Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Shock Waves: How Free-Market Economics Spread across the Globe an Interview with
Naomi Klein
Author(s): Naomi Klein, Peter Cahn and Misha Klein
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 2008), pp. 30-33
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40159666
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Shock Waves
How Free-Market Economics Spread across the Globe
An Interview with Naomi Klein
Misha Klein & Peter Cahn
Klein (b. 1970) is a Canadian writer,
-political analyst, and social activist. Her
first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the
Brand Bullies (2000), became a touchstone of the anti-
corporate globalization movement and has been trans-
lated into twenty-eight languages. She visited the Uni-
versity of Oklahoma in February 2007 as the keynote
speaker at the Latin American symposium "Citizenship
and Identity in an Age of Shifting Borders/' where she
previewed the argument for her new book, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metro-
politan Books, 2007). Based on her reporting from New
Orleans, Argentina, Iraq, South Africa, and Sri Lanka,
among other crisis zones, The Shock Doctrine traces
the expansion of radical free-market economics from
the 1973 coup in Chile to postwar Iraq. Wherever these
policies of privatization have been implemented, she
explains, they have been imposed through undemocratic
measures.
Misha Klein You've called your book The Shock
Doctrine, and you've drawn parallels with psy-
chiatry and the use of economic shock treatment.
You're using this as a mechanism by which free-
market policies get imposed. Can you explain
how that works and whether it's more than a
metaphor?
I chose this as the metaphor because the econ-
omists chose it as their metaphor. I just took the
metaphor they chose seriously. I'm not an econo-
mist; I come more from cultural criticism, and
people who write about culture know that the lan-
guage we choose tells us something. Susan Sontag
wrote so brilliantly about the danger of illness as
metaphor, particularly fatal illness as metaphor. I
was so struck reading this economic history about
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giODaiUMMOT
how consistently these illness metaphors came up
again and again: free-market economists diagnos-
ing entire countries as fatally ill, in need of radical
shock therapy or radical chemotherapy. As Sontag
wrote in Illness as Metaphor, once a society has been
diagnosed with a fatal illness, any treatment for
that illness becomes morally justifiable because the
alternative is death. Once you've raised the stakes
to that level, and you cast yourself as the healing
doctor, the shock therapist, then you're beyond
judgment because your patient was going to die
anyway. I was just so struck by this deathbed
language that economists used to describe Bolivia
in the 1980s and Russia in the 1990s, thereby justi-
fying the use of very violent economic shocks. So
it made me want to understand economic shock
therapy better.
I look at real shocks, shocks to bodies, in the
book in two ways. The first is as a very real tool
for enforcement for these policies because these
are contested policies, and in some places they're
more contested than others. When they are highly
contested, as in Chile and Argentina, Uruguay,
Brazil in the 1970s, or China in the late 1980s, they
cannot be imposed peacefully because people
resist. A context where workers are striking and
fighting back defeats the purpose of creating these
ideal conditions for foreign investors because, of
course, worker unrest is not ideal for investors.
So there must be a strategy for controlling dis-
sent, and there's always some measure of repres-
sion in a country's economic shock therapy. But
in some extreme cases that includes real shock
therapy, real shocks to bodies. Not in every case,
but I argue in the book that from Latin America
in the 1970s, Central America in the 1980s, China
March -April 2008 1 31
 during the Tiananmen period, to today, mass
imprisonment and torture have been strategies to
push through unwanted economic shock therapy.
I argue the same of Iraq. It was only after Paul
Bremer's [former head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority] extraordinary economic shocks that the
Iraqi resistance gained steam, and we began to see
the war move into the jails and the use of syste-
matic torture and abuse.
But I also look at torture as a metaphor, a
Disaster microcosm for the logic of what I'm calling "disas-
ter capitalism/7 because disaster capitalism is a
capitalism political strategy that is a concerted attempt to
harness the dislocation after a large-scale shock
is a political or disaster, to harness and exploit the window of
opportunity that opens up when whole societies
strategy that go into a state of shock or are just simply reeling
from some horrific experience that keeps them
is a concerted concentrated on day-to-day survival, and also
keeps them fearful and generally more trustful
attempt to than usual of their authority figures. Harnessing
that window of opportunity to push through
harness the policies that would be impossible under normal
circumstances - that's disaster capitalism.
dislocation
Peter Cahn The 1980s was a time of the ascendan-
after a large- cy of religious fundamentalism. What relationship f
do you see between that trend and what you call
scale shock "fundamentalist capitalism?"
Well, I think they're really compatible and
or disaster, to mutually reinforcing. Not just the rise of funda-
mentalist Christianity, but all forms of religious
harness and fundamentalism, because the heart of this ideo-
logical movement is a war on the public sphere,
exploit the on the state. Milton Friedman's vision of a correct
society was one in which the only acceptable role
window of for governments was to enforce contracts and to
police borders, and everything else should be left
opportunity that to the market. So, as this ideology has triumphed
around the world, you see the disappearance of a
opens up when state that provides real services to its citizens and
even noncitizens, and you see the disappearance
whole societies of public spaces, non-market spaces to convene.
As the state fails to provide these helping func-
go into a state tions and increasingly provides only repressive
functions and functions of social control, like pris-
of shock. ons and surveillance, then the gaps in this failing
32 1 World Literature Today
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state are filled by other forces. Those other forces
are often fundamentalist religions that also play
social-service roles or provide the only gathering
space for communities.
I think we see this really clearly in the United
States with the rise of the megachurches in the
so-called exurbs, where you don't have any public
space besides the megachurch; the megachurch
is a meeting place where you go to do aerobics,
a place where you get daycare, and is the only
community besides the shopping mall. I certainly
saw a different version of the same phenomenon
when I was in Iraq: first the destruction of the
state and then the failure to reconstruct created a
vacuum. When I was in Iraq, that was the time that
Moqtada al-Sadr was building his base. And he
was building his base by systematically filling the
vacuum created by the corporate reconstruction
that Paul Bremer was spearheading. So this recon-
struction was failing to provide jobs for Iraqis and
was a boondoggle just getting money to foreign
corporations but not providing security or water
or electricity. You had the shadow reconstruction
emerging out of the mosques. Part of this was also
the emergence of the Mahdi Army where they
began to play security functions, starting with
directing traffic and protecting the mosques, but it
turned into something much more extensive and
much more vicious. I would honestly say Blackwa-
ter is the mirror image of this in the United States,
where you have the vision of a hollow military,
which was actually Donald Rumsfeld's vision for
the military, vision of transformation. He invaded
Iraq with this very stripped-down force. As the
war spiraled out of control, the vacuum was filled
by private players like Blackwater.
MK How does this "fundamentalist capitalism"
differ from other kinds of capitalism that we have
seen? Is it a difference of intensity or a difference
of quality?
I think that there are very powerful similari-
ties between neoliberalism and more classic colo-
nial stages of capitalist expansion. I think the work
of David Harvey, at CUNY, has probably been the
most useful in terms of his analysis of both the
similarities and differences of a stage of capitalism,

colonial capitalism, which was about feeding off of
the raw resources of the land, gorging off of them
in frontier lawless moments, and Adam Smith's
praise for the frontier as being the purest capitalist
moment, precisely because there was no taxation
and because land could be seized. Harvey's analy-
sis, and it's one that I use in the book, is that neo-
liberalism is the same stage of frantic gorging off
of resources.* But rather than natural resources, it's
the veins of the state that are being mined. It is the
veins of the Keynesian or developmentalist state
that are the new frontier: water systems, transport
systems, roads. This is like the gold and silver of
the age of the conquistadors.
PC Your mention of David Harvey reminded me
that he makes the point that wherever neoliberal-
ism has gone it has increased the inequality in
wealth, and that this movement of free markets
serves the financial interests of the elite. Is that a
necessary consequence of the Shock Doctrine?
I think it's the purpose of the Shock Doctrine.
I think that neoliberalism should be understood
as a class war, but waged by the elites. The dissat-
isfaction with the mixed economies of the 1930s,
'40s, '50s, and '60s was a dissatisfaction with how
much of the wealth and economic growth was
being distributed to an increasingly large middle
class largely because of increasingly powerful
trade unions. The movement that is neoliberalism,
or Chicago School economics, should be under-
stood as a counterrevolution against Keynesian-
ism, waged very deliberately by some of the most
powerful economic interests in the United States
and the world, who very consciously funded the
most radical free-market economists in the market,
Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek,
and lavishly funded a network of right-wing
think tanks who exist in a state of acute disaster
preparedness, making sure that whenever the
next crisis hits, it will be their ideas that are
lying around, to borrow a phrase from Milton
Friedman.
PC One of the contributions of The Shock Doctrine,
you could say, is to provide this alternative to offi-
cial history. How do you create organized regions
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giODail^MMQM]
of resistance and not just separate challenges to the
neoliberal model?
I think that that really was happening in the
so-called antiglobalization movement, which was
never really an accurate phrase, because what was
remarkable about that moment of political conver-
gence in the late 1990s was how international it
was. It did represent both unprecedented interna-
tional links, in many ways facilitated by new tech-
nologies, and also multidisciplinary, cross-issue
coalitions. So that was what was so exciting about
those convergence moments in front of World
Trade Organization summits and International
Monetary Fund meetings. I think that we know
that it is possible because we saw that. Part of what After completing her book,
I'm trying to do with the book is refocus the discus- Klein worked with Mexican
sion on this economic model, on this economic filmmaker Alfonso Cuar6n
system, rather than on partisan politics, which I to produce The Shock
feel has pretty much hijacked the debate in this Doctrine short film. As Klein
country. I am even being somewhat critical of the notes on her website (www.
antiwar lens, because when we don't look at what naomiklein.org), she was
system and interests wars are serving our ability "hoping he would send
to contest them is limited. me a quote for the book
jacket, and instead he pulled
MK So you are suggesting that providing people together this amazing team
with a base for analysis rather than just an anti- of artists - including Jona"s
position is what is strengthening? Cuar6n, who directed and
I think ihat when the system itself is exposed, edited - to make The Shock
when we're not just looking at the symptoms of Doctrine short film. It was
a system. ... I think that preemptive wars over one of those blessed projects
resources are a symptom of a system that is so where everything felt fated."
dependent on short-term growth and incapable The six-minute short was an
of self-correction, even in the face of climate crisis. official selection at the Venice
When we are able to look at a system, then these and Toronto film festivals in
connections happen very organically, I think. 2007 and can be viewed at
Because it is a global system, so in a sense our www.naomiklein.org.
coalitions have been made for us, because this is
a system that is global by its nature and affects
pretty much everyone in the world. D
September 2007
Authors' note: We are very grateful to Lynn Franklin of
the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Jour-
nalism and Mass Communication, who donated space,
equipment, and his personal time to the recording of the
interview.
March -April 2008 1 33