Disaster Capitalism Notes

Violent Geographies Lecture 13: Disaster Capitalism

Film Screening

• The film contains scenes depicting abuse of psychiatric patients, torture, terrorism, assassination, warfare, and flashing images.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

• Naomi Klein's work:
  • Book: The Shock Doctrine (2008)
  • Film: The Shock Doctrine (2009), by Winterbottom/Whitecross
• Disaster capitalism: Profiting from disasters and crises.
• Two complexes:
  • Military-industrial complex: War economy (aka 'defence').
  • Disaster capitalism complex: Crisis economy (emergency).
• The shock doctrine: Resistance to adverse change is overcome by extreme trauma.
• Markets are opened by war, violence, and terror rather than popular democracy.
• States and corporations plunder the public sphere, enabled by the shock doctrine.
• Ideologies:
  • Free-market fundamentalism.
  • Pure capitalism.
  • Gangster capitalism.
• Key figures:
  • Milton Friedman.
  • Chicago School.
  • Neoliberalism.

Disaster Capitalism & The Shock Doctrine: Historical Context

• 1950s:
  • Donald Ewen Cameron and the CIA.
  • Sensory deprivation and shock therapy.
  • Mind control and psychological torture experiments.
• 1960s:
  • Milton Friedman & Chicago School economics.
  • Free-market capitalism; neoliberalism; bare-minimum State.
• 1970s:
  • South American Fascist coups (Chile, Argentina).
  • Economic shock therapy applied to entire societies.
  • Slash public services.
  • Privatize State assets.
  • Remove price & import controls.
  • De-regulate markets.
  • Enforced via State violence (key role of US Army School of the Americas).
• 1980s:
  • Margaret Thatcher (UK) & Ronald Reagan (USA).
  • Economic shock therapy in UK & US.
  • Normalization and legitimization of ‘free-market’ policies in West.
  • De-regulation; privatization; rolling back of the State.
  • Restraints due to democratic institutions and the ‘social’ contract (welfare).
• 1990s:
  • Russia & Eastern Europe – “all shock, no therapy.”
  • Crony capitalism / Gangster capitalism.
• 2000s:
  • War on Terror (Afghanistan, Iraq).
  • Cost ~8 trillion.
  • Profiting from war & (counter)terrorism: a vast military-industrial-security complex that increasingly includes media.
  • Disaster capitalism complex: profits from, thrives off, and even creates war, disaster & crisis.
  • World of small ‘green zones’ & vast ‘red zones’ – eg New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (2005): ‘disaster apartheid.’
  • State of emergency has become the norm, not the exception.
• 2010s:
  • Global financial crisis: heralds the end of free-market fundamentalism?
  • Can we resist shock therapy & disaster capitalism? (Klein hopes so. As does David Harvey.)
• 2020s:
  • What next?

A Broader Notion of Disaster Capitalism

• Beyond Naomi Klein's themes, the 'disastrous' character of capitalism extends to:
  • Accumulation through dispossession – especially seizing the commons as private property (legalized plunder).
  • Crisis tendencies of capitalist accumulation – with all of the destruction that this unleashes: from redundant workers to de-industrialized landscapes.
  • Ordinary capital accumulation – from alienation & exploitation to the cannibalism of value systems.
  • Ecological limits to capital accumulation – Resource depletion, mass extinction, climate emergency, etc.
  • Risk Society – the ‘Optimistic’ tendency to push processes & systems to the brink of catastrophe, in an attempt to maximize profit from risk-taking. (Dicing with death.)