A review of Naomi Klein's, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Allen Lane, $32.95

THE SHOCK Doctrine is an attempt to make sense of the present.

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo (2000), was originally commissioned to write a book on the Iraq War, but its scope ballooned, apparently, as she began looking into the background of the war.

She gives an excellent history of ideas and events mapping the development of disaster capitalism over half a century and numerous countries. This history accounts for 15 out of 21 chapters.

Klein situates the rise of "disaster capitalism"-roughly, neoliberalism-in the intervention of the late American economist Milton Friedman.

She describes the program set out in Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (1962) as a "counter-revolution" against the Keynesian orthodoxy of state management of the economy in the post-war period.

The most basic logic behind Friedman's counter-revolution is that efficiency-and therefore maximum profitability-requires an owner's self-interest at each step in production. (This is echoed in Howard's phrases "opportunity society" and "enterprise-worker".)

Klein's account follows the militants of this idea as they stack juntas in Latin America in the early 1970s, the ministries of democratic governments and top positions in the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s, trumpet the End of History in the 1990s, and finally wage a War on Terror in the 2000s.

The strength of this account is a systematic overturning of the mainstream narrative that free-markets sow political freedom.

Klein's major theme is the necessary coupling of violence and market institutions. This is the case from Chile's desaparecidos to the taxi drivers swifted away to Guantanamo Bay or electro-shocked in Abu Graib.

But the weakness of Klein's account is it fails in this history to situate the rise of "disaster capitalism" in terms of the inner contradictions of capitalism itself.

With the focus firmly on rebutting the clean-hands view of capitalism, she emphasises the relationship between violence and policy and ignores the market imperatives determining these policy choices.

The substantive question of markets and capital accumulation is untouched in this book.

David Harvey's Marxist account of the same period in A Brief History of Neo-liberalism (Oxford, 2005)-cited in Klein's book-benefits from an account of the structural crisis endemic to the market.

In other words, how the system responds to a declining return per dollar invested.

Naomi Klein rightly points out that only an ever-dwindling minority ever benefit from neoliberalism.But she tends to reduce the project to those beneficiaries as a small cabal of Friedmanites.

Her account ultimately tends to a rose-coloured view of Keynesianism and of the New Deal versus Friedman's meddling hands in the 1970s.

Walter Benjamin pointed out in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) that a state of emergency-Klein's "shock"-has always been capitalism's rule and not its exception. Benjamin wrote this as fascism was decimating the international left.

Against this, Benjamin argued that task of the left was to "bring about a real state of emergency"-a substantive rather than formal state of emergency-that would alter the whole situation.

Which bring us to Naomi Klein's confused sense of the relationship between the rule of capitalism and resistance movements.

The book's prologue is a quote from Milton Friedman: "Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."

Klein summarises this by saying: "Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones-gaps in politics when the need for consent and consensus do not apply."

She notes that: "Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise-shock resistant."

And on the final page she concludes: "people's renewal movements begin from the premise that there is no escape from the substantial messes we have created…. These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap…."

The "gaps in politics" Klein refers to are spaces in which a shock resistant movement can declare the real exception, that is, the state in which neo-liberal dominance does not apply.

This argument is pretty ambiguous. Her best hope becomes a market socialism that reins in the excesses of private interests by nationalising social goods. This amounts to an out-of-sight-out-of-mind solution to capitalism: just give us this small space and we can build something nicer.

The Shock Doctrine is definitely worth reading as an introduction to this essential history. But some of its weaknesses show that we need to think beyond the market.

Jonathon Collerson