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.

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. 

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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 21^st 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.