THE SHOCK DOCTRINE
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
By Naomi Klein
Knopf Canada, 662 pages, $36.95
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A reviewer who strives to be fair to a book that strips the world down, with an all-purpose formula, to a Theory of Everything, would seem to have an easy time. Mark the places where the author takes shortcuts; unearth counterexamples; note her penchant for the sensational thrust; observe that she concentrates on facts and sources that purport to cinch her case and dodges others; indicate the spots where she contradicts herself, shifts definitions and modifies her argument in order to freshen up its plausibility; and dismiss her for the overbearing habit of smugly knowing how the world works, never mind inconvenient truths.
Then, the review writes itself. This is an especially tempting recourse when the reviewer has direct experience with the author's tendentiousness - four years ago, in fact, when she grabbed hold of a subject he knows well, a book of his own, and mangled it in a review because its argument wasn't romantic enough for her.
I have striven to resist temptation, only to be overwhelmed by evidence of Naomi Klein's analytic overreach. But before I return to the not-inconsiderable flaws in her latest effort, I must say that even if a fair-minded reader discounts her claims about the iniquity of present-day global capitalism by half, her book is still worth reading, albeit critically, and it is a pity that its tendentiousness contaminates its value. Strip away her exaggerations and enough truth remains to condemn a global status quo in which the profit-hungry make use of the fantastical theories of Chicago School economics to capitalize on natural and social disasters, disasters that, at times, at least, they anticipated, or spurred, even half-wittingly; and then, to terrify a recalcitrant population, they turn torture into policy.
To make the point, all you need do is recite the names of Augusto Pinochet, the Argentine military goons and Bush proconsul Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, among others. In these cases, corruption was not incidental, it was the cornerstone of a dictatorial, brutally unequal social order. Cherchez l'école de Chicago.
On this, to my knowledge, Klein is far more right than wrong. But the critique of free-market fantasy is nothing new. Her contribution has to do with an idea about the yoking of theory and practice. In her vision of what makes the world work, and fail to work, the U.S. government is - indeed, all U.S. governments are, not just the incumbent's - hell-bent on "strip-mining the state."
Toward that end, the joint product of corporate depredation, IMF and World Bank lending policies and Chicago advice, it turns out, is "disaster capitalism," one of the brands Klein has affixed to her book. This amounts to "orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities." To get the job done requires shock - and it is at least metaphorical, but sometimes more, that she argues that "contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum" is a "shock doctrine" that requires breaking down a resistant society, making it scream and then carving imperial politics and economics into the tabula rasa: "The idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance."
Thus, Klein writes, "From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade. But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic." In fact, for her, shock is often more than a metaphor. She begins her book with a hair-raising account of a Canadian woman whose personality was broken apart by literal shock treatment administered by Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychiatrist who had an unsavoury relationship with the CIA 50 years ago, but no evident relationship to disaster capitalism.
That doctor's equivalent in economic theory, she maintains, is Milton Friedman. "Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to [a] pristine state, Friedman dreams of de-patterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism ..."
Klein is industrious - there seems not to be a land of misery she has not touched down in, at least for a while - and she writes fluidly and with fire. But her tendentiousness is of two sorts: sins of omission and of commission, on which a brief review can touch only glancingly. Her iron argument requires, for instance, that when the Chinese government opens fire in Tiananmen Square, it is aiming to terrify the working class and "free[ing] the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone." It was after Milton Friedman visited China in 1988 that "the Chinese government began to emulate many of Pinochet's most infamous tactics" - as if Mao and the state he founded needed lessons in torture and "thought reform."
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