Brad’s Reviews > The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism > Status Update

"A year and a half into the Iraq occupation, the U.S State Department launched a new branch: the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. On any given day, it is paying private contractors to draw up detailed plans to reconstruct twenty-five different countries that may...find themselves the target of U.S-sponsored destruction, from Venezuela to Iran."

"The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground," I was told earnestly by a delegate at the "Rebuilding Iraq 2" conference in Washington, D.C."

That's it. That's the perfect distillation of this nightmare system, spelled out as explicitly as possible.

the political state does not take the form of the simple ratification by force of the socio-economic interests, in the strict sense, of the dominant classes or class fractions…but must assume a specifically political mediated form and appear to embody the general interest of society as a whole

- Nicos Poulantzas, Preliminaries to the Study of Hegemony in the State

"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.