Crisis = Change?

Just the other day I was discussing with L. the idea of when we might see change in our society, or at least a critique of what's going on in the global economy that has widespread support. The last time that happened, I'd say forlornly, as many others have, was the Great Depression, which set off a re-evaluation of industrial capitalism and created the opportunity for things like Social Security, stronger labor unions, and an acceptance of government regulation of runaway corporations and profiteers. Now, as Petraeus drones on in the left corner of my desktop via APTN (and CodePink again disrupts and are dragged out by Capital Police), I get this e-mail about a new Naomi Klein book called The Shock Doctrine, in which she hypothesizes that many of global capital's greatest leaps forward in recent years have resulted in "shocks" to our collective systems in the form of wars, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.

              The book is being supported by a film Klein made with Mexican director Alfronso Cuarón, one that suggests a coincidental synergy with his 2006 feature Children of Men. After a cursory look at the film and Klein's own nutshelling of the ideas in the book, it does seem like another interesting critical view of what's happening to us, although the natural disaster part seems like a little bit of a stretch, unless you're subscribing to the view that rather than directly causing them (I guess it is clear that rich countries are at blame for global warming), big capitalists lie in wait for them to effect big change on the societies or localities that are victims of them. There is also a connective thread to the use of torture by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo, although these seem more like manifestations of these old techniques that have been lying around since the Cold War and revived by the unilateral attack-presidency of the Bush administration. 

                Klein's grounding of all of this in the work and views expressed by the infamous U of C economist Milton Friedman is probably the scariest aspect of the book, and the grounding of her argument. Apparently Friedman viewed the post-New Deal capitalist world as one needing shock treatment to wipe clean ideas of a regulatory state that protecting citizens from capitalist excesses, and using the new blank slate to impose ideas like the unquestioned necessity of allowing "free-market" capitalism to be the only possible template for a "free" society. The only problem I have with focusing so much on this line of analysis is that there have been so many conservative and neoconservative thinkers that have paved away for and made possible for this kind of behavior that it seems a little reductionist. Also, there have been so many instances in the past of states and private interests subjugating people through means of terror and "shock" that it hardly seems we can find the root of this in the '50s mania for electro-shock therapy. But I guess I should read the book first. Meanwhile, Friedman is quoted in materials for the book in a way that I found uncomfortably close to the sentiments expressed at the beginning of the entry.