Credibility Crunch: A Comment onThe Shock Doctrine

If you think that free markets haven’t worked that well recently, it is perhaps not surprising. If you think that free markets are spread only when business executives, politicians, soldiers, technocrats, and economists join to overwhelm popular resistance by force and violence, then you may have read it first in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.2 Already influential amongst a wide readership, The Shock Doctrine has gained academic laurels with the first biennial Warwick Prize for Writing, awarded on February 24, 2009.The Thesis Klein’s thesis goes as follows: Corporate capitalism is ever hungry for fresh pastures. To maximize their profits, big firms require open markets to grab assets and exploit market power over workers and consumers. The Washington Consensus of 1989 summed up the policies of liberalization and privatization that are required to “crack open ” a country to foreign investment and exploitation. These anti-poor policies are intrinsically unpopular and cannot be pursued democratically. Resistance must first be softened up by shock tactics – a sequence of natural or economic disaster