"The shock doctrine" by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein lays down in "The shock doctrine, the rise of disaster capitalism" a powerful thesis backed up by an impressive list of evidences, quotes and facts. She argues that, contrary to the claims of Milton Friedman and his followers, hard-core globalist capitalism has not been followed by peace and prosperity but rather by violence and the demise of democracies: Chile, Argentina, Russia are examples where that extreme breed of capitalism has lived on undemocratic regime. Using the pressure of the national debt, the pro-american international financial institutions even forced newly democratic governments to comply to their directives, open their markets to international companies, and shred down the existing net of social measures, all against the will and expectations of the people.

The preferred technique, as Klein explains, is that of the shock doctrine: use a shock, either a natural disaster, a coup d'etat or a political revolution, to take benefit of the stress and the weakness of the people to impose the hardship of lawless capitalism:

Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture -a flood, a war, a terrorist attack- can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

Naomi Klein, The shock doctrine, Introduction.

One of the interesting example is that of South Africa that tries to explain why, several years after the coming in power of the African National Congress (ANC), more (black) people are poor than under apartheid: while negotiations for the share of political power were done in the open, the former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, was negotiating in secret with the international institutions and the economic power of the country detained by the white community. The political agreement gave full human rights to the blacks, while the economic agreement was stripping down the socialist chart of the ANC and was assuring that little economical power can be transferable to the rest of the population:

A longtime antiapartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. «They never freed us. They only took the chain from our neck and put it on our ankles.» Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition «was business saying, 'We'll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name... You can have political power, you can have the façade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else.'»

Naomi Klein, The shock doctrine, Democracy born in chains.

Although the book is convincing, I do not reject the possibility that a selection of the facts has been done to support overwhelmingly the thesis. Is Naomi Klein entirely balanced? Likely no, but nobody could argue against what happened in Chile, Argentina and South Africa and deny the role played by Milton Friedman and his supporters. Those examples, alone, are enough to make Klein's thesis a likely and worrying story.

Naomi Klein finishes positively by assuring that the people has learnt from the damages of the shock doctrine and will be ready next time. We are at the time of a serious financial crisis. Is it part of the hard-core capitalist agenda and is the people ready for a next round of salvaging measures? Or, on the contrary, is that crisis the end of that extremist capitalism and a return to a humbler, fairer and more social view of capitalism?