Rouen, 27 January 2012
Dear Naomi Klein,
(This is letter is published in French on the chronicle page of Radio HDR, www.radiohdr.com).
I have just finished your book, “the Shock Doctrine and the Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. I can say I am still under shock and it is a very strange feeling to be stunned by exactly what you thought you already knew. Only, it’s worse.
The first time I heard about you was because of “No Logo”. I didn’t want to read it: the book was such a success that I thought it was some publisher’s trick to sell an innovative pseudo-theory on the marketing techniques of the future. Though I was then a teacher in a business school, I didn’t want to hear about marketing, however innovative.
I eventually left the school. “No Logo” is on my night table, along with Jean Ziegler’s latest books. And the “Shock Doctrine”.
But why read something you already agree with? Because it gives strength to your initial intuitions, it gives not only coherence to your thoughts but makes you understand you are not alone. Belief thus becomes reason. It’s out there, ready for confrontation and open debate. Because what you perceived in the light of a simple intuition is sustained by solid facts – and here, it is worse than what you thought.
Also because it is so easy to fall in the trap of the world plot argument: there is a bunch of powerful people who pull the strings of our lives and shape our destinies to their exclusive benefit. The plot argument is so pervasive that it is not the extreme right movement’s specialty or any other paranoid line of thinking; pop culture disseminates the idea in a very effective way, as in the movie “Matrix” or as in “Loose Change”, the controversial documentary about 9/11.
The plot argument also seduces a portion of the population that is rightly sensitive to alternative ideas; these people advocate for more democratic practices in our societies, they understand the political origins of poverty and the need for social justice, they criticize all-out consumerism and the exorbitant power of corporations, banks and brands, they are revolted by the intolerable excesses of world finance and today’s Western arrogance and neo-colonialism, they call for a greener future in a more hospitable world… But many of them also fall in the trap of creating false categories that only serve the worldview of extremist, racist movements.
The blog “Mecanopolis” conveys such generous ideas on the surface – only to attract websurfers to what really is a proto-fascist group of activists’ ideology. More visibly, France’s presidential campaign reveals the wide popular support for Marine Le Pen’s “ethnicised socialism”, whereby she criticises the loss of a country’s soul sold to the interests of global capitalism and the corrupt practices of many among our political and economic ruling class to the detriment of the good little people. But the sociologist who invented the expression “ethnicised socialism” did not mean to disparage socialism – only to point to the worrying similitude between “ethnicised” and “national” as in the expression “National-Sozialismus” – Nazism for short.
Pessimism is for analysis. We live in a dangerous world, fraught with spooky futures. The Third Way that some called for after the fall of the USSR and have believed was forming towards the end of the 90s (Tony Blair at their head) in Europe turned out to convert Thatcher’s heritage from mere reprehensible anecdote to carved-in-marble History. But this is not the end – on the contrary, hope has erupted in places no one (in the West) expected it to happen. Optimism is for perspective.
Is it simply that people have finally come to know things and they have gathered enough strength to make it known to others? Like politics must remain in the hands of the people? Like the economy should remain a province of the political realm, rather than the government be a vassal of the economy? Like unregulated capitalism and freedom are incompatible?
When riots and demonstrations started in Tunisia on the turn of 2011, France offered its counsel in policing and riot control techniques. Maybe the EU governments think the Greeks need the same kind of help? But could it be that Europeans, provided they discard their thick layer of arrogance, find a model in the social movements taking place elsewhere, as in Latin America? Aren’t the Indignados in Spain proof that people do not want economic rule, but the rule of the people? Is the euro crisis a sign of capitalism’s last try to impose itself by force? Is the treatment applied to the Greek economy a “shock”, comparable to the one administered by Pinochet to his own population? Or are we now witnessing the unmasking of generalized capitalism’s claim to be our societies’ sole path to salvation?
At the same time, how can we afford the dismantling of the European project, which at its heart contains an ideal of transnational cooperation and which commands a cosmopolitan model of government? Which – despite all appearances – remains dedicated to systematizing predominantly Keynesian measures of political economy?
I look forward to your reply and thank you for the incredibly stimulating ideas you dedicate yourself to sharing with your readers.
Regards,
Jonathan Thunin
