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askchapoI tried to start reading Shock Doctrine today and it's... not a good book, to be very mild.
It's clear that it's a huge work of research and the intentions were good, but the book is incredibly US-centric (beginning the book with hurricane Katrina), and staunchly anti-communist.
It uses the libtalk of authoritarianism, and it's staunchly anti-communist all over, even blaming the economic hardship on socialism (e.g. in the case of Poland). It glazes the pro-liberalism protestors in 1989 China, it glazes Polish union "Solidarity", and even describes Gorbachev in positive light, despite several pages later explaining how the number of Russians under poverty went from 2mn in 1988 to 75mn less than a decade later.
The book even very briefly acknowledges the huge economic boom in China, but replicates (without sourcing) made-up figures about the numbers of deaths and arrests in and after the protests, and it leaves aside the hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens uplifted from poverty and the fact that the economic doctrine in China did NOT implode the economy (as it happened in most of the eastern block), and describes the Chinese population as terrorized by the repressive state, or replicates laughable figures of corruption in China from US-based NGOs, comparing Deng's reforms to Pinochet.
So, yeah, why did anyone here recommend me this author? It's infuriating!!
It was constantly promoted by breadtubers and no one actially read it. Mentioning it is just a shorthand expression of "injecting neoliberalism into the former USSR resulted in a lot of poverty". So, socialists expect the author to not be a lib - and yet here we are.
Naomi Klein is a liberal and Shock Doctrine is liberal theory rediscovering primitive accumulation, particularly the way neoliberalism does it with finance and crisis.
Dunno why it was recommended did you ask for anything.
People recommend it because it was good introductory text on US foreign policy based economics and one of the first to critically examine that subject.
If you want to read about the US bureaucracy during the Iraq occupation, you're going to at some point be recommended reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and the author of that became a fucking Starbucks PR guy and later wrote a book about "What veterans can teach us about heroism".
People here will also recommend you read Max Weber, or at least they will cite Max Weber, even though the man had supremacist brainworms falling out his ears and all his conclusions have since been debunked.
Yeah but idk, isn't there today more mature written critique of US foreign economic policy than that? I swear I'd learn more and more truthful from a Hakim video than I would from most of this book
There sure are a lot of them. But again, she was one of the first to really dig in on that in a book with any mainstream success.
we're weird about purity sometimes. like mearschimer has a better read on IR than the neocons and end of history dorks that have been running the country but he's still a ghoul
Very weird. If you want my scorching lava hot take then there is a tendency on this site that the more accepted (But not read, sorry) a source is, the less scrutiny it receives. So a work accepted as "Theory" can be zionist, it can be sexist, it can be racist, it can have weird asides about the Han supremacist capitalist empire, and that's ok, but things that aren't "Theory" can be dismissed for wrong politics.
This also goes for individuals.
And that is not to say that they are wrong to do so. But better, newer, texts often stand on the shoulders of texts written by libs, chuds and otherwise politically monstrous people.
I read this back in 2015/2016 and the Katrina and Iraq viceroyalty structures were elucidating. I would still recommend it to libs if just for those parts. Every western semi-mainstream book about history and politics has bizarre anti-communist non sequiturs. An example that comes to mind is King Leopold’s Ghost that has a comment about the Soviet gulag system that makes little sense in the context of the Belgian Congo.
the Katrina and Iraq viceroyalty structures were elucidating
Idk, the core message seems to be "neoliberals will use any excuse to privatize everything", which is explicitly what neoliberals say. Isn't this a well-known foundational element of neoliberalism?
I don't think the majority of people can even define neoliberalism.
That's kind of who the book is for.
The majority of users on this here lemmy instance still think neoliberal is "Liberal but they pretend to not be racist"
I see... Well, 13€ down the sink I guess! I'm never not pirating a book again lmfao
An example that comes to mind is King Leopold’s Ghost that has a comment about the Soviet gulag system that makes little sense in the context of the Belgian Congo.
Same author (Adam Hochschild) wrote The Unquiet Ghost four years earlier, which is an oral history about the USSR under Stalin. Still reading it, but it starts from an anti-Stalin premise and is not too careful about looking for cracks in stories or challenges to that premise. To End All Wars and American Midnight still read to me as pretty good, and are much better sourced.
Well, I guess she really needs such disclaimer
Btw, just as a reminder, she's a liberal zionist
I think she has had evolving views on the topic. This is what she said her position on Zionism was a bit later than that: https://naomiklein.org/we-need-an-exodus-from-zionism/
She is far from perfect, but does seem to be anti ethno state.
To be completely fair to her, she did voice support for Hugo Chavez in the 2000s and she was way more pro-Palestinian in 2010 than I was in 2020, but yeah, shit didn't age well and idk if she recanted those
If you weren't cheering for their deaths they wouldn't be committing genocide!
Probably like this:
"Read Naomi Klein". Or smth.
Elucidating, thank thee
Not pictured:
- steepled fingers
- curled mustache
- tall, dark tophat
- possibly a monocle
WOW
Haven’t read it in a while, but yeah it didn’t blow my mind back when I read it. It’s pretty old though, so her thoughts have probably evolved a bit since then. The crisis-capitalism framework is still a useful model/frame even if some of the surrounding stuff hasn’t aged well.
Or put another way; back when I read it when it came out, the anti-communist stuff probably wouldn’t have really registered to me, but now it certainly would.
I haven't like followed her career or anything but I recently read Doppelganger and thought it was pretty good, even on zionism
When shock doctrine came out, all the stuff you're complaining about, while stupid and wrong, was "serious" leftlib orthodoxy and arguably still is. She manages to be insightful in some areas despite not seeing past some white empire ideological guardrails in others.
We need to be appreciative of the time it was authored, the intended audience, and that the world has violently accelerated in the time since.
When I read the book all the information in it was new to me so I enjoyed that ( this was a few years ago ). The book came out 3 years after Hurricane Katrina maybe that's why it starts there.
3 years after Katrina implies full blown Ukrainian debt trapping, yet not one single word about that. That's what I mean when I say American-centric...
is this a jasckon hinckle situation with her and a different Naomi?
There is such a situation, but she's the good (better, anyway) Naomi. The bad one is Naomi Wolf
and iirc wolf was ok as late as when obama crushed occupy
she really lost her mind after her badly researched book on gay persecution was shredded in real time in one of the worst interviews anyone has ever had, lol
