1.31.2009

thoughts on naomi klein's shock doctrine

As I mentioned, I'm finally reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. It's an excellent and important book, and my glacial reading pace is in no way attributable to Klein's writing, which is always lively and very accessible.

I'm learning a lot, especially about events that happened during my lifetime but of which I was only dimly aware, or aware of only through mainstream reports.

I'm finding it enormously depressing. I'm sure it isn't Klein's intentions to make her readers feel there is no hope of the majority of the world's peoples achieving real economic justice. But reading this book is making me feel hopeless and helpless.

Learning how the most successful people's movements of our lifetimes were hijacked by the hypercapitalist freemarketeers is just crushing.

I especially felt this when reading about South Africa. Divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa was the burning issue on US college (university) campuses when I was in school. Divestment was my first real activism, apart from the anti-war and civil rights marches I attended as a child with my father. The end of apartheid has remained my clearest sense of the possibility of change, because it was the singular event I witnessed in my lifetime. Nelson Mandela's release from prison and his presidency were a dream come true for hundreds of millions of people all over the world. I was one of them.

I knew that with political justice realized, the dream of real justice - land redistribution, nationalized mines - was derailed. I know that there remains brutal inequality in South Africa, that the black majority remains very poor. But I never knew why or how that happened. While The Freedom Charter was being assassinated, my attention was elsewhere. And there was no internet. Unless you read The Nation every week (and I didn't), you couldn't keep up on the inner workings of a distant counter-revolution.

The other horror for me to read about was Poland. I remember wearing my Solidarnosc t-shirt, and thrilling to Lech Walesa leading a truly democratic worker's revolution. And then... capitalism in the extreme.

Why did the dreams die? Who killed them? Global capitalism didn't prevail because it was the best choice for the most people. It didn't triumph because the people demanded it. Why did the leadership of these countries - so recently liberated, and so full of hope - adopt a system that would lock most of its people into lifelong poverty?

Yesterday, reading The Shock Doctrine, I learned the answers.

The brilliant thing about the book is Klein's framework, the context in which she places dozens of disparate events.

The horrible thing is how it's making me despair. The majority of the world toils in factories, fields, mines and shops, living on the edge of poverty, while giant multinational corporations reap the profits of their labour, and control access to the food, water and fuel that should be their birthright.

Oppressive regimes can be toppled, at great cost. But real justice remains a dream.

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