The Shock Doctrine of the Left

Graham Jones

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509528554, 9781509528547
• eBook ISBN: 9781509528585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Shocks, from natural disasters to military catastrophes, have long been exploited by the state to impose privatization, cuts and rampant free markets. This book argues that the left can use such moments of chaos to achieve emancipation. Graham Jones illustrates how everyone can help to exploit these shocks and bring about a new world of compassion and care. He examines how combining mutually reinforcing strategies of 'smashing, building, healing and taming' can become the basis of a unified left. His vivid personal experience underpins a compelling, practical vision for activism, from the scale of the individual body to the global social movement. This bold book is a toolkit for revolution for activists and radical millennials everywhere.

1
The Body Model

The Shape of Your Body

Let us start somewhere familiar: our own bodies. Focus on the feeling as you sit or stand or walk or lie. Scan downward from your head to the other extremes of your body. Feel the weight of your torso. The points of tension in your back. The taste in your mouth. The rise and fall of your chest with every breath.

Descend inwards, to what you cannot directly feel or control but know is there: bones and joints and muscles, a solid structure supporting lungs and heart and brain, directing blood and oxygen and nerve impulses, enabling thought and movement and keeping all the processes of your body flowing. This multitude of parts makes up the physical aspect of your body. These parts are neither isolated nor randomly arranged, but relate to each other in regular patterns.

Because of these patterns, your body is able to act in ways that its parts cannot. The whole human body can perform actions – whether thinking, eating, talking, typing, screaming – where neither the brain, limbs, bones nor blood could do this alone. We therefore have three core elements in the organization of a body: differentiated parts, which interact in a sustained pattern or structure, creating an emergent whole that is more than the sum of those parts.

This map of the body can be applied to all kinds of systems. Take the family. When I was young, our household included my mother, my father, my brother and myself: a set of parts. We interacted in a sustained pattern: my mother cleaning and cooking, my father paying the bills, fixing things and teaching music in the living room, both of them working during the week, the two children going to school and home again, sitting at the table for dinner and getting to bed on time. Through those interactions my parents were able to feed us, house us, have us educated, all four keeping each other feeling happy, loved and assured of a stable future. The family had emergent powers that no individual on their own possessed. If that organization ever broke down, then those emergent powers of safety and security could do likewise. In this way, a family is a body.

Now let us leave the immediate. Feel yourself becoming lighter. You begin to float, rising higher and higher, breaking through the clouds. You soar over a city, towers jutting up towards you, the smell of smog burning your nostrils. Looking down you see cars, trains and people passing through the veins of its streets, to the organs of its offices, shops and libraries. Unseen electrical wires act like synapses firing across the city. There are regular patterns of movement, flows waxing and waning by day and night, guided by the commute, by lunchtimes, and the weekend; by the papers, the post, the 10 o’clock news. Together these create a body which can sustain a populace, create jobs, build houses, keep people healthy, and more. It can equally fail to produce those powers, instead bringing poverty, pollution, sickness and unemployment. A city is a body.

We can even see the earth as a body, made up of its seas and lands and air, of biogeochemical cycles of gas and rock and water, producing a whole that makes life on the planet possible. And we make our mark on those cycles. The earth is criss-crossed with human activity, humans as much a part of the body as forests, oceans and glaciers. A massive network of cities and transport infrastructure drive rising temperature and sea levels, expanding deserts, ocean acidification and melting ice caps. The earth is a body, one we are part of and one that we are choking.

These different scales of body are nested. The human becomes part of a relationship, nested within a family, which is within a community, which is within a town or city, which is part of a global intercity network, which is part of the earth. In the same way, the human can become part of an organization, which is part of a local coalition, in a city-wide social movement, itself part of a national uprising, and a global revolution. A whole body can become a part of a larger body. This nesting of bodies-within-bodies-within-bodies allows us to picture the linkages between psychological, social and global organization.

This framework can help us to understand structures, but not change. For that, we must incorporate time.

The Path of Your Body

You are moving through your home. You feel the room with the senses available to you: its textures coarse and smooth, or sights dull and bright, or smells musty and sweet. You focus on an object, remembering the person who gave it to you. For a moment you live in the past, experiencing again that person, that place, their character. Back then you imagined a future, but of course the reality turned out to be quite different. Perhaps how these memories appear to you today is also quite different to how they felt at the time.

In every moment, you have a past, a present and a future. We experience a flow of sensation in the present moment, but it is understood through how our bodies have responded in the past, and how we hope to be in the future. The past lives on in our memories, in how we have learned to navigate our environments, in the habits we have created, in our knowledge, in the very shape of our bodies. Our pasts are embedded within us, like the rings and knots in a tree trunk, or the sag in an old chair where someone used to sit.

The future too lives in the present, in all the potentials alive within us. I can run, but I am not running now. I can swim, but likewise I remain sitting. These living potentials are not currently activated, but are still a real part of my body in this moment. They shape the futures that I can or am likely to experience. By finding new experiences in the present, I empower my body to control my path into the future.

To get a sense of how this can apply to wider social bodies, let us again visit that smog-filled city. You can trace the layers of the past in the changing architecture, new stacked atop old, in how the layout changes after wars or terror attacks or rapacious property development. You can see it in the ancient towns, their paths knotted and twisting, following the routes of the inhabitants as they carved out their worlds; quite unlike the gridlike rationality of the modern planned town. Economic crashes bringing skeletal high streets, shifting poverty and pain through generations. The ghost of the British Empire kept alive through its statues, its symbols, its heroes.

These pasts converge with those of other bodies in the present, defining a future path for the whole; to be an imperial centre, which sucks resources from the global periphery, or to be on the receiving end of this subjugation. To become prosperous, deprived or sharply divided. To shape itself in preparation for those futures, driving towards revolution or recoiling from civil war.

This model provides a simple but widely applicable tool for understanding complex bodies. Parts in relation creating emergent wholes. Past, present and future synthesized in every moment to produce change.

Rival Body Metaphors

Beyond making complex thought more accessible, the body metaphor links us back into the shock doctrine – and here we must take caution. As Naomi Klein points out, the architects of neoliberalism used the language of the ‘social body’ being ‘contaminated with disease’ (i.e. socialism), and that the violent repression and economic chaos they created was ‘a natural reaction to a sick body’. Organic metaphors for society are also found in Nazi discourse and the medieval ‘body politic’, both of which sought to justify repression in the name of social stability. We therefore need to be extremely careful in evoking similar metaphors to avoid carrying across their implications. On the other hand, this provides a point at which we can struggle for alternative emancipatory understandings of this language. As Chapter 5 will show, it is important that we contest the meanings of language rather than allowing our opponents to control them. Further, the complexity of the model developed over the following chapters – including its focus on change, the future, and difference – will demonstrate itself as resistant to being used as a tool of Conservative or fascist domination, particularly in the emotional aspects explored in Chapter 4.

Every Body is an Organizer

The body model of ‘parts–relations–wholes, pasts–presents–futures’ can be used as a tool for engaging in social struggle. When planning action, mapping the parts and relations within our opponents can highlight their weaknesses and our potential allies. When building organizations, a focus on how parts are interacting can inform how we design and structure bodies to create the powers we want to emerge. In mediating interpersonal disputes, and unlearning and healing from oppressions, it can help to understand how bodies on divergent paths have created conflict, and to ensure that the needs of all bodies affected are taken into account, in all their differences of experience and knowledge. And in navigating the corridors of power, it can help us understand how and why our paths can be corrupted, and what we can do to prevent this.

One lesson the model can immediately provide for political organizing is this: everybody is an organizer. Or rather, every body is an organizer – of its parts, of the wholes it is part of, and of its environment. We organize our social bodies and they organize us. We are born into social bodies with histories that guide, constrain and empower us. Structures of oppression, poverty, neoliberal ideology, ‘that is just the way things are’; all are the memory of bodies, of the clashes of the past, embedded in social and psychological structure. And yet it is we who reproduce this, in our individual and collective behaviour, in every moment. We create the present which will be the next generation’s past, shaping the future for ourselves and for every generation to come.

Making people aware of this power, and equipping them with the skills to use it, should be the focus of the left. Understanding the pasts we have come from, knowing our available interventions in the present, with a vision of an empowered future. When someone makes themselves aware of all this, and begins to act to change the world around them, they become revolutionary.

Beyond the human individual’s body, so too can any larger-scale body become revolutionary. An organization that is currently disconnected from social movements can become revolutionary, such as how churches formed the backbone of the civil rights movement. A whole city can become a revolutionary body, like the contemporary municipal movements in Spain, or a cross-country network of bodies like the Venezuelan system of communal councils. Ultimately, the Shock Doctrine of the Left calls to create revolutionary bodies at every scale, all the way up to the whole earth.

But first, we must descend back to ground level, and look more closely at the body through our four lenses.

Further Reading

The Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi provides an overview of the complex systems concepts which underlie the rest of this book. Political Affect by John Protevi translates the ideas of Deleuze and Guat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Body Model
• 2 Smashing
• 3 Building
• 4 Healing
• 5 Taming
• 6 The Meta-Strategy
• Bibliography