If you were young and desperately wanted a break from the status quo, the year 2000 felt like a drought. It was a decade since Francis Fukuyama had penned The End of History, but the sense of triumph among the champions of neo-liberal ideology was still overpowering.
The death of the Soviet regimes had been spun as the absolute vindication not just of capitalism, but untrammelled capitalism at that, red in tooth and claw. In Britain, New Labour had not just conquered the flailing Tories: it had apparently extinguished any troublesome opponents of the political consensus established by Thatcherism. Bill Clinton – who echoed the New Right with his pledge that “the era of big government is over” – held the US Presidency, while the Bush era beckoned.
Naomi Klein was a bit of a revelation in that barren time, when alternatives to neo-liberal hegemony seemed as though they had been permanently emptied from the world of political ideas. Her first book, No Logo was an all-too-rare puncture of the triumphalism of the era. The plight of the sweatshop workers who powered shiny happy Western consumerism through their exploitation could no longer be ignored. The superficial “coolness” of consumer capitalism – and its ingenious ability to assimilate virtually anything in the search for profit – was brilliantly dissected.
But there were two aspects of Naomi Klein that really inspired me; and I suspect many other aspiring opponents of the status quo. Firstly, she was not some stuffy, isolated writer, typing out grand proclamations without any link to the struggles around her: Klein was a movement-writer. This was the time of the alter-globalisation movements, when politicians, bankers and bureaucrats were stalked from summit to summit by activists. Her own writing was inextricably bound up with such movements: “Don’t just read, organise”, to misappropriate Swedish-American trade unionist Joe Hill’s famous call for action.
What Klein also showed me was the need to reach a mass audience, beyond the confines of the battered, bruised and increasingly marginalised confines of the left. Purity was all well and good, but unless you reached the discontented, who didn’t traditionally turn up to political rallies: what was the point? The left was very good at writing books and articles that could only be understood by their own; but Klein was successfully reaching those with an appetite for change, even those who did not instinctively identify as political.
In 2007 I read The Shock Doctrine, her dissection of how free market capitalism hijacked crises in order to further its goals. A powerful book, I thought at the time, but it was only following the global financial collapse that its arguments fully sunk in. When Lehman Brothers fell, it initially seemed as though neo-liberalism was permanently discredited: but, in line with Klein’s analysis, it was effectively transformed into yet another opportunity to hand public assets to profiteers, slash taxes on the wealthy and attack workers’ rights.
That’s why I’m so excited about her latest book, This Changes Everything, which is tackling the potential existential threat to humanity itself. To a mass audience, she’s demonstrating that the needs of capitalism are on a collision course with the very future of our planet.
I know there are millions of people scattered across the globe who – just like me when I read No Logo – are desperate for a principled, convincing, evidence-based attack on the status quo. We need collective movements to challenge and overturn our bankrupt social order. Klein helps to intellectually arm the rank-and-file activists and offer some hope to those thirsty for alternatives.
Giving the otherwise-resigned hope is a powerful gift indeed: and that – for me – is what Klein offers. Other writers who want a just, equal and sustainable world will undoubtedly emerge: and like me, Klein’s work will spur them on.
Guardian Live: Naomi Klein will be talking to Owen Jones about her latest book, This Changes Everything, on 6 October at Central Hall Westminster. Book now.
