00:03¿Qué es lo que hiciste en la idea de shock y su uso como un político político cuando yo estaba
00:07en Irak?
00:08En el tema de la ocupación, porque hubo un triple storm de shock en ese país.
00:17La primera shock, que fue el shock y no la invasión, que fue seguido después de la crisis de economic
00:23shock.
00:23Era más radical como lo que había hecho en el primer gobierno de la Unión de la economía de la
00:30economía,
00:31al menos lo que fue lo que fue tratado.
00:32Y entonces, este tercer shock, que se fue a la que se fue después de la situación de la gente
00:37se resistía a la ocupación,
00:39y esos dos otros shocks, y eso fue el shock de la tortura.
00:41Y yo me he interesado en cómo fue que los archivos de la invasión y ocupación de Irak,
00:50I chose this as their metaphor and what was it about the idea of shock that was so appealing
00:59to the people who wanted to remake Iraq and I started to actually go back, try to go back
01:08to the source of the metaphor of shock therapy so I started reading about its use in psychiatric
01:14contexts and also its use in torture and that led me to a really close reading of the declassified
01:23CIA interrogation manuals that were first published in 1963 and in the 80s, reprinted and have since
01:31been declassified and looking at how the CIA talks about the importance of putting prisoners
01:36into a state of shock because when they're in a state of shock they're not able to protect
01:41their interests, they become childlike and regressed.
01:45The interrogation manuals are really obsessed with this idea of regression so I started to
01:50think about how that had been applied on a mass scale.
01:54The exploitation of crisis and shock has very consciously been used by radical free marketeers
02:01and you know I start the book quoting Milton Friedman, something he wrote in 1982, only
02:08a crisis real or perceived produces real change.
02:12And he was admitting that his ideas, his vision of a radical privatized world couldn't be imposed
02:19in the absence of a crisis.
02:21He was referring to economic crises and economic crises have played that role of sort of softening
02:27the ground for the imposition of shock therapy.
02:30The Asian economic crisis was a classic example.
02:33The so called tequila crisis in Mexico was another one that unleashed a wave of privatizations
02:37in Mexico.
02:39But as people become more resistant and more aware of these strategies and you see these
02:44mass mobilizations against the institutions that exploited shock like the International
02:49Monetary Fund, then what starts to happen is the shocks need to get bigger in order for
02:54the disorientation to be greater.
02:57And that's where you have what I call disaster capitalism.
03:00What the Bush administration did after September 11, when the war on terror was declared, is
03:07they essentially launched a new economy.
03:10Because the parameters of this economy were extraordinarily wide.
03:14This is an endless war, we were told, that the enemy could not be reasoned with, there could
03:19be no diplomacy, there could be no discussion, there could only be attack.
03:23And that it would not end until evil was defeated everywhere, right?
03:27So if you think of it as a business plan, it could hardly be more profitable.
03:31Because basically what you're saying is you've got this new market, it's never going to end,
03:35and we have unlimited funds to finance this new market.
03:40So unlike a one-off war, what they were building was a permanent new part of the economy, a
03:48privatized security state.
03:50One other thing Milton Friedman said is that after the crisis hits, the kind of change will
03:57depend on the ideas that are lying around.
04:00And that's really what the University of Chicago Economics Department was producing all of those
04:06years, were ideas that would be lying around when the next crisis hit, being prepared for
04:11that crisis.
04:14And so it's not a question of, we don't need some vast conspiracy to say, oh, that these
04:21crises are being deliberately planned and created so that they can be exploited.
04:25Now certainly there are some cases of deliberate shocks that were then exploited.
04:31Like the book starts with the coup in Chile, which was obviously a planned attack that put
04:35a country into shock, and then was exploited for the sort of first classic case of economic
04:41shock therapy.
04:42The war in Iraq was of course planned as well, and planned to be as shocking as possible,
04:47called shock and awe so that it could be exploited.
04:49But I think in most cases it's not about planning the original shock.
04:53It's about being in an acute state of intellectual disaster preparedness, so that when the crisis
05:00hits, you're the ones who are ready with the ideas that are lying around.
05:04And so that's what happened when the levies broke, is that the Heritage Foundation was
05:09ready with their 32 free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina.
05:15And the first one was rollback labor standards.
05:17The next one was school vouchers instead of public school funding, and on and on.
05:23So they were ready to go.
05:24And it's easy to be ready when you have the same ideas no matter what the crisis is.
05:28Even though the material in the book is depressing, I mean it's horrifying to read about all these
05:37moments where people were taken advantage of when they couldn't defend themselves, and
05:42just the way in which torture and other forms of extreme violence have been used to impose
05:48this ideology.
05:50I don't find it completely depressing, and I'll tell you why.
05:54Before I did this research, I accepted, like most people, a large part of the narrative
06:01that the triumph of the free market around the world in the 80s and 90s was a largely peaceful
06:09process.
06:11And that in fact, even though we progressives don't admit that there is no alternative,
06:19we lost faith in our alternatives.
06:21And we accepted this narrative that there was a great battle of ideas, and that we lost
06:26that battle.
06:27That we lost that battle.
06:28And when we look back, and this is what I do in the book, is I look at key chapters
06:33where
06:34this free market ideology has had its leaps forward, like the coup in Chile, then the collapse
06:41of the Berlin Wall and the breaking apart of the Soviet Union, Poland in 1989, Tiananmen
06:48Square in 1989.
06:50And looking at these key junctures where you had these big leaps forward for Milton Friedman's
06:56ideology, and what you see at these moments is that it actually never was chosen.
07:04And the fact that we can look and say, okay, well, what did Polish voters vote for in 1989?
07:10They voted for a party that was promising not to privatize their state companies, but to
07:14turn them into workers' co-ops.
07:16And what did South Africans vote for in 1994?
07:18They voted for a party that was promising to take the rich resources of that country that
07:23was in the hands of a tiny elite and redistribute them.
07:27What did Russians want in 1993?
07:30Most of them believed that privatization should also be done through worker ownership.
07:35And these ideas were blasted out of the way through various forms of shock and violence.
07:41But it wasn't that we didn't have the ideas, and it wasn't that we ever consented.
07:47It wasn't that we were ever convinced of the rightness.
07:50We just succumbed at various points.
07:53And I actually think it's quite empowering to realize that we didn't lose this battle
07:58of ideas, because I think that a lot of what weakens us on the left is this notion that
08:06is repeated again and again that our ideas have tried and failed, that they're discredited.
08:11And that, I think, keeps us from having the strength of our conviction in key moments.
08:18So that's part of the reason why I wrote the book to say it was actually it wasn't a battle
08:23of ideas.
08:23It was a real battle.
08:24It was a real war with real casualties.
08:27So we came up against brutal forces and we lost, but we didn't lose the argument.
08:32Let's do it.
08:33It was a real battle.
08:34You just did it.
08:35Gracias por ver el video
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