Katie Psotka
Western Herald
“Only a crisis, actual or perceived, provides real change.”
This quotation from American economist Milton Friedman, provides the thesis of controversy around which Canadian investigative journalist Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” is based.
In her 2007 exposé, Klein attempted to identify the relentless tactics used by neo-liberal economists to quickly and quietly push their policies into place, and became the basis of discussion for Monday night’s panel discussion with three Western Michigan University professors in Room 159 of the Bernhard Center.
William Santiago-Valles, Ph.D., WMU associate professor of Africana studies, Ronald Kramer, Ph.D., WMU professor of sociology, and Vincent Lyon-Callo, Ph.D., WMU associate professor of anthropology, discussed the ideas of her book as well as any afterthoughts that may have come out of it.
The panel was part of the Western Michigan University Center for the Study of Ethics in Society’s fall lecture season.
“As a criminologist, specializing in corporate and state crime, I see criminality in all aspects of shock,” Kramer said. “It is used as a way to implement capitalism and provides an opening for an orchestrated raid on the public sphere.”
Together, the panel agreed with Klein on her claim that crises, however big or small, provide elites with the opportunities they need to take advantage of the public’s resulting insecurity and vulnerability to successfully force their neo-liberal, right-wing economic tactics into place. They also agreed that Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” provides much-needed insight into the truth behind that strategy.
“I think ‘Shock Doctrine’ provides a vantage point of what’s happening in the peripheral of the present day economy,” Santiago-Valles said.
Western Michigan University’s Associate Professor of Western’s Africana Studies program William Santiago-Valles talked about Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine,” Monday at the Bernhard Center. Thomas Doherty / Western Herald
Along with the panel discussion, a video was shown to clarify in six minutes, explaining metaphorically how the Shock Doctrine actually works.
Comparing the doctrine to a prisoner who would be more willing to supply information after being tortured, the film addressed the issue of what Klein referred to as “economic shock treatment.”
But the discussion held was not about the problem of the doctrine itself, but the possible opportunities available in solving the problems that the public faces and how these problems are established in the first place.
“What becomes a shocking event,” Lyon-Callo asked, “and how does it happen?”
Klein’s book, as well as the three professors that took part in the panel discussion, posed that there is a need for knowledge and mobilization if economic reform is to ever be achieved.
“We need demonstration to show people what alternatives would look like,” said Santiago-Valles to close.
“We need strong social and political movements that put pressure on a state. We are not creating spaces to mobilize people. If movement is absent, so are changes.”
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