Cyni, I would like you to read this and critique it for me. All Welcome.
" ..."I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock."
Forgive me this simple question Ms. Klein, but who praytell is "us"? Because if it is, as I suspect, your circle of friends, you know, the Birkenstock wearing, Starbuck's drinking, Barnes & Noble crowd, then you are preching to maybe the most impotent segment of the US population. Marx called them the petty bourgeois.
Check this out Ms. Klein, American bourgeois democracy is being held under water. It will drown, never to be resuscitated. The liberal intelligentsia of the petty bourgeois spins its wheels in the mud of this reality. On this point Al Gore’s quixotic campaign to sound the alarm on the ecological disaster right around the corner is instructive. In An Inconvenient Truth Gore lays out the incontrovertible facts of global warming, hoping to organize and agitate to a tipping point that changes governmental policy. A young Al Gore saw Dr. Martin Luther King do just that in his confrontation with racism. Despite titling his recent book “The Assault On Reason” Gore and clings to the idea that rationality still has influence in American ruling circles. The real inconvenient truth is that even the great Dr. King could not generate an effective civil rights movement in this era and that the rape of the planet will not end until a stake is driven into the heart of capitalism.
The sad truth is that the petty bourgeois cannot defeat the capitalist ruling class! They are a timid and passive group who, in this time for warriors, gather at the gates of the palace to nag and complain essentially to each other. There are scores of Internet websites, magazines, newspapers, radio programs and networks, and some small television networks where liberal, left, progressive, and other commentators show up to whine out loud. They rail against the outrages and inhumanity of the U.S. government and the Bush Administration. They point out the duplicity, the corruption, the hypocrisy, the inhumanity, and the utter criminality loosed in the world today but to no useful end since capitalism will not be reformed nor shamed to death. Pointing out the defects of capitalism has become as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. The ruling class brushes its liberal democratic critics off like gnats as long as they stay away from the third rail. But let one of these voices dare mention unity based on working class-consciousness and a mobilization to strike at profits and great danger would shortly thereafter visit.
No matter the danger, it must begin to be spoken by a warrior vanguard: socialism is the only way humankind will live into the distant future on this planet. Only a working class with a consciousness of itself and united across all racial, national and cultural boundaries is capable of seizing power. Only a working class in power will see to the end of this madness and willingly share our available resources for the sake of human survival."