Naomi Klein

In her latest book, Naomi Klein continues the cause of her career: arguing that a fundamentally new economic system is the only way to save society and the planet.

By Alyssa Battistoni

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal opens with the image of schoolchildren going on strike for the climate, following the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose blunt challenges to political leaders around the world have rocketed her to global fame. It's an opening that reflects the monumental shift in the conversation around climate change over the course of the past year, advanced by young people in particular — from Thunberg's School Strikes for Climate to the Sunrise Movement's sit-ins in the US— and the emergence of the Green New Deal (GND) as a central demand.

Yet rather than digging into the events of the past year or arguing for a particular set of policies or programs, On Fire makes the case for the Green New Deal by tracing the evolution of climate politics over the past decade. Setting the recent surge of GND momentum against ten years of Klein's reporting — on the BP oil spill, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline protests, and wildfires in British Columbia — serves as a reminder of how much it has taken to get to this point.

In 2011, Klein was protesting the Keystone XL pipeline at the White House. In October 2013, she wrote about the need for "political revolution" in response to increasingly dire climate science, and chronicled its opening flares — people taking action to stop fracking in England, disrupt oil drilling in Russian waters, and sue tar sands companies for violating indigenous sovereignty. Disruptive action, that is, didn't start with Sunrise or Extinction Rebellion. Even the pieces that narrate her own alarming encounters with a warming world, like her unsettling account of two weeks spent anxiously vacationing on the British Columbia coast in 2017 while forests to the north burned, always turn in the end to politics — a refreshing change from the proliferating genre of anguished meditations on climate doom.

Amid the many authors publishing books on climate change in recent years, Klein remains the most prominent analyst of climate in relation to capitalism; this collection also serves as a reminder of how long she has been making that case.

Her first major essay on climate change, 2011's "Capitalism vs. the Climate," argued that it is not a coincidence that many on the Right deny climate change: conservatives have correctly realised that climate change poses a severe challenge to the principles of capitalism.

For many conservatives, then, climate change appeared to be little more than a "Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some form of eco-socialism." Klein argues that conservative deniers were perfectly reasonable: action on climate change will require public investment, wealth redistribution, strict regulation, and a host of other things that conservatives oppose.

She reiterates a similar argument at the start of On Fire, this time with reference not to conservative think tanks but "the specter of ecofascism." Klein argues that "climate disruption demands a reckoning on the terrain most repellent to conservative minds: wealth redistribution, resource sharing, and reparations." Instead of denying climate change outright, the Right will now use it as a justification for hardening borders.

An essay on Edward Said, Palestine, and Israel's "green colonialism" illustrates Klein's worry more extensively. Israel's "separation barrier" in the West Bank, she points out, is not only comparable to right-wing chants to "build the wall" — in fact, the existence of the former has fuelled the latter.

Paradoxically, the Right is internationalist in its inspirations, if nationalist in its policies. Yet what goes mostly unaddressed is the ongoing transformation of the Right, as the capitalist "globalists" indicted in the original "Capitalism vs. the Climate" essay increasingly come under attack from right populists. The former get relatively short shrift in this book, but they remain formidable opponents. As the age of Exxon-funded climate denial comes to an end, what new tack will corporations seeking to derail a Green New Deal take, and how will they relate to their erstwhile allies of the nationalist right? How will the right populists like Missouri senator Josh Hawley relate to business conservatives like Utah senator Mitt Romney? What challenges, and opportunities, does this realignment present for the Left?

On that note, we could today make a similar observation from the opposite direction. It is not a coincidence that the strongest and most compelling frameworks for tackling climate change are coming from the Left: Ocasio-Cortez, of course; but also Bernie Sanders, whose climate plan recently won him an A rating from Sunrise. What is often described as Klein's "prescience" is better understood as her perspective: by following the development of global capitalism and the movements of the international left for the past two decades, Klein has been able to see emerging phenomena more clearly than many mainstream political observers.

As Daniel Denvir recently observed about the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests, "in Seattle, we saw Green New Deal politics in rudimentary form: that labour and environment united was the only way forward." We shouldn't be surprised that our best chronicler of that movement is now at the forefront of the Green New Deal.

In fact, Klein was making the case for the Green New Deal eight years ago: in the wake of Occupy, she argued, "There is a wide-open opportunity to seize the terrain from the right." That, she argued, would mean "making a persuasive case that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a fairer and much more enlightened economic system — one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power." In essays throughout the book that span years of writing, Klein repeatedly argues for "integrated solutions" that "radically bring down emissions while tackling structural inequality and making life tangibly better for the majority."

Yet for the most part, the writing collected in this book focuses less on those who might benefit from the likes of a Green New Deal than on those disproportionately impacted by climate change. In one essay, Klein uses Edward Said's concept of "othering" to describe how and why certain people and communities come to bear the most significant environmental burdens: as she argues, the "Faustian pact" of industrialism was that "the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto the other."

Today, she claims, "our fossil fuel-powered economy requires sacrifice zones." Though the rhetoric is different, such arguments have a long lineage in socialist thought. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Engels chronicled horrific air and water pollution as part of the condition of the working class in Manchester; socialists today would do well to follow him in seeing environmental justice organising as an expression of class struggle. The sacrifice zone is a useful concept for connecting the economic language of "externalities" — the pollution and waste that come along with production — to the moral and political critiques made by environmental justice activists. Capitalism happens not just in the factory but in the atmosphere; class struggle, too, is present not only in workplace struggles but in fights over who will bear the costs of capitalist production.

But it is true that connecting those struggles over who pays the costs of our current system to struggles over who might benefit from the future world we hope to build can be challenging. The central movement animating Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate was Blockadia, what she described as a "roving transnational conflict zone" of people determined to stop new fossil-fuel extraction projects. At the time, my most significant critique of This Changes Everything was the seeming mismatch between the strategies and sites of this political movement, which was oriented toward local struggles and stopping environmental harms, and the vision of a better future she laid out at the start of the book, which would require a mass movement oriented toward securing social goods.

But Klein, and climate movements, kept moving.

She was extensively involved in the collection of labour, environmental, and indigenous groups that authored the Leap Manifesto in Canada in 2016, a short but powerful statement outlining a new direction for the Canadian left, an exciting new vision of energy democracy, low-carbon care work, and decarbonisation for the public good.

But as Klein details in "The Leap Years," a 2016 lecture, it was under siege from the start: politicians fixated on its call for an end to fossil-fuel infrastructure went beyond the usual charges of environmental job-killing to decry it as an "existential threat" and a "philosophy of economic nihilism." Klein is admirably forthcoming about these difficulties. And set in the context of a decade of struggle, the manifesto appears not as a failed project, but as an experiment from which we can and should learn lessons.

For Klein, many of these lessons come in the form of meditations on the values underpinning modern Western life. The problem goes deeper than we tend to think, she argues. For example, Klein analyses the Leap Manifesto's failures as stemming from the conditions of Canada's origins: when European settlers arrived in the New World, it appeared to be a land of limitless bounty — oceans thick with fish, skies clouded by birds, seemingly endless forests of giant trees. Treating this land as if it was inexhaustible, settlers — more specifically, commercial enterprises like the Hudson Bay fur trading company — quickly exhausted it.

Her 2010 piece on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, "A Hole in the World," similarly sees BP's boasts of the "deepest well ever drilled" as an extension of the drive to dominate nature that began with the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century. The spill and BP's failure to contain it thus represented a "crash course in deep ecology" — a reminder that the earth is still alive and uncontrollable.

My concern is that Klein may be too thorough in her diagnosis. Although she is surely right to trace these deeper currents, the leap across centuries in the space of a few pages can have a disorienting effect, and perhaps a demobilising one. It suggests that the task before us is truly so tremendous — changing everything, beginning with our very understanding of the world — that it can feel impossible to undertake in the span of a few years. If a political project like the Leap Manifesto was doomed by its collision with the ideology that underpinned Canada's origins, why would the Green New Deal be any more likely to succeed?

At the same time, Klein sometimes seems to suggest that once we change our view of the world — often described in terms of "narratives" or "stories" — changes in the way we live will follow. In order to change our policies, Klein argued in "Capitalism vs. the Climate," we first must "confront the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis," which in turn means "embodying, in highly visible ways, radically different ways of treating one another and relating to the natural world."

To say this, Klein argues, is not a matter of "lifestyle" — about what goods we prefer to buy or what we like to eat. (Across essays, Klein forcefully, and refreshingly, rejects the idea of consumer choice as a form of politics, insisting that politics requires collective action.) Yet she has a tendency to describe features of capitalism in terms of culture: we suffer from "a culture of endless taking," "a culture of grabbing and going," a "cult of shopping," and so on.

Interrogating our inherited stories, narratives, mythologies, and values — our ideologies, say — is surely necessary. But new stories alone will not get us out of this mess. I would suggest a different order of operations: we do need to change many aspects of our relationships to the natural world and to one another. But we should not expect those changes to come in advance of changes in the material conditions of our lives, however imperative they may be.

This, in fact, is the premise of the Green New Deal: that we tackle climate change not by changing our values in the abstract, but by changing the material realities that shape them. (I think Klein would agree.) Only when green jobs are an option can people give up environmentally destructive work; only when public transportation is quick, reliable, and affordable can you dispense with a car; only when you can afford to retrofit your home will you do so.

And while the school strikes have done a lot to change the discourse, the fact remains that we have a long way to go in changing those material realities. Thunberg, blunt as ever, recently declared that the strikes have "achieved nothing," since carbon emissions have yet to budge. Klein's book is a helpful reminder that it is too soon to tell: movements build over the course not of months but years. Yet Thunberg's impatience is a helpful spur to take a hard look at our prospects, at where the climate left is building power and where we expect more to come from.

School strikes are stirring, but politicians' laudatory words for the courageous young people of the world will not be matched with action until real consequences seem likely to result. That will mean bringing other forms of power to bear: from the tenants' movements driving forward Green New Deal legislation, to the growing force of canvassers and organisers who have catapulted long-shot candidates to victories, to the power of traditional strikes to withhold labour.

I wish that such movements and their potential to deliver a Green New Deal had gotten more time in this book. But I have no doubt that Klein will be reporting on them — and organising with them — every step of the way.

Naomi A. Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of capitalism.[1] On a three-year appointment from September 2018, she is the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.[2][3]

Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo (1999). The Take (2004), a documentary film about Argentina's occupied factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile, while The Shock Doctrine (2007), a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage. The Shock Doctrine was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón,[4] as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom.[5] Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014) was a New York Times non-fiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.[6]

In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice.[7] Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute,[8] Prospect magazine's world thinkers 2014 poll,[9] and Maclean's 2014 Power List.[10] She used to be a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.[11]

Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents were self-described "hippies"[12] who emigrated from the United States in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War.[13] Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story.[14] Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is an author and the former director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Before World War II, her paternal grandparents were communists, but they began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. In 1942, her grandfather, an animator at Disney, was fired after the 1941 strike,[15] and had to switch to working in a shipyard instead.[16] By 1956, they had abandoned communism. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called red diaper baby.[17]

Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, was born into a political and journalistic family. His grandfather, David Lewis, was an architect and leader of the federal New Democratic Party, while his father, Stephen Lewis, was a leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party.[18] Avi Lewis works as a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. The couple's only child, son Toma, was born on June 13, 2012.[19]

Klein spent much of her teenage years in shopping malls, obsessed with designer labels.[20] As a child and teenager, she found it "very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother" and she rejected politics, instead embracing "full-on consumerism".[20]

She has attributed her change in worldview to two catalysts. One was when she was 17 and preparing for the University of Toronto, her mother had a stroke and became severely disabled.[21] Naomi, her father, and her brother took care of Bonnie through the period in hospital and at home, making educational sacrifices to do so.[21] That year off prevented her "from being such a brat".[20] The next year, after beginning her studies at the University of Toronto, the second catalyst occurred: the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students, which proved to be a wake-up call to feminism.[22]

Klein's writing career began with contributions to The Varsity, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. After her third year at the University of Toronto, she dropped out of university to take a job at The Globe and Mail, followed by an editorship at This Magazine. In 1995, she returned to the University of Toronto with the intention of finishing her degree[17] but left academia for a journalism internship before acquiring the final credits required to complete her degree.[23]

Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published on September 4, 2007. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile, under Pinochet, Poland, Russia, under Yeltsin. The book also argues that policy initiatives (for instance, the privatization of Iraq's economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority) were rushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters, upheavals, or invasion. The book became an international and New York Times bestseller[25] and was translated into 28 languages.[29]

Central to the book's thesis is the contention that those who wish to implement unpopular free market policies now routinely do so by taking advantage of certain features of the aftermath of major disasters, be they economic, political, military or natural. The suggestion is that when a society experiences a major 'shock' there is a widespread desire for a rapid and decisive response to correct the situation; this desire for bold and immediate action provides an opportunity for unscrupulous actors to implement policies which go far beyond a legitimate response to disaster. The book suggests that when the rush to act means the specifics of a response will go unscrutinized, that is the moment when unpopular and unrelated policies will intentionally be rushed into effect. The book appears to claim that these shocks are in some cases intentionally encouraged or even manufactured.

Klein identifies the "shock doctrine", elaborating on Joseph Schumpeter, as the latest in capitalism's phases of "creative destruction".[30]

The Shock Doctrine was adapted into a short film of the same name, released onto YouTube.[31] The original is no longer available on the site, however, a duplicate was published in 2008.[32] The film was directed by Jonás Cuarón, produced and co-written by his father Alfonso Cuarón. The original video was viewed over one million times.[25]

The publication of The Shock Doctrine increased Klein's prominence, with The New Yorker judging her "the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago." On February 24, 2009, the book was awarded the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writin

Klein's fourth book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate was published in September 2014.[33] The book puts forth the argument that the hegemony of neoliberal market fundamentalism is blocking any serious reforms to halt climate change and protect the environment.[34] Questioned about Klein's claim that capitalism and controlling climate change were incompatible, Benoit Blarel, manager of the Environment and Natural Resources global practice at the World Bank, said that the write-off of fossil fuels necessary to control climate change "will have a huge impact all over" and that the World Bank was "starting work on this".[35] The book won the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction,[36] and was a shortlisted nominee for the 2015 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.[37]

Klein signed a 2004 petition entitled "We would vote for Hugo Chávez".[50] In 2007, she described Venezuela under the Chávez government as a country where "citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to improve their lives," and described Venezuela as a place sheltered by Chávez's policies from the economic shocks produced by capitalism.[51] Rather, according to Klein, Chávez protected his country from financial crisis by building "a zone of relative economic calm and predictability."[51][52] According to reviewer Todd Gitlin, who described the overall argument of Klein's book The Shock Doctrine (2007) as "more right than wrong," Klein is "a romantic," who expected that the Chávez government would produce a bright future in which worker-controlled co-operatives would run the economy.[53] The Shock Doctrine was consistent with her prior thinking about globalization, and in that book she describes Chávez' policies as an example of public control of some sectors of the economy as protecting poor people from harm caused by globalization.[54] After the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and alleged erosion of its democratic institutions under Chávez' successor Nicolás Maduro, Klein and other people who had supported Chávez were criticized by conservative writers such as James Kirchick[55] and Mark Milke.[56]

In March 2008, Klein was the keynote speaker at the first national conference of the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians. In January 2009, during the Gaza War, Klein supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, arguing that "the best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa."[57]

In summer 2009, on the occasion of the publication of the Hebrew translation of her book The Shock Doctrine, Klein visited Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, combining the promotion of her book and the BDS campaign. In an interview to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz she emphasized that it is important to her "not to boycott Israelis but rather to boycott the normalization of Israel and the conflict."[58] In a speech in Ramallah on June 27, she apologized to the Palestinians for not joining the BDS campaign earlier.[59] Her remarks, particularly that "[Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card" were characterized by Noam Schimmel, an op-ed columnist in The Jerusalem Post, as "violent" and "unethical", and as the "most perverse of aspersions on Jews, an age-old stereotype of Jews as intrinsically evil and malicious."[60]

Klein was also a spokesperson for the protest against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, a spotlight that Klein said was a very selective and misleading portrait of Israel.[61]

Since 2009, Klein's attention has turned to environmentalism, with particular focus on climate change, the subject of her book This Changes Everything (2014).[63] According to her website, the book and its accompanying film (released in 2015) will be about "how the climate crisis can spur economic and political transformation."[64] She sits on the board of directors of campaign group 350.org[65] and took part in their "Do the Math" tour in 2013, encouraging a divestment movement.[66]

She has encouraged the Occupy movement to join forces with the environmental movement, saying the financial crisis and the climate crisis have the same root—unrestrained corporate greed.[67] She gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street where she described the world as "upside down", where we act as if "there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions," and as if there are "limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need."[68]

She has been a particularly vocal critic of the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, describing it in a TED talk as a form of "terrestrial skinning."[69] On September 2, 2011, she attended the demonstration against the Keystone XL pipeline outside the White House and was arrested.[70] Klein celebrated Obama's decision to postpone a decision on the Keystone pipeline until 2013 pending an environmental review as a victory for the environmental movement.[67]

She attended the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009. She put the blame for the failure of Copenhagen on President Barack Obama,[71] and described her own country, Canada, as a "climate criminal."[72] She presented the Angry Mermaid Award (a satirical award designed to recognise the corporations who have best sabotaged the climate negotiations) to Monsanto.[73]

Writing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, she warned that the climate crisis constitutes a massive opportunity for disaster capitalists and corporations seeking to profit from crisis. But equally, the climate crisis "can be a historic moment to usher in the next great wave of progressive change," or a so-called "People's Shock."[74]

On November 9, 2016, following the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, Klein called for an international campaign to impose economic sanctions on the United States if his administration refuses to abide by the terms of the Paris Agreement.[75]

Klein contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The Guardian, and is a senior contributor for The Intercept.[76] She is a former Miliband Fellow and lectured at the London School of Economics on the anti-globalization movement.[77] Her appointment as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick began in October 2018 and runs for 3 years.[2] The position is funded by foundations, endowments and individuals.

Klein ranked 11th in an internet poll of the top global intellectuals of 2005, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by the Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine.[78] She was involved in 2010 G-20 Toronto summit protests, condemning police force and brutality. She spoke to a rally seeking the release of protesters in front of police headquarters on June 28, 2010.[79]

On October 6, 2011, she visited Occupy Wall Street and gave a speech declaring the protest movement "the most important thing in the world".[80] On November 10, 2011, she participated in a panel discussion about the future of Occupy Wall Street with four other panelists, including Michael Moore, William Greider, and Rinku Sen, in which she stressed the crucial nature of the evolving movement.[81] Klein also made an appearance in the British radio show Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 in 2017.[82]

Klein was a key instigator of the Leap Manifesto, a political manifesto issued in the context of the 2015 Canadian federal election focused on addressing the climate crisis through restructuring the Canadian economy and dealing with issues of income and wealth inequality, racism, and colonialism.[83] The manifesto has been noted as an influence in the development of the Green New Deal and eventually led to the establishment of The Leap, an organization that works to promote the realization of the principles behind the original manifesto.[84][85]

In November 2019, along with other public figures, Klein signed a letter supporting Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn describing him as "a beacon of hope in the struggle against emergent far-right nationalism, xenophobia and racism in much of the democratic world" and endorsed him in the 2019 UK general election.[86]

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