The Shock Doctrine

On the flight to California, where I am spending my Christmas vacation, I began reading Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which just came out in paperback this summer. Many of you probably already know Klein from her articles in Harper’s, The Nation, and The Guardian or from her well-known first book No Logo, which I have taught in several of my classes over the past few years including my class on theory. Her new book has been reviewed by some prominent individuals, including Joseph Stiglitz [here], a Nobel-prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank. She was recently profiled (rather lamely) by The New Yorker [here] and was a guest on both the Colbert Report [here] and C-SPAN [here]. One should pay attention when a book gets reviewed twice in two days in the same newspaper, especially a newspaper like the New York Times; in addition to Stiglitz’s mostly positive review published Sept. 30, 2007, there is also Tom Redburn’s negative one published the day before [here]. One can of course find a list of most of the reviews, responses, and retaliations to the book through Wikipedia [here], along with a brief summary of those responses.

Klein’s thesis is rather straightforward. Fundamentalist free market policies promoted by the economist Milton Friedman and his followers are rarely popular with the majority of people, and so in order to put these policies into effect, the infamous Washington Consensus has taken advantage of various disasters in order to push their agenda. Friedman’s belief is that government gets in the way of natural economic forces, and so he advocates radical deregulation, privatization of government programs including health care and schools, cuts in government spending, and a flat income tax rather than a progressive tax. The Washington Consensus came into being in the 1980s when the Reagan and Thatcher governments and the IMF began to adopt a fundamentalist free-market ideology instead of the mixture of free market, Keynesian, and structuralist economics that were popular (and often successful) before. Worldwide, this ideology has been called “neoliberalism,” and those in the United States who believe that neoliberal economics should be aggressively pushed onto other countries have been called “neoconservatives.” (All of this vocabulary is admittedly strange and, in my view, indicates a strange history that begs to be understood.)

Ideologically, neoliberals and neocons believe that market freedoms and democratic freedoms go hand-in-hand, but in actual practice this is rarely the case because the vast majority of the world’s population is resistant to the privatization of such essentials as water, basic education, and security. Most of us are glad that such things as the minimum wage and the right to unionize are protected, and prefer certain services to be accountable to public scrutiny (e.g., the police just to name one of the more obvious public institutions that neocons have actively sought to privatize.) Consequently, Milton’s economic agenda is often achieved not through democratic means but through draconian, repressive regimes, and these regimes are only able to push through their policies when the general population is “shocked” by some disaster such as a coup d’etat, war, or hurricane. (See my earlier post on the James Bond movie and globalization theory for more on this.) Because market fundamentalism believes that local cultures are an impediment to the universal truths of markets, Klein argues, its proponents perform something analogous to electroshock therapy — attempting to wipe the cultural slate clean just as shock therapy is supposed to wipe the psychic slate clean. In each chapter of her book, Klein’s book carefully narrates how the “shock doctrine” was applied at different times and in different countries around the world. In essence, her book is a history of the dark side of global capitalism, starting with the infamous Pinochet regime in Chile in the 1970s and ending with the recent Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina.

In my opinion, everyone ought to read The Shock Doctrine and take it seriously. And especially now, a year after the book’s publication, as 2008 comes to a close and we are experiencing yet another economic shock, her thesis is particularly relevant. Klein is a terrific writer, and everything she says is backed up with solid research, all of which is carefully cited. The endnotes themselves are worth glancing at because I discovered some other books I’d like to read. (And I suspect that many of her reviewers did not bother to look at the notes.) Nevertheless, although I am a devoted fan of Klein, I do have some problems with it.

I would agree with Stiglitz that her analogy between electroshock therapy/torture techniques and economic shock policy is a bit tenuous, but I would also agree with Stiglitz that our problems with Klein’s metaphor shouldn’t distract us from the main thrust of her argument. In Stiglitz view, Klein’s version of history is basically correct, and in fact he thinks she understates her case rather than overstates it (and in this respect, Stiglitz presents a strong challenge to the main argument of the anti-Klein backlash.) I would also agree with Alexander Cockburn [here] that Klein’s emphasis on the shock doctrine doesn’t account for the other ways that neoliberalism has become the hegemonic ideology of our time. Klein is selective with the stories she tells, and Cockburn is right to ask, what about India? Since the 1990s, India would seem to have gradually begun to adopt the neoliberal agenda democratically, as the journalist Thomas Friedman has talked about at length in his well-known book, The World is Flat — a book that celebrates neoliberalism but ignores many of its consequences. And many cultural theorists would agree with Cockburn that cultural and economic hegemony is most effectively achieved below the radar of an unsuspecting public, rather than through the manipulation of crises and through violent repressive tactics.

However, I think Klein’s main point is often missed. While the political oppression of the Stalinist and Maoist governments are always linked to their Communist economic agenda, the mainstream media oddly refuses to see the linkages between neoliberal economic policy and the past forty years of political oppression and other human rights and environmental disasters. Her book convincingly makes that connection and presents us with a historical memory that can be used to enable people to resist future attempts by neocon governments to force their policies upon unsuspecting publics. In addition, Klein charts the “rise of disaster capitalism,” observing that a radical change occurred in the late 1990s. Until then, most economic theory since Adam Smith’s famous treatise The Wealth of Nations has argued that war and crisis were bad for the overall economy, but Klein shows how neoliberal policies have gradually, over the years, created a very large market for crisis — multinational corporations such as Halliburton specializing in the related industries of destruction and reconstruction. For instance, paradoxically, since the late 1990s, Israel’s stock market index has gone up during violent engagements with Palestine or Lebanon rather than down as it once did…. This is scary because the recent privatization of military operations by the Israeli and U.S. governments is creating a market incentive for violence.

There’s more to say, but my blog post is quite long enough, and my modest goal is simply to encourage everyone to read this book. Despite all its flaws, Klein’s book tells a history everyone really ought to know already.

I want to conclude with two open questions that I plan to address in future blogs. First, missing from her book is the continent of Africa. She talks at length about Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, China, and Palestine, but except for a brilliant chapter on South Africa, she has nothing to say about the rest of that continent which contains many of the poorest countries in the world. And the stories of many African countries — most obviously the Congo whose democratically elected president was assassinated by the United State’s Central Intelligence Agency — would support her thesis. So, how might her discussion of disaster capitalism be useful to my work with the Oromo struggle that I’ve talked about previously in this blog [here] and [here]?

Second, what about our current capitalist disaster? Her book was published almost a year before the collapse of our economy. It seems that Klein was somewhat prophetic about the inherent weakness of neoliberal economics. Several months ago, I began to analyze this economic collapse [here], but was overwhelmed by its complexity and was too busy working. Do I agree with how Klein has applied her “shock doctrine” thesis to the housing market fiasco and stock market crash in her recent articles (which you can access [here])?

Cyber Hip Hop in Diaspora… multicultural, multinational, glocal, transnational, post-national…

With some pride, I want to announce the new issue of Ogina: Oromo Arts in Disapora, the new “webzine” (on-line magazine) that I help to edit. This issue has been praised by Oromo websites and blogs here, here, here, and here. Naturally, it is very exciting for me to be a part of this adventure and to be a part of what I have previously in this blog called the “Oromo Renaissance.” As I mentioned there, most Americans don’t know who the Oromo are, even though they are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, and this sudden flourishing of cultural activity has only recently become possible because of a more tolerant Ethiopian government and a newly globalized Oromo culture. The new issue of Ogina focuses on hip hop and spoken word poetry, and it features several artists, an interview with two of them, and an essay about how the internet changes the nature of culture and politics by creating a transnational public sphere.

What that essay by Qeerransoo Biyyaa argues is that Oromo hip hop is a “glocal“ phenomenon because it brings together a global art form and a local political movement. However, Qeerransoo Biyyaa raises important questions about the internet as a tool for cultural and political communication. On the one hand it allows displaced Oromo refugees a means to share their cultural identity all over the world, but on the other hand, less than 1% of Oromo living in Ethiopia have access to a computer.

Making such observations, Qeerransoo Biyyaa raises some important theoretical questions about the very nature of culture itself as well as the nature of what the philosopher  Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere.” Such questions are clearly important to many Oromo in the United States and Canada who are refugees living in exile, and since my blog is a “theory teacher blog,” I want to draw attention to how he is using theory to make very practical observations about his culture and about the possibilty of political agency for his people.

But here I will raise yet another question. What is the best concept for describing the kind of cultural activity we are seeing here?

Before you continue reading this blog post, please take a moment to think about how many times you’ve heard the words “multicultural” or “multiculturalism.” Probably a lot, and since the early 1990s, it has become popular for Americans to say that we live in a multicultural society. Instead of the proverbial “melting pot” metaphor in which everyone is supposed to assimilate to a single national culture, we now celebrate the “salad bowl” of different cultures all mixed together. To celebrate our cultural diversity is to participate in the ideology of multiculturalism.

But is multiculturalism really the best concept? Certainly, in my view, it’s better than monoculturalism (a.k.a. national chauvenism) which argues for a homogenous culture and celebrates that one culture as somehow superior to all others. But multiculturalism’s celebration of diversity (as I have mentioned in my previous blog post on intercultural competency) can sometimes seem a little shallow. We’re all different, hooray? Is that it? Certainly there’s more to multiculturalism than that, and indeed there is. Theorists of multiculturalism are very serious about not only the importance of cultural recognition but also the problems of cultural recognition when it is understood as an end in itself. In other words, for many, the true end — or goal — of multiculturalism ought to be social justice, not the naive celebration of difference.

However, as many scholars and journalists have pointed out, all the while that people in the United States were celebrating their multicultural nation in the mid-1990s, large multinational corporations such as Nike and Wal-Mart were moving their factories overseas where they could find a cheaper and more powerless workforce to exploit. For the Oromo living in Ethiopia, such global trade was both good and bad. It was good because it opened up large markets for their biggest commercial product — coffee. But it was bad because the multinational corporations controlled the market and left the Oromo people politically powerless, economically dependent, and socially traumatized. In fact, an award winning movie Black Gold analyzed this problem and proposed fair trade coffee organizations such as Equal Exchange as a possible solution.

At the same time that we notice the rise of multinational corporations in a more globalized economy, we also notice another phenomenon. Not only are there more immigrants, but — because of new technologies such as the telephone, television, and the internet — immigrants are remaining more and more emotionally, culturally, and even politically attached to their homeland. Hence, just as multinational corporations are not based in any single nation-state but operate in many nations around the globe, so are diasporic communities such as the Oromo also multinational — living and operating as a single culture in many different nations. The concept “multicultural” doesn’t really capture this phenomenon, so today we use the word “transnational” to better explain the movement of commodities, capital, culture, and people across national borders. And what about communities such as the Oromo and Native Americans who have never felt fully at home within their own homeland and who have never been fully enfranchised by the national government to which they are subject? Aren’t they essentially transnational communities, even if they never emigrate?

However, though we may throw around terms such as transnational, global, and glocal, the nation-state has not disappeared (as the recent effort to strengthen the border between the United States and Mexico indicates.) The nation-state is still the primary political structure available to people through which to adjudicate legal disputes and deliberate on policy. But in terms of both cultural identity and business practices, it has become more confusing and complicated. Some people such as John Carlos Rowe argue that the word transnational is too weak. It doesn’t draw enough attention to the conflicting senses of identity and the challenges of governing multinational corporations and transnational communities. Since the old model assumed that the nation-state governs people and their business inside a nation, how do we govern people and businesses that seems to exist in more than one nation or between nations? Rowe favors the word “post-national” because, he argues, the very strangeness of that made-up word actually calls attention to itself as a fundamentally paradoxical situation.

So, which of these words — multicultural, transnational, glocal, multinational, transnational, global, or post-national — provides us with the best conceptual lens through which to see our world today?