If Thomas L. Friedman has acquired the reputation of being the English-speaking world’s foremost cheerleader of neoliberal globalisation, Naomi Klein has established herself as its principal naysayer. With the publication of No Logo seven years ago, in the wake of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Klein demonstrated that the “just do it” triumphalism of Nike and other global brands masked serious iniquities and injustices. Her new book, The Shock Doctrine, takes the argument an important step further. Neoliberal capitalism, she argues, thrives on disasters: not only are fortunes made from the misfortunes of the masses, but the global dominance of free-market capitalism is built on the infliction of disasters on the world’s less fortunate.

Klein develops her argument over 558, meticulously-endnoted pages. The imposition of radical, Milton Friedmanesque free-market capitalism on entire societies, she claims, takes place when the targeted population is reeling from some sort of exogenous shock: either a foreign invasion, like the “shock and awe” takeover of Iraq in 2003, or a natural disaster, like the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, or even an economic meltdown as occurred in South-east Asia in 1997 or in Argentina in 2001. The kind of disaster that shocks a society into losing its moorings enables the votaries of the free market to come in and rewrite the rules, according to Klein, literally re-programming the assumptions and patterns of behaviours of entire countries. So L. Paul Bremer, with his impeccable suits and pseudo-military boots, rides roughshod over occupied Iraq, dismantling its State-owned industries while passing new laws to privatise everything and permit foreigners to repatriate all their profits; hyperinflation is curbed in Argentina and Bolivia by remedies that ensure capitalists prevail; and in the Maldives, islanders displaced by the tsunami are displaced from their traditional homes in order to free their islands for high-value tourist accommodation. Klein says that not even the U.S. is exempt from this approach: the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has been hailed, she claims, as an opportunity to clear poor blacks out of the city to transform it into a place newly safe for (White) capital.

Katrina, Klein says, demonstrated vividly the inadequacy, indeed incompetence, of the State, and so provided a ready rationale for the private sector to take over. The prime contractors in the reconstruction of New Orleans are also, Klein points out, the leading contractors in Iraq and in Sri Lanka after the tsunami. She sees this as capitalism exploiting victims of disasters when they are at their most vulnerable and unsettled: people in need of aid are obliged to accept “structural adjustment” policies that change their lives. In the wake of the disaster, fisher folk in Sri Lanka and Thailand were prevented from rebuilding their destroyed homes on the waterfront, thereby reserving prime beach property for capitalist development. Milton Friedman had argued as far back as 1962 that “only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change”. Klein takes him quite literally at his word, seeing his prescription as a sinister agenda for corporatisation, abetted by the “colonisation of the World Bank and the IMF by [Friedman’s] Chicago School” and the adoption of the free-market “Washington Consensus” as policy doctrine by the Bretton Woods institutions.

Problematic

This is part of my problem with Klein’s thesis; she is too ready to see conspiracies where others might discern little more than the all-too-human pattern of chaos and confusion, good intentions and greed, playing themselves out in the wake of catastrophes. Her opening chapters, for instance, recount the tale of a CIA-funded Montreal psychiatrist who conducted electroshock experiments on his unwitting patients to de-program their minds and rebuild them as healthy people; Klein argues explicitly that this is precisely what the neoliberal “shock doctrine” does to societies and economies, an analogy with torture that might cause apoplexy in the boardrooms of the IMF. She goes so far as to suggest that economists and policy-makers are willing to deliberately precipitate crises in order to push their agendas.

Klein’s notion of disaster capitalism voraciously feeding on violent disruptions — the antithesis of the conventional wisdom that capitalism requires peace and tranquillity in order to thrive — is a provocative one, if partly vindicated by Halliburton’s profit margins in Iraq. But it is also overstated, ascribing sinister motives for conduct generally motivated by more banal and benign (if sometimes wrongheaded) ideas. In caricaturing the &l

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