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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.)