Book Report: "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein

"This blog is my political activity.    I am making it because I don't want to feel helpless and overpowered, and because I don't just want to sit on the sidelines and watch others work."   That was how I began this blog in April.   The stimulus to those words, and this blog, was Naomi Klein's profound and scary 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, subtitled The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Throughout my adult life my heart has belonged to the left and to progressive causes and the progressive mind-set;  but I have, excepting a few marches, letters to the editor, and a radio call-in or two, been a passive sideliner who voted Democrat at election time.   I have been a passive sideliner, because of a pretty deeply ingrained sense of helplessness.   The Shock Doctrine really did SHOCK me:   it showed me WHY I have felt helpless, and WHY I resigned myself to helplessness.  The Shock Doctrine convinced me moreover that there are people out there who want people like me to feel helpless and stay on the sidelines.   The book has convinced me that the people who want people like me on the sidelines know just how to make people like me feel helpless and behave passively, and that they actively work to create these feelings, and they actively work to keep us feeling that way and on the sidelines.

When I realized this, I became angry, and at the same time, almost instantly, I didn't feel helpless anymore.   I resolved that from this point forward I was going to find ways to speak up, and be active, and learn, and agitate, and look for kindred spirits, and change the way things are.   And that's where NOT ONLY THE FUTURE came from.

The argument of Klein's book is that for a long time there has been a strategy--NOT a conspiracy, a strategy--to exploit the "shock and awe" of disasters, natural like tsunamis or human-inflicted like wars, to advance the cause of unfettered free-market capitalism.   Klein's argument is nuanced, complex, and rests on a lot of detailed study of different examples of the Shock Doctrine's implementation over the last thirty-five years.

http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0312427999/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372400750&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Shock+Doctrine

A nutshell summation of the book's arguments are provided in Michael Winterbottom's film of the same title, which can be streamed here:  http://www.amazon.com/The-Shock-Doctrine/dp/B006GUW718/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1372401225&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Shock+Doctrine

Klein has distanced herself from the film, and I would caution viewers that what the book is about does NOT lend itself to being put in a nutshell, so the movie is no substitute for a careful reading of the book itself.

The most brilliant section of The Shock Doctrine for me is Chapter 12, "The Capitalist Id," which is essentially a capitalist critique of capitalism, making the point that capitalist system ceases to work very well (or at least ceases to work well for more than a very few), once the system itself has no real competition.