‘The Shock Doctrine’—pros & cons

Dr. Ewen Cameron tortured people with shock treatments in CIA-funded experiments. The economist Milton Friedman urged CIA-installed dictator Augusto Pinochet to take a “shock approach” against Chile’s working class.

Naomi Klein ties these two aspects of capitalist globalization together in her new book, “The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

She shows how “shock and awe” campaigns launched against oppressed people don’t just consist of cruise missiles. The cutbacks and privatizations imposed on poor countries by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank amount to economic war.

The CIA’s MKUltra program spent $25 million at 44 universities and 12 hospitals to develop torture techniques. Dr. Cameron used LSD and other drugs to destroy the memory of his victims at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

Cameron became president of the World Psychiatric Association. The Western capitalist media didn’t expose his background; they were too busy attacking psychiatrists in the Soviet Union for allegedly abusing patients.

As a result of MKUltra the CIA published a 128-page secret manual called “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation.” These methods are used today at U.S. prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

During the 1950s and 1960s the Ford Foundation brought hundreds of students from Latin America and Asia to study economics at the University of Chicago. Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan’s favorite economist, was their star professor.

Klein describes how these “Chicago Boys” went back to their countries where they pushed for eliminating all social programs and letting U.S. corporations exploit workers.

Their first big chance was in Indonesia where a million communists and progressives were slaughtered following a military coup in 1965. Friedman’s disciples became economic advisors to the dictator, General Suharto.

More people died in the CIA-backed coup in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, than at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Pinochet’s fascist reign of terror allowed the “Chicago Boys” to wipe out every gain of the working class, including social security. Bush’s scheme to privatize Social Security in the United States is based on it.

Naomi Klein shows how this “shock therapy” became the model for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to use in 50 other countries.

The first eight chapters of “The Shock Doctrine” are moving and full of interesting details. But Naomi Klein is wrong when she puts an equal sign between Pinochet’s fascist regime and the People’s Republic of China.

While gladdened by the tremendous economic gains of China, communists around the globe are worried by the country’s virtual integration into the world capitalist market and the growing class contradictions there.

Where previously there was virtually no unemployment, China now has the world’s largest reserve army of labor. Private capitalists exploit millions of workers. The People’s Communes are a distant memory.

Millions of Chinese communists are concerned as well about these backward steps and are struggling to revive the revolution. And while there are now millionaires in China, there are also hundreds of millions of wage workers. Chinese trade unionists are organizing Wal-Mart workers, something U.S. unions haven’t been able to do.

Home to one out of five human beings, China deserves a careful investigation, particularly when it is the Pentagon’s ultimate target.

Klein instead dwells on the 1989 events in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which she equates with the torture and killing of thousands of leftists in the football stadium of Santiago, Chile. There’s no comparison.

The leaders of the Tiananmen protests, and other elements in Chinese society, openly wanted a coup against the Communist Party. They weren’t satisfied with the market reforms of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping—they wanted a full-blown capitalist counterrevolution instead. That’s why they used U.S. imperialism’s Statue of Liberty as their symbol. That’s why they welcomed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who not long after allowed the disintegration of the USSR to begin. Some of the participants at Tiananmen had previously attacked college students from Africa.

What capitalist government would tolerate the occupation of its capital’s central square for weeks by opponents?

The People’s Liberation Army was forced to take action when its soldiers—young recruits from the countryside—were attacked by counter-revolutionaries and burned alive in their buses. Despite the inflated claims of the capitalist media, casualties in the battle that followed were in the hundreds, not the thousands, and were about the same on both sides.

“The Shock Doctrine” correctly points out how President Boris Yeltsin’s 1993 bombing of Russia’s parliament opened the way for the “Chicago Boys” to stage a fire sale of the country’s assets. But at the time, Workers World was one of the few voices to oppose the capitalist counter-revolution, and was called “Stalinist” for doing so.

Klein describes the painful compromises that the African National Congress was forced to make to get rid of the apartheid system. But using statistics she falsely implies that Black people in South Africa are no better off now than under racist rule.

The general strikes called by South Africa’s unions are never mentioned in this book. The assassination of Chris Hani is cited but he’s not identified as the Communist Party’s general secretary. Yet Joe Slovo, legendary leader of the SACP, is blamed for white racists being allowed to keep their pensions.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has called for a “21st-century socialism.” Naomi Klein offers no such vision in “The Shock Doctrine.”

She called herself a “democratic socialist” in a recent interview in the British “Socialist Review.” But she also said, “I’m a believer in mixed economies.”

Although Naomi Klein is a Canadian, she endorsed John Kerry for president in 2004. This is no road forward for the movement.

Here’s hoping that Naomi Klein will write her next book about the U.S. prison-industrial complex, including the frame-ups of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.