The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Milton Friedman is a familiar name that is revered by many economics students and perhaps can be regarded as one of the, if not the most influential economists, alongside with John Maynard Keynes. The same goes for me.

This book has shattered the reverence and the faith I had in the so-called free market and the all-mighty invisible hand that economists love to talk about. It talks about how Milton Friedman and his acolytes, or known as the Chicago School Economists, who were in positions of power in political parties and international organizations such as IMF & Worldbank, unleashed and forced their unfettered non-humanistic economic ideology onto countries that had gone through destructive events (and some of which were inflicted deliberately) via the imposition of draconian economic reforms.

How they forcefully attempt to impose an unwanted and in most cases, a form of privatism that enriches only the rich and greedy multinational corporations, onto countries in trouble under the pretence of introducing a free market is in essence in analogous to how torture works. Just as how electroshock, sensory deprivation and drug-induced reverie are quintessential interrogation and brainwashing treatments to annihilate the memory and forcibly turn the torturees into a clean blank slate for subsequent reconfiguration (it’s pretty much the grotesque 1984-style), the Chicago Boys applied a similar idea to countries which were devastated by natural disasters or found themselves deep in political turmoil and were desperately seeking a way out of the crisis.

Draconian economic reforms are the shocks that need to be administered to countries, one after another in rapid succession, or all at once, to hit them when they are at their lowest.

The initial testing ground for this ostensibly Holy Grail Friedmanism? Chile when they were under the reign of Augusto Pinochet. Beneath the purported Chile Economic Miracle, laissez-faire market was never the system that was put in place, it was a market where only multinational companies and the rich revelled, the middle and lower class were the ones that were left to foot the bill. It was the transfer of wealth from 90% of the population to the richest 10% under the packaging of radical but deemed necessary economic reforms, carried out by stone-cold juntas.

And that set the tone for what’s about to come.

Time and time again, Naomi brings us through examples over examples of how this predatory, disaster capitalism is to a shocking degree akin to colonialism. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, China, USSR – they were all lab rats of Friedmanism – only that free market was never the result, it was corporate colonialism accompanied by sky-high poverty rate, unemployment rate, the privatisation of natural resources, it’s all about taking away the wealth, hopes and dreams of those who are already suffering, plunging them more deeply into further pain and poverty.

And oh, if you think free-market goes well with democracy? You’re probably terribly wrong. Juntas and heavy-handed approaches were essential for the imposition of these radical economic reforms and the Friedmanites knew. To them, democratic will of the people needs to be rolled over for the sake of neoliberal corporate colonialism.

Iraq was the prime petri dish for this decades-long hypocritical exercise of this spread of “free market” and “democracy”.

“The unspoken assumption from the beginning was that much of it would have to disappear, to clear the ground for the grand experiment – an idea that contained, at its core, the certainty of extraordinary colonialist violence.”

And the Iraqis rose to the occasion. As rightfully as they should, they did not see the corporate reconstruction as a gift. They experienced the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from all the jobs and they witnessed their aid money stolen by foreign corporations. The privatization of nationalized industry means only one thing – the sacking of Iraqis from the jobs that are their only livelihood.

“Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside it. But it will not be privatized.”

That was the Iraqis’ hopeless but relentless determination to maintain their way of life, the life that had been taken away from them by the greedy politicians and corporatists who had no regard for their wellbeing.

A somber reading that will leave you disturbed and wondering how the perpetrators and designers of these proclaimed economic interventions that have ruined the lives of many are still able to sleep soundly at night, in good conscience. It's abhorrent.

“The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.”

― Naomi Klein