Just a month before Naomi Klein published No Logo in January 2000, the anti-globalization movement held its giant coming-out fracas at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Her timing was perfect. The book quickly became the movement’s unofficial bible, as well as an introductory text for every professor and journalist looking to understand the “root causes” of this violent new phenomenon. Over the last seven years, the young Canadian author has become the Noam Chomsky of her generation. A poll conducted in 2005 by England’s Prospect magazine put her at number eleven on the list of top “global intellectuals.”
But like other anti-globalization activists, Klein faced a quandary after the attacks of 9/11. How was she to square her convictions with the demonstrated reality that Islamofascism is a greater threat to our well-being than, say, McDonald’s or Wal-Mart? In her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein finesses this question in an original and ambitious way.
The war on terror, she argues, is not what it seems. Far from being a life-and-death battle between Western democracies and Islamic jihadists, it is in fact a stage-managed diversionary campaign, fought on behalf of corporate profiteers. Its goal is to create a crisis atmosphere in which the U.S. and its international lackeys can impose their favored economic policies. Indeed, as Klein sees it, this “shock doctrine” is the brutal reality behind a range of seemingly unrelated recent cataclysms, events that have allowed capitalist elites to “plunge in their hands and begin remaking the world.”
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In Klein’s telling, the event that tipped the world into the hands of corporate oligarchs—the original sin to which she repeatedly returns—was the CIA-abetted overthrow of left-wing Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. In the upheaval that followed the coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet, the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman convinced the new strongman to privatize state companies, deregulate the financial sector, tear down protectionist barriers, and eliminate price controls.
Friedman is Klein’s arch-villain. His policies in Chile, she argues, established the economic template that has guided global history to this day. Whenever working people have risen up to create an authentic socialist society, the unholy trinity of the U.S. government, Western business interests, and Friedmanite academics conspired to exploit or create a destabilizing crisis and thus to bring the commanding heights of the economy under corporate control.
The bulk of The Shock Doctrine is taken up with revisionist explanations of how the great events of our era fit this model. In the case of Poland, for instance, Klein disputes the idea that Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement and its rank-and-file supporters were hostile to Communist ideals. True, they wanted to break the government’s control of Poland’s debt-ridden economy. But their goal, she insists, was not to privatize state assets—it was to pursue a more authentic vision of socialism by putting the means of production into the hands of democratic workers’ cooperatives.
Before Solidarity could act, however, the free-market ideologues of the IMF and the U.S. Treasury moved in. “An economic meltdown and a heavy debt load, compounded by the disorientation of rapid regime change,” Klein writes, “meant that Poland was in the perfect weakened position to accept a radical shock-therapy program.” So too in post-Soviet Russia, where, she believes, citizens wanted the government to continue guaranteeing full employment and to devolve the assets of the Communist state to local workers.
Klein relates the story of South Africa’s transition to majority rule in nearly identical terms. Nelson Mandela, she reports, was dedicated to the “Freedom Charter,” a socialist blueprint that envisaged the nationalization of mines, banks, and utilities, and which promised the creation of an egalitarian workers’ utopia. But during the chaotic transition period, F.W. de Klerk and other white leaders ensured that the new black government would be beholden to multilateral entities like the IMF and GATT, which in turn coaxed the new South Africa to adopt free-market policies. “They never freed us,” a long-time anti-apartheid activist told Klein. “They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles.”
In post-Katrina New Orleans, Klein charges that right-wing operatives exploited the devastation to open charter schools, replace public housing with condominiums, and evade government regulation. In Sri Lanka, the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami allowed the government to clear coastal regions of traditional, self-reliant fishing communities in favor of high-end tourist resorts—a process tantamount, one local activist told her, to “a second tsunami of corporate globalization.”
As Klein sees it, public opinion in most societies naturally supports “social justice,” the empowerment of workers, and a heavy state role in the economy. The function of “disaster capitalism” is to undermine this tendency by scaring, distracting, or otherwise neutralizing ordinary people. Were it not for this “corporatist crusade,” Klein believes, advanced economies would have evolved to include the sort of local worker collectives once championed by leaders like Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela.
Only a few such small-scale cooperatives now exist, Klein concedes, but the idealists who run them are pointing the way to a better future, one that steers between the “fundamentalisms” of Communism and capitalism. These men and women, she writes, are “taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience—for when the next shock hits.”
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There can be no doubt that Naomi Klein is a hard-working writer. Unlike some contemporary pamphleteers, she does not pump out screeds from a laptop at Starbucks. From South Africa and Iraq to Sri Lanka and New Orleans, she has actually done legwork in the places she writes about.
What this demonstrates, however, is that all the fact-finding in the world is of no help to an observer whose view of events is systematically warped by ideology. Again and again in The Shock Doctrine, Klein reverts to the ridiculous idea that modern economies can be organized around networks of small worker collectives overseen by activist governments. Indeed, she is so enamored of this dream that she sees its almost universal failure as the prime evidence for a grand, diabolical plot led by Milton Friedman and his henchmen on Wall Street and at the IMF and WTO. It does not occur to her that the world has rejected socialism because, in the end, it was a bad idea.
As a result, The Shock Doctrine reads like an elaborate conspiracy theory, with Klein making her case largely by stitching together grandiose generalizations, incriminating factoids, and supporting quotations that she has gleaned from interviews with like-minded activists. Consider, for example, her treatment of Iraq, a country that has been “auctioned off” in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall. In one passage, she seizes on the offhand remarks of a few U.S. officials to argue that they allowed widespread looting in April 2003 because they sought “to radically downsize the [Iraqi] state and privatize its assets.” More ludicrously, she suggests that Iraq’s elections in late 2003 were canceled not because of the country’s unsettled political and security situation but because “Green Zone corporatists” were worried about an obscure poll suggesting that Iraqis might vote for parties promising to create “more government jobs.”
Where China is concerned, Klein’s analysis is no less bizarre. The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, she argues, was not really a confrontation between the country’s Communist establishment and reform-minded students. Rather, it was an anti-globalization protest, pitting young Chinese socialists against Beijing’s plans to implement “unregulated capitalism” and turn the country into “a sprawling export zone.” Her proof? An interview with a single oddball veteran of the protests, plus the incriminating fact that Deng Xiaoping once invited Milton Friedman to lecture Chinese civil servants about capitalism.
Perhaps the most outrageous section of Klein’s book deals with Israel, where, she alleges, “the rapid expansion of the high-tech security economy [has] created a powerful appetite inside [the country’s] wealthy and most powerful sectors for abandoning peace in favor of fighting a continual, and continuously expanding, war on terror.” She backs up this theory by noting that the value of Israel’s annual exports of counterterrorism-related products has risen to $1.2 billion. What she does not disclose is that the total value of Israel’s annual exports is more than $40 billion, within a gross domestic product of some $200 billion. The notion that Israel has an economic interest in continued suicide bombings and rocket attacks is nothing short of lunatic.
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Will any of this prevent The Shock Doctrine from repeating the success of No Logo? Probably not. The book plays powerfully to the idea that globalization has failed the world’s poor, a claim that, despite the economic booms under way in China, India, and other parts of the developing world, is now the received wisdom among many Western intellectuals. Even Joseph Stiglitz, a one-time World Bank chief economist who has become a strident critic of free-market economics and globalization, felt compelled, in a review for the New York Times, to offer some words of praise for Klein’s rantings.
The Shock Doctrine will be popular with the many leftists who, like Klein herself, believe that a mysterious right-wing cabal runs the world and is responsible for all its evils. A one-size-fits-all explanation is certainly a great comfort, making for ready answers to every question and sparing those who espouse it from having to sort out the complex reality of the world we actually inhabit. The pity is that the audience for such pathetic and insidious stuff has become, or remains, so large.
