{"id":7750,"date":"2020-02-05T18:57:12","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T18:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/infed.org\/mobi\/?p=7750"},"modified":"2025-08-12T15:26:37","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T14:26:37","slug":"naomi-klein-globalization-capitalism-neoliberalism-and-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/infed.org\/dir\/welcome\/naomi-klein-globalization-capitalism-neoliberalism-and-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Naomi Klein: globalization, capitalism, neoliberalism and climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
Naomi Klein has probably done more than any other commentator, to raise public understanding of the relationships between globalization, capitalism, neoliberalism and climate change. Here we explore her contribution.<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/h5>\r\n

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contents<\/strong>: naomi klein \u2013 life and contribution<\/a> \u2022 no logo, corporations and globalization<\/a> \u2022 the shock doctrine, neo-liberalism and the rise of disaster capitalism<\/a> \u2022 this changes everything – capitalism vs. the climate<\/a> \u2022 conclusion \u2013 where next?<\/a> \u2022 further reading and references<\/a> \u2022 acknowledgements<\/a> \u2022 how to cite this piece<\/a><\/span><\/p>\r\n

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<\/a>Introduction<\/h3>\r\n

Naomi Klein<\/strong> (1970- ) is a Canadian journalist, writer and activist known for her critiques of globalization and consumerism, neoliberalism,<\/span> and the role of capitalism in climate change. Her books – No Logo<\/em>, The Shock Doctrine <\/em>and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate<\/em> – became international bestsellers and have \u2018done more to popularise the inseparability of capitalism and climate change than perhaps any other author\u2019 (O\u2019Brien 2019). In 2018, she joined Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies.<\/p>\r\n

Early life<\/h3>\r\n

Born in Montreal, Naomi Klein\u2019s father was a paediatrician in a public hospital; her mother, a documentary filmmaker. They were both Jewish Americans who had made their way there through their resistance to US military action in Vietnam. Her paternal grandparents were also politically engaged. Involved with the Communist Party from the 1930s, like so many others, they left in 1956. Both were strong unionists. Writing in 2008, Larissa MacFarquhar suggests that the \u2018political stories in which Klein places herself all begin in the thirties\u2019.<\/p>\r\n

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The thirties and forties were the last time in America, she feels, that social movements were strong enough to force radical economic change in a progressive direction. They were also the last time that a certain kind of grand, bold political hope existed in her family\u2014the last time before events combined to extinguish all thoughts, among Kleins, of utopia. (MacFarquhar 2008)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Unlike her brother Seth, as a teenager, Naomi Klein, \u2018resented being dragged to demonstrations\u2019 and reacted against her mother\u2019s feminism and her parent\u2019s hippiness. \u2018All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper,\u2019 she wrote. \u2019That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar\u2019 (op. cit.<\/em>).<\/p>\r\n

In 1989 Klein began her studies in English and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She had spent some time nursing her mother after she had a stroke (Bonny Sherr Klein 1993). During her first year, the \u00c9cole Polytechnique massacre (also known as the Montreal Massacre) took place. Fourteen women were targeted and killed (the perpetrator said he was \u2018fighting feminism\u2019). It was a \u2018wake-up call\u2019 for Naomi Klein. She had shied away from activism (Klein 2012a). Her mother\u2019s feminism, work and involvement in, and commitment to, social movements now proved to be a compelling model. \u2018Media starts a conversation, but then people take it and act\u2019 (Klein 2012b). Naomi Klein had always wanted to be a writer. Now she began to combine it with activism – editing and writing for The Varsity<\/em> the University of Toronto student paper.<\/p>\r\n

Then deciding to interrupt her degree studies, Naomi Klein took up an internship with The Globe and Mail<\/em>, the Toronto-based paper and then went on to edit This Magazine <\/em>(which had been founded by a group of school activists in 1966) (see THIS<\/a>).<\/p>\r\n

From No Logo to This Changes Everything<\/h3>\r\n

In the mid-1990s Naomi Klein returned to the University to complete her studies. There, according to Larissa MacFarquhar, she found students were no longer so concerned with identity politics but were now talking about economics.<\/p>\r\n

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There was a feeling in the air that corporations were getting too powerful\u2014more powerful than governments, but not accountable to anyone except their shareholders. And, at the same time that big corporations were withdrawing physically from the United States and opening factories overseas, visually, even spiritually, they were everywhere, insinuating their logos into what had once been public space. Young activists found this especially objectionable, perhaps because one of the places into which corporations insinuated themselves most effectively was youth and activism, folding mutiny into advertising so deftly that resistance seemed futile. (MacFarquhar 2008)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Klein decided to write a book on branding culture rather than complete her studies. She had also met, and later married, Avi Lewis \u2013 a documentary filmmaker who had studied at Toronto. Completed in 1999 and published in 2000, No Logo<\/em> coincided with, and articulated protests against consumerism and globalization, and the exploitation involved. The book was translated into over 30 languages and sold over a million copies. In The Guardian<\/em>, it was rated as one of the top 100 non-fiction books of all time. Robert McCrum (2017) comments, \u2018Naomi Klein\u2019s timely anti-branding bible combined a fresh approach to corporate hegemony with potent reportage from the dark side of capitalism\u2019.<\/p>\r\n

No Logo <\/em>was followed by a couple of books of collected essays; two further major \u2013 and highly influential – works; and two shorter books \u2013 one on the rise of Trump, the other concerned with resistance to \u2018disaster capitalism\u2019 in Puerto Rico.<\/p>\r\n

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The Shock Doctrine<\/em> appeared in 2007. Subtitled \u2018the rise of disaster capitalism\u2019 this book divided reviewers with, broadly, those already critical of neoliberalism applauding it, and those supporting neoliberalism pointing out Naomi Klein\u2019s \u2018faults\u2019. In 2019, The Guardian\u2019s <\/em>listing of the 100 best books of the 21st<\/sup> century (fiction and non-fiction) put The Shock Doctrine <\/em>in the top twenty:<\/p>\r\n

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In this urgent examination of free-market fundamentalism, Klein argues \u2013 with accompanying reportage \u2013 that the social breakdowns witnessed during decades of neoliberal economic policies are not accidental, but in fact integral to the functioning of the free market, which relies on disaster and human suffering to function.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Many of the negative reviews for the book came from academic and professional economists complaining of Naomi Klein\u2019s lack of understanding, or appreciation, of economic theory. As we will see, an alternative reading is that Klein understood only too well the shallowness and ideological roots of that theory. Her work helped to prepare the way for the reception to Thomas Piketty\u2019s (2014) work Capital in the Twenty-First Century <\/em>which argued that neoliberalism produces vastly increased inequalities. Not unexpectedly, it too attracted criticism from economists, but this time they were attacking a critique that came from within.<\/p>\r\n

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate <\/em>came out in 2014 – the same year as another influential work – Elizabeth Kolbert\u2019s The Sixth Extinction \u2013 An unnatural history <\/em>appeared. Both Klein and Kolbert were journalists but were coming at the deep problems of climate change from different directions. Elizabeth Kolbert was reviewing the science – charting five mass extinctions on Earth and how humans are causing another. She noted that \u2018no creature has ever altered life on the planet\u2019 in the way\u00a0we are doing now.<\/p>\r\n

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Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they\u2019re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. When it is still too early to say whether it will reach the proportions of the Big Five, it becomes known as the Sixth Extinction. (Kolbert 2014: 8-9)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

It had been 25 years since the first \u2018popular\u2019 text on global warming had appeared (Bill McKibbin\u2019s The End of Nature<\/em>), and just over 50 years since Rachel Carson\u2019s ground-breaking book on the impact that humans have on \u2018the natural world\u2019 (Silent Spring<\/em>). She finished with a memorable attack on our failure of stewardship for the earth (what Klein 2014 talked about as extractivism \u2013 \u2018a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking\u2019 [Klein 2014: 176]).<\/p>\r\n

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\"\"The \u201ccontrol of nature\u201d is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. (Carson 1962: 297)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Klein and Kolbert were able to marshal and generate coherent narratives of the processes of change that appealed strongly to those who were already concerned with the climate emergency. They were, of course, never likely to be listened to by hardened climate change deniers. But they could encourage those (like Naomi Klein herself) who had been avoiding the \u2018real truth\u2019 that:<\/p>\r\n

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\u2026 climate change isn\u2019t an \u201cissue\u201d to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message\u2014spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions\u2014telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve. (Klein 2014: 37)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

And Naomi Klein had another pressing reason for the change \u2013 she had become a mother in 2012. In the past, when fears \u2019used to creep through my armor of climate change denial, I would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe it to ourselves and one another\u2019 (op. cit.<\/em>).<\/p>\r\n

Recent work<\/h3>\r\n

The rise of Donald Trump led to Naomi Klein returning to the themes of The Shock Doctrine <\/em>in 2017. <\/em>She quickly put together No is Not Enough<\/em>, subtitled Defeating the new shock politics<\/em> in the UK, and Resisting Trump’s shock politics and winning the world we need<\/em> in the United States. Unlike the three earlier books which took three or four years to finish, it was written in a matter of months. \u2018This book\u2019s argument, in a nutshell,\u2019 Klein (2017) wrote, \u2018is that Trump, extreme as he is, is less an aberration than a logical conclusion\u2014a pastiche of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half-century\u2019. She continues:<\/p>\r\n

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Most of all, he is the incarnation of a still-powerful free-market ideological project\u2014one embraced by centrist parties as well as conservative ones\u2014that wages war on everything public and commonly held, and imagines corporate CEOs as superheroes who will save humanity. (op. cit.<\/em>)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Importantly, and an extension of some of her work in This Changes Everything<\/em>, she also looks to the practical steps to be taken in order to resist.<\/p>\r\n

At this point, Naomi Klein made some significant changes. She formally entered the academic world becoming in 2018 the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. Klein also became a senior correspondent at The Intercept<\/em>, the online news site, that seeks to hold \u2018the powerful accountable through fearless, adversarial journalism\u2019 (Intercept undated). Based on work undertaken for The Intercept<\/em>, she published The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico takes on the disaster capitalists <\/em>in 2018. One consequence of these changes is that she had effectively become US-, rather than Canada-, based.<\/p>\r\n

<\/a>No logo, corporations and globalization<\/h3>\r\n

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Some political books capture the zeitgeist with such precision that they seem to blur the lines between the page and the real world and become part of the urgent, rapidly unfolding changes they are describing.<\/em> (Hancox 2019)<\/p>\r\n

No Logo<\/em> became a publishing phenomenon and \u2018hit at this moment when a global movement was exploding and taking mainstream commentators entirely by surprise\u2019 (Klein quoted by Hancox 2019). Naomi Klein makes clear that the title is not a literal slogan (as in No More Logos), or a post-logo logo.<\/p>\r\n

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Rather, it is an attempt to capture an anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition. (Klein 2000: xx)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

That hypothesis has not (as yet) proved to be correct. However, twenty years on the changes she identifies and explores are there for all to see \u2013 and \u2018are so much worse than we could have ever predicted\u2019 (Hancox 2019).<\/p>\r\n

No Logo<\/em> is a book of four parts.<\/p>\r\n

No Space<\/em> examines how marketing has ensnared culture and education. Here, Klein includes a particularly significant attack on the branding of education (op. cit.<\/em>: 87-106).<\/p>\r\n

No Choice<\/em> reflects on the extent to which market-driven globalization<\/a> may give the impression of diversity \u2013 but really homogenization is going on. \u2018Dazzled by the array of consumer choices, we may at first fail to notice the tremendous consolidation taking place in the boardrooms of the entertainment, media and retail industries\u2019 (op. cit.<\/em>: 129).<\/p>\r\n

No Jobs<\/em> examines the changing experience of work and the rise of self-employment, McJobs and outsourcing, as well as part-time and temporary work. (op. cit.<\/em>: 195-278)<\/p>\r\n

No Logo <\/em>argues that these forces involve an attack on \u2018the three social pillars of employment, civil liberties and civic space\u2019 and that this, in turn, is feeding anticorporate activism. (op. cit.<\/em>: xxiii)<\/p>\r\n

One of the great strengths of No Logo<\/em> is that evidence is drawn from across the globe and woven into an account of changing nature of corporations and the impact this has had on consumers and workers. Its themes were picked up by other writers such as Alissa Quart (exploring branding and teenagers) and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in The Rebel Sell: How the counterculture became consumer culture <\/em>(2005). Heath and Potter comment that \u2018No Logo<\/em> provides a stinging indictment of every aspect of the modern advertising-driven economy\u2019. They continue:<\/p>\r\n

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\u2026 it is not just that corporations are exploiting our desire to be cool by selling us \u201ccool\u201d products; it is that they are actually creating the desire for those products. We are being systematically duped, manipulated, programmed into the consumerist cool mindset, tricked into buying products we otherwise would not really want. (Heath and Potter 2004: 204-5)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

More generally, Naomi Klein was able to delineate and connect some key elements of globalization in a way that made sense to the growing numbers of people concerned about their experiences of education and culture, of contemporary consumerism, and of work. It linked the changing shape of corporations (and capitalism) to globalization. But in the end the \u2018vast wave of opposition\u2019 did not happen. The obvious problem with No Logo<\/em>, according to Heath and Potter (2004: 329) \u2018is that despite the rhetoric about the evils of consumerism and its call for \u201ca more citizen-centered alternative to the international rule of brands\u201d the book has very little to offer in the way of positive politics\u2019. This criticism is unfair \u2013 and it says more about the writers\u2019 perspective than Klein\u2019s argument. She does set out engaging possibilities and is surely right to explore people-centred alternatives. However, her optimism and hope seem to have led to her underestimating the power of counterforces. Branding has become ubiquitous:<\/p>\r\n

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What\u2019s more powerful now\u2026 is the idea that every single person has to be their own brand, and the application of the logic of corporate branding to our very selves. It\u2019s an insidious change that has everything to do with social media (Naomi Klein quoted in O\u2019Brien 2019).<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

<\/a>The Shock Doctrine, neoliberalism and the rise of disaster capitalism<\/h3>\r\n

There are very few books that really help us understand the present. <\/em>The Shock Doctrine is one of those books. Ranging across the world, Klein exposes the strikingly similar policies that enabled the imposition of free markets\u2026 Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments<\/em>. (Gray 2007)<\/p>\r\n

In The Shock Doctrine<\/em>, Naomi Klein assembles and explores a wide range of material to critique the actions of politicians and corporate leaders who took on the neoliberal ideas of Milton Friedman and his associates in the Chicago school of economics. In particular, she is concerned with the shock doctrine that was applied in varying degrees to countries as disparate as China, Russia, Iraq, Bolivia, Chile and the UK and USA. Friedman, in a key passage written in 1982 summarizes the doctrine:<\/p>\r\n

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Only a crisis\u2014actual or perceived\u2014produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. (1982: ix)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Milton Friedman and his followers \u2013 for more than three decades – had been developing this strategy: \u2018waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the \u201creforms\u201d permanent\u2019 (Klein 2007: 18). Klein calls these \u2018orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities\u2019, disaster capitalism<\/em> (op. cit.<\/em>: 15). It is a profoundly anti-democratic process. The only situation in which a population would accept such \u2018reforms\u2019 is when it is \u2018in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort\u2014a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war\u2019 (MacFarquhar 2008).<\/p>\r\n

It wasn\u2019t necessary for the rich and powerful to create catastrophes so that they could exploit them.<\/p>\r\n

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The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot-com collapse all demonstrate.\u00a0(op. cit.<\/em>: 743-4)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\u2018Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed\u2019, Naomi Klein claims, \u2018it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 per cent of the population\u2019. The outcome of the strategy was the creation of what Klein calls the \u2018corporatist state\u2019.<\/p>\r\n

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Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture. (op. cit.<\/em>: 32)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

The extent to which corporations understand or control these processes is a matter for some debate, according to John Gray (2007) \u2013 just as there must be considerable doubt that \u2018the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. \u2018[I]t is hard to resist the suspicion\u2019 he continues, \u2018that disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than it can handle\u2019 (op. cit.<\/em>).<\/p>\r\n

<\/a>This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate<\/h3>\r\n

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\"Extinction<\/p>\r\n

Naomi Klein\u2019s This Changes Everything <\/em>again caught a shift in public opinion \u2013 and one of great significance. In an article written in 2011 (and reprinted in Klein 2019) she notes that in 2007 a Harris poll found that \u201871 per cent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change\u2019. Klein continues:<\/p>\r\n

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By 2009, the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011, the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent\u2014well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, this is \u201camong the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum\u2026 Today, 70\u201375 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate, a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science. (2011, reprinted in Klein 2019: 73-4)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Eight or more years on, the divide remains underpinned by a dangerous effort to question scientific research in the service of shoring up strong vested interests. The first part of This Changes Everything<\/em> explores how these processes were added to by the 2007 financial crisis and the austerity programmes that followed \u2013 especially in terms of challenges to environmental movements. However, resistance to those vested interests and a resolve to deal with the climate emergency has subsequently strengthened \u2013 and the work undertaken by Klein, Kolbert and others has played a significant role.<\/p>\r\n

The power of Naomi Klein\u2019s approach lays in the way she pits capitalism against climate. The bottom line for her is that: \u2018our economic system and our planetary system are now at war\u2019 (Klein 2014: 30). \u00a0Very little she argues \u2018has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that came knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith\u2019 (op. cit.<\/em>: 28). Her focus on the ways in which vested economic interests have orchestrated attempts to undermine reputable science, and the work of those highlighting the impact of environmental change in the social and political spheres, sheds considerable light on the situation.<\/p>\r\n

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[W]e have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe\u2014and would benefit the vast majority\u2014are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. (op. cit.<\/em>: 27)<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

What concerns Klein is not so much the mechanics of the transition\u2014the shift from brown to green energy etc. \u2018than the power and ideological roadblocks that have so far prevented any of these long understood solutions from taking hold on anything close to the scale required. (op. cit.<\/em>: 34).<\/p>\r\n

The blocks to progress that Klein critiques include what she describes as \u2018magical thinking\u2019. She highlights the ideas that:<\/p>\r\n