[DEBATE] : NAOMI KLEIN, I PRESUME

[MFleshman at aol.com]

I think Roberts' stuff is generally simplistic to the point of simple  
minded. The South African electorate votes ANC (they should vote for who  instead, 
the DA?) and burn down ANC councillors houses for corruption and  incompetence. 
That's way too complicated for Roberts though.
 
In a message dated 5/15/2008 3:58:42 AM Eastern Daylight Time,  
africaparticipatorysociety at gmail.com writes:

...speaking of writers who can really string sentences  together...Roberts
below does that for me. He definitely is not acoward,  and he is a master at
constructing polemics. His stuff has insight and  generally his analysis is
worth considering...

ps. the piece below  is going to appear in The Journal of  Radical  Philosophy
:
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?v=1&issue=149



*NAOMI  KLEIN, I PRESUME*

*Ronald Suresh Roberts*

With the Karl Marx  epigraph at the front of his *Orientalism* ('They cannot
represent  themselves, they must be represented') Edward Said meant to
caution not  only against callow imperialists but also against benignly
orientalist  protectors who trample upon native political agency in the most
well  meaning ways. Everyone knows how neocon invaders Woodrow Wilson or
Henry  Kissinger tried to teach the natives to elect good men. We seem to
have  more trouble realising what's at stake when liberal imperialists  like
Michael Ignatieff or Samantha Power protest against what Power  sinuously
calls 'electocracy'. Electocracy is Power's term for what she  derides as a
widespread and regrettable 'reification of  elections.'

In the same week that she bailed out of the Barack Obama  campaign over her
relatively harmless description of Hillary Clinton as a  'monster', Samantha
Power made a far more outrageous and predictably  little-noticed defence of
Wilson-style interventionism and selective  respect for democratic outcomes
abroad. Just because Hamas was an elected  government doesn't mean that the
United States has to talk to it, she told  the *New Statesman*. 'You know,
there is a long tradition in the US of, um,  promoting elections up to the
point that you get an outcome you don't like.  Look at Latin America in the
Cold War.'[1]  
<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn1>Power
uncritically  cited the example of Salvador Allende, the elected
president of Chile in  1970 who was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup on
September 11 1973. 'We were  trying to figure out if we could promote that
election, but we certainly  didn't love the outcome. We played a role in
assassinating an elected  leader.' The difference that may divide people like
Power from people like  Kissinger, regarding this outcome, may boil down to
little more than the  rhetorical formulation of regret.

On the surface, Power's chilling  political 'realism' might seem far removed
from what Naomi Klein offers in  her new and warmly received book, *The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster  Capitalism*. Klein's coverage of the Chilean
coup and its aftermath is  extensive and full of outrage, with good reason.
Klein's critique of the  1973 coup is a cornerstone of her thesis, powerfully
argued in parts, that  autocratic violence and plutocratic economics often
ride in tandem. When  Klein emphasizes how electorates in Russia, Poland and
elsewhere rose up to  slap down 'shock therapy' economics, it is easy to
believe that Klein would  want to see electorates in the driver's seats of
national destinies  everywhere. She might seem to embrace that 'electocracy'
at which Samantha  Power scoffs.

But upon an attentive reading Klein, no less than Power,  seems happy with
native electorates only for so long as their collective  decisions match her
preferences. This is a particular weakness of her  chapter on South Africa.

In her discussion of non-African countries,  Klein confronts the articulated
logic of decision makers. But when she  turns her attention to post-apartheid
South Africa Klein is content to  recycle the impressions of a small and
like-minded clique of analysts such  as fellow-Canadian activist Patrick
Bond, described as someone "who worked  as an economic advisor in Mandela's
office during the first years of ANC  rule." Actually Bond is best known as
an anti-government fund-raising  maestro within global "social movements"
circles. His Centre for Civil  Society has at times accepted money from USAID
and the Ford Foundation and  has had links at Board level with Ford, Kellogg
and other such  
foundations.[2]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn2>Klein
decries  neocon "transitionologists" as a "hypermobile class" that
intellectually  dominates "inherently inward-looking" native governments,
softening them up  for neoliberal restructuring. Yet she and some of her
informants  participate in the same condescension and hypermobility. To  avoid
duplicating the imperialism they supposedly resist, the 'social  movements'
elite may need to become a little more 'electocratic' than at  present.

Ignoring the implications of her own excellent discussion of  how the Ford
Foundation channelled the economic interests of the Ford Motor  Company in
what was an obvious conflict of interest ('Ford on Ford',  pp121-128), Klein
uncritically recycles the Mbeki-bashing views of William  Mervyn Gumede, a
self-described Oppenheimer Scholar at St. Anthony's  College, Oxford and a
former employee of the London *Economist's*  Intelligence Unit. The
Oppenheimer dynasty, founders of Anglo-American and  owners of
diamond-dealing De Beers, is to South African politics and  economics as was
Ford to American economic and politics, except more so:  their plutocratic
dominance of the South African economy far exceeds Ford's  influence within
corporate and academic America.

At page 184 of her  book, Klein enthuses over global citizenry's "hard-won
democratic powers to  become the authors of their national destinies". But
not all these new  authors, it seems, have written equally compelling
political texts. In  South Africa 'the black majority were misled,' John
Pilger had argued of  the 1994 election in an essay that anticipates Klein's
argument, titled  'Apartheid Did  Not
Die'.[3]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn3>But
by  the time Pilger published this essay in 2006 (based on a 1998
documentary),  the electorate had given an even larger percentage of its vote
to the ANC  in 1999 (66%) and then a larger still share in 2004 (70%). If
Pilger was  correct, South Africa's black voters were not merely misled,  but
chronically misleadable. Pilger doesn't explain why that might  be.
Similarly, well before she published *The Shock Doctrine*, Klein  herself had
described William Mervyn Gumede's assault upon Mbeki, *Thabo  Mbeki and the
Battle for the Soul of the ANC* (2005), as 'a definitive  account of how one
of the greatest liberation struggles of our time failed  millions of people
in whose name  it
fought.'[4]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn4>Ah,
the  boundless stupidity of those millions.

Back in 1807, the liberal Lord  Gloucester founded the African Institution,
with a Charter to advance 'the  civilization and improvement of Africa' aimed
'to prepare and fortify the  minds of the ignorant natives of Africa against
the fraudulent and  mischievous efforts of eager and  adventurous
traffic.'[5]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn5>Appar
ently
the  natives still need such help, with people such as Klein and
Pilger looking  to supply it.

In an open letter of 1 August 2003, Mbeki addressed this  fashionably radical
contempt for the newly enfranchised:

We must  free ourselves of the 'friends' who populate our ranks, originating
from  the world of the rich, who come to us, perhaps dressed in jeans  and
T-shirts, as advisers and consultants, while we end up as the voice  that
gives popular legitimacy to decisions we neither made, nor intended to  make,
which our 'friends' made for us, taking advantage of an admission  that
perhaps we are not sufficiently educated.

*II*

If  Pilger's 'betrayal' analysis implied that newly enfranchised South
Africans  were mysteriously and chronically misleadable, Klein's *Shock
Doctrine*  says the same thing explicitly and even purports to remove the
mystery:  electorates, including black South Africans, were shocked into a
kind of  collective coma, so that what looked outwardly like freedom was
really a  new imprisonment.

The suggestion that millions of newly enfranchised  blacks have been so
quickly and so easily reduced to a quasi-comatose  passivity is a proposition
that must be expressed with great delicacy, to  say the least. Klein excels
in this. Her favoured strategy is to find a  black native informant who
mentions the unmentionable, rendering it  printable. Instead of speaking to
the elected Finance Minister, Trevor  Manuel, who admires Washington
Consensus critic Joseph Stiglitz; instead of  seeking out Manuel's Director
General through much of this period, Maria  Ramos, an LSE-trained Keynesian
economist, Klein allows her hand-picked  witnesses to speculate, sometimes
absurdly, about the supposed states of  mind of these individuals and,
indeed, entire collectives. From Bond's  friend, Ashwin Desai, Klein obtains
this unintentionally comic riff: 'Desai  spent time in jail during the
liberation struggle, and he sees parallels  between the psychology in prisons
and the ANC's behaviour in government. In  prison, he said, 'if you please
the warden more, you get better status. And  that logic obviously transposed
itself into some of the things that South  African society did. They did want
to somehow prove that they were much  better prisoners. Much more disciplined
prisoners than other countries,  even.''

Klein slips between starkly different 'shock' notions as her  text proceeds:
the literal electroshocks of the torture chamber; the  metaphorical
'shock-therapy' of neoliberal economic theory; the military,  metaphor of
'shock and awe' in Iraq, all somehow subsumed within a  loosely-defined
'shock doctrine.' When Klein describes Nelson Mandela's  release from prison
in 1990, the "shock" epidemic turns from fatuous to  farce: 'Mandela, for his
part, was suffering from such an epic case of  culture shock that he mistook
a camera microphone for 'some new-fangled  weapon developed while I was in
prison.'

Klein suggests that  electorates can become lobotomized by trauma. This is
most explicit when  she quotes another native informant, the slain Argentine
activist, Rudolfo  Walsh: 'Before he was gunned down on the streets of Buenos
Aires, Walsh  estimated that it would take twenty to thirty years until the
effects of  the terror receded and Argentines regained their footing, courage
and  confidence, ready once again to fight for economic and social equality.
It  was in 2001, twenty-four years later, that Argentina erupted in  protest
against IMF prescribed austerity measures and then proceeded to  force out
five presidents in only three weeks. I was living in Buenos Aires  in that
period, and people kept exclaiming, 'The dictatorship has just  ended!' At
the time I didn't understand the meaning behind the jubilation,  since the
dictatorship had been over for seventeen years. Now I think I do:  the state
of shock had finally worn off, just as Walsh predicted. In the  years since,
that wide-awake shock resistance has spread to many other  former shock labs
. . .' (447). In the South African context the question  is then: Why has the
ANC's vote risen in each election since 1994? Answer:  the electorate is
falling more and more deeply asleep.

And yet when  it comes to plain factual matters Klein herself is frequently
caught  napping. At page 203 of her chapter on 'South Africa's constricted
freedom'  Klein lists the apparent nets that descended upon the unwary
natives and  their political leadership. For instance she cites the
Constitution's  property clause, which explicitly contemplates and allows for
land reform,  as though it absolutely bars  land
reform.[6]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn6>Likewis
e,
an  ANC government that successfully litigated against intellectual
property  rights that had stymied cheap generic antiretrovirals, gets faulted
by  Klein for upholding the very constraints they successfully fought down!
[7]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn7> Again,  she
emphasizes the interest bill on pre-democracy loans as though  debt
repudiation would have enhanced the democratic government's cash flows  for
social spending, without addressing the cash crunch that debt  repudiation
would entail as retaliating banks shut down credit lines. She  suggests that
the World Bank succeeded in 'making private-sector  partnerships the service
norm.' As strategy and policy advisor to the ANC  Minister who piloted the
1998 water law reforms, I personally insisted upon  precisely the opposite
bias, which is why section 19 of the 1997 Water  Services Act establishes an
explicit onus *against *public-private  partnerships, of which there have
been next to  
none.[8]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn8>Moreover,
section  3 of the 1998 Water Act effectively nationalizes water
resources. Klein  convinces herself that 'currency controls' needed to be
imposed in 1994.  Actually these were already thick on the ground, a result
of the apartheid  regime's earlier battles with capital flight. Klein
repeatedly mentions an  $850 million IMF deal 'signed, conveniently enough,
right before the  elections' of 1994; this deal then supposedly constrained
the incoming  government. But she neglects to mention that the IMF has been
begging the  ANC, with zero success in fifteen years, to take its money. She
even  believes the minimum wage was not raised. It was.  Repeatedly.

Additionally, Klein implies that the ANC implemented a  massive privatization
plan. This is a major theme in *Shock Doctrine*;  privatisation is to
political economy what sensory deprivation is to  clinical psychology. In
fact the ANC successfully resisted massive  international pressure on
privatisation, and Mbeki took the steps that were  required to allow such
resistance to prevail. The ANC has privatized  nothing strategic other than
the telephone company. While Patrick Bond at  least quotes Mbeki's many and
varied assaults upon the Washington Consensus  before caricaturing them as
lip service (as in his book, *Talking Left,  Walking Right*) Klein proceeds
as though Mbeki's vigorous and longstanding  critiques, such as his speech at
the ILO Conference in  June
2003[9]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn9>,
simply  do not exist.

When Klein turns her attention to the Truth Commission,  which investigated
the apartheid past, she suggests that the ANC played a  role in limiting its
political effects. She suggests that the ANC wanted a  narrow torture-focused
process that neglected apartheid's systemic aspects.  Again I was a direct
participant in the formative debates surrounding the  truth commission, and
at the time I co-authored  a
book[10]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn10>with
Professor  Kader Asmal, the human rights lawyer and ANC Minister who
had
first  floated the idea in a 1992 lecture. We explicitly advocated a
systematic  focus and rejected precisely the narrow torture-based approach
that Klein  criticizes. We emphasised the role of business, which Klein
claims the ANC  tried to play down. Nelson Mandela wrote the book's Preface;
his successor,  Thabo Mbeki, spoke at the book's launch. Rather than the ANC
it was the  Truth Commissioners themselves who dropped the ball on this, not
least  because of the influence of their Deputy Chair, Alex Boraine, a  public
relations executive during the apartheid years within the  Oppenheimer-run
mining conglomerate, Anglo-American. After completing his  TRC work Boraine
left for New York to set up so-called "Justice in  Transition" Programmes at
New York University and Columbia University,  massively funded by the Ford
Foundation.

The plain truth is that  Klein's account of South Africa is clogged with
propaganda. This is all the  more poignant because of her undoubtedly
progressive intentions. Many of  the guiding assumptions of *Shock
Doctrine*do not fit the South African  situation, but rather than
revise her theory
Klein prefers to  misrepresent the 'case'. In fact the last thing sought by
the colonial  status quo in South Africa is 'shock' of any kind. Instead, for
obvious  reasons, they seek a kind of continuity that was vividly described
by one  Anglo American official in the 1980s as 'permanent transition'. He
meant  the continuation of state powerlessness: the powerlessness of the
apartheid  state, buffeted by sanctions and pariah status before 1994 ought
to give  way to a new powerlessness of the democratic state, which must be
weakened  by factionalism and delegitimised (not least by reckless internal
talk of  'betrayal') so that private and international interests can continue
to  dominate the field as the only entities capable of collective  action.

This is why the choice of Klein's chief source in this chapter,  William
Gumede, is so profoundly problematic. Klein thoroughly buys  Gumede's
anti-Mbeki line . In doing so, however, she relies on an  Oppenheimer-Scholar
to accuse Mbeki's ANC of channelling reactionary  Oppenheimer policies. It's
no accident that Gumede is also highly regarded  by the *Economist*,
ordinarily the in-house organ of the Washington  consensus that Klein so
heartily abhors. In January 2005 *The Economist*  had the following peculiar
sentence (italicized below) in a hostile profile  of Mbeki, based on Gumede's
book:

Mr Mbeki and a team of friends  [sic]—Trevor Manual as finance minister, Tito
Mboweni at the central  bank—pushed through a set of tough economic reforms
known as GEAR (the  Growth, Employment and Redistribution Plan) to cut the
deficit, lower  inflation, cut tariffs and bureaucracy and privatize some
state firms.  These reforms left opponents reeling. *Those who wanted to see
a  state-dominated economy were barged aside*.

But since when does the  *Economist* take up cudgels on behalf of labour
unions that were allegedly  'barged aside' by market measures? Klein's book
itself demonstrates what  everybody knows: the *Economist* traditionally
proselytizes in favour of  the sort of economic reforms embraced by Augusto
Pinochet and other  neoliberal 'modernisers'.

What, then, is going on? As Noam Chomsky has  repeatedly said: it is not the
self-styled left-ness or right-ness of  governments that offends imperialism,
but the extent of a government's  capacity for coherent collective action or
nationalist self-assertion.  'Left' regimes that sufficiently toe the line
are tolerated, as was the  China of the 1990s; 'right' regimes that show too
much independence quickly  become anathema. The same regime can cross from
initial client to  subsequent pariah status as in the cases of Saddam Hussein
and Panamanian  strongman Manuel Noriega; alternatively, the fire-breathing
devil of the  Reagan years, Daniel Ortega, can retake Nicaragua if he cleans
up his act.  One hears far more vituperation over Mbeki's Zimbabwe and AIDS
policies  than one does refutation of  his
logic[11]<http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftn11>On
AIDS  policy in particular, Mbeki has steadfastly resisted the  Big
Pharma
disaster capitalist logic, peddled by Jeffrey Sachs himself,  who advocates a
medical form of shock therapy in the form of massive  drug-buying binges—a
strategy critiqued by William Easterley in *The White  Man's Burden*. And
yet, despite her generally unremitting criticisms of  Sachs, Klein gives
Mbeki no credit here, scared away as she is by the  propaganda that has
caricatured his position as an ill-defined "AIDS  denialism." South Africa's
Deputy Foreign Minister was in Baghdad on the  eve of the war in 2003,
seeking to avert it; Mbeki successfully resisted  the then widespread calls
for externally imposed "regime change" in  Zimbabwe; and Mbeki was the only
head of state to attend the 200th  Anniversary of the Haitian slave uprising
in 2004, months before "regime  change" swept away President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide and swept in the  ongoing chaos.

The rise of factionalism inside the ANC is not now and  never was about the
country's location on a policy spectrum between  right-wing 'shock doctors'
and left wing progressives. Since the  defenestration of Mbeki at the ANC
conference last December, the new  leadership has reiterated the old economic
policy commitments.

On 22  April, 2008 Bobby Godsell, a recently retired executive within the
Anglo  American stable, and Mbeki's most vociferous 'left' critic,  Zwelinzima
Vavi, the General Secretary of the Congress of South African  Trade Unions,
co-authored an article in Johannesburg's *Business Day*  (owned by Pearson
and so a sister of the *Economist*). This unlikely duo  voiced thoughts much
more closely resembling Klein's 'disaster capitalism'  than anything Klein
cites in her book. After returning from a trip to  London they wrote: 'We met
a financial advisory company specialising in  energy and infrastructure
which, frankly, saw our situation [of rolling  electricity blackouts] as an
opportunity rather than a problem. We were a  little surprised to be told by
them, and by the MD of the investment  management arm of one of the world's
largest investment banks, that our  problems in this respect are little
different from the power challenges of  many other rapidly developing
countries.'

Klein would do well to  answer a question posed by the twenty-two year old
Durban-based  environmental activist, Khadija Sharife: 'But whose fault is it
that the  media acts as a thin veneer for Empire's interest? Theirs or ours?'
Klein  herself is, of course, a powerful part of the global media, with  her
well-meaning and yet stubbornly Orientalist representations of  African
politics, complete with a 'culture-shocked' Mandela and a  chronically
paralysed native electorate, falsely unconscious of its  authentic  best
interests.


------------------------------

[1]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref1>Samantha
Power,  in
*New Statesman*, 6 March 2008:  http://www.newstatesman.com/200803060030.

[2]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref2>  Stephen
Gowans, 'Talking Left, Funded Right', *Panafricanews* 8 April  2007,
http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2007/04/talking-left-funded-right-more-view
s-on.html.

[3]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref3>  John
Pilger, *Freedom Next Time*, Bantam Press, London, 2006, p.  218.

[4]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref4>  Ginny
Hooker, 'Take a leaf out of their books', Guardian (London), 25  November
2006. Klein described the book as her 'pick of 2006' although it  was
published in early 2005.

[5]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref5>  Africa
Institution, quoted by Rachel Holmes, *The Hottentot Venus: The Life  and
Death of Saartjie Baartman*, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p.  79.

[6]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref6>  See,
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, section 25, which  contemplates
expropriation, requires those calculating the compensation  payable to have
regard to "the history of the acquisition and use of the  property" and also
"the nation's commitment to land reform, and to reforms  to bring about
equitable access to all South Africa's natural  resources".

[7]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref7>  The
government passed a 1997 law permitting generic imports. The drug  industry
launched its challenge within months and the government finally  won the case
in 2001. See, "South Africa versus Big  Pharma",
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v7/n4/full/nm0401_390c.html.

[8]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref8>  Full
text of the Act available  at:
www.wrc.org.za/downloads/legislature/WSA108-97.pdf.

[9]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref9>  Thabo
Mbeki, Speech at ILO Conference, 11 June  2003,
http://www.polity.org.za/article.php?a_id=37111 Mbeki criticized  The
Washington Consensus, explicitly invoked John Maynard Keynes and  praised at
length the European Union's Keynesian resource transfer policies  meant to
benefit relatively underdeveloped EU regions. In his Budget Vote  Speech on
June 23 2004 Mbeki extensively quoted Will Hutton, a prominent  critic of
global neo-conservatism: "In his 2002 book "The World We're In",  the
columnist and former editor-in-chief of the British newspaper  "The
Observer", Will Hutton, has drawn attention to the global struggle to  defend
the public sector against an ideological onslaught that seeks, as he  puts
it, 'to celebrate individualism and denigrate the state'". He went on  to
expound Hutton's critique at length, endorsing it all the  way,
http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/2004/mbek0625.htm

[10]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref10>  Kader
Asmal, Louise Asmal and Ronald Suresh Roberts, *Reconciliation  Through
Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid's Criminal Governance* (London:  James
Currey, 2nd Ed. 1997), passim.

[11]  <http://messagecentre.mweb.co.za/Message/EditMail.aspx#_ftnref11>  See
my book, written with Mbeki's cooperation, *Fit to Govern: The  Native
Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki*, STE, Johannesburg,  2007.

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