Status Updates From The Shock Doctrine: The Ris...

"By 1949, [the U.S. was] tolerating from the West German government all kinds of policies that were positively uncapitalist: direct job creation by the state, huge investment in the public sector, subsidies for German firms and strong labour unions."

Defining those as "uncapitalist" policies presumes the very Friedmanian concept of capitalism Klein's critiquing.

A couple of missing points re: post-Soviet privatization:

Graeber's book came later, but data on the expansion of bureaucracy in post-Soviet Russia to facilitate privatizations (notwithstanding unchecked corruption and rapidity) was available. Wonder how that would fit into Klein's picture.

For a further case study surprisingly absent here, see Austin Murphy's Triumph of Evil on the former DDR's "Treuhand".

"As in Chile and China, [in Russia] rampant corruption and economic shock therapy went hand in hand."

Klein approaches the point, but in liberal fashion, decouples the political and the economic (even quoting analyst Wayne Merry, 'We chose the economic over the political'), and laments a lack of industrial pluralism/social democracy that was never going to emerge from the counter-revolution.

"Today, [South Africa] stands as a living testament to what happens when economic reform is severed from political transformation. Politically, its people have the right to vote, civil liberties and majority rule. Yet economically, South Africa has surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world."

Klein grasps the absurdity of media distortions around Tiananmen Square: "These historic protests were almost universally portrayed...as a clash between [students] who wanted Western-style democratic freedoms and...the Communist state." She rejects this conflation of pro-democracy/pro-neoliberal, but leaves "pro-democracy" vague and glosses over the influence of Mao even in her vaunted Chinese New Left.

"If the dream of Solidarity began with Walesa's energetic vault over the steel fence in Gdańsk, then Mazowiecki's exhaustedly succumbing to shock therapy represented the end of that dream.

No accident. Solidarity was rife with contradictions. Albert Szymanski describes "a coalition that offered all things to all people" seeking change, and structurally it was clear who could take advantage.

The first half of Chapter 9 focused on Poland is a real slog. I'd recommend reading it in conjunction with Albert Szymanski's Class Struggle in Socialist Poland for a more in-depth breakdown of the evolution of Solidarity and its role in place of bromides about authoritarianism.

"In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation often served as a front organization for the CIA, allowing the agency to channel funds to anti-Marxist academics and artists who did not know where the money was coming from, a process extensively documented in The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders.

"Just as an older form of capitalist conquest was built on the mass graves of the country's indigenous peoples, the Chicago School project in Latin America was quite literally built on the secret torture camps where thousands of people who believed in a different country disappeared."