On Apr 30, 2008, at 5:29 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>> ...
>>
>> As for her goal of a kinder, gentler capitalism....what can I say?
>>
>
> * Which Naomi Klein is that?!
The Shock Doctrine, p. 20:
"I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care.... It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the rights of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth.... Markets need not be fundamentalist.
Keynes proposed exactly that kind of mixed, regulated economy..., a revolution in public policy that created the New Deal.... It was exactly that system of compromises, checks and balances that Friedman's counterrevolution was launched to methodically dismantle [sic].... Seen in that light, the Chicago School strain of capitalism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society."
p. 53
"...Chicagoans did not see Marxism as their true enemy. The real source of the trouble was to be found in the ideas of the Keynesians in the United States, the social democrats in Europe and the developmentalists in what was then called the Third World. These were believers not in a utopia but in a mixed economy, to Chicago eyes an ugly hodgepodge...."
As I said in my review:
"Using words like 'Friedmanite' and 'neoliberalism' is a way to avoid talking about capitalism in any systemic fashion. When Klein does address systemic issues, she professes that she’s not anticapitalist, but prefers a form of managed or welfare capitalism. It would be sectarian to say that managed or welfare capitalism isn’t better than what we’ve got now; it most certainly would be, especially in the U.S., where a single-payer healthcare system seems almost like a revolutionary impossibility. But it would be naive to think that we could get there without a political upsurge demanding an even more radical renovation, and evasive to deny that exploitation wouldn’t still exist under a regulated capitalism."