Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein once again provides us with an engaging and easy to read account of the rise and rise of neoliberalism. However, her limited historical and analytical scope left this reader disappointed.
Naomi Klein is at her best in explaining the relentless onslaught of neoliberal policies all over the world, and their genesis in academic circles in the USA, particularly surrounding the economist Milton Friedman. Her basic thesis is that the doctrine of neoliberalism has come to dominate the world by using periods of massive public disorientation following collective shock – wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters – to push through unpopular neoliberal reforms. However, this thesis is not without its flaws.
Klein’s strongest insight is the analogy between psychological damage through torture, and physical damage through neoliberalism. She quotes CIA manuals on torture practices and draws illuminative parallels with neoliberalism: ‘Like the terrrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.’ This is a novel and instructive analogy – and goes some way to highlighting the close connections between psychological and physical damage that are neglected by so many other commentators. However, this analogy could be usefully applied much further. For Klein the ‘disaster capitalists’ lie in wait, ready to jump onto ‘disasters’ when they emerge. While this is no doubt the case for ‘natural’ disasters, most disasters are not natural, but are an intrinsic parts of the economic, political and social system we live in, and are increasingly frequent as neoliberalism extends its reach across the world. I would argue for a greater degree of culpability of neoliberalism and its advocates for creating the shocks in the first place - a culpability akin to that of the torturer. Yet Klein shies away taking her own analogy to its logical conclusion. For torture is not merely about the creation of sudden terror, but the normalisation and generalisation of states of fear amongst all who would resist. Similarly neo-liberal ‘shocks’ are merely particular moments in a much longer-term and more generalised attempt to control populations, by normalising fear and insecurity so much that they become part of our everyday experience. This seems to betray an overly narrow framework behind Klein’s analysis; she does not seem to take into account the wider dimensions of how power as a whole operates within a political, social and economic system, wider than just neoliberalism or corporations. This makes the book, despite its 466 pages, feel disappointingly partial, and limited in its analytical and historical scope.
For Klein, neoliberalism is basically the rule of the market and corporations over the state, and therefore over the people. In this scenario, corporations and the state are in direct competition with each other, which leads her to neglect the role of states and state power in facilitating elite power using the market, and more recently, using neoliberalism. This makes her explanation of neoliberalism’s dominance seem incomplete; arguing, as she does, that it is based on the power of opportunistic shock, rather than other, more historically embedded mechanisms. Not everyone has been ‘shocked’ into submission to neoliberalism. There have also been a host of other, often more hidden and insidious attempts to make people give up what it is in their interests to hold onto. These include ideological apparatuses such as education, control of the media, knowledge and information, think-tanks, the co-option of civil society, and repressive apparatuses such the police, the courts, governments, prisons etc. The power of corporations is enabled by a host of power mechanisms, stemming from a relationship of mutual benefit between elites, but this isn’t evident in Klein’s analysis.
Her oversight ensures that she does not analyse the wider context of the shock doctrine she dissects. For Klein, the use of shock is a sign of strength of the neoliberal project. However, it can also be argued to be a sign of weakness. Liberalism is no longer enough to keep populations in check and keep economic growth rising, so a more extreme form has emerged, one which it is increasingly difficult to secure consent for.
Iraq is a case in point: a country which had to be deliberately ‘shocked and awed’ into submission, making the companies and states behind it extremely unpopular, and unleashing a powerful Iraqi resistance, which puts the entire mission in jeopardy. Klein sees this as a shock operation, deliberately manufactured by neoliberal (and neo-conservative) architects, but she does not see this as a contradiction of her thesis, more a ‘notable exception’. However, it seems more plausible to see the destruction and ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq as proof that neoliberalism is being pushed to its limit – forced to reveal itself as a force that creates the disasters required to shock subjects into releasing to corporations their resources, their wealth and their labour.
Capitalism needs to constantly expand: exploiting and creating ‘disasters’ with neoliberal shock treatment is the latest weapon to do this. But it is a weapon which weakens the enterprise by exposing its in-built violence, and risks the effectiveness of the other ‘softer’ weapons. Just as torture is an extreme form of repression, so neoliberal shock treatment is an extreme form of liberal capitalism. But Klein fails to locate ‘disaster capitalism’ more broadly in the historical continuities and systemic features of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, she downplays both the everyday violence and the weaknesses of the current world order.
