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Book Review: The Shock Doctrine For those keen on understanding a back story of global governance evolution over the past several decades – or rather how honourable discourse between and within nations can be undermined by a relatively small group of influential people – Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine is a must-read. The book’s subtitle, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is a clue to Klein’s thesis – that, from the time Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973 through to George Bush’s present-day Iraq war, free-market fundamentalists in positions of enormous power have used the shock of social, political and military conflict to try to wipe national economic slates clean and to advance their notions of idealized global free markets, unfettered by regulation and such modern niceties as meaningful representative governance, human rights or labour laws. If that all sounds slightly conspiratorial, you can only wish that it was just a theory. But the disturbing story that Klein rolls out is meticulously documented, adding much to what we can recall from news reports over the past decades, and a mountain of detail that was never reported. Klein’s shock metaphor of ‘wiping slates clean’ refers quite purposefully to electroshock therapy. Klein begins there, with the CIA-funded experiments of Montreal psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. Cameron was using electrical current, inter alia, to test his ideas that he could wipe out the personality of his unwitting subjects and remake new personalities on a mental ‘tabula rasa.’ His research eventually made it into CIA cookbooks on torture and Klein documents how it has been used over and over on thousands of people. Enter Milton Friedman, stage right. In the 1950s and ’60s, Friedman was developing his ideas of ridding free markets of regulatory encumbrances to create a perfect capitalist system, a kind of Adam Smith on steroids. The market would regulate everything. But in the Keynesian world, Friedman couldn’t sell his purist dream to any government. That is, until Augusto Pinochet came along. Klein documents how Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics disciples were able to use Chile and Pinochet as their own free-market laboratory. The key element was that the country was in shock and disoriented by Pinochet’s abrupt grab for power. Friedman saw it as an opportunity to administer economic shock at a time when opposition to it could least resist, an opportunity to ‘clean the slate,’ and rid the country of collective ‘developmentalism’, state-run enterprise and labour protections, and to grab the country’s resources in a privatization frenzy. The fact it took place almost overnight kept the country in a state of shock. Pinochet was a willing collaborator. Opposition was ruthlessly crushed, by disappearing it or by intimidation and torture In the 600+ page tome, Klein goes on to document similar uses of economic shock therapy where crises of one sort or another opened a door for the shock doctors to come in and administer treatment: Argentina, Bolivia, Poland, China, South Africa, Russia and ultimately Iraq, where both destruction and reconstruction have effectively been privatized according to the vision of Donald Rumsfeld, a friend and admirer of Friedman. Who were the shock doctors? Treatments were administered largely by the Chicago School graduates who had colonized the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the 1980s. The two institutions were created in 1944 to prevent financial destabilization of countries in crisis, often making policy recommendations along with the aid, “but in the early eighties, emboldened by the desperation of developing countries, those recommendations morphed into radical free-market demands,” says Klein. She goes on to quote a senior IMF economist admitting that “everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south ‘privatized’ or die: towards this end, we ignominiously created economic bedlam in Latin America and Africa in 1983–88.” Klein connects the dots on a disturbing and violent 35-year history of free-market radicalism intervening forcefully in the self-determination of nations and emanating largely from American corridors of power. The picture that emerges is one of corruption and duplicity at the highest levels of international affairs. In the end, readers are left more than a bit wiser about how the visible spectrum of global political theatre often fails to live up to our ideals. Donna Lindenberg edits Mondial. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism |
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