The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

That’s why Elbit and Magal don’t mind the relentless negative publicity that Israel’s wall attracts around the world—in fact, they consider it free advertising. “People believe we are the only ones who have experience testing this equipment in real life,” explained Magal CEO Jacob Even-Ezra.

The extraordinary performance of Israel’s homeland security companies is well known to stock watchers, but it is rarely discussed as a factor in the politics of the region. It should be. It is not a coincidence that the Israeli state’s decision to put “counterterrorism” at the center of its export economy has coincided precisely with its abandonment of peace negotiations, as well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement with specific goals for land and rights but rather as part of the global War on Terror—one against illogical, fanatical forces bent only on destruction.

The Israeli business sector’s shift in political direction has been dramatic. The vision that captivates the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange today is no longer that of Israel as a regional trade hub but rather as a futuristic fortress, able to survive even in a sea of determined enemies.

the Israeli journalist and novelist Yitzhak Laor wrote at the time, “the current war is the first to become a branding opportunity for one of our largest mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a huge promotional campaign.”

Now he was one of the most inflammatory of Israel’s pro-war hawks, pushing for an even wider escalation. On CNN, Gillerman said that “while it may be politically incorrect and maybe even untrue to say that all Muslims are terrorists, it happens to be very true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim. So this is not just Israel’s war. This is the world’s war.”

Gag me with a spoon (eye roll)

It is not a war that can be won by any country, but winning is not the point. The point is to create “security” inside fortress states bolstered by endless low-level conflict outside their walls.

It is in Israel, however, that this process is most advanced: an entire country has turned itself into a fortified gated community, surrounded by locked-out people living in permanently excluded red zones.

One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza.

A symbol for the whole world (green zones and red zones)

It has become commonplace to compare the militarized ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, with their concrete walls, electrified fences and checkpoints, to the Bantustan system in South Africa, which kept blacks in ghettos and demanded passes when they left.

What Israel has constructed is a system designed to do the opposite: to keep workers from working, a network of open holding pens for millions of people who have been categorized as surplus humanity.

Surplus humanity

For those executives, the counterrevolution that began in the basement of the Social Sciences building in the 1950s has indeed been a success, but the cost of that victory has been the widespread loss of faith in the core free-market promise—that increased wealth will be shared. As Webb said during the midterm campaign, “Trickle-down economics didn’t happen.”

Despite the attempts of everyone from Pinochet to Cavallo to Berezovsky to Black to portray himself as a victim of baseless political persecution, this list, by no means complete, represents a radical departure from the neoliberal creation myth. The economic crusade managed to cling to a veneer of respectability and lawfulness as it progressed. Now that veneer was being very publicly stripped away to reveal a system of gross wealth inequalities, often opened up with the aid of grotesque criminality.

In the years since, that wide-awake shock resistance has spread to many other former shock labs—Chile, Bolivia, China, Lebanon. And as people shed the collective fear that was first instilled with tanks and cattle prods, with sudden flights of capital and brutal cutbacks, many are demanding more democracy and more control over markets.

Despite the Bush administration’s claim that the twentieth century ended with a “decisive victory” for free markets over all forms of socialism, many Latin Americans understand perfectly well that it was authoritarian communism that failed in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Democratic socialism, meaning not only socialist parties brought to power through elections but also democratically run workplaces and land holdings, has worked in many regions, from Scandinavia to the thriving and historic cooperative economy in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region.

The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures.

It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place.

Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy.

the favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity of developmentalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them with Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldviews. (Conflati...

Latin America’s mass movements, which have powered the wave of election victories for left-wing candidates, are learning how to build shock absorbers into their organizing models.

Latin America’s new leaders are also taking bold measures to block any future U.S.-backed coups that could attempt to undermine their democratic victories.

(now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation)—the infamous police and military training center in Fort Benning, Georgia, where so many of the continent’s notorious killers learned the latest in “counterterrorism” techniques, then promptly directed them against farmers in El Salvador and auto workers in Argentina.

It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing—rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services.

“but when [a country is] out of money, it hasn’t got many places to turn.”30 That is no longer the case. Thanks to high oil prices, Venezuela has emerged as a major lender to other developing countries, allowing them to do an end run around Washington.

We say to them, ‘Sirs, we are sovereign. We want to pay the debt, but no way in hell are we going to make an agreement again with the IMF.’” As a result, the IMF, supremely powerful in the eighties and nineties, is no longer a force on the continent. In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent—a sea change in only two years. “There is life after the IMF,” Kirchner declared, “and it’s a good life.”

The Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, “they were now laughed at.”

A state of shock, by definition, is a moment when there is a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them.

Without a story, we are, as many of us were after September 11, intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends.

The same is true for wider societies. Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse—shock resistant.

They did not want another reconstruction of Solidere-style bubbles and rotting suburbs—of fortressed green zones and raging red zones—but a reconstruction for the entire country. “How can we still accept this government that steals?” one demonstrator asked. “This government that built this downtown and accumulated this huge debt? Who’s going to pay for it? I have to pay for it, and my son is going to pay for it after me.”

Hezbollah’s version of aid did not filter through the government or foreign NGOs. It did not go to build five-star hotels, as in Kabul, or Olympic swimming pools for police trainers, as in Iraq. Instead, Hezbollah did what Renuka, the Sri Lankan tsunami survivor, told me she wished someone would do for her family: put the help in their hands.

The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping—having the right to be part of a communal recovery.

Unlike the fantasy of the Rapture, the apocalyptic erasure that allows the ethereal escape of true believers, local people’s renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have created and that there has already been enough erasure—of history, of culture, of memory.

As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms.