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Over the past couple of weeks MQUP has been presenting Stan Persky's recommendations from Reading the 21st Century.
The first decade of the twenty-first century was noteworthy for war, terror, religious revival, economic collapse, and a technological revolution that prompted countless critical responses and gave rise to a paradox: writing flourished, but reading declined. Reading the 21st Century investigates the urgent themes, major works, and crisis of reading in an era of instant communication.
For our final and fourth installment, Persky reviews The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.
Klein’s book, finally, is conceived as “a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story – that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy itself.” In making that challenge, she also offers some sensible cautions: “I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy … [that] coexists with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy – like a national oil company – held in state hands.” It’s equally possible, she adds, to require decent wages, workers’ rights, and redistribution of wealth. “Markets need not be fundamentalist.” But in instance after instance, she demonstrates that the imposition of radical free market policies seldom occurs in conditions of enhanced democracy; indeed such policies, whether implemented by authoritarian regimes or the dictates of the International Monetary Fund, tend to be accompanied by a brutal curtailment of freedom.
What follows Klein’s initial overview is an ambitious account that need not be reprised in detail here (but needs to be read in all its devilish detail), a panoramic story that ranges from military coups in Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 70s to the terrorism, wars, tsunamis, and hurricanes of the last decade. Whether or not one entirely agrees with the delineation of the macro-economic “patterns” that Klein claims to recognize, her book offers a bold thesis, substantial research as well as first-hand reporting, and popular readability, all at the right political moment in the decade. For her generation, Klein conveys something of the urgency and astuteness that a previous era of radical readers had found in the work of Noam Chomsky.
The reception of The Shock Doctrine is also noteworthy. Klein had again written a best-seller, one that was widely reviewed, promptly translated into multiple languages, and named to numerous book-of-the-year lists. Succeeding editions carried an impressive roster of endorsements from economists, historians, and political journalists, as well as writers and other cultural figures. Novelist Arundhati Roy hailed the book as “nothing less than the secret history of what we call the ‘free market’”; William Kowinski saw it as a possible revelation of “the master narrative of our time”; John Berger praised Klein as “an accusing angel.”
Even discounting for the hyperbole, thoughtful analysts reckoned that Klein had recognized something important. The British social critic John Gray saw Klein’s critique of neo-liberalism as both timely and devastating. “Many of the ideas of the far left,” he writes, “have found new homes on the right.” Once upon a time, it was the communist revolutionary Lenin who believed that conditions of catastrophic upheaval were crucial to social transformation; today, “the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market,” says Gray.
To learn more about Reading the 21st Century, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
Reading the 21st Century: Part 1
Reading the 21st Century: Part 2
Reading the 21st Century: Part 3
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