ABSTRACT

NS Let me push you a wee bit on the neoliberalism question because indeed I think you're absolutely right that the North American audiences, and even European audiences I regret to say, are a bit confused about neoliberalism. Isn't liberalism supposed to be the left? How did it end up being so conservative? How do we make sense of that? NK I'm not even sure it is that useful a word. It is useful in the sense that it's a word a lot of us use so it's kind of a shorthand word, but it is confusing and I actually think that when we use it we are supporting the very propaganda campaign that I'm trying to challenge. For the same reason, I don't use the term Tree markets' because I don't think there's anything Tree' about these markets. Milton Friedman called himself a liberal because he believed that sold better than calling himself a corporatist, which is really what he was. NS Is there any contradiction between conservative and liberal, actually? I mean, liberalism has always been conservative in a strange way. NK I think that's a different political tradition than what we're talking about. I think these are just radical, pro-corporate policies. I think that the people who advance them show that, in terms of other aspects of things that people associate with liberalism, civil liberties for instance, they actually don't defend them with any vigour. Maybe they agree on paper with civil liberties but when push comes to shove they certainly don't defend them with any of the enthusiasm that they reserve for privatisation and free trade and the rest of it. I think the governing principle is defending the interests of the elites. I don't consider this to be an intellectually honest movement. I see them as paid thinkers for the most part, even in the academic context. Their academic institutions are heavily funded by business interests and the wealthiest interests who funded this counterrevolution. The University of Chicago was ground zero of a revolt of the elites; we know this. It began because other academic institutions of the time were seen as being overly dominated by Keynesians and socialists and it was getting too expensive to pay workers incremental raises and costs of living increases and the taxes were getting too high. This counterrevolution is best understood as an "all bets are off; we want it back". The way I see it is-this is probably overly populist for CUNY-but that the period after the Great Depression and the postwar period was capitalism in its seductive phase. It was capitalism that knew there were rival suitors and it came with flowers and chocolates like health care programmes and unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and all kinds of goodies precisely because it was part of this seductive dance to keep people from sliding into the hands of the socialists or, God forbid, the communists. Neoliberalism is really just capitalism in its boorish phase, capitalism on the couch in an undershirt saying "what are you going to do, leave me?" NS I think you've arrived at a very good place. Let me push you on a slightly different angle. I actually went back and read No Logo again in preparation for this. NK That was me in my seductive phase ... NS But it seems to me that there's a political shift, evolution, movement between that and The Shock Doctrine and I wondered whether you've had a chance to think that through for yourself? I know you're incredibly busy going around doing all these things, but again I think back to when you were here five years ago and it seems to me that there's a political movement that's going on in your own mind. I don't know if you would like to reflect on that? NK I certainly think there are continuities with No Logo in the sense that I always saw No Logo not as a book about marketing but a book about public space. The core issues in No Logo, even though it was often presented as a book about marketing, the reason

why I was interested in branding was because on the one side there was the degradation of labour and on the other side there was the swallowing of public space in order to project the branded lifestyle. These hollow corporations needed ever more surfaces and backdrops and contact to fuel the idea that they were lifestyles not products. The superfunding of the marketing side was directly connected to the underfunding of the labour side. I considered that to be very much a left book even though it was about marketing and it came out of my concern about both of those issues: about labour rights, the right to organise, and the disappearance of the public sphere. That is neoliberalism too. I wasn't using this language, but I guess this book [The Shock Doctrine] is more overt. This book is much more radical and when I first launched it in Canada an interviewer said to me-it was one of my first interviews-he said "so what's it like to write when you don't care what people think of you anymore?" in the sense that it is a very radical critique of capitalism. What's gotten me into the most trouble in the book is the way I look at torture as both an enforcement tool to impose these economic programmes as well as a metaphor for the idea of taking advantage of shocked societies in their moment of trauma. NS How has that got you in trouble? NK Some people just don't like it when you compare economists to torturers. NS Seems normal to me. NK It's good to be here. NS You're right; it's not a populist crowd. NK In some ways I think the book is kind of funny in that the critique is more radical than I set out to make. It's a very different book. One of my editors, who's here today, Sara Bershtel can attest to the fact that this book completely changed from the proposal that was submitted some three to four years ago. It was changed by the research. I thought that I was going to write a book about contemporary disaster capitalism-Iraq, New Orleans, Katrina-and that this was the evolution. After No Logo I was very much part of the antiglobalisation movement, which was actually just an anti-neoliberalism movement but people had trouble with that concept. There was a change in that the policies that we had been protesting outside of trade summits-the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, the World Bank, the G8-were no longer being negotiated, they were being imposed in the aftermath of major shocks, like the shockand-awe invasion of Iraq or after the tsunami or hurricane Katrina so this was no longer asking, no veneer of consent, and just this seizing new markets on the battlefield of preemptive war. I thought I was writing about something new and what I found in the research was that this pattern of exploiting moments of shock recurred again and again in the key, 'big bang', 'leap forward' moments for neoliberalism. Russia in 1993 when Yeltsin sent the tanks in to attack the Russian parliament, suspended the Constitution, and in that window of opportunity sold off the Russian state. China after the Tiananmen Square massacres in the terror and shock that those spread through the country; that was the period when China became the sweatshop to the world. It had started before 1989, but the fact that it was contested was why there were protests in the streets and they were crushed so brutally. So the radicalism of the thesis came out of the research. On the flip side of it is some people on the left think the book is too Keynesian. The book is not saying "this is my worldview; this is what I believe in". It's showing a range of third ways, of experiments in democratic socialism that were shocked out of the way through these tactics. My position is I'm interested in all of them: I'm interested in what Allende was trying to do in Chile, I'm interested in

the Solidarity vision in Poland of workers' coops, I'm interested in what Gorbachev wanted to do in the former Soviet Union. What's interesting to me is that none of these experiments were allowed to play out. So in that way it's not that radical, I suppose.