Bronze-level articleNaomi Klein

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Klein at Occupy Wall Street, 6 October 2011.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and activist.[1] She is most known for her two books, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, as well as a variety of shorter journalism, all professing a left-wing anti-globalization viewpoint. Her early books were specifically attacks on consumerism and trends in the world's consumer-goods market, while The Shock Doctrine examines capitalism more generally.

Klein is currently a staff writer for The Nation.[2] She has been rated the 21st century's answer to such left-wing writers as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.[3]

Contents

[edit] Books

[edit]

Klein's first major book, No Logo, was published in 2000, and became popular enough that it was sometimes considered the unofficial manifesto of the anti-globalization movement.

The book's main focus was on the phenomenon of "branding;" Klein argued that major companies had, starting in the 1980s, transitioned from manufacturing products to "branding" products made by other companies, specifically overseas subcontractors; in this process, brands had expanded from identifying the manufacturers of products into representing entire lifestyles, and management of brands and corporate images had become more important to companies than actually manufacturing products. These trends, Klein said, were the primary cause of "astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multi-national corporations."[4]

The book also includes extensive documentation of the anti-globalization movement at that time, which is best known for the 1999 anti-WTO riots in Seattle.

[edit] The Shock Doctrine

Klein's second book, The Shock Doctrine, argues that capitalism (or, as it is called here, neoliberalism) is only able to be built from a "blank slate," necessitating the use of violence to destroy any pre-existing economic order. This entails, among other things, that in order for free market reforms to be introduced or expanded in an area, the people of that area must first be distracted so the sinister reforms can be slipped right by them without their being able to stop it.

Klein set forth a theory that a popular tactic for expanding free markets was to ramrod the measures through during times of upheaval or war. However, she was rather short on actual examples to support the theory; the primary example, receiving extensive documentation, was the neoliberal reform in Chile under Augusto Pinochet, which was carried out by the "Chicago Boys," subscribers to Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics.

Being thus short on examples, Klein flew completely off the rails in attempting to shoehorn various global political events into her thesis, with Friedman becoming the head bogeyman in the vast conspiracy to undermine democracy.[5] Perhaps the most egregious instance of this is her rewriting of the Iraq War as part of this "Friedman-ite" scheme, ignoring Friedman's own most definitive statement of being against the war.[6] She also brought conspiracy into the theory by claiming that several of the historical upheavals allowing free-market reforms were manufactured expressly for that purpose (specifically the Falklands War of 1982[7]).

One reviewer called it "The New Road to Serfdom,"[8] an apt description. Just as wingnuts can invoke the original Road to Serfdom to demonstrate how any leftist policy will inevitably lead to a socialist dictatorship, moonbats can similarly invoke The Shock Doctrine to show that any neoliberal policy is a slippery slope to corporate fascism.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. "Meet Naomi," naomiklein.org
  2. "Naomi Klein on Occupy Wall Street: 'The Sky's the Limit'", The Huffington Post
  3. http://www.nationinstitute.org/files/managed/Klein_PressKit2.pdf
  4. Extract from No Logo
  5. Indeed, reviewers were not averse to using the "c-word." See the reviews by Jonathan Chait and the New York Times
  6. She makes some questionable use of his earlier vaguely ambivalent statements on the war. See Milton Friedman and the Iraq War and Libertarianism, the Iraq War, and the Division in the Friedman Household.
  7. Shock Jock, October 3, 2007
  8. "The New Road to Serfdom", In These Times
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