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THE SHASHI THAROOR COLUMN

Klein develops her argument over 558, meticulously-endnoted pages. The imposition of radical, Milton Friedmanesque free-market capitalism on entire societies, she claims, takes place when the targeted population is reeling from some sort of exogenous shock: either a foreign invasion, like the “shock and awe” takeover of Iraq in 2003, or a natural disaster, like the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, or even an economic meltdown as occurred in South-east Asia in 1997 or in Argentina in 2001. The kind of disaster that shocks a society into losing its moorings enables the votaries of the free market to come in and rewrite the rules, according to Klein, literally re-programming the assumptions and patterns of behaviours of entire countries. So L. Paul Bremer, with his impeccable suits and pseudo-military boots, rides roughshod over occupied Iraq, dismantling its State-owned industries while passing new laws to privatise everything and permit foreigners to repatriate all their profits; hyperinflation is curbed in Argentina and Bolivia by remedies that ensure capitalists prevail; and in the Maldives, islanders displaced by the tsunami are displaced from their traditional homes in order to free their islands for high-value tourist accommodation. Klein says that not even the U.S. is exempt from this approach: the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has been hailed, she claims, as an opportunity to clear poor blacks out of the city to transform it into a place newly safe for (White) capital.

Katrina, Klein says, demonstrated vividly the inadequacy, indeed incompetence, of the State, and so provided a ready rationale for the private sector to take over. The prime contractors in the reconstruction of New Orleans are also, Klein points out, the leading contractors in Iraq and in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. She sees this as capitalism exploiting victims of disasters when they are at their most vulnerable and unsettled: people in need of aid are obliged to accept “structural adjustment” policies that change their lives. In the wake of the disaster, fisher folk in Sri Lanka and Thailand were prevented from rebuilding their destroyed homes on the waterfront, thereby reserving prime beach property for capitalist development. Milton Friedman had argued as far back as 1962 that “only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change”. Klein takes him quite literally at his word, seeing his prescription as a sinister agenda for corporatisation, abetted by the “colonisation of the World Bank and the IMF by [Friedman’s] Chicago School” and the adoption of the free-market “Washington Consensus” as policy doctrine by the Bretton Woods institutions.

This is part of my problem with Klein’s thesis; she is too ready to see conspiracies where others might discern little more than the all-too-human pattern of chaos and confusion, good intentions and greed, playing themselves out in the wake of catastrophes. Her opening chapters, for instance, recount the tale of a CIA-funded Montreal psychiatrist who conducted electroshock experiments on his unwitting patients to de-program their minds and rebuild them as healthy people; Klein argues explicitly that this is precisely what the neoliberal “shock doctrine” does to societies and economies, an analogy with torture that might cause apoplexy in the boardrooms of the IMF. She goes so far as to suggest that economists and policy-makers are willing to deliberately precipitate crises in order to push their agendas.

Klein’s notion of disaster capitalism voraciously feeding on violent disruptions — the antithesis of the conventional wisdom that capitalism requires peace and tranquillity in order to thrive — is a provocative one, if partly vindicated by Halliburton’s profit margins in Iraq. But it is also overstated, ascribing sinister motives for conduct generally motivated by more banal and benign (if sometimes wrongheaded) ideas. In caricaturing the “shock docs” and their acolytes, for instance in its treatment of Jeffrey Sachs, perhaps the most passionate advocate for ending global poverty, Klein is often palpably unfair. And it begs the question — if the private sector did not ride to the rescue, who would? The State has been withering away in much of the developing world, and nearly five decades of official development assistance have not built enough State capacity to transform the lives of poor people for the better. More and more governments, afflicted by corruption, bureaucracy and inefficiency, are realising that the private sector is an indispensable partner in the long quest for development. Klein acknowledges little of this.

Despite its limitations, The Shock Doctrine is a valuable addition to the corpus of popular books that have attempted to rethink the big ideas of our post-Cold War age. Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the “end of history” — the idea that all societies would be governed by liberal democracy and free markets — started the process of reflection; Samuel Huntington’s concept of the “clash of civilisations” underpinned much of the anxiety that followed the realisation that reports of history’s demise were exaggerated. Thomas Friedman’s celebration of the flatness of the globalised world is now countered by Klein’s argument that the world’s disasters are seen as opportunities for corporations to assume control of our governance. Each thesis has its flaws, but each contributes to the ongoing contestation of ideas about the shape and direction of our current Age of Uncertainty. For this reason, and for the vigour and accessibility with which she marshals her argument, Naomi Klein is well worth reading.

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