Full review here: Naomi Klein’s website here.
“Because she [Klein} was part of a generation that could viscerally feel the seductive power of the corporate brand machine, she was able to express the fomenting desire to break free of its hold.”
Klien is still expressing that desire within a Progressive leftist, nearly radical world-view. Whereas most of us find corporate branding harmless or a necessary evil, tolerating it and ignoring it…Naomi Klein finds it to be morally serious, and a symptom of something larger:
...“orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.” She dubs it “disaster capitalism.”
To Klein, there is an excess of capitalism, an ideology of privatization that can put cronyism and dollar signs above the public good in the wake of disasters.
Katrina? The Tsunami? Iraq?
It’s disaster capitalism and its roots go much deeper than merely the Bush administration, according to Klein:
“the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning.”
It all goes back to Milton Friedman, apparently. The Chicago School Of Economics that he helped create has since spread around the globe through neoliberalism and:
they [sic} have been “perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the ‘reforms’ permanent.” This, in short, is “the shock doctrine.”
Ah, the shock doctrine.
A few thoughts:
1. Klein must identify the excessive/ideological elements of capitalism largely because her own progressive platform is so weak. One clear goal of hers seems to be the advancement of her own ideology. Her reductivist tendencies further suggest this.
2. Klein constantly hints at moral corruption and nefarious intent to bolster her position. This supports thought #1 even though there are truths and deep insights in her work.
3. If we assume (and that’s a big assumption) that Klein’s diagnosis is correct, wouldn’t she have to be held to the same standard to which she holds capitalism? What about the record of her own party’s ideological bent? Communism? Mao? Stalin?
Her conception of freedom may even more dangerous than Bush’s, to say, the Iraqi on the street.
See Also: Milton Friedman On Greed. Notice Friedman doesn’t suggest that people aren’t greedy (they are greedy as well as many other, worse and better things), but rather that free-market activity is the best way to help the largest number of people out of poverty.
by Ben Haldenby
