THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. The rise of disaster capitalism. By Naomi Klein. 559pp.
Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Pounds 25. - 978 0 7139 9899 3. US: Metropolitan Books. $28. - 978 0 8050 7983 8.
Under the sprawling surface of Naomi Klein's noisily enraged new book, two interesting ideas are diffidently signalling to be let out. Both concern a tendency for advanced capitalist economies to spawn crises, and for once neither lays the blame particularly at the door of financial institutions, which is unusual in these financially fixated days.
The first is the idea that since many of the reforms favoured by economic conservatives - privatization, deregulation and fiscal retrenchment, for instance - are difficult to sell to democratic electorates in normal times, those who stand to benefit from such reforms have an interest in provoking the arrival of abnormal times. Crises - military, economic, or political - do not just happen through bad luck but can be made more or less likely through the conscious choice of strategies of risk management. Economic conservatives, Klein believes, choose policies that make crises more likely to happen, because they know they will then profit from the enhanced marketability of their ideology.
The second idea concerns more specifically the post-September 11 world of foreign policymaking in the United States. Klein claims that enough individuals with a personal financial interest in activities and companies that profit from military disaster have moved into positions of influence to give US policymaking a dangerously risk- loving tilt. Like the first, this claim is important and may even be true. It also makes a welcome change from the widespread tendency on the Centre Left to blame the catastrophe of the Iraq adventure on simple stupidity in Washington, and helps to sketch an account of its origins in terms of deliberate strategies of the main actors involved - strategies that, whether or not they provoke disaster deliberately, certainly do too little to avoid it.
The Shock Doctrine could have been a great book if it had concentrated on carefully researching and arguing the case for these two interesting claims.
But Naomi Klein has bigger fish to fry, and a whole public of readers eager for a repeat of the bestselling moral fervour of her earlier book No Logo (2000) - eager, indeed, for an even bigger and more extravagant thrill. Her target is "free market ideology", specifically that popularized by the Chicago School of economists, whom she holds responsible for dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, the invasion of Iraq, the evils and follies committed by the
CIA and, indeed, most of the other ills of the world that you might name, including authoritarianism in China, the spread of AIDS in South Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian problem and the use of torture.
In case you think this might be attributing too many consequences to so small a list of villains, it soon becomes clear that free- market ideologues, though genuflecting to Chicago, include virtually anyone who has expressed any doubts about central planning, state ownership, or any aspect of the regulation of modern economies. This no doubt adds vigour to the polemic, but it makes this book about as useful a guide to modern economics as a book on the state of contemporary religion written by an atheist for whom there is no real difference between Catholics, Quakers and Bible Belt fundamentalists.
