Naomi Klein’s “fevered” prose
In case you haven’t noticed, Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, tends to divide critics and political pundits into two camps: those who support her contentious thesis – basically, that Chicago School neoliberals capitalize on natural and social catastrophes – and those who don’t. That divide couldn’t be made more clear than by a spread in today’s National Post, which pairs an excerpt of the book’s opening pages with salty commentary by right-wing columnist Terence Corcoran, who not only counters Klein’s argument but claims its opposite, maintaining that Klein blames Chicago School guru Milton Friedman for what are really “socialism’s failures.” However, what makes the column good reading is Corcoran’s description of the book as a kind of surreal travelogue:
By the end of the book, the Klein shock theory is careening like an out-of-control Bolivian bus on the road to La Paz, Milton Friedman strapped to the hood as a symbolic ornament, her rhetoric and ideas flying off in all directions.
If that’s the case, I can’t wait to get to the end of The Shock Doctrine.
The Post will be running excerpts of the book until Friday, presumably with more accompanying commentary. For more tempered perspectives, see The Globe and Mail’s review (where Todd Gitlin essentially agrees with Klein, but won’t stomach her “tendentiousness” and left-wing romanticism), Q&Q’s review (where Dan Rowe compares the book to Dr. Seuss’s story “The Sneetches,” and lauds Klein for her timeliness), or the Toronto Star’s review (where James Grainger opens with this line: “The Shock Doctrine may be one of the most important non-fiction books aimed at the general reader published in the last decade”).
It appears that Mr. Woods in his effort to pump up Ms. Klein’s latest effort has dramatically misrepresented Todd Gitlin’s review. He did not “essentially agree” with Ms. Klein’s thesis. Instead, he found her book suffered from “analytic overreach”, and was full of “not-inconsiderable flaws” so that its “tendentiousness contaminates” the value of its claim of global inequity.
Now it is true that Mr. Gitlin acknowledges that after you “strip Klein’s argument of intentionality and diabolical foresight”, what remains is “right and important”. .According to Mr. Gitlin, what remains, however, is the argument that capitalism is “an amoral system that grabs hold of opportunities wherever it finds them, not least in human calamity and suffering, to make bucks.” As a he points out, and as certainly Ms. Klein would agree, this thesis is a much weaker and less original version than is the advertised point of “The Shock Doctrine.”
The difficulty with suggesting that Mr. Gitlin essentially agreed with “The Shock Doctrine” is that it promotes a kind of reductionist view of global affairs: either you believe (as do neo-liberal free marketers) in the free market as a force of absolute good, or you view it (as does Naomi Klein) as an instrument whose sole purpose is to create social and economic inequity. Mr. Gitlin in his review tries, I think, to navigate a way between those reductionist ideas. Mr. Woods by writing that Mr. Gitlin ‘essentially” agreed with Naomi Klein misses the whole subtlety of his position.
I’ve read Ms. Klein’s book and I can assure you that there are some of us out here who are quite capable of falling squarely in the middle — partially agreeing with Klein’s arguments. The deleterious effects of Friedman & Sachs’s economic policies on Southern Cone nations is, in many respects, undeniable. But it is a substantial mistake to claim, as Klein often suggests, that this originated exclusively out of economic policy. Klein’s book would have been more substantial, along the lines of Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell” (which is very clear about concrete definitions of “genocide,” as bandied about by numerous governments), had she not clung to her overly reaching metaphor of “shock” and stuck primarily with her focus on Friedman’s influence. There are points here where she is very judicious, such as focusing on Friedman’s ire directed at Nixon.
But Klein often has difficulty separating the facts from her convictions. (For example, I don’t think it’s fair to indict Madeline Albright for seeing “no connection between the fact that so many Thai girls were being forced into the sex trade and the [IMF’s] austerity policies for which she expressed her ’strong support’ on the same trip,” when it was very clear that Albright hoped that government safeguards and border policies would help to solve this problem.)
I’m not suggesting by any means that economic reform is perfect or that the World Bank and IMF shouldn’t be taken to task. But the way that Klein frames her argument, anyone who even vaguely supported Friedman’s policies had no interest in democratic or economic reform. What Klein doesn’t seem to understand in politics, as she does so poorly in examining the relationship between Clinton and Yeltsin, is that often one must sometimes embrace the devil in order to effect diplomacy. Politics is a numbers game: which political scenario benefits the most people? And there are often no clear winners and losers. That such a basic political reality is ignored by Klein suggests to me that she has some additional maturing to do.
As always, Klein provides economic ‘insight’ for the dumb and inattentive. If we are to look at the history of giving aid, then we learn a few things that place ‘disaster capitalism’ into context. The Marshall Plan and the first age of aid under Truman, were both ideological in character. They sought to bring about a world that was taking on an American hue. Aid prior to the Bush period and the neo-cons, was characterised by grotesque corruption and waste. This was the period of the catastrophic debts built up in Africa and Latin America. The Bush period of aid, where private contractors - and let’s be honest about this, global charities and NGOs - have become more favoured, is also ideological. It has no trust in government anymore, because of past experiences, and sees the private sector and NGOs and charities as more effective. Take that with a grain of salt, but it is a reflection of a history of being burned by government-led aid programmes. Klein, we must remember, told us ‘brands were bad’, while we instead have seen nothing but brands and logos and design becoming even more important in the world (it’s the information age don’t you know?). Look at the economies and countries she admires: Venezuala, Argentina - not shining lights of political freedom or economic management. Her observations about capitalism are banal and well-worn from Marx onwards. Her observation that the world is changing at breakneck speed is also not original (just check Amazon for thousands of books on the same topic). Her native Canada has not taken up her ideas, as can be seen from the car-clogged cities and yuppie, suburban economy. Canada is a capitalist country as any other. As Marx once said, the philosophers of the world have only interpreted it, but the point is to change it. She speaks of ‘another world is possible’, yet offers over and over again thin gruel as to what that would would be, or how she would be better.