Staff Review

‘The most important female intellectual in the world’... ‘reinterprets our history and will set the agenda for years to come, as No Logo did ten years ago’ - Thus the long-awaited second book by Naomi Klein is heralded - obviously making some big calls!! But folks - I’ve got the sneaking suspicion this will be THE non-fiction title of the year! Klein’s book is an expose of what she terms disaster capitalism - about how countries are shocked - by wars, terror attacks, coup d’etats, economic crises, natural disasters. And then shocked again - by those who exploit catastrophe to push through economic reforms that, rather than help a country rebuild itself, serve only further to break it down. So think: 9/11, collapse of communism, 70s South American dictatorships, New Orleans, Iraq, post-apartheid South Africa, tsunami-affected South-East Asia etc. But if you are starting to think: ‘here we go, just a superficial anti-G7 rant!’, I would beg to differ, at least on the evidence of the first two chapters made available to me: it’s clear the amount of research Klein has done, in the best traditions of investigative journalism and political critique. In this 576 page volume, Klein portrays how the far right has erased and remade the world in its own ideology over the last 30 or so years, and how global capital will go to the most extreme lengths to snuff out resistance. This is a ‘cri de coeur’ that, I hope, will resound for years to come and, as all such committed authors must hope, make a difference! ---Martin Shaw is from Readings Carlton

The neo-liberal economic policies privatization, free trade, slashed social spending that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market “reforms” the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market “shock therapies” to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy.