To start on a superficial note: Naomi Klein, scourge of corporations and hollow brand iconography, is well-served by the publishing behemoth (Pearson PLC, as embodied by Penguin Books) charged with distributing her latest treatise, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Coming in a shade of yellow typically associated with radioactive and biological hazard signs, the book’s phosphorescent cover arrests the eyeballs of both prospective buyers and–perhaps equally important–like-minded strangers sharing the same commuter train or coffee shop as the reader. Against the lurid cover, the black lettering of the title has an austere cast, suggesting the contents within are likely to yield unpalatable truths that must nevertheless be choked down.

And the book does, in its 460+ page survey of free marketeers’ exploits across the globe over the past 30 or so years, present some pretty dismaying information. Beginning with the first “experiment” in implementing the laissez-faire doctrine of Milton Friedman in Pinochet’s Chile, Klein presents an exhaustive (and occasionally exhaustingly repetitious) analysis of how right-wing ideologues have exploited (and later engineered) crises to impose radical policies that would have no hope of being implemented had not democratic checks and balances been suspended or violently overridden.

Klein’s thesis is, pace Friedman and his “Chicago Boys“, there is no natural harmony between free markets and a free society. In fact, there is an inherently violent disjunction between the two: the theories of Milton Friedman (who, you might gather by now, is a sort of monetarist Sauron looming over this book) presage a society in which a select band of “winners” can amass immense fortunes while the great bulk of society–the “losers”–can basically go boil their heads. Countering this few-against-the-many economic landscape (with a touch of trickle-down to ameliorate the lives of sommeliers, landscape gardeners, and chauffeurs) are the egalitarian tendencies associated with one-person-one-vote democracy. As it’s unlikely the masses will voluntarily vote for their immiseration, Friedman’s theories can be implemented only when most people have no say in the matter–or are too afraid or stunned to raised their voices.

And this is where the “shock” of Klein’s title comes in. TBC…