Shock of the “Shock Doctrine”
The news that Naomi Klein, the Canadian activist author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, has won the inaugural $90,000 Warwick Prize for Writing, is causing a lot of us to look more closely at her work.
This is a new literary prize put up by the University of Warwick, England. Nominees are named by university staff. It will be awarded every two years for work on a theme that will change with every award.
This year’s award was for “excellent and substantial writing” on the theme of complexity. Ms. Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is indeed complex. It is an exhaustively thorough examination of the use of social, political and economic shock to entrench free market economies around the world, especially in developing countries and in those migrating from state control.
Every good story needs a villain, and in the case of Shock Doctrine Ms. Klein has found an evil one in Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economics professor whose “Chicago Boys” had a hand in virtually every economic makeover of the last half of the 20th century.
From the South American dictatorships of Brazil, Argentina and Chile to the “cold bath” of capitalism in places like Poland, China, and Iraq, Friedman’s thinking provided the economic underpinning to impose the unbridled free market capitalism that has turned into such a disaster.
The gospel of a free market unleashed from regulation became a virtual state religion under George W. Bush and by association, among the neocons of Canada who morphed the right-wing Reform movement into today’s governing Conservative party under Stephen Harper.
The fact Naomi Klein’s work is now being reconsidered after having been initially dismissed as that of a left wing ideologue can be laid, of course, to the dreadful consequences of the abuse of the free market by banks, insurance companies and other financial manipulators, primarily in the United States.
As the world economy staggers toward depression and chaos, it’s clear to anyone with eyes to see it that the Friedman version of the free market – selling off public property, starving public education, cutting taxes on the rich, building up the military, relieving the financial industry of regulation – has been a catastrophic failure.
The first third of Ms. Klein’s book covers the imposition of free market dictatorships in South America and the struggle there to regain democracy. Throughout, the juntas are fed on Friedman economics, although Friedman himself maintains he provided only “technical advice” to such monsters as Chile’s dictator General Pinchet.
Curiously, Friedman (who died in 2006 and thus never lived to see the full consequences of his theories) claimed to have given China ”precisely the same advice” on how to impose a free market economy.
Klein originally intended her book as an expose of the American free market takeover of Iraq. Early into her research, the scope of the book expanded to cover other examples around the world where the use of shock to create crisis facilitated the imposition of free market solutions.
She begins in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the shock of Katrina was used to justify abolition of the state’s entire public education system and its replacement with private charter schools.
Over 500 pages later, she has exploded the ethos of disaster capitalism. She has also exposed how the free maket has been manipulated to create a new type of corporate state that has ravished the public interest, beggared private wealth, and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people through repression, war and poverty.
Such has become the legacy of the free market exponents who told us when Communism collapsed that we had seen “the end of history.” Now, as Western politicians rush to embrace government rescue of the economy, we are witnessing the end of the unregulated free market. Ironically, this also comes as the result of shock — the shock of the free market fiasco of Friedman and his “Chicago School” of economic wizards.
Being unfamiliar with the Warwick Prize for Writing, I can only conclude that it rewards form versus substance. One need only read the news of the day to see that what is actually happening is precisely the opposite of what Klein claims. Led by the President, the Democrats are taking advantage of the current economic crisis to usher in a sweeping centralization of power in the hands of the government. (As was the case, by the way, during the Great Depression as well.)