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Loading... The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (original 2007; edition 2014)by Naomi Klein (Author)
Work InformationThe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein (2007)
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LT picks: Blue Books (32) » 14 more Five star books (249) Books Read in 2019 (942) Read This Next (21) Female Author (1,068) Macmillan Publishers (13) Entender el mundo (28) Blue Books (11) My List (204) No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() First off, I really like that this book what written with a clear perspective. This being a journalistic project, the author could have very easily sunk into an artificially “objective” perspective, or try to avoid fully committing to the implications of the story she was telling. Thankfully that didn’t happen. The author clearly has a philosophical and ideological basis for the reporting done in this book, and it’s a compelling one. This isn’t just a criticism of American foreign policy or the avarice of international finance - it’s a indictment of the capitalist system that relies on never ending expansion and increase of profits in order to keep itself alive. Reading this book directly after Marx’s Das Kapital vol. 1, I picked up echos of Marx’s critiques of capitalism that are playing out to this very day. Klein’s fluency with these concepts makes her argument even more compelling. Of course the main function of this book is to shine a light on the machinations of the neoliberal economic order that has effectively run the world economy for the last 35 years, and it does that very well. Americans have a tendency to view geopolitics on a purely ideological level. This was surely a big part of why conservatives and liberals alike were duped into supporting the Iraq war- we feel like it is our duty as the most “advanced” country in the world to save poor brown people from themselves. Who couldn’t benefit from a free press, religious tolerance, equality for women? And yet this was never what the war in Iraq was about. Klein shows that it is economics first and foremost that drives conflict and social upheaval, not vague concepts about freedom. The great switcheroo of American politics is that we traded the fight for economic rights with the fight over cultural rights, and the reason why is clear: those at the top of society know that discussion of economic rights is much more dangerous to them than vague arguments about kneeling for the National anthem or whatever.
The Shock Doctrine shows in chilling detail how the free market has been backed up with violence over the last 30 years. I suspect it has stirred up a debate already. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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