Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

Well it is extremely unrealistic to assume that teachers will all give their pensions to charity and go live in a new tent city somewhere.

On the other hand many anarchists and socialists "played the market" taking advantage of their economic knowledge to extract profits from the ruling classes.

What I think is really at issue here is if something like the "Shock Doctrine" is a new invention of the Chicago School as Klein suggests or simply a readjustment to an older way of dealing with the world that has been with us a long time.

The big illusion has been that there has been a time when the big states were not manipulating the world for their own ends.

As the facts become revealed with time it doesn't seem like anything has really changed and that the law of the jungle has always been the operating force in Western civilization.

More importantly what can be done to change that behaviour?

Very little it would seem.

I think the general prospects for long term survival in any way consistent with ourt current belief systems is doomed.

Thus we need books like Naiomo Klein's book to make us aware of the forces that operate.

They are beyond democratic control, they affect every aspect of our existence, and they are indestructible ideologically and philosophically because they do not engage debate.

It is quite the dilema...;-)

I believe ethical investing was largely responsible for bringing down the fascist apartheid system in South Africa. At some point, people began to question where their pensions and other funds were being invested. The Norwegians have decided that country's Petroleum Fund, the largest national pension fund in the world, will not be invested in tobacco or big government defence industries.

There are a number of ethical investments to be made in a wide range of emerging green technologies, medical research, and [url=http://www.ethicalfunds.com/do_the_right_thing/]socially responsible mutual funds[/url] Just don't let it sit in a large Canadian bank or it will be loaned to TNC's to scoop up what's left of Canada.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Famouspipeliner:
[b]Saskatchewan is about to get a taste of the 'shock doctrine' when the SP convenes the legislature for a before Christmas session. All indications are that labor is the intended target. Will the NDP fight for labor by filibustering the SP's changes to labor laws (by working into the holidays if need be) or will they fold and let the SP begin it's reich wing agenda?[/b]

---

Hey, welcome back

[img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]

quote:

---

But surely the political effects of the market buccaneers on the people who are salting away their earnings for some golden-aged future here at home, including New Democrats, cries out for attention.

---

Have your retired parents or friends looked at their saltings lately? Have they been invested in US mortgages?

The free market chickens are on their way home to roost. God help everyone.

quote:

---

some of her critics are saying Naomi Klein's attempt to connect Ewen Cameron's experiments on Canadians and right-wing economic philosophy is weak.

---

I haven't read all the way through it yet, but so far I don't think that Klein is making that link in a direct way, but in philosophical way. I think she is saying that the same barbaric motives are at work.

Where in an interrogation "shock treatment" is used to "erase" a subject and gain total control, an economic "shock treatment" is applied to nations to gain a blank slate that can be reprogrammed for a "pure" free market. And, at times, the former "shock treatment" has been used to stifle domestic dissent while the latter "shock treatment" is applied.

Because she does give examples of cases where economic "shock treatment" has been applied without a resort to political repression.

Yeah. It's pretty out there stuff.

I'm trying, really, really, trying to work through this book. I'm stalled halfway. And I've come to the conclusion that I'd rather dig a moat around my house with a trowel than dedicate anymore time to reading Klein's awful prose.

This book reminds me of what might happen if some of my friends currently attending LSE ever got a large grant to write a book. It's like an endless PHD thesis. Certainly well documented and throughly researched. Still, can Klein write a paragraph without the words "shock doctrine"? Must every paragraph refer back to her grand thesis, on some level?

This book should have been an annotated bibliography. Would have saved a significant amount of paper. I'm going to try and read her source material, but I've almost given up on the book.

You don't say. To me the writing is leaden. It clunks from one quote or bit of footnoted info to the next, using "shock doctrine" as a bridge.

Her shorter pieces read better. I imagine she ran across the problem of needing to condense and document a massive amount of information.

Structurally, for my tastes, maybe the book should have been cleared of footnotes and references, and had a well annotated bibilography, page by page, if need be. To me that's a journalistic style where she's writing a very long LSE essay. Or maybe she's just not a story teller.

I criticized this book, and Klein, in a different Shock Doctrine thread. My main point before was that I didn't think she was going to be able to bring the subject matter down to a level where it was accessible to new readers. Reading the book hasn't changed my mind. It's not a book I'm going to recommend, partly because I doubt I'll be able to finish it, and partly because I don't think anyone I'd recommend it to will finish it either. Unless they want to be able to say they read Klein's latest.

I think it's an excellent book so far. The excellent footnotes and documentation are an indication of just how much time and effort went in to researching material for the book. I imagine that for some, reading about torture and terror and a miserable right wing economic philosophy would be rather drab and depressing. But this is what the ideologues have forced on several nations without democratic stamp of approval. Depressing as hell but a good read just the same.

We can do better than that. Here is Brad Delong:

---------------------------------------

[url=http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/10/tyler-cowen-thi.html]Tyler Cowen thinks Naomi Klein believes her own bull----[/url]

He reads her book. He doesn't think it meets minimum intellectual standards. I think he is right: now I can borrow Tyler's ideas and have an informed view:

quote:

---

Rarely are the simplest facts, many of which complicate Ms. Klein's presentation, given their proper due. First, the reach of government has been growing in virtually every developed nation.... [T]he reach of government has been shrinking in India and China, to the indisputable benefit of billions.... [I]t is the New Deal — the greatest restriction on capitalism in 20th century America and presumably beloved by Ms. Klein — that was imposed in a time of crisis.... China was falling apart because of the murderous and tyrannical policies of Chairman Mao, which then led to bottom-up demands for capitalistic reforms.... [T]he reader will search in vain for an intelligent discussion of any of these points. What the reader will find is a series of fabricated claims, such as the suggestion that Margaret Thatcher created the Falkland Islands crisis to crush the unions and foist unfettered capitalism upon an unwilling British public.

The simplest response to Ms. Klein's polemic is to invoke old school conservatism... reject[ing] the idea of throwing out or revising all social institutions at once. Indeed the long history of conservative thought stands behind moderation.... That tradition does advise a scaling down of free-market ambitions, no matter how good they may sound in theory, and is probably our best hedge against disasters of our own making. Such a simple — indeed sensible — point would not have produced a best-selling screed....

The clash between democratic preferences and policy prescriptions is, if anything, a problem for Ms. Klein herself. Ms. Klein's previous book, "No Logo" (2000), called for rebellion against advertising and multinational corporations, two institutions which have proved remarkably popular with ordinary democratic citizens. Starbucks is ubiquitous because of pressure from the bottom, not because of a top-down decision to force capitalism upon the suffering workers in a time of crisis.

If nothing else, Ms. Klein's book provides an interesting litmus test as to who is willing to condemn its shoddy reasoning. In the New York Times, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz defended the book: "Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one." So nonacademics get a pass on sloppy thinking, false "facts," and emotional appeals? In making economic claims, Ms. Klein demands to be judged by economists' standards — or at the very least, standards of simple truth or falsehood. Mr. Stiglitz continued: "There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification." Have we come to citing the failures of one point of view to excuse the mistakes of another?

With "The Shock Doctrine," Ms. Klein has become the kind of brand she lamented in "No Logo." Brands offer a simplification of image and presentation, rather than stressing the complexity, the details, and the inevitable trade-offs of a particular product.... Klein... admitted that brands were never her real target, rather they were a convenient means of attacking the capitalist system more generally. In the same interview, Ms. Klein also tellingly remarked, "I believe people believe their own bulls---. Ideology can be a great enabler for greed."

When it comes to the best-selling "Shock Doctrine," that is perhaps the bottom line on what Klein herself has been up to.

---

Five points:

1.) Margaret Thatcher did not create the Falklands War in order to crush unions and implement the rest of a domestic program that could barely get 40% of the vote, but she did take advantage of it--of the popularity generated by a short victorious war--to do so. There is only a very small amount of moral fault there: had she provoked the war for domestic political purposes there would be a great deal of fault, but she did not.

2.) Tyler is right: Stiglitz ought to know better, for degrading the level of the debate is in your long-run interest only if you are one of the bad guys. And we are not.

3.) Some governments can be trusted to run mixed-economy social democracies: those of Western Europe, of the British Dominions, of the islands and peninsulas off the coast of East Asia, and of California, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and New England come to mind.

4.) Other governments cannot be trusted to run mixed-economy social democracies: Ghana and Zimbabwe and Egypt and Cuba and China and Mississippi come to mind. We do not know even much about how to predict which governments will fall into which category. We do not know how to change governments from one category to another. We do not have alternatives to recommend to governments that cannot run effictive mixed-economy social democracies.

5.) And so the best advice really is Keynes's response to Trotsky: "Granted his assumptions, much of Trotsky's argument is, I think, unanswerable.... But what are his assumptions? He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved--that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation.... An understanding of the historical process, to which Trotsky is so fond of appealing, declares not for, but against, Force at this juncture of things.... All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists. It is not necessary to debate the subtleties of what justifies a man in promoting his gospel by force; for no one has a gospel. The next move is with the head, and fists must wait..."

I'm not done yet, but Keynes gets a lot of play in Shock Doctrine. In fact, Klein's repetitive style (which Farmpunk so dislikes)makes for numerous paragraphs linking Marxist and Neo-Con orthodoxy, and suggesting instead that a mixed economic system would be the most viable, even desirable, end.

Stephen, I am much closer to your perspective than most people on this board. But I cannot believe you can nod with approval at the "degrading the debate" meme. Politics, history, economics, and philosophy are not gnostic rites to be known and spoken of only by the initiated; they are subjects that have to be a part of the general popular debate or they are nothing. Instead of picking even a single substantive point and refuting it, your favoured reviewer picks on her academic background? Nice.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Coyote:
Instead of picking even a single substantive point and refuting it, your favoured reviewer picks on her academic background? Nice.

---

Cowen and DeLong are critical of [i]Stiglitz[/i] for using Klein's background as a criterion in evaluating the book.

[ 29 December 2007: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

What is so painfully and boringly typical is that both Geneva and Stephen resort to ideological attacks and bullshit rather than any actual argument.

Worse, and depressingly but not at all surprisingly so, is that it would appear Stephen Gordon (and probably Geneva) has not even bothered to read the book. So Gordon relies on the blogs of ideologues to form his own opinion. Now that should be shocking.

quote:

---

Margaret Thatcher did not create the Falklands War in order to crush unions and implement the rest of a domestic program that could barely get 40% of the vote, but she did take advantage of it

---

That is exactly Klein's point. So your intellectually challenged right wing bloggers are attacking Klein's arguments by repeating them? That is hilarious.

The rest is all bullshit particularly the points with regard to what governments can be trusted. I smell a hint of bigotry in those statements.

First and foremost, governments are not entrusted to manage "mixed-economy social democracies". Mixed-economy social democracies are forms of government. They displace other forms of government.

It is the form of government most hated by both tyrants of the political ideological slant and tyrants of the so-called free market -- another failed religion that believes only deep human suffering before the unbridled comfort and wealth of the high-priests can bring salvation.

The intellectual merits of SD aren't really my field, and I'd hate to tread on the sensitive toes of people with better credentials than myself.

My problem with this book boils down to what Coyote calls her repetitive style. It's absurdly repetitive, and ends up being boring. This book may be like bad tasting but effective medicine - a little pain for the overall gain. It's not the depressing and violent evidence she's gathered that bothers me, or keeps me from reading, it's the presentation allied with her rock star of the left\progressive set that mystifies me. This can't be the best of the left's writers, can it?

While reading, I get the feeling that she's frustrated herself, with the journalist's tone, that she has a lot more to say and could say it more forcefully. But she doesn't, for whatever reason. I'd like to see her drop the semblance of objectivity and tell me what she thinks, in a book half the size of SD. Instead the book is a compliation of research notes, stuck together, without any sense of style. I feel like she's hiding behind all this research. After she explains her thesis, or central theme, of The Shock Doctrine, then basically all she needed to do was write: It happened here, and here's some pieces of evidence I've complied. That Klein herself can't recognize this absurd pattern to her own work is a fact that I find disturbing. A lack of self awareness that keeps me from taking her seriously.

All that said, I will probably, eventually, slog through the rest of the book.

I would think it pretty difficult to spice up any critique of a failed economic doctrine - an economic philosophy, as it turns out, that is duller and greyer than Soviet communism. And as one Iraqi citizen pointed out to western opinionators, the torture is worse now than under Saddam!

[url=http://www.gregpalast.com/tinker-bell-pinochet-and-the-fairy-tale-miracl... Doctrine: the Ersatz Genesis Fable in Chile[/url] ... or how Keynes and Marx saved Chile not Milton Friedman and the Reaganauts

Greg Palast was a student of finance at the Chicago School. One of his professors was Milton Friedman, the shock specialist himself.

[ 29 December 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Klien is an unbeliever a free market heretic... BURN HER!!!

quote:

---

He doesn't think it meets minimum intellectual standards. I think he is right: now I can borrow Tyler's ideas and have an informed view:

---

When we depend on an Economist to define intellectual standards we are certainly in trouble.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]

No, that's not it. it's as if Stiglitz is holding his nose.[/b]

---

Stephen, I don't think that discounts my characterization. Again being fair, I haven't read Stiglitz's review.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
But then I went back and read the quoted segment of his favoured blog posting and realized that the bloggers hadn't read the book either.

---

How do you know that Tyler Cowan didn't read the book?

You're quite the smartass, Stephen, a real plus for what is a discipline seeking credibility in general.

[url=http://brightonregencylabourparty.blogspot.com/2005/10/20-reasons-why-i-... Reasons Why I Hate Thatcher[/url] Brighton Regency Labour blog

quote:

---

It would appear that Stiglitz had two choices:

a) Apply the normal standards of our profession and trash the book.
b) Hold his nose, say nice things, and hold onto his radical street cred.

He chose b). Cowan and DeLong chose a).

---

So the normal standards of your profession are to trash books you haven't read if they question the profession's current prevailing ideology?

quote:

---

Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]

How do you know that Tyler Cowan didn't read the book?[/b]

---

Fair question. Because I did.

According to Cowan, as per your citation:

quote:

---

What the reader will find is a series of fabricated claims, such as the suggestion that Margaret Thatcher created the Falkland Islands crisis

---

Klein made no such claim. She wrote "Both sides in the conflict had good reasons to want a war," but she never made the claim that anyone, not even the Argentinians, "created" a crisis or engineered a war. Rather, she argues that Thatcher used her popularity resulting from the war to push through economic measures that just weeks earlier she had described as "impossible".

To suggest Klein had claimed that Thatcher had "created the Falkland Islands crisis" is absurd and suggests, quite strongly to me, that the commentator hasn't actually read the book.

As well, the comments on China are steeped in ideological hogwash rather than a fair reading of the book. At least, even as indicated by Farmpunk, Klein is meticulous at sourcing her material.

According to Klein, Milton Friedman was first invited to China in 1980 as that country began a top-down reform of China's economy and the embracing of the free market. According to Klein, Friedman remarked that Hong Kong, despite having no democratic government, was freer than the US.

She acknowledges that free market reform had its winners as well as losers. But by the end of the 80s, the losers were becoming sore and more numerous. Friedman was invited back to China in 1988. Upon return to the US, Friedman wrote, as cited by Klein, that "I gave precisely the same advise to Chile as China," and he added, sarcastically, according to Klein, "should I prepare for an avalanche of protests for having been willing to give advise to so evil a government?"

A year later the world witnessed the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Stephen was not saying that Stiglitz was critisizing Klein; he was citing Cowan who critisized Stiglitz for not critisizing Klein.