Still on the Shock Doctrine audiobook I posted about some time ago. Gotta say it gets better after the initial wave of anti-communism in the first chapters. It’s generally a fairly good book and covers a lot of ground. It’s just - and I can’t say it any other way - Naomi Klein is a dumbass. I’m sorry, but how the hell can you write a book like that and still not only refuse to draw the proper conclusions, but spout the same anti-communist nonsense as the people the book is criticizing?

She’s correctly identifiying the conditions under which the liberal ‘welfare states’/Keynesianism she keeps harping on about (‘threat’ of the USSR/socialist movements), she’s also correctly identifiying the effect the fall of the USSR had on those welfare states - their ongoing dismantling. Lady, these two things are connected, it isn’t some fucking coincidence social democracies fall into neoliberal hell every god damn time, as this book aptly points out, so how the fuck do you still ramble on and on about muh Keynes. It doesn’t work.

My god, it’s just infuriating how close and yet how far she is from getting it. Like Chomsky really, just even worse.

Edit: I also can’t get over her equating Deng and the Dengist reforms with Yeltsin and constantly portraying the Tiananmen protests as result of ‘corporatist’ shock therapy by the CPC. Yeltsin caused 70mio Russians to fall below the poverty line, Deng’s reforms lifted almost a billion Chinese out of poverty. How the fuck are these in any way comparable?