Leftists used to think that, as a general axiom, capitalism was doomed. But today most of these same leftists deem capitalism invincible and fearfully lob documentation at each other detailing the efficient devilry of the executives of the system. The internet amplifies their funk into a catastrophist mindset. This catastrophism imbues most of the English-speaking left west of the Atlantic after seven years of Bush and Cheney, and frames Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

At the outset, Klein permits herself a robust trumpet blast as an intrepid pioneer: “This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story – that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy.”

The arc of triumph to which Klein alludes is the half century from the Eisenhower administration’s onslaughts on political and economic nationalism in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s, to the US attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. These are not decades where “the official story” has been entirely without challenge until Klein started her researches. There are shelves worth of books on the ghastly consequences of the covert interventions and massacres organised or connived at by the United States in the name of freedom and the capitalist way. Klein’s own bibliography attests that there has been plenty of detailed work on the neo-liberal onslaught that gathered strength from the mid1970s on, marching under the intellectual colours of one of her arch villains, the late Milton Friedman, the Chicago School economist.

Where Klein would presumably claim originality is in identifying and describing the taxonomy of what she calls “shock capitalism”; the shock of a sudden attack, whether the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1971 or the bombing of Bagh-dad in 2003; the shock of torturers using sensory-deprivation techniques and crude electrodes to instil fear and acquiescence; Friedman’s economic “shock treatment”. Methodically combined and elaborated, these onslaughts now amount, on Klein’s account, to a new and frightful chapter in the history of capitalist predation.

Klein begins with a chapter on the CIA-sponsored psychic “depatterning” experiments of that monster, Ewen Cameron of McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute, and states explicitly that torture, aside from being a tool, is “a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic”. To use shock literary tactics to focus attention on the deliberate and sadistic engineering of collective social trauma is certainly no crime. But, as often happens after a shock, one eventually retrieves a sense of proportion, one that is not entirely flattering to Klein’s larger ambitions for her book.

Capitalism, after all, has always been a shock doctrine of selfish predation, as one can discover from Hobbes and Locke, Marx and Weber, none of whom is discussed by Klein. Read historians like the Hammonds on the English enclosures of the 18th century, when villagers would find nailed to the door of the parish church an announcement that their common lands had been privatised. Protesters may not have been “depatterned” Cameron-style, but were briskly hanged or sent to Botany Bay.

Friedman’s Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier 1m Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about “the bloody birth of counter-revolution” in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past.

Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the civil war the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use the crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.

Just as there is continuity in capitalist predation, there is continuity in resistance. Here’s where Klein’s catastrophism distorts the picture. Her controlling metaphor for the attack on Iraq is the initial “shock and awe” bombardment, designed to numb Saddam’s forces and the overall civilian population into instant surrender and long-term submission. But the “shock and awe” tactic was a bust. Having sensibly decided not to fight or die on an American timetable, many of Iraq’s soldiers regrouped to commence an effective resistance.

Capitalists try to use social and economic dislocation to advantage, but so do those they oppress. War has been the mother of many a positive social revolution, as have natural disasters. The incompetence of the Mexican police and emergency forces after the huge earthquake of 1985 prompted a vast popular upheaval. In Latin America there have been shock attacks and shock doctrines for 500 years. Right now, in Latin America, the pendulum is swinging away from the years of darkness, the death squads and Friedman’s doctrines. Klein’s outrage is admirable as are her specific exposés across six decades of infamy, but in her larger ambitions her metaphors betray her.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
Allen Lane £25 pp558
Buy the book here at the offer price of £22.50 (inc p&p)

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