Page 3 of
3 BOOK REVIEW Power, passion and
neo-liberalism The Shock
Doctrine
by Naomi
Klein
Reviewed by Walden
Bello
and 1.1% in the 1990s,
compared to 3.5% in the 1960s and 2.4% in the
1970s.
Disaster capitalism It
is this fundamental failure of finance-driven
capitalism to reignite vigorous capital
accumulation that allows us to fully appreciate
Klein's theory of disaster
capitalism and David Harvey's closely related
notion of "accumulation by dispossession". Both
may be seen as the latest desperate effort of an
increasingly sputtering capitalist machine's
effort to surmount the persistent and deepening
crisis of overproduction.
In the past few
years, stagnation or weak growth has marked most
areas of the world economy, with the exception of
China and India. US growth has been higher than
that of sclerotic Europe, but it has been largely
illusory, being largely the result of middle-class
spending fueled by massive credit from China and
East Asia.
China has to lend to the United
States to keep up demand for its cheap-labor based
export-industrial sector, but the expansion of its
production has itself contributed mightily to the
overcapacity, overproduction, and shrinking
profitability plaguing the whole global system.
Even the International Monetary Fund has
recognized that the world is skating on thin ice,
which could break should American consumers rein
in their debt-driven spending, as they now seem to
be doing.
In its efforts to surmount the
crisis, capitalism has increasingly supplemented,
if not supplanted, accumulation through production
with accumulation through dispossession, or the
expropriation of already created wealth or sources
of wealth akin to the process of primitive
accumulation that marked early capitalism in the
14th to the 17th centuries. Accumulation by
dispossession involves an acceleration of the
privatization and commodification of the commons,
which includes not only land but also the
environment and knowledge.
Millions of
peasants and indigenous peoples are displaced from
the soil as private property supplants common
property or communal regimes, often with the
active support of institutions like the World Bank
and the Asian Development Bank. Seeds, the
end-result of eons of interaction between nature
and human communities, are now privatized through
mechanisms such as the Trade Related Intellectual
Property Rights Agreement, which has also dampened
technological development in the South owing to
fear of infringing on the patents of northern
corporations.
Contracting out the 'war on
terror' A key mechanism for accumulation by
dispossession is the accelerated privatization of
hitherto public or state assets, which is what
disaster capitalism is all about. Disaster
capitalism is the Bush administration's central
contribution to neo-liberalism. Its key feature is
the parceling out to the private sector of the
"core" functions of security, defense, and
infrastructure that Adam Smith himself thought had
to be left to the state. Through the "war on
terror," Klein writes, the Bush administration
brought about:
The creation of the disaster
capitalism complex - a full-fledged new economy
in homeland security, privatized war, and
disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less
than building and running a privatized security
state, both at home and abroad. The economic
stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved
enough to pick up the slack where globalization
and the dot-com booms had left off. Just as the
Internet launched the dot-com bubble, 9/11
launched the disaster capitalism bubble ... It
was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution
launched by Friedman. For decades, the market
had been feeding off the appendages of the
state; now it would devour the
core.
In the disaster capitalism
paradigm, the state serves as the engine of
capital accumulation - that is, it raises capital
via taxes, and then transfers it to private
contractors that take over its core functions,
from defense to incarceration to the provision of
infrastructure.
Security provision becomes
the new growth industry, incorporating but going
beyond the old military-industrial complex.
Disaster, either of the natural kind like Katrina
or the socially-created kind like Iraq, is seen as
opportunity in several ways. It creates demand for
a commodity, that is, for security or
reconstruction. By taking advantage of natural
disasters, it provides the opportunity to alter
the physical landscape and "add value" to it, by
sweeping away "value-deprived" poor communities
and converting the land to upscale commercial or
residential real estate, as in post-Katrina New
Orleans.
Finally, as in Iraq, war becomes
the instrument to erase the old interventionist
state and create from scratch the ideal
neo-liberal government whose key function is to
delegate its own functions to private contractors,
like the engineering firm Bechtel or the notorious
private security firm Blackwater. "In Iraq," Klein
writes, "there was not a single governmental
function that was considered so 'core' that it
could not be handed to a contractor, preferably
one who provided the Republican Party with
financial contributions or Christian footsoldiers
during elections campaigns. The usual Bush motto
governed all aspects of the foreign forces'
involvement in Iraq: if a task could be performed
by a private entity, it must be."
The
problem, of course, is that disaster capitalism is
so brazenly anti-people that even dressed up in
the rhetoric of freedom, entrepreneurship, and
efficiency, it cannot win over people in the way
early neo-liberal ideology was able to captivate
the middle classes in the era of Reagan and
Thatcher. Reading Klein's chilling account, one
wonders how L Paul Bremer, the head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority, could not have
realized that the decrees he made which had the
effect of making Iraqi youth a surplus population
in a society where the state functioned mainly to
enrich foreign contractors would turn them into
insurgents. Disaster capitalism and accumulation
by dispossession represent a capitalist order that
no longer seeks ideological hegemony but seeks to
impose itself through pure force. This is not
sustainable.
Klein's last chapter, which
looks at the vast and varied global movement that
has risen against what French thinkers call
"savage capitalism" shows that, as Gramsci noted,
nothing can remain hegemonic for long without
legitimacy. People have become both more hopeful
and more savvy: they will not be easily subjected
to another neo-liberal shock.
Klein
past versus Klein present So here's the
inevitable question: which is the better book,
No Logo or The Shock Doctrine? This
is not an easy choice, but I would land on the
side of No Logo.
Let me explain.
The critical edge, analytical sharpness, and
passion of No Logo are to be found in
The Shock Doctrine as well. But there is
something different about the writing. In a review
I did for Yes! in 2001, I wrote:
No Logo is compelling, but
it's not an easy read. Reading Klein is like
serving alongside a skilled commander who
relentlessly probes the enemy's many defenses to
locate the principal point of vulnerability. And
just when the reader thinks Klein has identified
the key to the defense, she reveals that this is
only one episode in unraveling the dynamics of
contemporary capitalism. This is deconstructive
writing at its best, the product of a
first-rate, restless mind that is not satisfied
with drawing a solitary insight or two from her
material.
Reading The Shock
Doctrine is a different experience. You don't
need to work. You're like a tourist being guided
on a well-lit path where there are few surprises.
I much prefer the discourse of No
Logo, and I certainly do not relish being
subjected at the very beginning to a literary
shock treatment that has no other purpose but to
prod me to read further. That flaw - and the
change in style - I prefer to attribute not so
much to the Toronto-based Klein but to the New
York School of publishing, which, like Hollywood,
much prefers an in-your-face approach to a more
allusive, more indirect, less predictable, but
ultimately more enlightening discourse.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books
(September 18, 2007). ISBN-10: 0805079831. Price
US$28, 576 pages.
Foreign Policy In
Focus columnist Walden Bello is currently a
distinguished visiting professor at St Mary's
University in Halifax, Canada. Bello is also a
senior analyst at the Bangkok-based institute
Focus on the Global South and professor of
sociology at the University of the Philippines at
Diliman. He is the author of Walden Bello
Introduces Ho Chi Minh (London: Verso,
2007), Dilemmas of Domination (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2005), and Deglobalization
(London: Zed, 2002).
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