Here.
I've been reading Naomi Klein's new-ish book, The Shock Doctrine. It's classic Klein, which is to say that it's smart, insightful, and a tad too radical for my taste. I will say though, back in high school, reading No Logo--her monolithic study on the effects of advertising and branding for our culture, politics, and psyche--I became an anarchist for about a month or two.
Her new book keeps her precise, studied, scalpel-like prose, style, and insight, but takes on an entirely different topic. The Shock Doctrine looks a particular brand of capitalism--that espoused by Milton Friedman (and others, of course)--and examines how it aims to "shock" (Friedman's word) a county into a state of regression, a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which a new and pure capitalist economy might be built. She shows how America experiments with this mode economic shock treatment, both abroad and here in The Homeland. Times of crisis are either exploited (Katrina), or deliberately created (Iraq, Chile), and then puritan neoliberal economic policies are forced on the chosen community. This has been taken a step further in recent years, with the disaster and following reconstruction itself used as an opportunity for neoliberal economics. As Klein writes:
"[F]or-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war... or a hurricane.
Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom--the medium is the message.
One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earning of the energy services company Halliburton, "Iraq was better than expected." That was in October, 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709. (16)
She goes on to compare the efforts of mid-century researchers' quest for an artificially created blank slate in the human mind. The method used--both by almost-fictional-seeming, conscienceless doctors, researchers and torturers--was shock treatment. They would pour electricity though the body of their victim over and over again, causing a state of child-like regression. From this, the experimenters/tortures would try to re-mold the personality of the subject to their own liking--eliciting forced confessions or "curing" mental illness. (I should note here that modern shock therapy bears almost no resemblance to this earlier medical abomination.)
It's an interesting analogy, as far as it goes. Klein loses herself a bit in the horror of it all, and the result--while chilling and gripping--is a bit of an overreach.
Her best example is Pinochet's Chile. After Pinochet's notorious coup, he handed control of the economy over to "the Chicago Boys." A group of economists trained at the University of Chicago during the heyday of its Friedmanism. They immediately instituted a policy of economic slash-and-burn, privatizing everything from the postal service to fruit companies, gutting regulations, and brutalizing benefits and spending. The result wasn't a quick shock as had been hoped by Friedman and his desciples, rather, as Klein notes:
The country's period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties--a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That's because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago doctrine, Chile's economy crashed: its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent--ten times higher than it was under Allende. (104)
Too, there was, of course, the creation of massive inequality: pretty much throughout Pinochet's reign, the creme de la creme was making a killing.
It isn't enough, however, to just note that economic shock treatment and shock torture are both done in the hopes of regressing its patient. That would just be an interesting coincidence. The comparison runs deeper than that. Economic shock treatment is done, generally speaking, against the will of its victim. It took a coup in Venuzuela, a war in Iraq, brutal strongmen across the globe, to institute these policies in the pure and unadulterated manner in which they were designed. It's done for the greater good--a necessary evil. Torture, that moral scourge, too, is done because it is a necessary evil. Isn't the cost of the morality of a nation a the souls of the tortures worth the saving of innocent lives? Or, so the argument goes. But, just as with torture, even granting that the hoped-for ends would justify the means (something I'd argue isn't true), the hoped-for end is almost always unattainable.
The New York Times (h/t dday) recently pointed out that the coercive interrogation (read: torture) techniques currently being practiced by the United States, were designed by Communist China to elicit false confessions:
he military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners [...]
The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.
Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.
Similarly, even if we grant that economic shock treatment--and its inevitable partner, bloodshed--would be worth having a economically healthy country, there's still the problem that economic shock treatment doesn't actually produce an economically healthy country. Why do you think that South America has so firmly rejected Chicago School policies, electing leftists like Chavez?
How else can we explain the Chilean Miracle that wasn't?But I, the bleeding-heart that I am, reject the idea that, with either torture or economic shock treatment, that the ends justify the means. This point can be argued, of course, and its a matter of ethics. What is more clear--and ignored by Freidman disciples--is that, just as you can't have torture without pain, you can't have economic tabula rasa without blood. Klein slides up to this point. She asks:
"It was the flesh-and-blood Communism that imposed wholesale repression, culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror," writes Stephane Courois, coauthor of the contentious Black Book of Communism. "Is the ideology itself blameless?" Of course it is not. ... Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, forever tainted by those real-world laboratories [Soviet Russia, Maoist China, etc.].
But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-cororate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excesses of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts of the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism--almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.
It is a cruel coincidence--perhaps irony--that September 11 was both the day of the felling of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon but also the day in which Allende--Chile's democratically-elected leader--was killed in a bloody coup. As we become further enmeshed in this new cold war against ill-defined enemies, we would do well to not stray from the fight against terrorism. Klein writes:
[T]he Chicago School strain of capitalism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society.
This "desire for godlike power of total creation" is the implacable enemy of freedom and the inevitable trait of dictators and necessarily dictatorial unrestrained capitalism.
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