(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[politics] It's been seven years since Naomi Klein became the anti-globalization gobbler and the new social movements' favorite guru. She had written No Logo, a title that, ironically, became an identity marker among the young and radical. In the Canadian activist celebrity's new book, which will be published in Norwegian in a few weeks, the refrain may be less sobering, but at least as indispensable.
The Shock Doctrine is more than an "important book". It is more than "thorough", "challenging", "engaged", "original", or whatever punctual adjective one should choose, and is rather among the few books that can be easily rejected, even for those who disagree on both terms and conclusions.
Large fall height
Not only has Klein and her small army of assistants and lawyers (who demanded original documents to defend her against any lawsuits) bothered to check the facts in the usual revelations of cynicism in the global economy, and yet found an unusual amount of filth and dishonesty. The concepts of "shock doctrine" and "disaster capitalism" are also important contributions to a contemporary diagnosis – even if one were to problematize them after thinking for a while.
What really raises the project's fall, however, is the attempt to reformulate the history of the last 30 years. Klein criticizes established frameworks for political thinking, such as the connection between democracy and capitalism (she thinks free trade is primarily implemented through authoritarian means), the ideological implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union (rumors of the death of socialism are deliberately exaggerated) and found somewhere a global learning process that makes the economic horse courses more humane than before (thus the "neo-liberal" ideology disclaims responsibility for the suffering and misery inflicted on the world in its name).
The crisis as an opportunity
The author's main point is that we are no longer in the same boat. Instead, the growing crises, whether coups and wars or hurricanes and tsunamis, have created profit opportunities for the few and given the powerful the opportunity to carry out unpopular liberal reforms. In the words of the main villain and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman: «Only a crisis… produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. »
As this particular free trade dogmatist's ideas have "been around" in recent decades, penetrating both international financial institutions and Western governments, the victims are hit by another shock in the wake of the crises, according to Klein. She thinks of the economic shock therapy, with its conditions of privatization and budget cuts, characterized by scavenger-like multinational companies throwing themselves over the remnants.
Weapons and caviar
Klein follows the emergence of this eerie new world order. She identifies the starting point of dictator Augusto Pinochet's Chile and the preliminary crescendo in Iraq, where the war itself has become a money machine for disaster profiteers. She has also been to Argentina, China, South Africa and Russia, where Boris Yeltsin used tanks against parliament to force through the free trade bonanza that created the gang of powerful oligarchs. The financial crisis in Asia was deliberately prolonged and used to open up the relatively protected economies, she writes, and in Sri Lanka the government refused to allow fishermen to return to the beaches after the tsunami, so that the rich hotel guests would have more space. Thus, the absolute losers of crisis capitalism stood against the absolute winners. According to Klein, the wings do not represent two continents, but two centuries.
One of the most striking indicators is the so-called "guns & caviar" index. Previously, when sales of guns increased, sales of private jets (caviar) decreased. Well. That was before.
From Iraq to New Orleans, both security missions and reconstruction contracts are now awarded to companies such as Halliburton. The Pentagon alone pays this industry $ 230 billion a year. It is no longer a question of free competition, but of an intricate mix of money and politics. Klein calls it "corporatism." Among the mafiosos we find people like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, both archetypal disaster profiteers.
It all fits together very well, in a consistent line of development. Klein says, for example, that the British military used the code name "Operation Corporate" during the Falklands War in 1982. Coincidentally? Hardly.
Brave but one-sided
There is little doubt that The Shock Doctrine points out matters worthy of criticism, not least with regard to the privatization of the war in Iraq and that crisis management is now left to the business community. But the author probably exaggerates the planning zeal of the disaster profiteers. That they should pursue anti-climate policy and terror-promoting warfare to create more crises, on which they can then make money, is more than manic.
Moreover, only a fragment of the story is told. Klein, for example, does not mention so-called "failed states" such as Somalia or Zimbabwe, where liberalization pressure is less, while reports of concern about the countries' destabilizing role come almost weekly, from Washington, the mecca of crisis capitalism in Klein's eyes. Reducing Iraq's conflicts to the economy, or claiming that China's economic growth does not serve few Chinese other than the party nomenclature and its sons, will also be one-sided, bordering on the stupid.
Klein also links the effects of the economic shocks to torture. Nor is it entirely successful. Although Klein undoubtedly delivers interesting perspectives on the nature of torture and constantly reveals CIA interference, any similarity quickly remains only a superficial similarity when the comparison crosses the line between individual and collective level. Even with a good pen and warm commitment, one can not blur the difference between psychological and social processes.
Unclear and not very constructive
The consequences of such analytical creativity are also seen in the fact that the book's key concepts become more easily obscured. The shock doctrine is, on the one hand, a strategy, which is admittedly cynical, but nevertheless has often been part of the political game. It has also been used by the left, as when economist John Maynard Keynes persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to implement the New Deal in the 1930s after the stock market crash of 1929. On the other hand, this doctrine is almost described as something the neoliberals have boiled down to. own hand. When economic shock therapy and the shock effect of torture are also included in the concept, it breaks its own framework, and becomes less fruitful, analytically speaking.
As long as Klein agrees with Friedman that crises create opportunities for change, it is also partly the left's responsibility that free trade dogma has had such an impact. Unfortunately, Klein does not significantly compensate for the practical-political drought of ideas. Those who have wondered exactly what other world is possible (and desirable) in the eyes of the anti-globalization movement are still getting crumbs.
Admittedly, there are some vague declarations of support in Keynes' direction, and a relatively clear rejection of both authoritarian communism and xenophobic elements in the anti-globalization movement. But first and foremost, Klein longs for the "third way" that was shut down when the Friedmanites gained influence over the IMF, the World Bank and the US government. When it comes to current practical-political role models, she is left with a motley assembly of people like Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and – yes, in fact – Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. It is rather doubtful whether they represent a completely problem-free alternative.
