Review: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

"I didn't sign up for a book about torture, but that's what I got" was my annoyed update when I was done with Naomi telling the story of the CIA's 1950's torture research spearheaded by Donald Ewen Cameron. The introduction of the book was pretty straight forward: neoconservatives have pushed Friedmanite neoliberal policy down the throat of people by using engineered and fake disasters. It began, Klein says, in Chile: Friedman got the US government to pay to send Chilean students to Chicago, who returned to help Pinochet overturn Allende and institute extreme laissez-faire capitalism. This process was repeated in other South American countries, and, eventually, Iraq and the United States government itself. The result is a world with soaring inequality, where we will soon all look like Israel: rich people building a wall around the poor masses to keep them out of our "green zones." Now, I'm a globalist and I read this book specifically because Klein is anti-globalization. She sees American imperialism as something that reaches out and "exploiting profits" while I see a giant redistribution machine (along the lines of Star Slate Codex, it is "the demon that wears its summoner's skin.") But despite this large difference there are a lot of areas that we can agree on: we agree that Friedman is kind of a fraud and that Keynesianism and Neokeynsianism are good economic theories. We agree that the war in Iraq was bungled and that American foreign policy has meant the death and torture of hundreds of thousands across the world. We agree that people who don't believe that governments can do good cannot govern well. But, like many disagreements on the centrist-to-far-left spectrum, there are disagreements about the sort of emphasis that people make... and then there are fallacies that people make. My first disagreement on emphasis is that Klein does not bring up racism or American ethnocentricity. Are we really to believe that Sandy Springs' secession from Atlanta was a part of class warfare, or that New Orleans was left to flood by the government because the rich could drive out? Could it be, I don't know, that the America and the American South in particular just don't care about their black people? Zooming out a little, I think that Klein's framework might be a little bit to overemphasized as a real factual thing throughout the entire tomb despite not being consistently applied: This arrow of causation that flows from "disaster to neoliberalism to crack down" simply doesn't follow in all cases. For example, Naomi uses the Chinese Tienanmen Square event to describe how capitalist policies are in direct response to neoliberalism. This is a really weird example. Firstly, the "shock" in this example would be... Mao's communism? The neoliberalism itself is in China is entirely antithetical to the Friedmanite Chicago School of Econ (I don't think Milton was that fond of currency manipulation). And the protesters themselves? They were against the party, corruption in the government- basically the entire Chinese state of affairs. People protesting against secret police probably care less about inequality than Occupy Wall Street. This lack of facts -this lack of context- is another annoying part of the Shock Doctrine. You aren't told the state of affairs before the shock (unless it is to point out how bad the shock was). You are simply told, "This place was ok, then something bad happened or somebody bad happened to it, and now it is a capitalist hellscape." This context setting is important. It's easy to say "Horrible Event A was in shadowy Organization B's economic interest" but its a lot harder to make that matter. For example, did Russia have an economic interest in retaking Crimea? Sure. Is that why they did it? No, they did it because its an easily defensible base they can use to project power. Then you have this confabulation about what "disaster" means. Disaster can mean (1) an invasion, (2) a coup, (3) a hurricane, (4) an economic meltdown. Basically, anything bad that happens will be used by X to justify a change... Duh? Like, that's basically all of history. Nothing good has ever happened by people just deciding "Let's make the world better." It has always, always, always been people saying "Holy shit this is the worst we have to change it" and "change it" can mean anything from "New Deal" to "overturn the Czar." If you turn history into a chronology of violence to achieve a political aim, then all ideologies have been culpable at one time or another. The biggest and most annoying part of this book, again, is I did not expect a torture story. Klein tries to draw the line that what happened in Chile, in Iraq, and even Katrina is a psychological torture trying to return these regions into a "blank slate". Her descriptions of the first blows in Iraq draw on the same language that she uses to describe Cameron's torture experiments. But she never shows they're morally equivalent. There is a purposefulness to Cameron's psychology. There was a intended goal and and attention to detail. Those goals and attentions to detail explicitly did not exist in the nations that she compares them to. As a conclusive nay against this book: Klein seems to group lots of disparate peoples and ideologies into one. China's movement towards capitalism is nothing like Pinochet's economic illiberalism which was nothing like Yeltsin and Putin's oligarchism which is nothing like Bush's insistence on devolution which is nothing like Israel's securitech economy. Lumping them together they're all alike because they're inherently ok with the existence of markets is like saying that Clinton and Trump are the same. It's an ok thing, but it isn't useful. The sky is blue. What suggestions does Klein bring to the table? How do we fight against the Shock Doctrine? Not many. Don't destroy governments. Allow communities to build and rebuild themselves. That latter fact is actually actionable. The Marshall Plan gave Europe the tools to build itself. Post-2004 tsunami communities that flourished flourished because they were paid. But it can be written shorter, "Don't fuck it up." I don't know how much value there is in that. But how much value is there in the book itself? Its a good popular history. If you divorce the book from the overarching worldview therein, and the conspiracies that it holds, the stories themselves are strong and they stand alone. They're warnings about the limits to trying to govern by proxy and about the damage that can be done when democracy is ignored. If you want to "shock" yourself with American atrocities, this would be a good reminder... but I bet there's a Chomsky book out there that would do it better.