Shock Doctrine Series
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, Edited Excerpts
Today’s multinationals see government programs, public assets and everything that is not for sale as terrain to be conquered and seized – the post office, national parks, schools, social security, disaster relief and anything else that is publicly administered. Corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthless determination and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home the gold and silver of the
What we have been living with for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up. The coups, the wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate regimes have been written off as excesses of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts of the Cold War, and now the War on Terror.
It was 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: “Only in a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
John Williamson coined the phrase “the Washington Consensus.” He reminded his audience that only when countries are truly suffering do they agree to swallow their bitter market medicine; only when they are in shock do they lie down for shock therapy. “These worst of times give rise to the best of opportunities for those who understand the need for fundamental economic reform,” he declared. “One will have to ask whether it could conceivably make sense to think of deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform.
We are living in an era of corporatist massacres, with countries suffering tremendous military violence alongside organized attempts to remake them into model ‘free market” economies; disappearances and torture are back with a vengeance. And once again the goals of building free markets, and the need for such brutality, are treated as entirely unrelated. The idea that policy change should be like launching a surprise military attack is a recurring theme for economic shock therapists.
