The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

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. It was a version of this combination of democracy and socialism that Allende was attempting to bring to Chile between 1970 and 1973. Gorbachev had a similar, though less radical, vision to turn the Soviet Union into a “socialist beacon” on the Scandinavian model. South Africa’s Freedom Charter, the dream that animated the long liberation struggle, was a version of this same third way: not state communism, but markets existing alongside the nationalization of the banks and mines, with the income used to build comfortable neighborhoods and decent schools—economic as well as political democracy. The workers who founded Solidarity in 1980 pledged to struggle not against socialism but for it, with workers eventually winning the power to run their workplaces and country democratically.