor Parties. New Zealand’s transformation is widely regarded as one of the most radical in the world. Douglas travelled the world advising anyone who’d listen on the necessity of creating a “crisis” to promote the free-marketeers’ agenda. But this is an ancient principle of statecraft; one of Klein’s chapter epigraphs is a 500-year-old gem from Machiavelli: “For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less.”
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Thatcher, Reagan Clinton and the rest used social forces within legal, liberal democratic means to enact these reforms, just like FDR used social forces to enact a keynesian agenda.
I still think The Shock Doctrine is too long on sweeping indictment and not nuanced/ sophisticated enough. I’m glad that it was well-marketed, but if there was ever really a market-place of ideas, lots of other left-wing books would have been here instead of Klein’s. Don’t get me wrong, I would much rather see The Shock Doctrine selling out at Borders than The World is Flat, but having Klein try to battle Milton Freidman is like having Thomas Freidman try to debate Karl Marx.
I was always more impressed with the ideologically grounded critiques of capitalism (in-it-of-itself) by Neil Smith. His Uneven Capital was actually just re-released (it was initially published in1984) and is well worth a look.
Wow – I’m tired. I meant his book Uneven Development. There we go . . .
You’re not tired, you just overestimate the ability of wordpress comment boxes to render HTML, I do it all the time. Apparently <i> was too easy so they had to invent a “/em”.
If you did enjoy this book, I would suggest taking a look at the BBC documentary The Trap, by Adam Curtis. It takes a look at how, while attempting to free mankind from the old bondage of bureaucracy and inefficiency, a new, more sinister, narrow, and often anti-humanistic vision popped up to replace any possible humanist renaissance. We see this most clearly portrayed in the philosophy of Isaiah Berlin, the theory of “public choice”, and the implementation of Cold War “game theory” in civil society and everyday life. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=404227395387111085&ei=cjvQSc64O4OeqgLLkbGKAQ&q=the+trap
I agree that Naomi Klein’s book is overrated. However, your retort does not address her main point. To say that a sentence like “the tree is green” is false because there are other green trees in the neighborhood doesn’t make any relevant contribution to the conversation. I think that the main point of Klein’s book -a point pervasively ignored by radical democrats in the global north- is that neo-liberalism demands a systematic repression of grass roots movements to become dominant. In most of the world, that repression was carried through by military dictatorship that counted on the tacit aproval and the not so tacit encouragement of Western democracies.
Yes, that should be common sense. Labor unions and other vehicles of social solidarity are against the neoliberal mantra. Other community organizations like private charities, churches, etc in civil society is fine within the neoliberal model, but citizens voting democratically for redistributionist parties, and forming trade unions that lead to “inflexibility” in the labor markets is against neoliberal dogma.
Socialism, populism, fascism, all forms of corporatism, communism are all to be feared according to neoliberal dogma, so yes a capitalist dictatorship is preferable to any of these forces coming to power for the neoliberals.
One of the arguments that really demonstrates how poor The Shock Doctrine is her coverage of Maggie Thachter’s use of nationalism and the war with Argentina to pursue her neoliberal agenda. She did these things to get elected, she was also against integration with Europe for this reason— this wasn’t a neoliberal thing, the neoliberals were for UK integration for Europe. She didn’t need a “shock” of a war to pursue her agenda, she was elected on the platform of smashing the trade unionists with a lot of support from middle class voters. Her own voters withdrew support when she went a bit too radical and started attacking public services like health care and tried to institute the poll tax.
“When chronicling Pinochet, Klein at times makes it seem like dictatorship is a main part of the neoliberal project for the third world, while any Marxist would tell you bourgeois class rule is more stable and profitable in a liberal democracy.”
After a year or so of learning a bit more I’d dispute this claim of mine. What about Taiwan, South Korea and other countries that seemed to perform better under dictatorships? Or, the model of authoritarian capitalism that appears to be serving the expropriators in Singapore and China so well? Of course, labor-capital relations are far from stable in China.