Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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Naomi Klein’s argument in The Shock Doctrine is that capitalism actually requires deliberately engineered shocks to the economic systems, of the sort that we’ve just had with the banking crisis. I admire the way Klein develops a ‘big’ thesis that weaves together apparently disparate phenomena – what I also try to do with the buzzing and confusing world of modern biotechnology, which I present as united by the commodification of the human body.
Your next book, The Shock Doctrine, is also a critique of American society. Tell us about the book.
Naomi Klein’s argument is that capitalism actually requires shocks to the economic systems. Economic management, she argues, is not about stabilising the economic system, but actually undermining it so that it can be ‘rescued’ by capitalist interests. It is the fact that she can apply her theory to such a wide range of areas that I admire, her weaving together of apparently disparate phenomena – this is what I try to do with the buzzing and confusing world of modern biotechnology, which I present as united by the process of the commodification of the human body.
What is the most interesting example she uses in the book?
It’s probably a bit predictable to choose her analysis of the Iraq war, but that is very telling. Klein argues that the war wasn’t caused just by what many critics saw as Bush’s monomania or Blair’s toadying. Nor was it merely a matter of ‘one-word answers’ like ‘oil’ or ‘Israel’. Instead, she sees the war as being about the deliberate destruction of the Iraqi economy and infrastructure so that Western firms could move in to win lucrative contracts and penetrate the closed economies of the Middle East. It was an entirely rational doctrine, she argues, the ‘shock doctrine’: just an evil one.
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The author and activist writes on medical ethics, the study of morality and ethics as applied to medicine. Her latest book, Body Shopping, is about the market for human tissue and the ethical issues involved in buying and selling the parts of the human body. Are we the legal owners of our own bodies? Can blood be privatised? Body shopping for human organs is a shocking experience and the medical ethics slippery.
