Doug Henwood on Naomi Klein

Doug writes, apropos of Naomi Klein:

History, but not exactly a secret: As is often the case with arguments organized around a conceit, Klein works hard to squeeze events into her model’s form. There’s the problem mentioned above—that Cameron and Pinochet cannot explain Ronald Reagan’s 59-41 victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. But there are also problems with many of Klein’s case studies.

In her chapter on post-apartheid South Africa, Klein notes how the hope generated by the ANC’s taking power was dashed by the orthodox economic policy the party pursued once in power. She explains that the country was “outnegotiated” by the World Bank and IMF. That is not how many on the South African left see the problem. Their analysis is that the ANC was never anti-capitalist, and was quite eager to join the world system and get its own piece of the action. As no less than Mandela himself put it: “The ANC has never...advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it...ever condemned capitalist society.”

She also asserts that Israel is in the midst of a Chinese-style boom, which has been occurring because, not in spite of, the country’s constant state of war. The boom, she asserts, is being driven by the production and export of military and surveillance equipment. But in fact Israel’s economy isn’t booming, the military share of GDP is way down from its 1970s peaks and has been flat in recent years, and arms represent only a fraction of Israeli exports. Israel’s per capita GDP has been growing at about a quarter of the Chinese rate over the last couple of years; over the last seven years, it’s more like a tenth the Chinese rate. Electronics, including military–surveillance goods, have been declining as a share of Israeli exports, while that of drugs and chemicals has been rising. Israel’s share of the world’s arms trade is just over 1%, behind Sweden’s.

For Klein, the invasion of Iraq wasn’t a geopolitical adventure so much as an economically rational attempt to complete the Chicago-school counterrevolution that began in Chile in 1973: to bring the “Friedmanite” model to the Middle East. “The ‘fiasco’ of Iraq is one created by a careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology.” It was, in a phrase she likes, “Friedmanite to the core.” Among the problems with this reading are that things haven’t worked out as planned—Iraq barely has an economy to impose any policy on, though privatization decrees were certainly issued—and that Friedman himself opposed the invasion of Iraq. He told the Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan in July 2006: “What's really killed the Republican Party isn't spending, it's Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.”

Miltie

Klein’s use of a one-dimensional caricature of Friedman as an all-purpose whipping boy may play to the choir, but he deserves more serious attention than this. His economics was in many ways wrong and vile, but over the course of a fifty-year career, he helped reshape not only his discipline, but the way politicians and regular people think and talk about the economy. He was an extremely effective popular writer; if only the left could have produced a book as persuasive as Capitalism and Freedom, the world might be a better place. (Yes, yes, his argument was nicely aligned with the needs of capital in the 1970s, but on the other hand, capital also needed some degree of popular assent, which Friedman helped produce—and, on the third hand, polemic doesn’t count for nothing, and material interest isn’t everything.)

One reason that Friedman became popular both within his own profession and in the larger world was that there were real economic problems in the 1970s. In the richer countries, Keynesian/welfare-state capitalism was in crisis because of stagflation. According to the economic consensus of the time, weak growth was supposed to mean low inflation—but weak growth coexisted with persistently high inflation throughout the 1970s. Friedman offered an explanation for that: monetary stimulus beyond a certain point results in inflation, not additional growth. Growth was being held back by unions and regulations, which were interfering with the magic self-adjusting powers of the market. The solution was tight money and deregulation. It worked, at least for a while, on its own terms, though at great human cost.

But there’s a radical way of expressing the insights of Friedman and the others who came to power and influence in the late 1970s. Capitalism simply cannot live with low unemployment rates. Workers gain confidence, resist the direction of the boss, and wages are forced up. Add to that a welfare state, which cushions workers against the risk of job loss, and things are even worse from the bosses’ point of view. Their plight was evident in the depressed profit rates of the leisure-suit decade.

Sure enough, the application of the Friedman agenda raised profit rates and ended the great inflation—though it put the working class into a semipermanent state of anxiety, which was part of the point. That does suggest a permanent shock strategy is part of the system’s normal operating procedure, not an extraordinary event.

Limits and beyond

An honest evaluation of this history would have to recognize that the Keynesian model in the northern hemisphere had reached an impasse in the 1970s. Either things had to break in the Friedmanite direction or a more anticapitalist direction. And in the southern hemisphere, import substitution was running into similar problems: rising inflation and low levels of productivity. Many governments borrowed heavily abroad in an attempt to keep things going, laying the groundwork for the debt crisis of the 1980s. Obviously Friedman, Pinochet, and Reagan do not represent the full range of possibilities, but something had to give, and the left worldwide was too weak to win the battle.

Though the analysis may be problematic, Klein’s closing chapter does inspire hope even in a skeptical reader. Shocks wear off, and some of the most inspiring agitation is coming from the region that suffered some of the worst abuses of the 1970s and 1980s, Latin America. The word “socialism” is even being dusted off in Venezuela and Bolivia. But the emphasis on shock as the organizing principle of the book even constrains the inspiration. Those recovering from shock, whether in the Southern Cone or in New Orleans, see themselves as “repair people, taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resistance—for when the next shock hits.” These are the concluding words of the book. Is this really all we can do? Tinker while the weather’s fair, and get ready to duck and cover on a moment’s notice?

Comments

[christofay]

Oh, no, Naomi Klein wrote a book that has bad things to say about virtuous capitalism.

Meanwhile regarding Rubin whose role at Citi is to act as a form of CDS:

Shortly before leaving Goldman to head up President Clinton’s National Economic Council, Mr. Rubin says, he met with Richard B. Fisher, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, to discuss the idea of imposing stricter margin requirements on futures trading. Mr. Rubin says the idea died after the Chicago Board of Trade told him “we will make sure Goldman Sachs never trades another future on the C.B.O.T. if this went ahead.”

"Did Robert Rubin Jeopardize Financial Stability to Protect Goldman Sachs?"

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=04&year=2008&base_name=did_robert_rubin_jeopardize_fi#106086

[Neal]

Milton Friedman never conceived of the idea or lived to see the day when the US consumer became "too big to fail". Wasn't the Fed worried about Bear Stearns and "cascading cross-defaults"? Shouldn't they be even more worried about the vaunted "70% of the economy" (aka "engine of the world economy") and their "cascading cross-defaults"?

Too big to fail, indeed.

The ultimate revenge of the proletariat--no more money to spend and unable to pay the lenders back.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

"As is often the case with arguments organized around a conceit, Klein works hard to squeeze events into her model’s form."

Right on! Squeezing events to fit models is reserved for that special class of hominids known as Economists.

christofay, watch out when you bash Robert "cut Enron a break" Rubin. He is worshipped by those in the Democratic elite who think any rich financier who is not *explicitly* calling for the back of American labor to be broken is a saint.

[Matt Weiner]

"Friedman himself opposed the invasion of Iraq."

Did Friedman say anything about it at the time, as opposed to saying he had always been against it when it turned out to be a failure?

As it happens the privatization degrees were in line with what Friedman thought needed to be done after Iraq was invaded:

"Almost every country in the Middle East that is rich in oil is a despotism.

LA: Why do you think that is so?

MF: One reason, and one reason only—the oil is owned by the governments in question. If that oil were privately owned and thus someone's private property, the political outcome would be freedom rather than tyranny. This is why I believe the first step following the 2003 invasion of Iraq should have been the privatization of the oil fields. If the government had given every individual over 21 years of age equal shares in a corporation that had the right and responsibility to make appropriate arrangements with foreign oil companies for the purpose of discovering and developing Iraq's oil reserves, the oil income would have flowed in the form of dividends to the people—the shareholders—rather than into government coffers. This would have provided an income to the whole people of Iraq and thereby prevented the current disputes over oil between the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, because oil income would have been distributed on an individual rather than a group basis."

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2006&month=07

So it seems fair to call the war's execution Friedmanite even if he thought it should not have been started.

[Colin Danby]

Walden Bello made related criticisms of Klein last Fall.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=14353

I heard him expand on this theme at the ISA last month. Klein is trying to make one theory do way too much work. This is a standard broad-brush history of neoliberalism (is David Harvey the source?) that you see everywhere in the glob lit.

Walden and Doug can't be dismissed as apologists for capitalism.

[Matt Weiner]

Here is an op-ed Friedman wrote in January 2003 that mentions Iraq in passing:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110002933

While offering extravagant praise for Bush's tax cuts, he says:

"And as we are already seeing, such surpluses are not here to stay. I conjecture that they would have faded away even if there had been no 9/11, and no Iraq war danger."

His opposition to the war seems to have been so muted as to be subliminal. If anyone has a contemporary source in which he speaks out against the war, let me have it, but I don't think we should give him retrospective credit for opposing it.

[anne]

The Wall Street Journal’s Tunku Varadarajan, so that we know, has supported war and occupation in Iraq from the mere mention and still does so taking time to smash and bash Joseph Stiglitz, who really has opposed war and occupation, a few weeks ago. I could not be less impressed with Milton Friedman, and the lack of a Friedman public comment on the war and occupation when it really really really mattered.

[anne]

Me, I like Naomi Klein simply for the spunk which I fail to find here in Doug Henwood. Spunk on Naomi; imagine a spunky woman in economics. Who would'a thunk it?

[Kenneth Almquist]

In an interview on May 15, 2004, Milton Friedman didn't say he opposed invading Iraq. My guess is that he was ambivalent about the war, and now (mis)remembers that ambvalence as opposition.

DA: Do you agree with President Bush that the actions in Iraq were necessary as a part of our war on terrorism?

MF: I think you can argue either side of that. Where I do feel strongly, is that having gone into it, whether we should have or not, we must see it through.

DA: Even if it costs some of our freedoms?

MF: There's no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there's no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom. But if we're going to avoid a permanent reduction in freedom, we have to see this war through.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,230045,00.html

[christofay]

"But if we're going to avoid a permanent reduction in freedom, we have to see this war through." And in the process of seeing it through, we will lose that freedom that we are fighting to regain after it is seen through.

[christofay]

"Sure enough, the application of the Friedman agenda raised profit rates and ended the great inflation"

ah, no, it wasn't Friedman-thought that ended the great 70s inflation, that was Volcker.

As to the first point, "raised profit rates," did Friedman work at Chrysler or Ford?

[christofay]

Shock Therapy.

Grantham's quarterly update at GMO is being widely quoted over the internets, and this guy is no hair under-the-arm-pits feministThe quarterly letter from Grantham at GMO is being widely quoted over the internets. While he manages money even for Dirk Cheney, he too has complaints similar to Hairy Klein:

It’s not that the former Fed boss Greenspan was incompetent that is remarkable. Incompetence is common enough after all, even in important jobs. What’s remarkable is that so many people don’t seem, even now, to get it. Do people just believe high-quality self-justifying blarney? Or is it just that they apparently want to believe that critical jobs in a great country attract great talent by divine right. Sometimes, of course, they do, but sometimes the most important jobs – even that of a presidency or a Fed boss – end up with mediocrities....

Paul Volcker inherited about as big a mess as we have today. He worked out what he had to do and did it with unusual lack of concern about what Congress thought of the necessary pain involved and the number of enemies he might make. He paid the price for forthright behavior by being replaced, despite a record for correct and tough behavior that makes for the most invidious comparison today. When Volcker was replaced, by the way, he did not moan and groan but like an old soldier quietly disappeared. There were no high-profile announcements about the economy or any $300,000-an-evening appearances paid for by financial firms.

[christofay]

Doug Henwood a master of the unsupported blanket statement

Friedman-thought raised profit margins

and stopped inflation

A tenured professor of the U C system holds this up as valid criticism of the conceitist Klein, Jeebus, no wonder we're doomed

Hey, how we doing in the government of California is bust sweepstakes?

Is it time to hold a special referendum to elect a true Republican conservative guf-na?

[Alex]

I read the extracts the Guardian trailed and decided I wouldn't read the book; I remember the UK in the 1980s, and it was not actually a demented warzone. It is risible to talk about the "disorder" following the Falklands, as if it was rather like Peru. Further, Thatcher's monetarist phase kicked in straight off the bat in 1979. That was when the big public-spending cuts hit, the various money supply targeting measures went in effect, sterling went through the roof and credit contracted, and as a result, unemployment went off the chart.

The miners' strike was still in the future in 1983, but it only dramatised what had already happened right across industry in 1979-1982. Of course, looking forward from 1983, you come to the power struggle in the Treasury between Alan Walters and Patrick Minford; by 1985 Walters had won and monetarism was out in favour of shadowing the Deutschmark.

[anne]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,230045,00.html

May 14, 2004

Interview With Milton Frideman
By David Asman

DA: Do you agree with President Bush that the actions in Iraq were necessary as a part of our war on terrorism?

MF: I think you can argue either side of that. Where I do feel strongly, is that having gone into it, whether we should have or not, we must see it through.

DA: Even if it costs some of our freedoms?

MF: There’s no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there’s no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom. But if we’re going to avoid a permanent reduction in freedom, we have to see this war through....

[Kate G.]

I particularly like the criticism, often raised by pro-war types, that the war couldn't have been fought for X reason because the conduct of the war so botched up the situation surrounding X that X is no longer available. So, it wasn't a war for cheap oil because, look, we now have expensive oil. Of course it can't have been a war for democracy because, look, we didn't get democracy. And it can't have been a war for liberty, because the Iraqis didn't get liberated. In fact, the argument that the war was meant to produce what it did produce gets us to "the war was fought to create chaos in the middle east and enable the Bush regime to torture and wiretap its political enemies at will." Which, actually, I could get behind.

But there's no excuse for that line of argument in the original criticism of Klein's work. Just because the war was stupid and badly fought doesn't mean that the idiots who supported it had the faintest idea that fighting a war wasn't going to be like playing a board game. Certainly the neo-cons and their little AEI apparatchiks thought that Iraq was going to be open territory for all kinds of capitalist fantasies. Flat tax, anyone?

Oh, and I love the argument that *since the ANC retroactively decided it needed to play ball with capitalism* that proves what? exactly? That the way they decided to do it wasn't a disaster from the point of view of some of their own supporters who expected differently? Its like the first part of his arguments bear no relation to the second part. Is English his second language? Or just thinking about stuff rationally a second job?

kate G.

[Shane Taylor]

Colin Danby wrote, "Walden and Doug can't be dismissed as apologists for capitalism."

Exactly. Doug is an anti-capitalist who has little indulgence for the vices of mainstream economics. Bad arguments against Milton Friedman are like welfare for his acolytes: they make Friedman's legacy that much easier to defend.

As Doug wrote, "Klein’s use of a one-dimensional caricature of Friedman as an all-purpose whipping boy may play to the choir, but he deserves more serious attention than this. His economics was in many ways wrong and vile, but over the course of a fifty-year career, he helped reshape not only his discipline, but the way politicians and regular people think and talk about the economy. He was an extremely effective popular writer; if only the left could have produced a book as persuasive as Capitalism and Freedom, the world might be a better place."

[Hedley Lamarr]

The paragraph just preceding the title "Miltie" hardly refutes Klein. The fact that Iraq is a mess and MF opposed the invasion are beside her point that the country was to be yet another proving ground.

[Barry]

"DA: Do you agree with President Bush that the actions in Iraq were necessary as a part of our war on terrorism?

MF: I think you can argue either side of that. Where I do feel strongly, is that having gone into it, whether we should have or not, we must see it through.

DA: Even if it costs some of our freedoms?"

Please note that, aside from the Friedmanite dismissal of our freedoms, here he is advocating that we can't discontinue a clearly failed government program, for no good reason, despite the massive damage it's doing.

In the end, Milton picked a side.

[gcochran]

Israel's share of the world arms trade is a lot bigger than 1%. They specialize in high-technology fitting and upgrading equipment: sales were over 4 billion (in US dollars) in 2007. Some lists of arms exports only count primary systems like ships and tanks, but electronics and refits involve a lot of money. At this point Israeli arms exports are apparently a bit larger than those of France.

[Susan Marie]

Perhaps not a secret for Mr. Henwood...let's look at the impact this book is having on folks like me who are not in the field or are not students of economics. Naomi gives perspective and insight on the role of economics in the creation/destruction of the economies/infrastructure of developing/ emerging countries that I have not been exposed to. So it would be accurate to say that SHE has already "helped reshape not only his (her) discipline, but the way politicians and regular people think and talk about the economy." with this book.

Now I understand the forces driving this disastrous Administration!

[Colin Danby]

How do we deal with the scarier possibility, Susan, that some parts of history may be the result of blind chance and folly?

The problem is not that Klein looks for connections and asks large questions, but that she may be too determined to make one theory explain everything.

I first encountered this around Central America in the 1980's. A lot of people glommed onto an economic-imperialism analysis of U.S. policy, and I remember eagerly setting out as a young activist to demonstrate this and coming up empty. Even Guatemala in 1954, everyone's favorite example of economic-imperialist intervention, turns out to be much less simple, as Piero Gleijeses' book showed. Part of Walden Bello's critique of Klein is that his own fieldwork in Chile before the 1973 coup (Walden's been everywhere!) showed a middle-class counterrevolution gathering force with no U.S. help. A basic problem with Klein-type analysis is that it does not take the particular histories of places like Chile or South Africa seriously enough to see them as anything but the acting-out of global forces.

[Doug French]

to my mind NK's book is about theft on a global scale - in pillorying MF she tried to fit an intellectual framework over a crime (or many crimes) and in doing so, changed the focus in an unfortunate way, so that the theory becomes the conversation rather than the events themselves.

[Kate G.]

I don't really get Colin Danby's objection, and I see doug French's as an explanation of something that doesn't need an explanation. Of *course* everything is more complicated than any single theory. Of course motivations of individual actors, or even whole groups of actors, aren't the sole or sufficient explanation for world historical movements or events which, by their very nature, have to include non human, unintended, and even chance events and interactions. That, oddly enough, hasn't stopped theoreticians and apologists of the "free market" from asserting that their actions and intentions have played a major part in the construction of the world as we know it. Klein has an alternate and quite compelling explanation of (some) aspects of international economic and political activity. Its not wrong because she can't account for everything, or because it doesn't fit everything to which she tries to apply it. It may need tweaking, or it may only be partially correct. But *every* explanation for such large things is only ever partially correct. What's cool, to my mind, is that she has taking the analytic telescope and turned it, or widened its focus, to account for things that we took for granted in a wholly new way.

As for the problem that Doug French observes which is taht "the theory becomes the conversation rather than the events themselves." I see that as a fact of our entire political discourse, really. Isn't that in fact exactly what is happening right now with John McCain's own statement that he sees no problem with staying in Iraq for 100 years? The right wing has suceeded in turning the discussion away from his actual statement and into a deep in the weeds epistemological discussion of whether he "meant" war or not war. Similarly with Reverend Wright's words and experiences--the right has turned from an examination of race and racism in america to a discussion of "how crazy is that old black guy." and the media has followed in lockstep. That's a bug of the system or a feature of the propaganda machine, not of the original intellectual framework.

Kate G.

[Debbie]

Respected South African scholar Patrick Bond refutes Henwood - take a look:

------------------------
Hey, you have some good points, but isn't this review a bit over the top and often a caricature, Doug?

Doug sez (I reply after the *, not that Naomi needs any defenders):

"The Shock Doctrine is organized around a conceit: “shock” and its cousin “disaster” explain the political economy of the last several decades."

* Doug, there are increasing reports, e.g. by David Harvey (whom you hailed at his booklaunch a few years ago), that extraeconomic coercion - accumulation by dispossession - is central to contemporary political economy. You don't use the word "conceit" when you address Harvey's thesis, do you? Why "conceit" when shock, disaster and economic-psychosocial linkages are concepts Naomi has deployed?

"the list of instances is so varied that they don’t always merit a single theory."

* Doug, a "theory" in an academic sense - let's say Marx's approach in Das Kapital - has to explain the laws of motion of a system's reproduction. This is done at great length, with proofs, and with jargon. In contrast, a theory expressed through popular, journalistic investigative - and non-academic - writing whose objective is partly raising the outrage level, has very different standards. I think you write well inbetween, judging by Wall Street, so a little perspective would help you get through Shock Doctrine with the proper expectations. You're right that the cases are varied; and a valid concern might be that South Africa - in effect, a "happy shock" of winning the 1994 election instead of slipping into civil war - doesn't quite go with the Chile coup. Neither her "outnegotiated" nor your "ANC never revolutionary" captures the dynamics perfectly (since we definitely had a much more radical campaign program - the RDP - than was implemented by Mandela's government). Yeah, perhaps the way this case is made by Naomi stretches the value of "shock doctrine" to the point of overgeneralisation. Still, here in SA, she did a fine job of scoping out ways neoliberalism snuck in, leaving people worse off, and how capital benefited magnificently from turmoil associated with liberalisation of SA's economy. So I think it works. Your old friend Alexander Cockburn complained about Naomi, in much the same spirit, that India is an exemplar of neoliberalism and didn't have a traumatic shock; actually it did, if you look at the way farm suicides reflect the oppression and pacification of rural people.

"there’s one prominent missing case: Lyndon Johnson, who engineered the killing of something like a million Indochinese."

* Doug, when you cite Clinton and LBJ - "Democrats even" - you make it sound like Naomi joins a conspiracy of silence in not attacking the center. As far as I know her work, you are guilty of bizarre distortion. As for LBJ, the book is meant to cover the neoliberal era (roughly 1973-present); so you could add, in the same way, what about JFK who catalysed the killing of even more Indochinese, or Eisenhower who built up the military-industrial complex to do so, or Truman who dropped the A-bomb unnecessarily so as to shock the Soviet Union, or Roosevelt who authorised building the A-bomb, or etc etc etc. But the book's already too long, and most of her readers are probably born after 1973, and from around then there was indeed a substantial sea-change.

"The effect of setting the starting clock on history so recently is to make the present seem far more extraordinary than it is."

* It is an "extraordinary" period if you consider that "ordinary" capitalism recovers from a crisis and has relatively high growth periods based upon growing production as the source of profitability; the neoliberal period is, like a few others before it (e.g. 1920s with the "Treasury View"), extraordinary for maintaining a neoliberal approach to accumulation, in which growth rates have slowed and profits are increasingly sourced from financial/speculative activities. The present is worth studying in those terms, and the ways in which accumulation by dispossession add to the picture are crucial. We owe Naomi a great thanks for unveiling many of them.

"Neoliberalism, a word that Klein uses a lot, has consistently gained electoral victories in the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, India."

* This is banal, Doug. We can just as easily accuse you: the word "crisis" was not used by Doug Henwood nor enough others in the US, UK, Oz, NZ, India, or South Africa to project the logical trajectory of the economy, and hence the current mess is all a great surprise to those who, believing neoliberalism might deliver the goods, voted for neolib or neocon parties.

"Using words like “Friedmanite” and “neoliberalism” is a way to avoid talking about capitalism in any systemic fashion.

* Come on, she treats capitalism and its need for extraeconomic coercion as systematically as any writer for the mass popular audiences you can identify. Who else can sell 100 000 copies of a radical economics text, one so long and with such a boring cover?! And declaring herself a democratic socialist, as she did last year, means Naomi has transcended an earlier interest in small-scale resistances, even if you don't like the concluding lines. Even for the sake of praise-sandwich balance, give some credit for what she's accomplished, otherwise this review sounds too jealous, picky and snarky.

The review, Doug, is foul-moody. Where's your solidarity?

[Susan Marie]

Thank you for expanding/clarifying the on-going conversation Kate G.

Many of us are looking for answers beyond the established "talking points" utilized by both sides. NZ's view offers a plausable/potential expanation where no other is found.

I am not seeking the "ultimate theory" to encompass/explain everything - micro management of the ideas/issues would only distract from the CORE ESSENCE of NZ's work. Initially I operate from a macro perspective of INCLUSION where everything is considered as a giant WHOLE, then move to the details to determine what fits/works and what doesn't. And how. And why.

For those of us who felt the insanity of our drive to war in Iraq, who rode busses in the middle of the night(from here in LA)to participate in the San Fransisco peace marches, who wondered WHY nothing anyone said or did back then - and say or do now has any impact at all on this disasterous Administration...

Perhaps this book gives us traction in our quest for NEW talking points. How do we best frame this moment in time, in real terms, so that folks can see the truth of who we have become for themselves.

[Colin Danby]

I think the point, Kate, is to be more aware of the point where a theory's correctness gets partial, or rather less than partial, and we start cramming stuff into categories to make it fit. Part of Doug H's critique is that Klein has passed that point. What both Walden and Doug are arguing is that we should be very attentive to those moments because otherwise people make dreadful analytical and political mistakes.

Your "hasn't stopped" riposte is exactly the point! Neoliberalism, arguably, errs as it shifts from spheres where it has sharp insights into a general theory of the world in which the Market sweeps all before it. Much antiglob literature reverses this and makes the Market a sinister juggernaut. So neolib and antiglob agree that there's a single coherent force driving world history. Maybe there's not.

I'm much happier with the kind of debate Patrick Bond opens up, which is grounded in real history and events.

Susan, why not try out the reverse: that those folks may know things that you and I don't. The project of inquiry, of finding truth, may want to be a joint one.

[Susan Marie]

sp. correction: San Francisco

clarification: unfortunately the national dialogue is reduced to "talking points". This will be corrected/enhanced over time. Until then, the re-framing of our dialogue as inspired by NZ's perspective is essential.

Debbie - wow, some passion! Yeah, the book was a long slog but so worth the effort.

[Kate G.]

I think its a mistake to demand that every reader read each book the same way that subject area specialists read it, or even the way people with their own political/historical axes to grind read it. I think Klein has done some ground breaking work in terms of reframing the public debate about the salience of the interests of non state, supra state, private actors and corporations in what had previously been understood as large scale political events (like wars) which we (the people) were to understand as growing out of principles or major political events rather than mere capitalistic competition for market share or capitalistic competition for market share in a novel economic sphere like disaster and state owned goods and services. I have yet to read the book but I've been following the discussion of the book and that's the way I take it. I'm not really all that interested in the minute details of the argument as it applies to every single historical situation. hat doesn't mean that I (or susan) have given up on "the project of inquiry..of finding truth" (a very rude assertion to make of other people's viewpoint) perhaps I'll be shocked when it turns out she discusses some area with which I have great personal familiarity. But I'm not shocked that she had the temerity to try creating a grand unified theory of disaster, shock, capitalism, war and competition beyond and around war. When the student is ready, the teacher arrives. The Iraq war in particular and the rise of the privatized army of blackwater has reminded us, if we had forgotten all our world history, that wars are very profitable for some people and that within actual political systems the people who make the profits often have a greater share of the say than "the people" or their elected or appointed representatives actually do. Hard to believe, but true.

Kate G.

[Susan Marie]

Per Kate: "I think Klein has done some ground breaking work in terms of reframing the public debate about the salience of the interests of non state, supra state, private actors and corporations in what had previously been understood as large scale political events (like wars) which we (the people) were to understand as growing out of principles or major political events rather than mere capitalistic competition for market share or capitalistic competition for market share in a novel economic sphere like disaster and state owned goods and services."

Exactly. Throughout the book I continued to exclaim - my G*D, the power of economics - the role of economics - it's all about Economics! And then my thinking/feeling evolved...more precisely, this was Economics gone wrong - tainted by the ego(s)of man and used a weapon for mass destruction so that those in power would prevail.

I am haunted by the three pillars (referred to as the free-market trinity) (P 77): 1) privitization 2) deregulation 3)cuts to social spending. The only "winners" in this are those in power.

[Peter K.]

Patrick Bond is right, the review is a little too foul moody, but Doug is right about a lot of it.

Naomi's critique reminds me of the theory that the Iraq war was all about oil. It's a little too neat and conspiratorial.

Defenders of capitalism see the Bear Sterns bailout and the food riots and explain it away and blame "lax regulators" or biofuels and environmental regulations, where I see flaws in or symptoms of the system.

On the other hand how much was South Africa "pressured" by some sort of neoliberal Star Chamber (the mysterious neocons?)? It's often forgotten the ANC was allied with and helped by the Communists, but what choice did they really have? Where would Venezuela be without oil?

[Colin Danby]

Kate do me the minimal courtesy of reading carefully. I do not say that anyone has "given up on" inquiry or truth-finding. I'm making a very different response to Susan's words about "see the truth" in the sentence just above.

[Susan Marie]

Colin RE: "why not try out the reverse: that those folks may know things that you and I don't. The project of inquiry, of finding truth, may want to be a joint one."

Interesting comment that needs further discussion. Granted, there are plenty of folks who know much more than I. However, the project of inquiry, of finding truth, SHOULD be a joint one! I believe that those in power do not care to engage in a dialogue and or co-operative discussion because they do not seek a truth other than their own. Why risk the benefit of having to INCLUDE other points-of-view? Why create opportunity for a crack in the foundation of their perscribed truth to develop?

Perhaps there really is a single coherent force driving world history after all - and that force is NOT the Markets or the Economics. The force is in HOW we play the game and not the game itself - the force is identified as EXCLUSION.

Colin am I crazy?

[Kate G.]

Colin, I did you the "minimal courtesy" of not using my usual foul mouthed approach. That's pretty much all I've got since I don't do maximal courtesy any more. Too old for it. And in re Peter K's claim, up above that the whole "Iraq war for oil" thing is too pat. I just don't get that as a critique. Look, all this stuff is *overdetermined*--lots of actors need to be brought on board for a war and each of those actors has a different set of buttons to be pushed, different set of resources that are needed, different set of objectives that brings them on board. As you move up the political food chain, however, to key actors we can start talking about ranking their motivations and interests *even if* part of the public push for war revolves around wholly other issues.

I have absolutely no doubt that Bush himself had trivial psychological reasons for re-invading Iraq. But so what? Does anyone think for a single minute that Cheney, who as we know was hugely important in this decision, wasn't significantly influenced by a desire to control Iraq's oil? The war itself was always going to have to be a product, as all crimes are, of means, motivation, goals, opportunity. Of *course* there are other places we could have invaded for oil, but Iraq, for a lot of contingent reasons, was the most promising target. If we'd simply wanted to guarantee democracy somehwere, or improve the lives of children, or prevent rape, there are literally tens of other countries we could have invaded--hell, that we should have invaded.

Putting "war for oil" down as some kind of nutty conspiracy theory really is unfair--its also kind of odd. Wars have *always* been fought over key resources. Our entire foreign policy with regard to Saudi Arabia is *based on oil.* Why would Iraq and a multi billion dollar, multi thousand death war be any different?

Kate G.

[thorstein veblen]

Just curious, how many economists have gotten credit for being the lone voice telling the world how to do economic policy in the 1970s, and taking credit for the improved economic conditions in the 80s.

Off the top of my head, i'd say... Milton Friedman. Robert Lucas. Paul Samuelson. Edmund Phelps.

Any others? I suspect any then-prominent economist has been applauded in retrospect for courageously steering the US economy out of the economic crisis caused by the oil shocks. Oh, and you gotta love this guy's imagination... the 1970s stagflation was not caused by the oil shocks and Arthur Burns pumping up the economy to reelect Nixon, but, Friedman supposedly told us, "labor unions"... Probly, the labor unions and other commie pinkos caused the oil shocks too...