A New Conservative Kleimate

Last night Canadian journalist and author, Naomi Klein, launched her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank, London. Prior to Klein going through her main thesis on 'shock therapy capialism', there was a short film by Klein and Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón (Children of Men) to accompany the book. It was one of those fast-cut, MTV montage of images and diagrams to show that, hey, the world is a really bad place. Whenever video makers use footage of 1950s America, complete with ironic use of avancular conservatives narrating over the top, you know we're in the terrain of fifth form radicalism.

And so to The Shock Doctrine itself. As you might know from acres of coverage elsewhere, Klein's thesis is that present-day global capitalism took hold when its advocates learned to exploit disasters. After a disaster (war, tsunami, terrorist attack), you can push your agenda for worsening labour conditions, looser regulation, and pocket-lining exercises (Enron, Halliburton) while the reeling, disaster-struck population of the world has its attention elsewhere. All radical, agenda setting stuff on the destructive limitations of capitalism, right? Not quite.

What Klein is concerned about is the disruption caused by rapid, tumultuous social change. Aiming her fire on the likes of Friedman and Thatcher and advocates of New Right classical liberalism might appear progressively left-wing, but in the footnotes she is also hostile to the left-wing version of social change: revolution. During her speech, she sounded very similar to aristocratic conservatives response to the 1789 French Revolution, and later the Russian Revolution, and how 'shock tactic' political change by any stripe is best avoided altogether. After all, One Nation Conservatism emerged precisely to instill order and continuity as a buffer against the deference-challenging dynamic of the market.

Interestingly enough, it was Madeline Bunting from the Guardian, who interviewed/chaired last night's discussion, that proved more insightful. She challenged Klein by arguing that shock disasters can be positive because they can allow a society to start again and replace a previous order with a more progressive one. Indeed so. Why should rapid social change be viewed solely as destructive and terrible? Well, only if you have the Burkeian mindset of Naomi Klein, that is.

Alongside all this, Klein's thesis buys into and borrows wholesale from various manifestations of therapy culture. She argues that individuals are easily cowed and diminished by authoritarian 'shock tactics' and therefore are unable of fighting back. Aren't we incapable of getting over 'shock' and moving on? When does the 'shock' actually wear off? For Klein, in true therapy couch mode, it doesn't. She gives the example of the 1973 coup in Chile, but fails to mention that while Allende's Worker's Party was brutually crushed, there was still opposition to Pinochet throught out Chilean society.

Elsewhere, her assessment of the defeat of the British working-class isolated the 'shock' of the Falklands War, not the weakness and exhaustion of British labourism as the main contributing factor. Too often it seems that Klein is shoehorning her thesis onto events outside of any broader historical context. Overall, though, far from The Shock Doctrine reconstituting any robust subjectivism, Klein presents 'blue collar workers' as fragile creatures easily disorientated by the manipulations of 'shock tactic' politicians. As with much of the old British radical left, she ends up endorsing our victim-in-waiting-status all the way.

It's hardly a recipe for encouraging dissent and revolt, as some of her more fanciful supporters will inevitably claim. Then again, as Klein abhors the disruptive effects of social crisis and social change, perhaps that's just as well.