| What's most striking to me about this short film is how good it feels to see such a compact, cogent presentation of a progressive perspective. Now, imagine if we had our own tv network, like the right does with Fox. Can you imagine what it would be like to see these kinds of messages not just on a daily basis, but hourly?
I want to have a discussion here about Klein's ideas without expecting everyone to have read her just-published book, and so I'm going to refer to her interview [transcript and audio/video stream] on Democracy Now! last week. I'll have plenty to say about her ideas, but I'm going to save most of them for the comments, at least for now.
Here's how Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman introduced the program: Pinochet's coup in Chile, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11th 2001, the war on Iraq, the Asian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. Award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein brings together all of these world-changing events in her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." In her first national broadcast interview since the publication of "The Shock Doctrine," Klein joins us in our firehouse studio for the hour. Klein writes, "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks." She argues that "Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty five years which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms."
Economist Milton Friedman once said, "Only a crisis produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. " Naomi Klein examines some of what she considers the most dangerous ideas-Friedmanite economics and expose how catastrophic events are both extremely profitable to corporations and have also allowed governments to push through what she calls "disaster capitalism."
Klein writes in the introduction to "The Shock Doctrine" that "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks." She argues that "Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty five years which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms."
In the discussion of my previous diary, Valatan asked:
how is this strategy any different than the means used by FDR to establish the welfare state in the first place? He used a vast national crisis to create the modern system of social services. I have a feeling that the American people probably would have been equally amenable to a megalomaniac like Huey Long, had he become President. Similarly, I doubt that LBJ is able to get Medicare or all of the civil rights legislation passed without something like the Kennedy assassination hanging over the nation's head.
I answered at some length here, but I bring it up again now, because it can help sharpen our sense of what Klein is and is not saying. It is, after all, well-known that major policy changes tend to come about in response to crises. "If it ain't broke don't fix it," has as much currency in politics as anywhere else. So Klein is not arguing that policymaking in response to crisis is bad. Rather, she is arguing against the false impression that free market ideas are natural, obvious, "self-evident" and beyond question. Quite to the contrary, the only way these notions have gained a foothold is via the use of force and exploitation of chaos and tragedy. And it is this contrast, between the pseudo-naturalism of free market ideology and the historical reality of its reliance on force that Klein has focused on.
Here's the beginning of the interview itself:
AMY GOODMAN: It's very good to have you with us. Why don't you start off by talking about exactly what you consider to be the shock doctrine?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, the shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It's a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a terrorist attack. It could be a war. But the idea, as you just saw in the film, is that these crises, these disasters, these shocks soften up whole societies. They discombobulate them. People lose their bearings. And a window opens up, just like the window in the interrogation chamber. And in that window, you can push through what economists call "economic shock therapy." That's sort of extreme country makeovers. It's everything all at once. It's not, you know, one reform here, one reform there, but the kind of radical change that we saw in Russia in the 1990s, that Paul Bremer tried to push through in Iraq after the invasion. So that's the shock doctrine.
And it's not claiming that right-wingers in a contemporary age are the only people who have ever exploited crisis, because this idea of exploiting a crisis is not unique to this particular ideology. Fascists have done it. State communists have done it. But this is an attempt to better understand the ideology that we live with, the dominant ideology of our time, which is unfettered market economics.
Of course, fascism and communism were both philosophies of social struggle, so it was entirely consistent with their philosophies that such means should be used. But the free market ideology is opposed to the notion of political struggle, particularly the notion of coercion. It claims to be all about freedom, and utterly opposed to coercion of any sort, except for the bare minimum needed to keep its view of freedom alive. It is this internal contradiction that Klein is going after.
The interview continues:
AMY GOODMAN: Explain who Milton Friedman is, who you take on in a big way in this book.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I take on Milton Friedman because he is the symbol of the history that I am trying to challenge. Milton Friedman died last year. He died in 2006. And when he died, we heard him described in very lavish tributes as probably the most important intellectual of the post-war period, not just the most important economist, but the most important intellectual. And I think that a strong argument can be made for that. This was an adviser to Thatcher, to Nixon, to Reagan, to the current Bush administration. He tutored Donald Rumsfeld in the early days of his career. He advised Pinochet in the 1970s. He also advised the Communist Party of China in the key reform period in the late 1980s. So he had enormous influence. And I was talking to somebody the other day who described him as the Karl Marx for capitalism. And I think that's not a bad description, although I'm sure Marx wouldn't have liked it very much. But he was really a popularizer of these ideas.
He had a vision of society, in which the only acceptable role for the state was to enforce contracts and to protect borders. Everything else should be completely left to the market, whether education, national parks, the post office; everything that could be performed at a profit should be. And he really saw, I guess, shopping-buying and selling-as the highest form of democracy, as the highest form of freedom. And his best-known book was Capitalism and Freedom.
So, you know, when he died last year, we were all treated to a retelling of the official version of how these radical free-market ideas came to dominate the globe, how they swept through the former Soviet Union, Latin America, Africa, you know, how these ideas triumphed over the past thirty-five years. And I was so struck, because I was in the middle of writing this book, that we never heard about violence, and we never heard about crises, and we never heard about shocks. I mean, the official story is that these ideas triumphed because we wanted them to, that the Berlin Wall fell and people demanded their Big Macs along with their democracy. And, you know, the official story of the rise of this ideology goes through Margaret Thatcher saying, "There is no alternative," to Francis Fukuyama saying, "History has ended. Capitalism and freedom go hand in hand."
And so, what I'm trying to do with this book is tell that same story, the key junctures where this ideology has leapt forward, but I'm reinserting the violence, I'm reinserting the shocks, and I'm saying that there is a relationship between massacres, between crises, between major shocks and body blows to countries and the ability to impose policies that are actually rejected by the vast majority of the people on this planet.
What Klein is doing is actually quite similar, in a way, to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States--she is reinserting the history of struggle that has been expunged from the official texts. And in this case, the official texts are holy books of economic doctrine telling how we all must live. That, for example, we must have health care insurance, even though the insurance may prevent us from getting the actual health care itself. If we are to successfully challenge this orthodoxy, the knowledge of its blood-drenched history is an invaluable resource for us.
But above all, Klein is reminding us that we live in history, that history makes us, and that we make history as well. The systems we live in are a matter of choice-even if we chose to pretend otherwise. Demystifying the old order is an integral part of the work of building a new one. This is how realignments happen, in part. It is how slavery ended. It is how the welfare state was created, and with it a middle class without precedent in history. New visions make new worlds. But old ones must be seen clearly, too, in order to move beyond them. |
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