Thanks for the response, and I should apologise slightly for using you as a straw man to get to Klein. The piece above is mostly about my frustration with her intellectual framework, rather than a set of real policy objectives, although I suspect that there is room for both agreement and disagreement there as well.

Having said that, I think it’s useful to distinguish between the intellectual basis of a position and the activism used to promulgate it. That’s easy for me, as I’m not really an activist; I can happily critique activist slogans from the sidelines without feeling obliged to offer anything more substantive. And I do recognise that it’s necessary to reduce arguments in order to build an online consensus around them.

The demands of intellectual politics require, however, that we recognise that the right are engaged in the same process – that while we may read the absolutist, doctrinaire arguments for the savage cuts agenda, those arguments are intended to build activist consensus in exactly the same way that we do when we use arguments like “shock doctrine”.

I know that’s not going to surprise anyone; it’s how politics works, and always has. My concern is not so much to do with the tactics of the approach as the effectiveness of it. The government has largely gotten away with this budget; complaints that it was insufficiently progressive have gained traction, but the cuts agenda itself has not been seriously challenged. I don’t think that the problem is that “shock doctrine” is a strapline that almost no-one understands; I think that the problem is that those who do appreciate it are capable of subjecting it to a level of scrutiny that it can’t withstand. “Savage cuts,” as a piece of propaganda or sloganeering, has an internal consistency that “shock doctrine” doesn’t. The association with Klein’s book – which, in fairness, is actually, genuinely, really not very good – undermines a lot of the intellectual framework that the left is building against the government and its plans.

In short: I think that the label of “shock doctrine” undersells the left-wing case against the budget, and causes it to be tarnished by association. I just feel like it’s bad positioning.

Josh

thanks for this – these are reasonable criticisms. Any idea expressed in 3 words is, of course, an oversimplification. As you say, I don’t actually have a problem with rebuilding after a disaster something different from what came before. The reason I think it is (in so far as anyone knows what it means) a useful term is when combating the idea that cuts are ‘inevitable’. I am happy to argue, and do often, that the economy we build from the ashes of the credit crunch should be different from how it was before – I am happy to defend my lefty vision for where we should be heading. But that’s not what the right are doing – they are saying “we have to do this, or we will lose everything” – which is, as I see it, untrue.

I also think it’s somewhat unfair to criticise us for failing to make other arguments – the piece you link to is a whole load of reasons why I’m against cuts, and arguing that we need to come up with a positive direction. Sure, in our attempt to construct a relatively comprehensible story around cuts – that they are motivated by an ideological desire, not economic need – we may have been a little simplistic, and that’s a fair criticism, but I think a fairer one would be that we use a strap line which almost no one understands…

Adam