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Causing and/or using a disaster for the benefit of capitalism

Causing and/or using a disaster for the benefit of capitalism

In her book, The Shock Doctrine, Canadian author Naomi Klein suggests that our apparently free and democratic world is nothing but the product of measures forcefully applied by the world economic elites.

Introduction of the free market responds to a social and economic programme defined by the author as “disaster capitalism”. Theories defending liberalism and economic capitalism would have it that the global free market has triumphed democratically and capitalism goes hand-in-hand with democracy. But Klein sustains that capitalism constantly uses violence and terrorism against individuals and society, while exploiting crises to impose unpopular economic shock treatment measures.

To explain this, Klein makes an extreme analogy: she compares the electroshock treatment used by the CIA in the 50s to pacify “inappropriate” citizens with the protectionist and totalitarian politics behind the USA’s so-called “war on terrorism”.

This analogy finds its origins in the postulates defended by Nobel Economy Laureate, Milton Friedman. The neo-liberal North American economist transferred to the field of economy the following theory based on psychological studies of human beings: a person in a state of shock is completely open to manipulation. Friedman proposed that governments the world over apply their least popular economic steps when the population was in shock, whether due to natural causes (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes), or to those manufactured by a political force or strategy (Coup d’états, wars, terrorist attacks, etc.).

Thus – according to Naomi Klein – governments “use the post-traumatic state of citizens following a disaster to debilitate their freedoms and eliminate their civil rights in favour of absolutism and in the benefit of capital. If a personality can be remade, a country can also be remade”.

The result of this doctrine is a number of civilian populations subject to the voracity of the new world kingpins: the industrial, commercial and governmental conglomeration for which disasters, wars and citizen insecurity are the fodder of shock economy.

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