permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Hardcover)
by Naomi Klein (Author)

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

The Shock Doctrine
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces 
real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions 
that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
–Milton Friedman, godfather of the modern market.
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the 
myth that the global free market triumphed 
democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money 
trail and the puppet strings behind the 
world-changing crises and wars of the last four 
decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story 
of how America’s “free market” policies have come 
to dominate the world-- through the exploitation 
of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, 
a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and 
BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. 
Immediately following September 11, the Bush 
Administration quietly out-sources the running of 
the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and 
Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts 
of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are 
auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New 
Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane 
Katrina, discover that their public housing, 
hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. 
These events are examples of “the shock 
doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation 
following massive collective shocks – wars, 
terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to 
achieve control by imposing economic shock 
therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks 
don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third 
shock is employed: the electrode in the prison 
cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and 
four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster 
zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how 
disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate 
reengineering of societies still reeling from 
shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. 
The book traces its origins back fifty years, to 
the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, 
which produced many of the leading 
neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose 
influence is still profound in Washington today. 
New, surprising connections are drawn between 
economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and 
covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and 
sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that 
helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of 
these ideas though our contemporary history, 
showing in riveting detail how well-known events 
of the recent past have been deliberate, active 
theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: 
Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands 
War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 
1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, 
the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division 
of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the 
global free market has exploited crises and shock 
for three decades, from Chile to Iraq


In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few 
years, Naomi Klein introduced the term disaster 
capitalism. Whether covering Baghdad after the 
U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the 
tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she 
witnessed something remarkably similar. People 
still reeling from catastrophe were being hit 
again, this time with economic shock treatment, 
losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.


The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most 
dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman s 
free market economic revolution. In contrast to 
the popular myth of this movement s peaceful 
global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited 
moments of shock and extreme violence in order to 
implement its economic policies in so many parts 
of the world from Latin America and Eastern 
Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.


At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of 
cataclysmic events to advance radical 
privatization combined with the privatization of 
the disaster response itself. Klein argues that 
by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or 
war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists 
as a booming new economy, and is the violent 
culmination of a radical economic project that 
has been incubating for fifty years.

See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Hardcover: 576 pages
Publisher: Metropolitan Books (September 18, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805079831
ISBN-13: 978-0805079838

Democracy now Program Interview to listen too 
interview with Noami Klein the author

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/15/1432250

Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
Naomi Klein: From Think Tanks to Battle Tanks, 
"The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions"

Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3
Watch 128k stream       Watch 256k stream       Read Transcript

'Is Another World Possible?' That was the theme 
of this year's annual meeting of the American 
Sociological Association that was held in New 
York City this past weekend. "We did not lose the 
battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and we 
were not out-argued,” journalist and author Naomi 
Klein said. “We lost because we were crushed. 
Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and 
sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by 
think tanks I mean the people who are paid to 
think by the makers of tanks." Klein is author of 
the forthcoming book, "The Shock Doctrine: The 
Rise of Disaster Capitalism." [includes rush transcript]

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge. 
However, donations help us provide closed 
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AMY GOODMAN: The State Department is coming under 
criticism this week for refusing to allow a 
prominent South African social scientist to enter 
the country. Adam Habib was scheduled to speak at 
the annual meeting of the American Sociological 
Association in New York this past weekend, but 
the government refused to give him a visa.

Ironically, the theme of this year's sociology 
conference was "Is Another World Possible?" At 
the conference, the ASA planned a series of 
sessions to assess the potential for progressive 
social change both in the US and in the world and 
to invite a serious discussion of "economic 
globalization" and its consequences.

One of the most highly anticipated sessions was 
to feature Jeffrey Sachs, an internationally 
known economist and a former special advisor to 
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, versus Naomi 
Klein, the Canadian journalist and author. But 
shortly before the ASA conference opened, Sachs 
pulled out. Unclear if it was related to the fact 
that Naomi Klein takes him on in her forthcoming 
book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster 
Capitalism. The theme of her talk was "Lost Worlds." This is Naomi Klein.

NAOMI KLEIN: As we think about reaching this 
other possible world, I want to be very clear 
that I don't believe the problem is a lack of 
ideas. I think we’re swimming in ideas: universal 
healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; 
participatory democracy; public services that are 
accountable to the people who use them; food, 
medicine and shelter as a human right. These 
aren't new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN 
Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.

I don't think our problem is money, lack of 
resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at 
the risk of being accused of economic populism, I 
would just point out that in this city, the 
employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16 
billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and 
ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, 
a world record. It seems to me that there’s 
clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for 
our modest dreams. We can tax the polluters and 
the casino capitalists to pay for alternative 
energy development and a global social safety 
net. We don't lack ideas. Neither are we short on cash.

And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don't 
believe that what is lacking is political will at 
the highest levels, cooperation between world 
leaders. I don't think that if we could just 
present our elites with the right graphs and 
PowerPoint presentations -- no offense -- that we 
would finally convince them to make poverty 
history. I don't believe that. I don't believe we 
could do it, even if that PowerPoint presentation 
was being delivered Angelina Jolie wearing a 
(Product) Red TM Gap tank top and carrying a 
(Product) Red cell phone. Even if she had a 
(Product) Red iPhone, I still don't think they 
would listen. That’s because elites don't make 
justice because we ask them to nicely and 
appealingly. They do it when the alternative to 
justice is worse. And that is what happened all 
those years ago when the income gap began to 
close. That was the motivation behind the New 
Deal and the Marshall Plan. Communism spreading 
around the world, that was the fear. Capitalism 
needed to embellish itself. It needed to soften 
its edges. It was in a competition. So ideas 
aren't the problem, and money is not the problem, 
and I don't think political will is ever the problem.

The real problem, I want to argue today, is 
confidence, our confidence, the confidence of 
people who gather at events like this under the 
banner of building another world, a kinder more 
sustainable world. I think we lack the strength 
of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas 
with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are 
missing movement power. That’s what we’re 
missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats 
wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate 
intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle 
climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants 
Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal 
healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be 
the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why 
not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

What is at the root of our crisis of confidence? 
What drains us of our conviction at crucial 
moments when we are tested? At the root, I think 
it’s the notion that we have accepted, which is 
that our ideas have already been tried and found 
wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the 
alternatives that we deserve and long for and 
that the world needs so desperately, like a 
healthcare system that doesn't sicken us when we 
see it portrayed on film, like the ability to 
rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive 
human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid 
profit-making for politically connected 
contractors, the right to have bridges that don't 
collapse and subways that don't flood when it 
rains. I think that what lies at the root of that 
lack of confidence is that we’re told over and 
over again that progressive ideas have already 
been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we 
accepted it. So our alternatives are posed 
tentatively, almost apologetically. “Is another world possible?” we ask.

This idea of our intellectual and ideological 
failure is the dominant narrative of our time. 
It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve 
been referring to. “There is no alternative,” 
said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said 
Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking 
has already been done, the consensus is there. 
Now, the premise of all these proclamations was 
that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was 
conquering every corner of the globe because all 
other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The 
only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these 
pronouncements were being made that what was 
failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, 
which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare 
state, which has produced the highest standard of 
living by UN measures in the world, or at least 
it did before my government started embracing 
some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called 
Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in 
the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” 
economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a 
combination of trade protections to nurture and 
develop national industry, even when that meant 
keeping American products out and preventing 
foreign ownership, as well as maintaining 
government control over key assets, like water 
and electricity. These policies did not create 
explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as 
we see today. But record levels of profit and a 
rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has 
been attacked in these past thirty years.

What was failing and collapsing when history was 
declared over was something very specific in 
1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous 
declaration, and when the Washington Consensus 
was declared, also in 1989. What was collapsing 
was centralized state communism, authoritarian, 
anti-democratic, repressive. Something very 
specific was collapsing, and it was a moment of tremendous flux.

And it was in that moment of flux and 
disorientation that several very savvy people, 
many of them in this country, seized on that 
moment to declare victory not only against 
communism, but against all ideas but their own. 
Now, this was the Fukuyama chutzpah, when he 
actually said -- and it seems so strange to read 
it now -- in his famous 1989 speech, that the 
significance of that moment was not that we were 
reaching an end of ideology, as some were 
suggesting, or a convergence between capitalism 
and socialism, as Gorbachev was suggesting, it 
was not that ideology had ended, but that history 
as such had ended. He argued that deregulated 
markets in the economic sphere combined with 
liberal democracy in the political sphere 
represented the endpoint of mankind's ideological 
evolution and the final form of human government.

Now, what was interesting and never quite stated 
in this formulation was that you basically had 
two streams: you had democracy, which you can use 
to vote for your leaders, and then you had a 
single economic model. Now, the catch was that 
you couldn't use your vote, you couldn't use your 
democracy to reshape your economy, because all of 
the economic decisions had already been decided. 
There was only -- it was the final endpoint of 
ideological evolution. So you could have 
democracy, but you couldn't use it to change the 
basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the 
economy. This moment was held up as a celebration 
of victory for democracy, but that idea, that 
democracy cannot affect the economy, is and 
remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.

Now, I was drawn to the slogan that was chosen 
for this year's ASA gathering, because I think, 
as many of you know and have read in the program, 
it comes from the World Social Forum. And I was 
at the first World Social Forum six-and-a-half 
years ago -- more than six-and-a-half years ago 
in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I was 
one of only a handful of North Americans who 
attended. And we gathered under that same slogan, 
but I think it’s significant and interesting that 
it wasn't posed as a question back then. There 
was a proud exclamation mark at the end of the 
sentence: “Another world is possible!”

I wrote a feature article for The Nation when I 
came back from Brazil, trying to explain to 
readers in the US -- the event wasn't covered at 
all in this country, although it was covered very 
heavily in the international press -- what it 
felt like to be there with 10,000 other people. 
And a lot of people were saying that they felt 
like we were making history. And what I wrote was 
that what it really felt like was the end of the 
end of history. That's what it felt like to be in 
that room. It was this powerful gust of wind that 
you could suddenly breathe more deeply. You were 
free to imagine. Our minds were unleashed.

And it wasn’t just Porto Alegre, because Porto 
Alegre was the culmination of these types of 
spontaneous -- often spontaneous uprisings that 
were happening around the world whenever world 
leaders were gathering to advance the so-called 
Washington Consensus, whether it was in Seattle 
at the WTO meeting in 1999, whether it was the 
IMF/World Bank meetings a few years later in 
Washington, then in Genoa during the G8. And, of 
course, the Zapatistas and the MST in Brazil were at the forefront.

And the theme in Porto Alegre was democracy. That 
was the -- it was about redefining democracy to 
include the economy: deep democracy, 
participatory democracy. And it was a challenge 
to this idea that these two streams could not 
intersect. The right to land as a form of 
democracy, the right to biodiversity, to 
independent media. But what was most 
extraordinary about Porto Alegre was that -- you 
know, certainly there were some politicians 
there, there were some big NGOs there, but the 
people who were at the podiums, who were shaping 
the discussion, were the people who were the 
casualties of this economic model, who were 
themselves discarded, made landless, forced to 
occupy pieces of land, chop down fences and plant 
food and make decisions democratically.

So, you know, Jeffery Sachs talks about these 
model villages that he’s building in Africa. And 
many of them, you know, are making tremendous 
progress. But I can't help thinking back to these 
field trips that we made in Porto Alegre to MST 
villages, where it was the people themselves, the 
landless people themselves, who were showing us 
their own model villages and were asking for our 
solidarity. And I think as sociologists, you 
understand this key distinction, that it was the 
actors who were the protagonists of their 
history, and that was what was historic. It was 
breaking the charity model in a very real way.

Now, I look at where we are now, six-and-a-half 
years later, and it does feel that we have moved 
backwards in many areas. Talk of fixing the world 
has become an astonishingly elite affair. Davos 
-- now, Porto Alegre was in rebellion against the 
Davos Summit every year in January. This was the 
anti-Davos. Davos has been re-legitimized, and 
now solving the world's problems appears to be a 
matter between CEOs and super-celebrities. And 
the idea that we don't need to challenge these 
mass disparities, what we need is sort of 
noblesse oblige on a mass scale, that is very 
different than what we were talking about in Porto Alegre those years ago.

Now, we know what closed that window of 
possibility, that freedom that opened up in 2001, 
and it was September 11th in this country. And 
the window didn't close everywhere, but it did 
close, at least temporarily, in North America, 
that sense of possibility, that putting these 
issues and the people affected by these policies 
at the center of the political debate. Now, the 
shock of those attacks, I think we can see with 
some hindsight, was harnessed by leaders in this 
country and their allies around the world to 
abruptly end the discussion of global justice 
that was exploding around the world. There was a 
door that had opened, and it was suddenly slammed 
shut. We heard that phrase again and again: 9/11 
changes everything. And one of the first things 
we were told that it had changed was that trade, 
privatization, labor rates, all the things we 
were fighting for just so recently no longer 
mattered. It was Year Zero. Wipe the slate clean. 
And it was another one of these rebooting history 
moments. History was apparently starting all over 
again from scratch, and nothing we knew before 
mattered. It was all relegated to pre-9/11 thinking.

Now, the Bush administration justified this by 
saying that all that mattered was security and 
the war on terror. And in Canada, we were told 
that -- by the US ambassador -- that security 
trumps trade. That became the new slogan, that 
before 9/11 it was economic priorities that drove 
the US administration, but post-9/11 the only 
thing that mattered was security. So talk of 
economic justice, corporate greed, the loss of 
the public sphere, the talk of Porto Alegre, was suddenly retro, so 2001.

Now, the irony that we can now see is that, while 
denying the importance of this economic project, 
the Bush administration used the dislocation of 
9/11 to pursue the very same pre-9/11 radical 
capitalist project, now with a furious vengeance, 
under the cover of war and natural disasters. So 
forget negotiating trade deals at the World Trade 
Organization. When the US invaded Iraq, Bush sent 
in Paul Bremer to seize new markets on the 
battlefields of his preemptive war. He didn’t 
have to negotiate with anyone. He just rewrote 
the country's entire economic architecture in one 
swoop. But, of course, if you said that the war 
had anything to do with economics, you were 
dismissed as naïve. It was, of course, about 
security, about liberating Iraqis from Saddam.

AMY GOODMAN: Journalist Naomi Klein. We’ll be 
back with her speech in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return to journalist Naomi Klein.

NAOMI KLEIN: Meanwhile, at home the 
administration quickly moved to exploit the shock 
that gripped the nation to push through a radical 
vision of hollow government, in which everything 
from waging wars to reconstructing from those 
wars to disaster response became an entirely 
for-profit venture. This was a bold evolution of 
market logic. Rather than the ’90s approach of 
selling off existing public companies, like water 
and electricity, the Bush team was creating a 
whole new framework for its actions. That 
framework was and is the war on terror, which was 
built to be private, privately managed from the 
start. The Bush administration played the role of 
a kind of a venture capitalist for the startup 
security companies, and they created an economic 
boom on par with the dotcom boom of the 1990s. 
But we didn’t talk about it, because we were too busy talking about security.

Now, this feat required a kind of two-stage 
process, which was using 9/11, of course, to 
radically increase the surveillance and security 
powers of the state, concentrated in the 
executive branch, but at the same time to take 
those powers and outsource them to a web of 
private companies, whether Blackwater, Boeing, 
AT&T, Halliburton, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group. 
Now, in the ’80s, the goal of privatization -- 
and in the ’90s -- was devouring the appendages 
of the state. But what was happening now is it 
was the core that was being devoured, because 
what is more central to the very definition of a 
state of a government than security and disaster 
response? Now, this is one of the great ironies 
of the war on terror, is that it proved such an 
effective weapon to furthering the corporate 
agenda precisely because it denied that it has, 
and continues to deny that it has, a corporate agenda at all.

Now, it had another benefit, too, which was the 
ability to pay anyone who opposed this system as 
aligned with potential terrorists and so on. So 
our movement, which was already facing extreme 
repression before 9/11, was put on notice as 
traitorous. Looking back, it’s clear that the 
shock, the disorientation caused by the attacks, 
was used to reassert this economic agenda, to 
reassert that consensus that never really was. 
The window that was opened at the end of the ’90s 
in the movement known as the anti-globalization 
movement, but which was always a pro-democracy 
movement, was slammed shut, at least in North 
America. And it was terror that slammed it shut. 
The alternatives started to disappear.

Now, I want to use the rest of my time just to 
say that this was not the first time, that this 
-- if we look back at the past thirty-five years, 
we see this slamming of the door on alternatives 
just as they are emerging repeating again and 
again. Many of you were here for the opening 
address from Ricardo Lagos, the former president 
of Chile, who talked about another September 
11th, which was another one of those moments, a 
far more significant one, when a very important 
democratic alternative, the real third way, not 
Tony Blair's third way, but the real third way 
between totalitarian communism and extreme 
capitalism was being forged in Chile. And that was the great threat.

And we know that now through all of the 
declassified documents. There’s a really 
revealing one: a correspondence between Henry 
Kissinger and Nixon, in which Kissinger says very 
bluntly that the problem with Allende’s election 
is not what they were saying publicly, which was 
that he was aligned with the Soviets, that he was 
only pretending to be democratic, but that he was 
really going to impose a totalitarian system in 
Chile. That was the spin at the time. What he 
actually wrote was, “The example of a successful 
elected Marxist government in Chile would surely 
have an impact on -- and even precedent value for 
-- other parts of the world…The imitative spread 
of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn 
significantly affect the world balance and our 
own position in it.” So that alternative, that 
other world, had to be blasted out of the way, 
and extreme violence was used in order to accomplish that.

Now, this kind of preemptive attack on our 
democratic alternatives, the persistent dream of 
a third way, of a real third way, has come up 
again and again. And this is what I discuss at 
length in the book, but I want to mention a 
couple of examples -- unless I’m totally out of 
time? OK -- examples of moments where there was a 
similar sense of effervescent possibility of 
being able to breathe more and dream more fully.

One of them was in Poland in 1989. June 4th was 
the day of the historic elections in Poland that 
elected Solidarity as the new government. They 
hadn't had elections there in decades. And this 
was the event that really set off the domino -- 
what’s now referred to as the domino effect in 
Eastern Bloc countries -- and ultimately 
resulting in the breaking apart of the Soviet 
Union. But it’s worth remembering what it 
actually looked like in June of 1989. In Poland, 
people didn’t think that history was over, 
because they had just elected Solidarity as their 
government. They thought that history was just 
beginning and that they were finally going to be 
able to implement what the movement, which was a 
labor movement, had always seen as the third way, 
the third way not taken. Now, Solidarity's vision 
was not a rejection of socialism. They said that 
they were calling for “real socialism,” as 
socialists often do, and it was a rejection of 
the Communist party. They were everything that 
the party was not: dispersed where it was 
centralized, democratic where it was 
authoritarian, participatory where it was 
bureaucratic. And Solidarity had ten million 
members, which gave them the power to completely shut down the state.

So when people went to the polls and elected a 
Solidarity government, what were they voting for? 
What did they think they were voting for? Did 
they think that they were voting to become a free 
market economy on the model that Francis Fukuyama 
was talking about? No, they didn't. They thought 
they were voting for the labor party that they had helped to build.

And I just want to read you a short passage from 
Solidarity’s economic program, which was passed 
democratically in 1981. They said, “The 
socialized enterprise should be the basic 
organizational unit in the economy. It should be 
controlled by the workers’ council representing 
the collective” and should be operated -- 
cooperatively run by a director appointed through 
competition, recalled by the council, workers’ 
cooperatives. So the idea was to get the party 
out of control of the economy, to decentralize it 
and have the people who were doing the work 
actually control their workplaces. And they 
believed that they could make them more sustainable.

Now, did they get the chance to try that, to act 
on that vision of a worker cooperative economy as 
the centerpiece of the economy, to have 
democratic elections but still have socialism? 
Did they get that chance when they voted for 
Solidarity? No, they didn't. What they got was an 
inherited debt, and they were told that the only 
way that they would get any relief from that debt 
and any aid is if they followed a very radical 
shock therapy program. Now, I would be remiss if 
I didn't point out that the person who prescribed 
that shock therapy program was Jeffery Sachs. And 
I -- no, I say that because I really had hoped 
that we could debate these different worlds, 
because there are differences, there are real 
differences that we must not smooth over.

Now, in 2006, 40% of young workers in Poland were 
unemployed, 40%, last year. That’s twice the EU 
average. And Poland is often held up as a great 
success story of transition. In 1989, 15% of the 
Poland’s population was living below the poverty 
line. In 2003, 59% of Poles had fallen below the 
line. That’s that opening of that gap. That’s 
what these economic policies do. And then, we can 
say we’re very, very worried about the people at 
the bottom, let's bring them up, but let’s be 
clear about what we’re talking about. These 
jarring levels of inequality and economic 
exclusion are now feeding a resurgence of 
chauvinism, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, 
rampant homophobia in Poland. And I think we can 
see, actually, that it’s inevitable that this 
would be the case, because they tried communism, 
they tried capitalism, they tried democratic 
socialism, but they got shock therapy instead. 
After you’ve tried all that, there really isn't a 
whole lot left but fascism. It’s dangerous to 
suppress democratic alternatives when people 
invest their dreams in them. It’s risky business.

Another one of these powerful dreams was 
Tiananmen Square, and it’s a sort of a very sad 
fluke of history that on the same day that 
Solidarity won those historic elections and that 
dream was betrayed, what they voted for was 
betrayed, tanks rolled in Tiananmen Square, and 
that was the day of the massacre: June 4, 1989. 
It was another bloody end to a moment of effervescent possibility.

Now, the way those protests were always reported 
on in the West was that students in Beijing just 
wanted to live like in the United States. And 
they, you know, put a goddess to democracy that 
looked a lot like the Statue of Liberty. So it 
was reported on CNN as just kind of pro-American–style democracy protests.

But in recent years, an alternative analysis of 
those events has emerged. And what we’re starting 
to hear from what’s being called China's New 
Left, and people like Wang Hui, who’s a wonderful 
academic, is that this was a vast 
oversimplification of what was driving the 
pro-democracy movement in 1989 in China. What was 
driving it was that the government of Deng 
Xiaoping was radically restructuring the economy 
along with the lines that had been prescribed by 
Milton Friedman -- economic shock therapy -- and 
people were seeing their quality of life 
devalued. Workers were losing their rights. And 
they were taking to the streets and demanding 
democratic control over the economic transition.

So democracy wasn't an abstract idea. It wasn't 
just “We want to vote.” It was, “We want to 
control this transition. We want to have a say in 
it.” It was a direct challenge to the Fukuyama 
formulation, which, by the way, was made that 
same year: the idea that you would have these two 
streams and that they wouldn't intersect.

I just want to read one other thing, which is 
another one of these paths not taken, because we 
know how that one ended in Tiananmen Square: that 
dream was crushed. Another historic moment of 
possibility, when we look back on our recent 
history, was 1994, when the ANC government won 
landslide elections in South Africa. That was a 
victory for people power. That was one of the 
most hopeful days that I can remember.

I think we should remember what South Africans 
thought they were voting for in those historic 
elections. You know, it was just portrayed as 
something very simple: it was an end to 
apartheid. But what did an end to apartheid mean 
to South Africans? And we can get an answer from 
that actually from Nelson Mandela, who wrote a 
little note two weeks before he was released from 
prison. And he wrote this note because there was 
a growing concern that he had been in prison so 
long that he had forgotten the promise of 
liberation, which was not just to have elections, 
but to change the economy of the country and 
redistribute the wealth. And Mandela was under so 
much pressure that he had to release this very 
short statement just to clarify this point. And 
what he said was, "The nationalization of the 
mines, banks and monopoly industry is the policy 
of the ANC and a change or modification of our 
views in this regard is inconceivable in our 
situation. State control of certain sectors of 
the economy is unavoidable.” And this was a 
reiteration of South Africa’s Freedom Charter, 
which is the platform of the ANC, which calls for 
the national wealth of South Africa, the heritage 
of the country, to be restored for the people, the mineral wealth and so on.

Now, I say this because this was one of those 
worlds that wasn't chosen, one of those paths 
that wasn't chosen. And I spent the past four 
years pulling these stolen and betrayed 
alternatives out of the dustbin of our recent 
history, because I think it matters. I think it 
matters that we had ideas all along, that there 
were always alternatives to the free market. And 
we need to retell our own history and understand 
that history, and we have to have all the shocks 
and all the losses, the loss of lives, in that 
story, because history didn't end. There were 
alternatives. They were chosen, and then they 
were stolen. They were stolen by military coups. 
They were stolen by massacres. They stolen by 
trickery, by deception. They were stolen by terror.

We who say we believe in this other world need to 
know that we are not losers. We did not lose the 
battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we 
were not out-argued. We lost because we were 
crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, 
and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And 
by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to 
think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective 
we have seen is when the army tanks and the think 
tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world 
market has casualties now in the millions, from 
Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for 
another world were crushed and disappeared 
because they are popular and because, when tried, 
they work. They're popular because they have the 
power to give millions of people lives with 
dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are 
dangerous because they put real limits on the 
rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this 
history, understanding that we never lost the 
battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of 
dirty wars, is key to building the confidence 
that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, author of the 
forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

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