The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism.”

For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the “reforms” permanent.

He observed that “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere and rooted communities, then quickly moving to replace them with a kind of corporate New Jerusalem—all

Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market “reforms.” In Argentina in the seventies, the junta’s “disappearance” of thirty thousand people, most of them leftist activists, was integral to the imposition of the country’s Chicago School policies, just as terror had been a partner for the same kind of economic metamorphosis in Chile. In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the subsequent arrests of tens of thousands that freed the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. In Russia in 1993, it was Boris Yeltsin’s decision to send in tanks to set fire to the parliament building and lock up the opposition leaders that cleared the way for the fire-sale privatization that created the country’s notorious oligarchs.

The bottom line is that while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision.

In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state—in effect, to privatize the government.

A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.

The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely, attempting to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell. The clearest example was the shock of September 11, which, for millions of people, exploded “the world that is familiar” and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited. Suddenly we found ourselves living in a kind of Year Zero, in which everything we knew of the world before could now be dismissed as “pre-9/11 thinking.” Never strong in our knowledge of history, North Americans had become a blank slate—“a

A new army of experts instantly materialized to write new and beautiful words on the receptive canvas of our posttrauma consciousness: “clash of civilizations,” they inscribed. “Axis of evil,” “Islamo-fascism,” “homeland security.” With everyone preoccupied by the deadly new culture wars, the Bush administration was able to pull off what it could only have dreamed of doing before 9/1 1: wage privatized wars abroad and build a corporate security complex at home.

The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably toward violence. The ideologies that long for that impossible clean slate, which can be reached only through some kind of cataclysm, are the dangerous ones.

Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture—a flood, a war, a terrorist attack—can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.

We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

A declassified CIA memorandum explained that the program “examined and investigated numerous unusual techniques of interrogation including psychological harassment and such matters as ‘total isolation’” as well as “the use of drugs and chemicals.”14 First code-named Project Bluebird, then Project Artichoke, it was finally renamed MKUltra in 1953. Over the next decade, MKUltra would spend $25 million on research in a quest to find new ways to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents. Eighty institutions were involved in the program, including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals.

But it is the work of Cameron, and his recipe for disturbing “the time-space-image,” that forms the core of the Kubark formula. The manual describes several of the techniques that were honed to depattern patients in the basement of the Allan Memorial Institute: “The principle is that sessions should be so planned as to disrupt the source’s sense of chronological order … . Some interrogatees can be regressed by persistent manipulation of time, by retarding and advancing clocks and serving meals at odd times—ten minutes or ten hours after the last food was given. Day and night are jumbled.”

Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones—gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.

In the heat of the midterm elections in 2006, three weeks before announcing Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, George W. Bush signed the Defense Authorization Act in a private Oval Office ceremony. Tucked into its fourteen hundred pages is a rider that went almost completely unnoticed at the time. It gave the president the power to declare martial law and “employ the armed forces, including the National Guard,” overriding the wishes of state governors, in the event of a “public emergency” in order to “restore public order” and “suppress” the disorder. That emergency could be a hurricane, a mass protest or a “public health emergency,” in which case the army could be used to impose quarantines and to safeguard vaccine supplies.4 Before this act, the president had these martial law powers only in the face of an insurrection.