After The Shocks - The Shock Doctrine

Chapter and Verse: Naomi Klein's study of "Disaster Capitalism" demonstrates how the extreme Right has seized upon natural and man-made disasters to ram through self-serving and often highly unpopular political and economic changes.

"ONLY A CRISIS – actual or perceived – produces real change", wrote the American neoliberal economist, Milton Friedman. "When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."

What the people of Christchurch should be asking themselves right now is: "What are the ideas "lying around" in the rubble of their stricken city?"

Some ideas have already inspired Cantabrians to action.

Like the extraordinary generosity of the dairy-owner who told his quake-struck neighbours to "help themselves" until the stock on his shelves ran out.

Like the altruism of the young man who organised more than a thousand of his fellow university students into clean-up teams.

The images of these young people shovelling contaminated silt from the front yards of their neighbours sent a swell of pride across the entire nation.

If Christchurch is re-built with generosity and altruism it will soon be a great city once again.

Sadly, generosity and altruism – those most human of responses to social crisis and natural disaster - are swiftly dissipated in the vast bureaucracies of local and central government.

It’s one of life’s tragedies that organised altruism and bureaucratic generosity are never even remotely the same as the real thing. Indeed, they’re all-too-often experienced as the opposite of genuine human feeling.

Large organisations – of the sort required to clean up after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake – are almost always characterised by complex hierarchies and inflexible, rules-based delivery systems. They are power structures and, like everything else that wields power on this earth, they are not at all keen to share that power – let alone give it away.

Basically, local and state bureaucracies have bossiness inscribed into their institutional DNA. Confronted with the enormous task of repairing and re-building Christchurch’s basic infrastructure, the first thought of the City Council and the relevent Government Departments will be: "We’ve got a huge job to be getting on with, so we mustn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by every Tom, Dick and Harriet with a damaged chimney or a cracked pavement."

Fair enough, you might say, the sooner the big things are dealt with, the sooner the little things can be fixed. Unfortunately, the natural arrogance of large bureaucracies isn’t limited to matters of straightforward reconstruction and repair.

In any large organisation there are always a great many ideas just "lying around". Pet theories about architecture and urban design, for example. Or, pet projects long deferred for lack of opportunity and funding. The citizens of Christchurch need to be vigilant against the wants of a few taking precedence over the needs of the many.

But the ideas of big bureaucracies are not the only, or the most dangerous ideas Christchurch faces.

Three years ago the Canadian social activist, Naomi Klein, wrote a book called The Shock Doctrine. Guided by that quote from Milton Friedman concerning crisis and change, Klein discovered that, over the course of the last 30 years, an alarming number of man-made and natural disasters had been turned to the advantage of right-wing corporate interests.

From the 1973 military coup in Chile, to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, these critical moments of massive social and economic dislocation have been used to erase what "Disaster Capitalists" regarded as the "bad ideas" and practices of the past. Taking advantage of the population’s temporary disorientation and distress they forced through radical (and often unwanted) changes.

In Klein’s own words:

"Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture – a flood, a war, a terrorist attack – can generate the kind of vast, clean canvasses they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world."

We are often reminded that the Chinese characters for "crisis" and "opportunity" are the same. The people of Christchurch need to keep this relationship very firmly at the front of their minds in the coming months. Because if they don’t, and if Naomi Klein is right, then they can be absolutely certain that others will.

Perhaps their surest defence against becoming victims of "The Shock Doctrine" would be to require both the leading mayoral contenders, and the opposing slates of council candidates, to provide voters with a list of their ideas for the new Christchurch.

Both Mr Parker and Mr Anderton should be asked to spell out clearly how they intend to involve Christchurch’s bruised and battered electors in the planning and reconstruction process? How the big bureaucracies will be prevented from simply taking over. And – most importantly – how they propose to stop a gang of Disaster Capitalists from using the present crisis to ram through a host of radical neoliberal ideas that they just happened to have "lying around".

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 September 2010.

Plus ça change …

The two faces of National: The National Party's first Prime Minister, Sid Holland (standing, appropriately, on the right) dominated New Zealand society from 1949 until 1957 by unleashing the most brutal instincts of New Zealand conservatism. Keith Holyoake, by contrast, ruled New Zealand from 1960 until 1972 by adroitly deflecting the worst impulses of his own his party.

The naïve, the almost childish brutality, with which the chiefs of the National Party fell upon power may seem quite surprising, until one remembers how famished for power they were, and with what innocency of experience they faced the world about them … One does not mean that Mr Holland and his subordinates (lieutenants? – most of them looked like subordinates) went down personally to Government Buildings and kicked the bodies of public servants. Some of them were obviously not as bad as their leader ... Yet the insensitiveness to administrative delicacies, the conviction … that all you had to do with exchange controls was to end them, that all you had to do to make the pound go "further" was to take your hands off it, that the main thing needed in education was to insult the Education Department, was quite appalling.

Dr J.C. Beaglehole, 1961. (Describing the conduct of the first National government, 1949-1957.)

　
THE MORE things change, say the French, the more they stay the same. Ten years into the 21st Century, it is sobering to read the words of the eminent New Zealand historian, Dr John Beaglehole, and realise how very closely the events of sixty years ago are mirrored in the events of today.

Sobering, but not surprising, since similar causes tend to produce similar effects. By 1949, the New Zealand Right had been out of power for fourteen years, and most historians agree that it would have remained so indefinitely had Sid Holland, the National Party’s pugnacious leader, not reassured the electorate that Labour’s "cradle to grave" welfare state would not be dismantled by an incoming conservative government.

John Key came to power on a similar promise. His party had drawn the appropriate lessons from its narrow defeat in the 2005 General Election. New Zealanders had demonstrated that they were reasonably comfortable with Labour’s softened version of the neoliberal economic order, and would deny office to National for as long as the party threatened to "harden it up".

Don Brash’s flinty countenance was duly exchanged for Key’s fresh face – and the new National leader’s attractive combination of youth and openness swiftly convinced the electorate that his party’s pledge to preserve Helen Clark’s and Michael Cullen’s "kinder, gentler" version of the market economy could be trusted.

Even so, the experience of being out of office for a decade or more cannot help but leave its mark upon a party. Contrary to Lord Acton’s famous observation, it is the prolonged denial of power, rather than its too ample possession, which is most likely to corrupt a political movement.

Being forced to watch, in impotent rage, as one’s most cherished beliefs, and the institutions erected to give them force, are derided and dismantled will drive an iron spike into the tenderest soul. How this alienation manifests itself is one of those endlessly fascinating aspects of political behaviour.

The Labour Party provides vivid examples of the two most common responses: reaffirmation and rejection.

Kept out of office for twelve years by the imperturbable Keith Holyoake, Labour’s Norman Kirk saw his party’s landslide victory of 1972 as an opportunity to rush into law all the cherished policies he and his colleagues had developed during their political exile.

How different was David Lange’s response to the Labour Party victory of 1984. Repeated electoral rejection had soured him on Labour’s traditional offerings, and he entered office determined to implement the radical new political and economic agenda of his finance minister, Roger Douglas.

John Key’s government, by contrast, seems incapable of either reaffirming the Right’s traditional agenda, or rejecting it in favour of a new one.

The opportunity was certainly there at the end of 2008 for Key to "do a Lange", and dramatically steer his own party in a radical new direction. In essence, this would have necessitated the sort of social volte-face that Labour pulled-off in the late-1980s, when it all but deserted its electoral base to embrace that fraction of the New Zealand business community determined to move the country on from what it saw as a decrepit and discredited Keynesianism.

The Global Financial Crisis offered Key the perfect opportunity to effect what anti-capitalist author, Naomi Klein, calls "The Shock Doctrine" (and, for a moment, his "Jobs Summit" did teeter intriguingly on the edge of that precipice). It would have meant pouring money into the universities and the CRIs; strengthening the civil service and the state-owned media; and enlisting the co-operation of the Council of Trade Unions (which would certainly have been given) – all with the aim of introducing to New Zealand the sort of state-driven mode of economic development perfected by Singapore.

Key could have complemented and softened this "New Zealand Incorporated" approach by encouraging a generous and humanitarian social policy – drawing on the reforming legacy of liberal National politicians like Ralph Hanan, Les Gandar and Doug Graham.

Sadly, the Prime Minister proved unequal to this Kleinian moment. Having spurned the opportunity for "rejection", Key has instead presided over his deeply conservative caucus’s determination to "reaffirm" National’s traditional aims and objectives.

All the childishness, naiveté and political brutality described by Beaglehole in his 1961 essay has returned, proving that this National Government – like the Bourbon dynasty restored to power following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 – has "learned nothing and forgotten nothing". Intelligent, and (in Opposition, at least) thoughtful politicians like Simon Power, Judith Collins and Chris Finlayson have been forced to scramble aboard the same sort of obnoxious political juggernaut that clattered and clanked its way out of National’s provincial and suburban heartlands in 1949, 1975 and 1990.

Except, that all those members of National’s caucus who have, in the past week, cheered Education Minister, Anne Tolley’s, downsizing of the Ministry of Education, and applauded Stephen Joyce’s disastrous assault on university standards, are forgetting something of vital importance: their leader’s promise to maintain Labour’s "kinder, gentler" neoliberal state.

National’s backwoodsmen may see nothing wrong with "kicking the bodies of public servants" and ruthlessly reaffirming the policy objectives of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, but those few wise heads that still remain in the National Party would do well to remind these backwoods Bourbons that the voters have firmly rejected them.

The Prime Minister’s winning smile cannot forever be relied upon to distract voters’ attention from the mounting casualties of National’s noxious nostalgia.

This essay was first published in The Independent of Thursday, 18 March 2010.