The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Book Review: A chilling point of view on globalization that, if accurate, must make us angry and ashamed.
Summary: 4 Stars
This is an important book which deserves to be read and considered carefully when forming our view on the issue of the practical and moral application of Corporate Globalization, which surely is one of the most significant changes to world order that has taken place in the last 25 years or less.
We have all learned over time that we must be careful in our quest for the truth; that we must weigh with a healthy amount of skepticism the facts as presented to us by various writers; that we must be cautious about unquestioningly accepting any particular interpretation of history, or more recent or current issues, as being fair, accurate or even honest. Naomi Klein is a radical lady. Anyone who has read her book "No Logo" will already know this. To me she comes across sometimes as an advocate of a deeply held personal point of view rather than as a fully dispassionate objective reporter. I have a sense at times that some of the facts on the other side of the debate are glossed over somewhat. I have some misgivings about the validity of a point of view that, as she presents it, seems to have only one side. All her bad guys are in one corner while the good guys are in the other. I really don't think the world is that black and white. Nevertheless......
Having stated those reservations I would say that Naomi Klein sets out for us a chilling account of the workings and influences of the laissez faire economics of the Chicago School, as expounded in the "sink-or-swim" theories of the Noble Prize winning economist Milton Friedman. Ms Klein relates how Friedmanite economics were initially tested in real life in Chile, with horrific results, subsequent to the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973. In other accounts she details how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund subsequently went on to undermine the economic sovereignty of many nations by imposing Friedmanite ideology on them as a condition of support - the IMF was created in the wing of the UN, after the 2nd World War, to provide support to threatened economies and thus to preserve world stability. It was not formed to promote any specific economic ideology. But that is what happened.
She outlines many other examples of what she describes as the devastating effects of corporate globalization in action - in Argentina; Brazil; Bolivia; Uruguay; Indonesia; Russia and Poland. She describes her interpretation of "disaster capitalism" as manifested in the aftermath of the massive tsunami of 2004, in the present day corporate management of "project Iraq" and "opportunity New Orleans". She claims that the current US administration (Bush/Cheney et al) have effectively privatized the US government - a staggering thought which she supports very well with her arguments. If her facts as related are accurate, if her account tells the tale of what really happened, and is happening today, then we must make ourselves fully aware of the lengths to which greed will drive the exponents of the "free marketplace" and of the suffering that they are prepared to cause in pursuit of their economic ideology and ultimately in the acquisition of incredible wealth. The world used to be hijacked by the one with the strongest arm, the biggest sword; now it is the turn of some politicians and the big corporate bosses. That's basically her story. It's fairly convincing and definitely worth reading.
Book Review: A twisted and frequently inchoate rant
Summary: 2 Stars
Seven years ago, while still a university student, the must read book at my alma mater was Naomi Klein's `No Logo.' A probing and insightful look into the way that corporations were taking over our high streets and lives, it was at once pertinent and relevant. I had only lived in London for a couple of years, and already witnessed how its high streets were transmogrifying into `any street/ any town'. In barely 18 months the coffee shop culture I had once loved had been wrecked by Starbucks, one of Klein's principle targets. Though those who said it was the `defining tome' of its generation or the `handbook of the anti-globalization' movement overstated its importance, `No Logo' was an outstanding and memorable book, a must-read, even.
Now, we have `The Shock doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' the long awaited follow up to `No Logo'.
Naomi Klein writes that this started out as a book about the privatization of the war on terror and became something else. `The truth [of its content] seems so bizarre,' she writes in an early chapter. It is `a book about shock. About how countries are shocked - by wars, terror attacks, coups d'etat and natural disasters . And then they are shocked again - by corporations and politicians who exploit their fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist this shock politics are, if necessary, shocked for a third time - by police soldiers and prison officers...'
The premise and scope of the book are thus ambitious and promising. Klein's thesis is certainly original and thought-provoking. Unfortunately she is unable to support it without making ludicrous jumps between historical events, drawing incorrect conclusions, using cursory evidence, and painting a picture of a vast right wing global conspiracy that often verges on the ludicrous.
The target for most of her ire is Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago School of economists, that have influenced the policy of every world leader from Augusto Pinochet to Margaret Thatcher to George W Bush. Alas, Klein gives the Chicago School far too much importance. She doesn't recognize them for what they are: academics, whose work is only ever taken and modified to suit the needs of the country it is applied to. The Chicago School has never changed the fate of a single country - only those that have employed their strategies have done that.
The picture Klein paints is one in which the Chicago School spend forty years traveling the world, coercing global politicians - many of whom are portrayed as dozy or unwitting - into implementing their theories. According to Klein these men are fanatics that live for the stripping down and privatization of the global economy. Omnipresent is Friedman, who is portrayed as a sort of `Dr Evil' figure pulling the strings behind this cabal. The impression one gets, if taking this thesis at face value, is not unlike that behind the infamous nineteenth century anti-Semitic tome `The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' which made out that the world was governed by a global Jewish conspiracy. Replace the Jews with Chicago School economics professors and you have the updated version - The Shock Doctrine.
To support this theory Klein twists and turns global historical events to fit her narrative. The context of the Cold War is ignored completely with regards events in the 1960s 70s and 80s (of course all US foreign policy was pretty much dictated by the Chicago School, wasn't it?). Mrs Thatcher launches the Falklands War not to defend British sovereign territory, but to allow her to privatize British state utilities. (That the Argentine defeat led to the overthrow of the hated military junta, a target of Klein in an earlier chapter is conveniently overlooked). The necessary reforms to bring the rotten and bankrupt former Communist countries up to date are lambasted at every turn. Poland, which underwent a particularly harsh form `shock therapy', and Russia, which was undermined by the corruption of the Yeltsin era, are the only examples given; not the Baltic states, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic or Slovakia whose transitions were all smoother and are wealthy and well-integrated members of the EU 25 (an inconceivable notion in 1989). None of this would be extreme enough to fit her narrative.
Ignored also are the unquestioned success stories of those countries that have brought in liberal economic reforms, some modeled on the Chicago school. What of Ireland, once the sick man of Europe and now its richest country after oil rich Norway? Why not give some context on the reforms in Britain, where, pre-Thatcher, it was a strike ridden, ineffective country on an inexorable downward spiral? Why no mention of the colorlessness, economic pallor and corruption of the communist world?
There are other inconsistencies and twisted facts too. The South American junta leaders are (rightly) lambasted for their corruption. But when the IMF and World Bank get successor regimes to sign reforms designed to stop future leaders using the state treasuries as their current accounts, it is seen as part of the Chicago School's conspiracy.
Klein's use of figures can be sketchy too. She uses the NASDAQ and how it reacts `positively' to terrorist attacks to show how it suits those wicked capitalists for bad things to happen. Thus it jumps 7 points the day of the 7/7 bombings in London (she doesn't point out that this was about 0.2%) and 11.4 points the day a terror plot was thwarted in the UK the following year. This is obviously because it suits banks for bad stuff to happen because we live in a disaster economy, not because it might be down to ordinary fluctuations (not even that the jumps were anything out of the ordinary). She is rightly angry that an incompetent former governor of New Mexico is put in charge of post-invasion Iraq's educational program. But in contrasting New Mexico and Iraq's literacy rates, she uses figures from 1985.
She is better on her original subject - the privatization of the Iraq war. The corrupt, idiotic and wholly inefficient rule of the Bush administration is a perfect target, and her account of its work in Iraq, and also New Orleans, is a reminder of what a good journalist she can be. The chapters dealing with the betrayal of the Tsunami hit populations of South Asia are good - but then she spoils it with trying to draw it into her tirade against Friedman and the Chicago School.
It is only these parts that save the Shock Doctrine from oblivion. The rest is an uneven, frequently inchoate and self righteous rant that is utterly unconvincing if you read between the lines. Unfortunately there are those that will take everything she writes at face value, and repeat and adopt her many ludicrous stances. That is why this work is so detrimental to those - like me - seeking social justice in this world and ultimately a panacea to those she lambastes.
Book Review: The Most Eye-OpeningBook of our Time
Summary: 5 Stars
Naomi Klein's book is one of the most eye-opening books of our time. I couldn't put it down. I thought I knew everything she talked about but no one else before has connected the dots like she has. Everyone should read this so they can understand what's really going on with American "free market" polices.
Just look at what's happening in Myanmar now, a true test of the shock doctrine thesis. The government has suspended the referendum so that they can recover from the cyclone but aren't letting foreign aid in!
Shock Doctrine should be read by everyone, especially students, to open their eyes to what's really going on in the world.
Book Review: A rant about capitalism from someone that doesn't know what it is
Summary: 1 Stars
I was really disappointed in this book on many levels. While I ideologically disagree with Miss Klein on many things, at least "No Logo" was quite insightful. Perhaps it contained a bit of humility, whereas the success of No Logo has pushed her in to full ranting mode, assuming that her logic makes some sense because it's her logic (ironically enough, her logic's proof is in her brand or in other words, the "logo" of her name).
Her fundamental problem with this book is that her theory somehow ties the Chicago Schools minimal government ideology in to political shocks. Looking at the objective data I wouldn't have even considered this possibility, since it seems so obvious that the total opposite is the actual case!
Big shocks always increase government power, and government is loathe to relinquish it. This is so blatantly true both intuitively and from history (in 1893 US supreme court declared income taxes illegal, after 3 major shocks in the forms of 2 world wars and a great depression, income taxes were a part of daily life, and all over the west they were higher than ever before anywhere in the history of the planet...).
With that basic history in mind, her thesis comes off as borderline insane. Certainly it's well accepted that Friedman and the Chicago School have been trying to reverse the massive encroachment of government in the private sphere that is totally new in the history of the planet, but that they are trying to take us somewhere new and nefarious is patently absurd. They are trying to get us back to the status quo, which was throw so badly out of whack by the shocks of the 20th century.
Any logic that can somehow tie the Patriot Act (reacting to a shock) to Milton Friedman's teachings is so flawed that one can't help but boggle.
Book Review: Profiting From Disaster
Summary: 5 Stars
Ideology aside, I consider this to be one of the most important books of our time. The reason I started off the way I did is that many people will react to Naomi Klein's book based on their political leanings. In fact, before starting this book, I was inclined to disagree with her premise -that Chicago School economics can be directly tied to oppressive regimes in many parts of the world. This book, however, thoroughly proves this disconcerting truth. The Shock Doctrine is also a brilliant expose and an elegant model which enables us to understand modern history in a new way.
I had originally seen a short video online that summarized the ideas of this book, and my first reaction (again, before reading the book) was that this must be a typical leftist rant, making an abstruse analogy between an economic system with which the author disagrees and real life practices like torture and shock treatment. As someone who was raised, or at least self-raised as basically a libertarian, I did not want to believe Klein's argument. In fact, the only reason I bothered to read the book is that I liked her earlier book, No Logo so much. She is one of the few writers on political and economic subjects whom I actually enjoy reading. Her style is so lucid that, even if I don't agree with some of her ideas, I understand where she is coming from and enjoy following her reasoning.
Alas, there is nothing abstract, symbolic or abstruse about The Shock Doctrine. Nor is it any kind of conspiracy theory, as one reviewer oddly remarked. Everything in this book is well documented, and most of the references are anything but obscure. You can find almost everything that is written about here by going back over newspapers of the last few decades. The fact is, recent oppressive regimes in South America, Eastern Europe and Asia built their systems around the ideas of Milton Friedman and Chicago School economics. This is not a theory or an accusation, but a matter of public record. The only thing that we can dispute and speculate over is whether or not Milton Friedman (and his Chicago School disciples) really approved of the actions of tyrants like Pinochet. In the end, does this really matter?
Again, when I first saw the video based on this book, I was skeptical, especially when I watched graphic footage of people being tortured and then told that there is a nearly perfect analogy between the literal shocking of political prisoners and the economic "shock therapy" inflicted on many nations. The reason this book overcame my skepticism is that these practices really were carried out in a symmetrical manner. That is, individuals were being tortured (by people who studied manuals on shock therapy, devised by a real life "mad doctor" named Ewen Cameron) at the same time their governments were conspiring with Chicago School luminaries.
Advocates of free market economics have always said that we must separate economic and political freedom. For example, we can be horrified by the actions of a Pinochet and yet admire the "economic freedom" that exists under such a regime.
I think one of the most impressive achievements of The Shock Doctrine is the way it discredits this widely held assumption. Even assuming that Chicago School ideas represent the ultimate in economic freedom, is it right, even by libertarian standards, to force such freedom on people who don't want it? The idea of forcing people to be free is an oxymoron, and yet this seems to be the mentality of the U.S. government, World Bank and other supposed defenders of freedom when implementing their strategies in the Third World.
Hardcore libertarians will argue that nothing in this book is a refutation of free market capitalism because none of the examples given are true examples of pure laissez faire capitalism. As someone who would have said this myself twenty years ago, I would now simply ask, what difference does it make? Similar arguments are made by dogmatic Marxists concerning the atrocities of Mao and Stalin (they weren't "really" communists). If we are shown, time after time, that a given ideology is used as a justification for implementing policies that include torture, the murder of dissidents and wide-scale corruption, it may be time to rethink that ideology.
Naomi Klein is an advocate of a "Third Way" between capitalism and communism. Examples of this include the relatively free but socialistic Scandinavian nations. Personally, I don't find these rather bureaucratic societies very attractive, being something of a hardcore anarcho-capitalist in my heart. Yet if people genuinely want a society that looks like modern day Sweden or Venezuela, do I (or the U.S. government) have the right to say they can't have it?
The Shock Doctrine illustrates something that goes beyond politics and ideology. I don't really believe that the people in government, industry and the World Bank, who are responsible for many of the atrocities Klein documents, are actually believers in Chicago School economics, laissez faire or any other system. What they want is wealth and power, and they use ideology as a justification for their actions.
If we put aside the political theory and look at the actions and strategies this book catalogs, we see a clear pattern. These people, as Klein documents, use war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and the like as opportunities to exploit the masses. This is not a mere hypothesis, for there are ample quotes in the book where this doctrine is openly admitted by those who carry it out. Klein stops short of conspiracy theory, the kind that claims that catastrophic events (such as 9/11 and even natural disasters) were orchestrated by those who later exploited them. Whether Klein's more moderate position or the conspiratorial one is closer to the truth is ultimately of secondary importance. The fact is, those at the top of the power structure use disasters as opportunities to increase their wealth and power.
The beauty of this book is that it presents a coherent picture of American (and allied nations) foreign policy and, to some extent, domestic policy -- the Patriot Act and the Katrina tragedy are also described -- that clearly explains the modus operandi of the power elite. It doesn't matter what kind of political system you think is ideal. This is what is really happening. The book concludes on an upbeat note, as hard to believe as that might seem. There is evidence that as people wise up to the shock doctrine strategy, it will become less effective. Hopefully, many people will read this book and the process will be accelerated.