The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

In every country where Chicago School policies have been applied over the past three decades, what has emerged is a powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians—with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups.

Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain—from Russia’s oil fields, to China’s collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq.

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What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system—whether political, religious or economic—that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling.

The only prospect that threatens the booming disaster economy on which so much wealth depends—from weapons to oil to engineering to surveillance to patented drugs—is the possibility of achieving some measure of climatic stability and geopolitical peace.

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.

Baghdad, New Orleans and Sandy Springs provide glimpses of a kind of gated future built and run by the disaster capitalism complex. 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. This is what a society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive for peace and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an endless and unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza.

After it becomes clear that Baghdad is never going to be Dubai, and New Orleans won’t be Disneyland, Plan B is to settle into another Colombia or Nigeria—never-ending war, fought in large measure by private soldiers and paramilitaries, damped down just enough to get the natural resources out of the ground, helped along by mercenaries guarding the pipelines, platforms and water reserves.

The hoarding of so much wealth by a tiny minority of the world’s population was not a peaceful process, as we have seen, nor, often, was it a legal one.

In the U.S., rage at the shrinking of the middle class has been easily redirected to calls for border fences, with CNN’s Lou Dobbs leading a nightly campaign against the “invasion of illegal aliens” waging “war on the American middle class”—stealing jobs, spreading crime, as well as bringing in “highly contagious diseases.”

With socialism still closely associated with the decades of brutality carried out in its name, public anger has few outlets for expression except nationalism and protofascism.

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.