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alternatives at the moment have this quality of ‘starting from scrap’, which I think emerges from learning from the past mistakes of the totalitarian left.

You mention the shift from shock therapy to shock-and-awe, but there are also attempts to soften the image of neoliberalism. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who pioneered shock therapy, wrote his latest book on The End of Poverty. Is there any more to this than a rebranding exercise? A lot of people are under the impression that Jeffrey Sachs has renounced his past as a shock therapist and is doing penance. But if you read The End of Povertymore closely he continues to defend these policies, but simply says there should be a greater cushion for the people at the bottom. The real legacy of neoliberalism is the story of the income gap. It destroyed the tools that narrowed the gap between rich and poor. The very people who opened up this violent divide might now be saying that we have to do something for the people at the very bottom, but they still have nothing to say for the people in the middle who’ve lost everything. This is really just a charity model. Jeffrey Sachs defines poverty as those whose lives are at risk, the people living on a dollar a day, the same people discussed in the [UN’s] millennium development goals. Of course that needs to be addressed, but let us be clear that we’re talking here about noblesse oblige, that’s all.

Do the tools for reconstructing a more just society exist? Many of them do, and we see how deliberately they’re attacked in these moments of disorientation. Look at what has happened to New Orleans in the years since Katrina struck (see ‘Organising the bottom’, page 15). The city was turned into a laboratory for these right-wing, corporatefunded think-tanks. I start The Shock Doctrineby discussing an op-ed by Milton Friedman, written three months after the levees broke in New Orleans, in which he calls for the privatisation of the city’s schools. Well, this has really happened – following a particular form of privatisation that is favoured in the US called ‘charter schools’. Two years after Katrina, the subsidised housing projects that allowed low-income

people to live in downtown New Orleans rather than be exiled to the margins are the ones slated for demolition to be turned into condos. The original idea behind the city’s largest public health facilities, like the Charity Hospital, was also one of closing the gap, although they had been allowed to decay for decades. These are the bridges, and it is the bridges that get bombed first by this ideology – the public housing, the public health facilities, the public schools. The central message of my book is that we’ve been told that our ideas have been tried and failed but, in fact, it is the opposite. Our ideas work, but they cost. They are very good for economic growth but they really eat into super-profit, and that is why there has been such an aggressive attempt to paint them as failures.

The degradation and closure of public spaces doesn’t just require traumatic events. Take the example of the Olympics. It is not a ‘shock’, but the mega-event of the Games ends up being used to displace communities and gentrify whole neighbourhoods. That’s a good point, and it fits into the idea of states of exception. Leszek Balcerowicz, the former finance minister who worked with Jeffrey Sachs to impose shock therapy in Poland in 1989, said that the ideology advances in moments of extraordinary politics. He listed these moments of extraordinary politics as ends of war and moments of extreme political transition. But you are absolutely right that even Games can play that role, because they are moments of exception when our cities are no longer our cities, when other rules apply. We are going through that same thing now in Vancouver in preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics. It is interesting because there are two states of exception that are really transforming that city. One is the increasing Canadian involvement in the war in Afghanistan and the other is the Winter Olympics. It is games and guns.

What opportunities for hope do you see in today’s world? The project kind of came full circle. It began in Argentina on the roof of an occupied factory. I looked back at these moments of extraordinary politics, when the dream of a real alternative emerges, a non-New Labour third way between totalitarian communism

and savage capitalism. Looking back at those junctures, the dream that has come up again and again is this idea of co-operatives. This idea did not fail – it was never tried. Solidarity never got a chance to enact its real economic programme in Poland before those dreams were betrayed with shock therapy. In Russia there was a clear choice not to democratically remake the economy, despite the fact that 67 per cent of Russians stated that their preferred means of privatising state companies was to hand them over as workers’ co-operatives. I find it tremendously hopeful to realise that these ideas that we have been told are impractical did not fail. The notion that our ideas are already discredited is the major source of weakness on the left. It is what makes us tentative in key moments. Pulling these lost worlds out of the narrative of our last 35 years shows that what the vast majority of people wanted in South Africa, Poland, Russia and China did not fail, but was crushed. It was crushed by military tanks and it was crushed by think-tanks. Knowing how shock works can help you to steal yourself against it. Once prisoners understand how shock works as an interrogation technique they can resist these methods. I think the same is true on a mass scale. Societies that have learned from their past traumas – and many Latin American societies fit into that category – are more shock resistant, and it is harder to exploit them in moments of trauma. What we witnessed in Argentina – with the collapse of its economy and citizens suddenly being locked out of their banks – was as traumatic for Argentineans as the Great Depression. The president declared a state of siege on 19 December 2001, saying ‘everybody stay in your homes, the country is under threat, trust me’. The people poured out of their homes with pots and pans and overthrew him. If you ask everyone there why, they tell you that this had happened to them before and they weren’t going to let it happen again. Meaning: we know how shock works and we were not going to return to a state of fearful regressed acceptance of people in positions of authority. I draw my hope from this.

The ShockDoctrine: The Rise ofDisaster Capitalism is published byPenguin, price£25 theotheramerica

oct/nov2007 red pepper

15

ew Orleans musicians marked the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina devastating their city this summer by carrying their instruments in sombre silence. Of the estimated 3,000 who played in the city before Katrina, only about 1,800 have returned. More than 100,000 of the city’s ex-residents remain in exile, while tens of thousands more are still making do in temporary accommodation. Curtis Muhammad, a civil rights movement veteran and member of the New Orleans Survivor Council (NOSC), was in the UK in August to rally international support for this grass-roots movement. The NOSC has been inspired by the ‘bottom-up’ organising of the likes of the sharecroppers’ unions of the 1930s and 1940s and civil rights activists such as Ella Baker, a mentor and trainer of young campaigners. Muhammad draws parallels between the abandoned and displaced poor black survivors of today and the ‘liberated’ black slaves cast adrift after the American civil war: ‘The survivor council is an attempt to recapture their old models of organising when your government has deserted you. When there’s no aid, no foundation, nobody – where do you go? You’ve got to go back to try and bring that old technology forward and use it.’ Muhammad talks a lot about mobilising from the ‘bottom’. He is referring to the roughly 80 per cent of the world’s population that lives on an average of two dollars a day. ‘What you have seen in Latin America,’ he says, ‘is a group of people that nobody ever considered people. The left didn’t see them as the working class. They are the “informal economy”. They live in cardboard boxes and sleep in shacks in riverbanks. Thousands of people

so poor they have no job, no house. And they’re organising and raising hell in Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela – all over.’

Solidarity In early 2007, Muhammad and a delegation from the NOSC visited the communal councils in Caracas, Venezuela, to begin to establish an international solidarity movement between these ‘people of the bottom’. The Venezuelan government, just after Katrina, had offered to send resources to help the recovery, but the Bush administration rejected the move. Meanwhile, it took the administration a year to approve a $10 billion grant for flooded-out homeowners. The fund has already run out – well before the last applicant has been paid. With members of the councils, the NOSC met with Venezuelan government officials to organise help directly. In March the organisers also sent a letter to the people of Venezuela requesting they send over organisers and resources and also engineers to help build a small demonstration levee to world-class

standards. Organisers have visited the city twice since then. A decision has also been made to try to build a sister-city relationship between the NOSC and the Caracas communal councils. ‘We started looking internationally at the Zapatistas in Mexico, the communal councils in Venezuela, the landless people in Bolivia and Brazil and we have taken our people to visit these places,’ says Muhammad. ‘Every programme and everything we do grows out of the ideas of the people. We consider the genius of the people.’ The first step taken in New Orleans, following the example of Latin American organisers, was sending organisers and volunteers into the streets to meet and talk with as many poor black survivors as they could. Almost 6,000 visits were conducted. The purpose was to begin building relationships and establish agreement for future communication with people who

Organising from the bottom

Bythe time Hurricane Katrina struckNewOrleans the Wall StreetJournal was reporting thatthe rich white elite was already planning its newvision forthe citydemographically, economicallyand politically. TAMANNAKALHARtalked to local blackactivistCURTISMUHAMMAD aboutthe resistance and alternatives to the ‘new’NewOrleans