Free-Marketeering

Stephen Holmes
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein Buy this book
The anti-globalisation movement suffered a dizzying setback on 9/11. Symbolic gatecrashing into the well-guarded meeting places of the super-rich suddenly seemed a much more sinister activity than before. Busting up branches of Starbucks and other Seattle-style antics became anathema in an atmosphere of injured and vindictive patriotism. But Naomi Klein, the combative theorist and publicist of anti-globalisation, was not about to accept such guilt by association. Her reply, The Shock Doctrine, deals with the corporate acquisitiveness that she sees as ravaging the planet and reformulates the ideas of the anti-globalisation and anti-corporate movements for a post-9/11 world. Klein believes she has found the answer to a question that has perplexed many on the left: if every modern American government has been a tool of powerful business interests, what, if anything, makes the Bush administration uniquely odious?

Her answer is that the Bush administration draws its political support not from America’s corporate class generally, but rather from a particular part of it: ‘the sprawling disaster capitalism complex’. She has in mind the companies that reap huge profits from catastrophes, both man-made and natural. They include defence contractors, arms dealers, high-tech security firms, the oil and gas sectors, construction companies, private healthcare firms and so on. Not exactly ambulance-chasers, they are driving the ambulances themselves – for a profit. For the most part, they capitalise on emergencies rather than deliberately bringing them about. But the distinction is not always so clear: the stock price of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, almost tripled between 2003 and 2007 after a former vice president at the firm chaired a committee agitating for war with Iraq. The Iraq war was also ‘the single most profitable event’ in the history of Halliburton, whose former CEO, who still retains stock options, is Dick Cheney.

Klein is outraged by the rapacity of corporations that see ‘exciting market opportunities’, rather than human suffering, in wars, hurricanes, epidemics and other disasters. She draws an extended analogy between Sri Lanka after the tsunami and New Orleans after Katrina. In each case, she claims, the predatory impulses of the disaster capitalism complex won out over sympathy for the victims, as developers took advantage of the evacuation of the poor from areas made temporarily uninhabitable and seized prime real estate. Almost everywhere she looks, Klein sees the privileged becoming wealthier, and the disadvantaged increasingly marginalised and no longer even worth exploiting.

Disasters discriminate because the rich are equipped with shock absorbers that the poor cannot afford. Peace of mind in the face of an unknown but perilous future is one of the most unfairly distributed of fundamental human goods. Today’s super-rich can buy disaster insurance from private security firms that offer to whisk their clients out of any area lashed by a man-made or natural catastrophe. As Klein points out – and it isn’t only a joke – both materialistic businessmen and evangelical end-timers imagine being ‘raptured’ out of apocalypse while the unworthy are left behind to die.

In the developed world, globalisation has unravelled the New Deal’s social compact between rich and poor. Corporations have an easier time than ever squirrelling their wealth abroad, where it will not be taxed. Moving labour-intensive production to countries where unions are illegal or non-existent has swollen corporate profits while lowering the living standards of Western workers. The collapse of Communism has exacerbated these trends: immunising the poor to the Communist virus no longer provides an incentive for employers to make concessions to employees. The social safety net, subsidised healthcare and laws favouring organised labour were originally introduced, Klein claims, because of a ‘fear of popular revolt’. In the globalised world, this fear is greatly diminished. As a result, potentially lethal class conflict is increasingly managed not by redistribution but by coercion and the erection of ‘stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned’. The relation Klein has in mind seems eerily hydraulic: as redistribution goes down, walls go up – notably those surrounding prisons and gated communities.

Most observers assume that the concrete barriers found at airports and encircling government buildings and embassies are meant to protect soft targets from terrorist attack. They would say the same about the blast walls, buffer zones, heavily guarded checkpoints and concertina-wire fences ubiquitous in ‘liberated’ Iraq. Klein, by contrast, views these barriers as a way of protecting the haves from the have-nots. They divide luxury shops from shanty towns, the swimming-pools of the rich from the non-potable water of the poor. This is Klein’s description of Baghdad’s Green Zone in 2004, long before mortars began to pierce its protective perimeter:

It feels, oddly, like a giant fortified Carnival Cruise Ship parked in the middle of a sea of violence and despair, the boiling Red Zone that is Iraq. If you can get on board, there are poolside drinks, bad Hollywood movies and Nautilus machines. If you are not among the chosen, you can get yourself shot just by standing too close to the wall.

In New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, Klein found poor evacuees living in ‘desolate, out-of-the-way trailer camps’ where private security companies ‘treated survivors like criminals’. In stark contrast were

the gated communities built in the wealthy areas of the city, such as Audubon and the Garden District, bubbles of functionality that seemed to have seceded from the state altogether. Within weeks of the storm, residents there had water and powerful emergency generators. Their sick were treated in private hospitals, and their children went to new charter schools. As usual, they had no need for public transit.

Security apartheid is not restricted to the aftermath of great disasters, however. It is becoming the new normal. In the suburbs of Atlanta, far from any natural disaster, wealthy neighbourhoods are incorporating themselves legally in order to prevent their taxes being spent on supporting schools and hospitals in poor areas. Instead, they use their taxes to enhance the security and prosperity of their own ‘armoured suburbs’. That private security firms make their biggest profits from furnishing iron gates, alarm systems, armoured cars and private bodyguards in those cities – Johannesburg, São Paulo, New Delhi – where the gap between rich and poor is greatest, provides powerful if not conclusive evidence for Klein’s claim.

At the US border, new and burdensome visa requirements reflect the increased danger of territorial permeability. (To appreciate the irony of this development, we need only recall Reagan’s famous cry: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’) In Israel, ‘an entire country has turned itself into a fortified gated community, surrounded by locked-out people living in permanently excluded red zones.’ Far from being exceptional, Klein argues, the Israeli wall embodies the evolution of class relations in the 21st century: ‘The point is to create “security” inside fortress states bolstered by endless low-level conflict outside their walls.’

Klein is an energetic and insatiably curious traveller who seems to have something vivid and illuminating to report about almost every part of the world. Some might feel, however, that she skips lightly over evidence that complicates her narrative of innocence besieged by corruption. It would be unfair to suggest that if she hadn’t believed it, she wouldn’t have seen it with her own eyes. But her high-altitude generalisations seem less fresh than her ground-level observations.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/holm01_.html