I tried to start reading Shock Doctrine today and it’s… not a good book, to be very mild.

It’s clear that it’s a huge work of research and the intentions were good, but the book is incredibly US-centric (beginning the book with hurricane Katrina), and staunchly anti-communist.

It uses the libtalk of authoritarianism, and it’s staunchly anti-communist all over, even blaming the economic hardship on socialism (e.g. in the case of Poland). It glazes the pro-liberalism protestors in 1989 China, it glazes Polish union “Solidarity”, and even describes Gorbachev in positive light, despite several pages later explaining how the number of Russians under poverty went from 2mn in 1988 to 75mn less than a decade later.

The book even very briefly acknowledges the huge economic boom in China, but replicates (without sourcing) made-up figures about the numbers of deaths and arrests in and after the protests, and it leaves aside the hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens uplifted from poverty and the fact that the economic doctrine in China did NOT implode the economy (as it happened in most of the eastern block), and describes the Chinese population as terrorized by the repressive state, or replicates laughable figures of corruption in China from US-based NGOs, comparing Deng’s reforms to Pinochet.

So, yeah, why did anyone here recommend me this author? It’s infuriating!!

    • Feed_el_Castro [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      2·
      2 天前

      Libs be mad lmfao. I’m sorry you were exposed to Naomi Klein too, hope you didn’t spend MONEY on her book like I did.

      Naomi Klein: “Yes, transitions to capitalism impoverish hundreds of millions, killing tens of millions in the process. Socialism is worse and authoritarian for trying to defend its peoples from this. I am very intelligent”

  • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    36·
    4 天前

    People recommend it because it was good introductory text on US foreign policy based economics and one of the first to critically examine that subject.

    If you want to read about the US bureaucracy during the Iraq occupation, you’re going to at some point be recommended reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and the author of that became a fucking Starbucks PR guy and later wrote a book about “What veterans can teach us about heroism”.

    People here will also recommend you read Max Weber, or at least they will cite Max Weber, even though the man had supremacist brainworms falling out his ears and all his conclusions have since been debunked.

      • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        121·
        4 天前

        Very weird. If you want my scorching lava hot take then there is a tendency on this site that the more accepted (But not read, sorry) a source is, the less scrutiny it receives. So a work accepted as “Theory” can be zionist, it can be sexist, it can be racist, it can have weird asides about the Han supremacist capitalist empire, and that’s ok, but things that aren’t “Theory” can be dismissed for wrong politics.

        This also goes for individuals.

    • Keld [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      18·
      4 天前

      And that is not to say that they are wrong to do so. But better, newer, texts often stand on the shoulders of texts written by libs, chuds and otherwise politically monstrous people.

  • FloridaBoi [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    33·
    4 天前

    I read this back in 2015/2016 and the Katrina and Iraq viceroyalty structures were elucidating. I would still recommend it to libs if just for those parts. Every western semi-mainstream book about history and politics has bizarre anti-communist non sequiturs. An example that comes to mind is King Leopold’s Ghost that has a comment about the Soviet gulag system that makes little sense in the context of the Belgian Congo.

    • MarxMadness [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      12·
      4 天前

      An example that comes to mind is King Leopold’s Ghost that has a comment about the Soviet gulag system that makes little sense in the context of the Belgian Congo.

      Same author (Adam Hochschild) wrote The Unquiet Ghost four years earlier, which is an oral history about the USSR under Stalin. Still reading it, but it starts from an anti-Stalin premise and is not too careful about looking for cracks in stories or challenges to that premise. To End All Wars and American Midnight still read to me as pretty good, and are much better sourced.

    • Feed_el_Castro [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      5·
      4 天前

      the Katrina and Iraq viceroyalty structures were elucidating

      Idk, the core message seems to be “neoliberals will use any excuse to privatize everything”, which is explicitly what neoliberals say. Isn’t this a well-known foundational element of neoliberalism?

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    25·
    4 天前

    Naomi Klein is a liberal and Shock Doctrine is liberal theory rediscovering primitive accumulation, particularly the way neoliberalism does it with finance and crisis.

    Dunno why it was recommended did you ask for anything.

    • hungrybread [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      3 天前

      I used to see that book recommended quite a bit but not recently. I had a similar reaction as OP and ended up dropping the book not long after picking it up. The combination of reactionary takes and that others have cited all the more useful information made it a total slog.

  • hotspur [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    4 天前

    Haven’t read it in a while, but yeah it didn’t blow my mind back when I read it. It’s pretty old though, so her thoughts have probably evolved a bit since then. The crisis-capitalism framework is still a useful model/frame even if some of the surrounding stuff hasn’t aged well.

    Or put another way; back when I read it when it came out, the anti-communist stuff probably wouldn’t have really registered to me, but now it certainly would.

  • I_Voxgaard [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    4 天前

    It was constantly promoted by breadtubers and no one actially read it. Mentioning it is just a shorthand expression of “injecting neoliberalism into the former USSR resulted in a lot of poverty”. So, socialists expect the author to not be a lib - and yet here we are.

    • supafuzz [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      24·
      4 天前

      When shock doctrine came out, all the stuff you’re complaining about, while stupid and wrong, was “serious” leftlib orthodoxy and arguably still is. She manages to be insightful in some areas despite not seeing past some white empire ideological guardrails in others.

  • CanYouFeelItMrKrabs [any, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    4 天前

    When I read the book all the information in it was new to me so I enjoyed that ( this was a few years ago ). The book came out 3 years after Hurricane Katrina maybe that’s why it starts there.