[R-G] Naomi Klein and the new new left

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_macfarquhar
Profiles
Outside Agitator
Naomi Klein and the new new left.
by Larissa MacFarquhar December 8, 2008

The marquee outside the Bloor Cinema, in Toronto, advertised “The  
Last Mistress” at four, “Naomi Klein—the Shock Doctrine” at  
seven, and “Little Shop of Horrors” at nine-thirty. It was a  
warmish night. The falafel shop next door was doing a brisk business.  
A line of people holding tickets to the Naomi Klein event stretched to  
the end of the block and around the corner. Outside the entrance to  
the cinema, a middle-aged man and an elderly woman paced up and down  
selling copies of Socialist Action for a dollar. (The September issue  
included articles about capitalism’s contradictions, class war in  
Bolivia, and a commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal—a regular feature.)

“We apologize for starting late, but it’s typical activist time, so  
I’m sure you’re used to it,” a young woman organizer said from  
the stage. The young woman wore a black necklace, black jeans, and  
black hoop earrings. She urged the audience to fight racism and  
poverty, and to work for education, international solidarity, justice  
for immigrants and refugees, and solidarity with Palestine and with  
the Mohawk of Tyendinaga and the Algonquin of Barriere Lake, on whose  
behalf the fund-raiser that night was being held. She squinted into  
the lights. “I’m glad you can’t see the audience from here,”  
she said, “because I don’t think I’ve ever spoken in front of  
eight hundred and fifty people except at a protest, and then you can  
always dissolve into a chant.” She consulted her notes. “To a  
different audience—to those that hold capital and power in this  
society—Naomi Klein’s words and her ideas are seen as a serious  
threat,” she said. “Her words are a source of inspiration . . . for  
those of us who were and are being radicalized by the anti- 
globalization, anti-colonial, and anti-poverty movements and the  
demands to change the system totally and completely.”

Klein ascended the stage. “It’s been an eventful few hours,” she  
said, smiling. The first bailout package announced by Treasury  
Secretary Henry Paulson had been voted down that afternoon by the  
House. “The President went on television and informed us that there  
would be Armageddon, essentially, if they didn’t get this deal . . .  
but it didn’t work!” she went on, over rowdy clapping. She was  
wearing dark jeans tucked into tall brown boots, a crisp white shirt,  
and a long black blazer. She was dressed for a fox hunt. She looked  
terrific.

She had spent the day curled up on the blue sofa in her living room,  
watching CNN while she waited restlessly to hear what would happen in  
Washington. She fortified herself with cups of coffee and a smoothie.  
She checked her iPhone for messages from an economist friend who was  
keeping her posted on what was going on behind the scenes. She  
followed the Dow as it pitched downward, thinking how ridiculous it  
was for Paulson to believe that he could control it. “This is  
politicians acting like traders,” she said, staring at the  
television. “A government shouldn’t play the market—it should  
govern.”

The past couple of weeks had been a giddy time. Since her book “The  
Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has  
become the most visible and influential figure on the American left— 
what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks  
every few days, all over the world, and hundreds of people turn up to  
hear her. They visit her Web site and subscribe to her newsletter and  
send her passionate fan mail. She has become an icon’s icon:  
Radiohead and Laurie Anderson promote her books to their fans; John  
Cusack’s comedy “War, Inc.” was inspired by her reporting from  
Baghdad. The Mexican film director Alfonso Cuarón felt so strongly  
about “The Shock Doctrine” that he made a short promotional film  
about it for free. Now, suddenly, she was in demand everywhere. The  
economic crisis had looked at first like a textbook enactment of her  
“shock doctrine” theory, and everyone wanted her to go on TV and  
explain it.

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free  
markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand.  
On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of  
the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his  
“Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously  
harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its  
establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and  
torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from  
government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs,  
subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security,  
financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for  
doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people  
from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only  
circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms  
is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a  
natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock  
regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure  
to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand  
exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the  
regulatory functions of government.

Friedman once observed that much of the time societies are too  
paralyzed by the “tyranny of the status quo” to accept real reform,  
and that only a crisis can convince people that the way things are  
done needs to change. This idea is not particularly controversial. But  
from Friedman’s words Klein concludes that the Chicago School is “a  
movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for  
rain.” Worse, Friedmanites are impatient—sometimes too impatient to  
sit around praying for acts of God. Natural disasters are tricky to  
engineer, but coups and terror are always possible. “Some of the most  
infamous human rights violations of this era,” she writes, “which  
have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by  
antidemocratic regimes”—Pinochet’s in Chile, for instance, or the  
Argentinean junta—“were in fact either committed with the  
deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to  
prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market  
‘reforms.’ ”

Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in  
Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer’s goal seemed to be to establish  
a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still  
reeling from the “shock and awe” bombing. Then she noticed that  
soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been  
inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed  
that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to  
replace New Orleans’s disastrous public schools with charter schools.  
The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington  
itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one  
hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory— 
the shock (the bank failures and the market’s nosedive) had inspired  
the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred  
billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a  
crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even  
though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the  
wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook  
part. But the plan wasn’t working. Constituents wrote thousands of  
outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar,  
like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the  
economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written  
at the end of the book: memory was shock’s antidote. (Another  
difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not  
Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the  
market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out  
banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.)

“Americans remembered that they thought Rudy Giuliani was their daddy  
after September 11th, which was why they’re a little less inclined to  
say that Paulson and Goldman Sachs were going to take care of them  
this time,” Klein told the audience at the Bloor Cinema. “I think  
actually their biggest mistake with the bailout was how short it was.  
It’s just two pages and three paragraphs, and so the weirdest thing  
happened: people read it.” Everyone laughed. “It sounded like a  
coup.”

She went on, “It’s worth thinking about what the right has been  
doing for the past thirty-five years as a counter-revolution that has  
been waged against our victories.” The New Deal is usually told as a  
history of F.D.R., she said, but we don’t talk enough about the  
pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted  
neighbors’ furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into  
their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like  
rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The  
other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the  
organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that  
which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise,  
or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.” Now, these market  
shocks are opportunities for the same reason that the crash was in the  
thirties, because we are seeing the failures of laissez-faire before  
our eyes. “It’s time to say, ‘Your model failed,’ ” she said.  
“This is a progressive moment: it’s ours to lose.”

Klein was born in 1970, but the political stories in which she places  
herself all begin in the thirties. 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—the last time before events  
combined to extinguish all thoughts, among Kleins, of utopia.

Her paternal grandparents, Anne and Philip, met at the Jack London Club 
—a leftist artists’ club—in Newark, New Jersey, sometime in the  
thirties. (Philip’s older brother, Sol, was more committed—he moved  
to the Soviet Union after the revolution and never came back.) Philip  
wanted to be a painter, and in 1936 he got a job as an animator for  
Disney. He worked on “Fantasia” and “Snow White” and  
“Pinocchio.” Disney animators had been trying to organize  
themselves in secret since the early thirties, but they didn’t pull  
it off until after the bonuses they were promised for “Snow White”  
failed to materialize. In the late spring of 1941, they went on  
strike. Philip and Anne, ardent believers in the union, lived in a  
tent across the street from the studio, cooking over open fires and  
manning the picket line. Their first son, Michael, Naomi’s father,  
was then three, and lived with them in the tent part of the time. The  
strike was settled in September, but a few months after that Philip  
was fired for being an agitator. In 1942, he and Anne moved back to  
New Jersey, and he went to work in a shipyard.

At the time they were ruining their lives for politics, Anne and  
Philip were experiencing the beginnings of a crisis of faith. Stalin  
had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: that was the first betrayal.  
Then came news of gulags in the Soviet Union. By the time of  
Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956, in which he denounced the  
cult of Stalin and its consequences, Philip and Anne, along with many  
others, had bitterly abandoned Communism. They held on to their core  
beliefs in social justice and racial equality, and taught their sons  
to believe in those things, but apart from brief forays—Anne took ten- 
year-old Michael canvassing for the Progressive Party in 1948, and  
marched on Washington in support of the Rosenbergs—they withdrew from  
politics. They began to spend time at Nature Friends (later Camp  
Midvale)—a retreat near Paterson, founded in the twenties as a place  
where workers of all races could congregate and enjoy nature. Nature  
Friends became their life. Philip built a house nearby, and Anne grew  
her own vegetables. They went to see leftist singers like Pete Seeger  
and Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. Philip sought to revive his early  
ambition of becoming a painter, but all his figures looked like Disney  
cartoons. He tried sculpting in metal, and after a while this brought  
him a measure of satisfaction.

In high school, Michael Klein was in the band and the student council  
and was the captain of the swim team, but he led a double life. He’d  
been sent to Socialist summer camp, and his real friends were other  
red-diaper babies who lived in New York, with whom he could discuss  
his home life without fear of exposure. It was difficult and  
frightening to be the child of Communists. One of his most vivid  
childhood memories was seeing buses arrive at Camp Midvale in the  
early fall of 1949 and disgorge dozens of bloodied people who had gone  
to a Paul Robeson concert and had been attacked with rocks and bats by  
a local mob. The electrocution of the Rosenbergs, in 1953, which left  
their two boys orphaned at the ages of six and ten, terrified Michael,  
who was not much older.

Michael Klein never deviated from the beliefs of his parents, but,  
like them, he stayed away from political parties. In medical school,  
he protested against the Vietnam War and joined Physicians for Social  
Responsibility. When he was drafted, he didn’t sign the statement  
about not belonging to organizations with Communist ties, so the Army  
held a hearing to decide whether he was loyal enough to serve.  
Meanwhile, he had met a young activist filmmaker from Philadelphia  
named Bonnie Sherr, and got her pregnant. In the middle of his draft  
negotiations, she saw a documentary about American soldiers dropping  
napalm on civilian populations, commissioned by the Canadian  
Broadcasting Corporation. She said, “If a Canadian government agency  
can produce a film like this, we should get married and run away to  
Canada.” So they did.

They ended up in Montreal. Michael worked as a pediatrician in a  
public hospital. Bonnie had studied film in California—the first film  
she shot was of César Chávez’s first march in Sacramento. In  
Canada, she made a film in which welfare recipients interviewed one  
another about health care; she made a series of films about the  
community organizer Saul Alinsky; later, she made a film about women  
peace activists, at Greenham Common and in the Soviet Union. (“I had  
pretty simplistic political ideas about dialogue,” she says now.  
“You know, an enemy is somebody whose stories you haven’t  
heard.”) In 1980, she set out to make a feminist film about sex, to  
be titled “Celebration,” but instead made “Not a Love Story,”  
about pornography. She was involved in a feminist film group at the  
National Film Board called Studio D. Her friends at Studio D were into  
solstices and female spirituality, and at one point she confided to  
her daughter that she wanted to be a witch. “My mother was always  
saying things like that,” Klein recalled later in her mother’s  
memoir. “She always wanted to be more of a hippie earth mother than  
she actually was. . . . The Joan Baez fantasy ran deep. It would  
resurface every few years, and she would learn to play  
‘Greensleeves’ again.”

Her parents’ careers, so very Canadian, give Klein’s commitment to  
public institutions an emotional force, beyond her sense that profit  
distorts certain functions, such as health care. “Both of my parents  
lived through a honeymoon period in the public sector,” she says.  
“My mother and Studio D were always furious because they weren’t  
getting the resources they thought they deserved, but from the outside  
perspective it was, like, Oh, my God. You were allowed to have a  
women’s studio making films about social change within a huge public  
institution! And my father was able to do something similar within the  
health-care system, starting the birthing room at the hospital”—he  
admitted midwives and alternative medicine, and waged a campaign  
against unnecessary surgical interventions in childbirth. “It’s  
easy to deride the idea of government in America, where people’s  
association with the public sphere is the post office.”

Naomi and her older brother, Seth, were brought up to be proud of the  
history of their family and of the left. “I can’t tell you a  
time,” Seth Klein says, “when I didn’t simultaneously know that I  
really liked Disney movies and that Walt Disney was a bastard.” When  
they drove to their cabin in Vermont on weekends, Bonnie and Michael  
would play tapes of a Pacifica Radio show that related American  
history through folk music—the story of McCarthyism through the  
Weavers, the civil-rights movement through the Freedom Singers. When  
Seth was little, he worried that all the good fights had already been  
fought, but Bonnie told him that she was sure he would find something  
that needed attending to, and from an early age he was on the lookout  
for what that thing might be—what fight would turn out to be his  
identity and his legacy. When he was in the sixth grade, his father  
took him to hear Helen Caldicott speak against nuclear weapons, and he  
decided that that was it. He started an anti-nuclear group, and after  
graduating he took a year off to travel around the country with the  
group, speaking to students.

While Seth was the good activist child, Naomi always resented being  
dragged to demonstrations. She found her mother’s feminism repellent.  
“She really didn’t like the way I dressed,” Bonnie says. “My  
crowd at Studio D wore long skirts, schlumpy clothes.” Naomi recalled  
that when she was eight or nine she spent “an entire journey through  
the Rockies conducting covert makeovers on everyone in the car. My  
father would lose the sandals and get a sharp, dignified suit, my  
mother a helmet hairdo and a wardrobe of smart pastel blazers, skirts  
and matching pumps.” She fought with her parents all the time.  
“Since I was an impeccable liar and rarely got caught,” Naomi  
recalled, “our fights were less about actual transgressions than  
about my silence, my sullenness and, as my dad was always fond of  
putting it, my ‘refusal to be part of this family.’ ”

Naomi spent her adolescence in her room writing poetry or  
experimenting in the bathroom with makeup. Bonnie was appalled. She  
worried that Naomi was turning into a brat, thinking about clothes,  
spending time in front of the mirror. “I think we were overly  
concerned about the kind of typical teen-age stuff she was into,”  
Bonnie says. “She read Judy Blume! I was beside myself. I was a  
feminist—I wanted my daughter to be good at math.” “They had  
imagined themselves to be breeding a new kind of post-revolutionary  
child,” Naomi wrote in her twenties. “Hadn’t they diligently  
mushed their own baby food? Read Parent Effectiveness Training? Banned  
war toys and other ‘gendered’ play?” Bonnie says now, “I think  
she thought, ‘What’s wrong with having a good time?’ And there  
was something in us—although I don’t like to admit it—something  
of the overearnest, you know? We were always fighting something. There  
were always people who were the bad guy.” In fact, it was worse than  
that. Naomi suffered from a kind of spiritual claustrophobia: she had  
glumly concluded that any path she chose in life—conformist or  
rebellious, lawyer or itinerant poet—would be equally hackneyed and  
ridiculous. And so even her parents’ idea of a good time, which  
usually involved getting out into nature and attending to one’s  
bodily needs under artificially primitive conditions (“another  
ponchoed picnic”), was to her just more proof of their irredeemable  
cheesiness and the vast gulf between them and herself. “All my  
parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper,” she wrote. “That  
was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic  
guitar. . . . ”

Soon after she graduated from high school, two catastrophic events  
erased her animus toward her parents and their politics. First, her  
mother had a severe stroke that initially left her quadriplegic. Naomi  
quit her job and spent most of the six months that Bonnie was in the  
hospital at her side. Then, during her first semester at the  
University of Toronto, a gunman killed fourteen women at the École  
Polytechnique in Montreal, declaring, “I hate feminists.” She  
decided to call herself a feminist from then on.

Klein sat on a table, inside the MTV studios, in Manhattan. She swung  
her legs back and forth. She was wearing a long necklace and black  
high-heeled mini-boots. She may have made up with her parents, but in  
matters of style she stands firm against activism of the old school.  
She wears jeans, but she is groomed as flawlessly as an anchorwoman.  
She giggles, she makes jokes. She smiles a lot, especially onstage,  
though it is never clear whether she is smiling in amusement,  
politeness, irritation, or for some other reason. Her demeanor is  
friendly but guarded.

While they were waiting for the interview to start, the interviewer, a  
young man in a black T-shirt, asked her what she’d been doing lately.  
She told him that she’d been working on the movie version of “The  
Shock Doctrine,” which was being made by the director of “Road to  
Guantánamo.”

“Did you see ‘Road to Guantánamo’?” she asked.

“No. I heard about it, though.”

“It’s excellent—it’s intercut between interviews with the  
Tipton Three”—three young British men who were held in Guantánamo  
for two years—“and they’re just, like, blokes, you know? The best  
moment in the film was when one of them suggests going to Afghanistan  
because they’ve got massive naans there. That was the reason.”

The producer, a young man in jeans and an acid-lime polo shirt,  
appeared.

“We’ll be talking about China and the Olympics, about Darfur and  
intervention,” the interviewer said. “But also about you personally 
—how you became who you are—because it’s a young audience that  
looks up to each and every person on the program. The goal is to have  
them want to be like that person.”

“Are you going to ask me my favorite band?” she asked.

“We will, yes, I’m afraid.”

“I’m going to say M.I.A., just so you know.”

“That will definitely ingratiate you with the demographic,” the  
producer said.

“I’m sucking up, that’s why I’m here. D’you think I could get  
some tea?”

Klein has been a person whom young people look up to since she found  
herself in charge of emotional teach-ins right after the Montreal  
massacre. She spent most of her time in college on politics and  
journalism; she was the editor-in-chief of the university paper, the  
Varsity. Then, after her third year, the Globe and Mail offered her a  
job, and she dropped out of school to take it. At the age of twenty- 
three, she took over as the editor of This Magazine, the Canadian  
equivalent of The Nation. But after a little more than a year she  
started to get discouraged about the state of the left—she felt that  
it had run out of things to say, apart from being outraged by people  
it disagreed with—and she decided to go back to school.

When she arrived back at university in 1996, she discovered that  
everything had changed. During her previous stint as an undergraduate,  
she had spent all her time protesting the underrepresentation of women  
and minorities in the curriculum and the media; campus politics in  
1989 had mostly meant identity politics. But students in 1996 weren’t  
interested in identity; what they talked about was economics. At the  
time, corporations were starting to make inroads into schools: soft- 
drink companies were negotiating exclusive deals; advertisements were  
appearing in bathrooms. There was a feeling in the air that  
corporations were getting too powerful—more 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.

Klein dropped out of college again and started writing a book about  
the insidious new branding culture. She thought about how much she had  
loved shiny, plastic brand-name stuff when she was a kid—everyone had 
—and she concluded that a movement was doomed to hippies-only  
irrelevance if it condemned the longing and the pleasure that brands  
could create. “Soft drink and computer brands play the roles of  
deities in our culture,” she wrote later. “They are creating our  
most powerful iconography, they are the ones building our most utopian  
monuments.” She discovered that an anti-corporatist movement was  
brewing all over the world, in response to sweatshops abroad and brand  
encroachment at home. By 1999, she had finished “No Logo,” a book  
about brands and the new movement they had inspired. Then, in an  
extraordinary stroke of publishing luck, while “No Logo” was at the  
printer’s, enormous crowds of protesters suddenly materialized  
outside a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The  
protest seemed to come out of nowhere—or, at least, that was how it  
appeared to the bewildered old left—and there was “No Logo” and  
Klein herself to explain it.

Klein lives with her husband, Avi Lewis, in a small house in Toronto,  
on a quiet street. Lewis is a host of political talk shows and a maker  
of documentaries; this year he is covering the U.S. elections for Al  
Jazeera English. Their house is very tidy, free of any sort of  
clutter. It is furnished simply, as though on one quick trip to Crate  
& Barrel. It does not look lived in, and, indeed, most of the time it  
is not: both Lewis and Klein are on the road so much that they  
estimate they have spent no more than two months in Toronto since they  
moved in, a year ago. Nonetheless, the house is important to her. “I  
come from such a line of wanderers that I wanted to stop wandering,”  
Klein says. “In Montreal, the city I grew up in, there’s no trace  
of us.” (Klein’s parents moved to British Columbia after Bonnie’s  
stroke, because the weather made it easier to get around in a  
wheelchair; Bonnie has become a disability-rights activist. Seth also  
lives in British Columbia, working on poverty issues for a think  
tank.) “I don’t like to go to the city I grew up in and feel like a  
stranger,” Klein says. “This is Avi’s city, he goes back  
generations here, and that’s as close to roots as I’m going to  
get.”

Although Klein and Lewis spend a lot of time apart, they make a point  
of preserving their dependence upon each other. Avi tries not to work  
when Naomi needs him. “He feeds her and takes care of her while  
she’s writing,” Bonnie says. “He edits things first.” He  
accompanies her on her book tours whenever he can. In 2002, Klein and  
Lewis concluded that their only hope of spending a long stretch  
together was to do a joint project, and they decided to make a film.  
They were tired of being against things all the time, and they were  
always being asked what they would suggest as an alternative, so they  
started travelling, looking for something that they could feel good  
about. They settled on Argentina, and ended up making “The Take,” a  
moving documentary about a group of laid-off workers who broke into  
their shuttered factory and started it up again as a collective. At  
the time, Buenos Aires was in turmoil, and every now and again a  
protest they were documenting would turn violent and the police would  
start shooting, and there was an ongoing discussion about what to do.  
Lewis wanted to run; Klein wanted to stay. “I was trying to dissuade  
the cowboys in our crew from putting themselves in danger,” Lewis  
says. “I was, like, ‘Just be safe, guys, it’s not our country,  
we’re here at best in a capacity of solidarity, it’s not the time  
to die.’ But Naomi said, ‘Here’s the principle: if something is  
happening and we’re the only ones witnessing it, we have a  
responsibility to posterity.’ ”

Klein and Lewis agree on most political issues, but Klein seems more  
ready to break things; more cynical; angrier. “I think Avi is too  
quick to reject revolutionary movements,” she says. “I think that  
incremental change makes sense in the Canadian context, but it  
doesn’t necessarily make sense in the mountains of Chiapas. I don’t  
fetishize guerrilla violence, but I think there are situations where  
people are justified in taking up arms. We’ve had fights about  
that.” Unlike Klein, the descendant of embittered ex-Communists,  
Lewis comes from a distinguished political family that has always been  
Socialist rather than Communist, and so has kept its political faith.  
“My earliest memories are of conventions and election nights, seeing  
grownups crying or celebrating,” Lewis says. “We understood in my  
family that we were part of a cause, a movement, and the Party,  
capitalized, was a big part of that.”

The politics of the Lewis family have changed very little in the past  
hundred years. Avi Lewis’s great-grandfather Maishe Losz was the  
leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Socialist party, in his  
small town just east of Bialystok. The Bund was anti-Bolshevik; it  
believed that revolution should be achieved through democratic  
processes, even if that meant compromise. Thus, the Bundist maxim:  
“It is better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct  
direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist.” In  
1921, fearing that he would be killed by the Red Army, Losz fled to  
Canada. Losz’s son David Lewis became the national leader of the  
Canadian democratic socialist party, the New Democratic Party. The  
N.D.P. never formed a national government, but it came to power in the  
provinces: in Canada, socialism was mainstream. David Lewis persuaded  
the Party to delete the eradication of capitalism from its manifesto,  
and he crushed movement dogmatism and indiscipline. (“When in  
heaven’s name are we going to learn that working-class politics and  
the struggle for power are not a Sunday-school class?” he asked.)  
David’s son Stephen, Avi’s father, also followed in the family  
tradition, and was elected the leader of the N.D.P. in Ontario at the  
age of thirty-two. (Avi’s mother, Michele Landsberg, is a journalist,  
who is well known in Canada for her feminism and her pugnacious left- 
wing politics—in her columns, conservatives are always “jack- 
booted” or “henchmen.”) When, in the late sixties, a faction  
called “the Waffle” threatened to splinter the Party, Stephen Lewis  
crushed it, just as his father had crushed factions before. For  
Stephen and for David, loyalty to the Party was paramount. They would  
not permit the left to destroy itself.

Stephen Lewis left office thirty years ago, and David Lewis died in  
1981, but the Lewises are still well known and beloved in Canada. “I  
live in that fantasy world in which you should say what you believe in  
and shouldn’t retreat because the electorate may not be receptive,”  
Stephen Lewis says. “That may explain why my own leadership was one  
of remarkable futility, almost legendary futility.” Recently, Lewis  
spent five years as the United Nations special envoy for H.I.V. /AIDS  
in Africa, but his respite from campaigning has not made him quieter.  
“I’m more fundamentalist now,” he says. “I have no patience for  
capitalism at all. I see now that there is almost nothing that is  
positive in this ugly international system, and that’s why I embrace  
Naomi’s view of the way the world works. I’m actually tired of my  
rhetorical outbursts—I’d like to engage in physical aggression.”

“I think there is, for my parents’ generation, a sense of  
defeat,” Avi Lewis says. “They grew up in a postwar period when it  
seemed like the world was changeable—a welfare state had been built  
and had to be protected and extended. But their adult lives have  
encompassed a long deterioration of the standard of living for the  
majority of people on this continent, and as they’ve seen the gains  
of the sixties and seventies largely erased, they’ve started to feel  
more and more hopeless. Whereas Naomi and I grew up in a time when the  
backlash was already well under way, so we may be just as pessimistic,  
but we don’t feel defeated, because we never had the luxury of  
hope.”

These days, Avi Lewis looks very much like the product of his family,  
but this was not always so. “I rebelled furiously, but without  
rebelling in the most hurtful way, which would have been to rebel  
politically,” he says. “I was a host on MuchMusic, which is our  
MTV. I knew that I wasn’t doing politics the way I was brought up to,  
and I was conflicted about that. My parents would ask me, ‘Are you  
sure you know what you’re doing? I know you love music, and it’s  
cool for you to hang out with Bowie, and you sometimes get to do a one- 
hour special on music and politics in South Africa, which is sort of  
political, but are you sure you’re doing the most you can?’ I was  
alienated from my own political inheritance. I had a tradition to fit  
into. I had a platform from the time I was four or five years old.”  
It was at this point that Lewis met Klein. They were both covering the  
Canadian elections in 1993—he for MuchMusic, she for CBC. When Lewis  
met Klein, he felt that she was freer of her family than he was of  
his, and this somehow relieved him of the urge to run away. “I always  
got the feeling that Naomi was the author of her own politics,” Lewis  
says. “And when I got close to her I started seizing the reins of my  
own political development.”

To Klein’s and Lewis’s parents, it seems that the only difference  
between their children and their families is style. “I remember  
Stephen’s father debating William F. Buckley when I was an  
undergraduate,” Michele Landsberg says. “The place was packed to  
the rafters, and we went mad with joy when David trounced that  
snakelike William Buckley. Remembering David’s rhetoric, a lot of it  
was sentimental and heartfelt old Socialist lingo, talking about the  
poor working man in his tattered raincoat. Naomi would use more irony,  
because we’ve gotten past our romanticism about how we change the  
world.” But their parents never doubted what ought to be done to make  
the world better; Lewis and Klein are not so sure. “Naomi takes the  
responsibility of young people listening to her and looking up to her  
really, really seriously,” Lewis says. “Which is precisely why she  
refuses to say, ‘Here’s the alternative, here’s what we all have  
to line up and fight for.’ Suspicion of people who know what the  
answer is—that’s very characteristic of our generation, and  
that’s one of the reasons I’ve never gone into politics. It’s  
very difficult for both of us when people look to us for the kind of  
certainty that earlier generations had.” One of the few political  
leaders whom Klein really likes is Subcommandant Marcos, the head of  
the Zapatistas, in Mexico, who makes a fetish of his elusiveness and  
doubt.

In “No Logo,” Klein celebrated the anarchic formlessness of the  
anti-corporate protests—what she wryly termed “laissez-faire  
organizing.” Her generation of activists was “challenging systems  
of centralized power on principle, as critical of left-wing, one-size- 
fits-all state solutions as of right-wing market ones,” she wrote.  
“It is often said disparagingly that this movement lacks ideology, an  
overarching message, a master plan. This is absolutely true, and we  
should be extraordinarily thankful.” These days, the movement long  
gone, she is not so sanguine about it. “What I was responding to at  
the time was people on the left who I thought were opportunistically  
trying to impose their solutions,” she says. “I was hoping that  
more of an articulation would emerge in a grass-roots way, but it’s  
not happening—I think because the entire discussion was severed on  
September 11th. The mainstream N.G.O.s became frightened of being  
associated with people who seemed quasi-terrorist, and then we started  
talking about war.” Lewis has never been as enamored as Klein of the  
movement’s lack of discipline, and she admits now that he may have  
been right. “Seeing how easy it was for everything to evaporate,  
without institutions taking that energy and nailing it down—we were  
too ephemeral,” she says. “It was that experience that made me feel  
like we need to be more tangible, whether it’s political parties or  
putting it in writing.”

In the end, despite all his suspicion of leaders and certainty, Lewis  
loves and honors his family tradition. The N.D.P. regularly approaches  
him about running for office (as it does Klein), and he thinks  
seriously about doing so (she does not). During the recent election  
campaign in Canada, Klein advocated strategic voting—voting for  
either the Liberals or the N.D.P., depending on which had a better  
chance of winning in a particular district, to promote the greater  
goal of unseating the Tories. “I don’t believe enough in the N.D.P.  
to really care,” she says. Avi tried to talk her out of it, while her  
father-in-law was appalled. “I don’t have one minute’s use for  
strategic voting,” Stephen Lewis says. “I just believe in the most  
intransigent of ways that you vote for your convictions.” But Klein  
doesn’t have much use for political parties. When she is asked about  
this, she explains that she has seen liberation movements betrayed by  
the politicians they fought to get elected, but her impatience appears  
to be rooted in something more than that: she seems to dislike parties  
and, indeed, governments, in a visceral way, almost the way that  
Milton Friedman does. In principle, she is a Keynesian, but she  
distrusts centralization, institutions, platforms, theories—anything  
except extremely small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives.  
Basically, she really, really doesn’t like being told what to do.

It is clear, in “The Shock Doctrine,” just how deeply she disdains  
the political. She tends to conflate very different right-wing groups— 
neoconservatives, crony capitalists, libertarians. (In the end, “The  
Shock Doctrine” is not so much anti-Friedman as anti-corporate.) And  
in hunting down instances in which ideology has been used as a cover  
for enriching cronies and corporations, she slides into the position  
that politics is always and everywhere about enrichment. Her great  
strength—following the money; never taking ideology at face value but  
always questioning who benefits from it; helping to pull the left back  
to the economic analysis that it forgot during the era of “the  
personal is political”—is also a weakness. Her materialism is such  
that she sometimes seems scarcely to believe that politics exists at  
all. At one point, for instance, she argues that the Israeli élite  
lost interest in peace in large part because Israeli companies were  
doing a booming business in security technology, which benefits from  
war. She argues that the Chinese Communist Party cracked down on  
protesters in Tiananmen Square not in order to protect its power but  
in order to protect Deng Xiaoping’s economic-liberalization program  
(of which breach of orthodoxy, in fact, many in the Party were quite  
suspicious—a suspicion only reinforced by the pro-Western protests).

“I’m not a utopian thinker,” Klein says. “I don’t imagine my  
ideal society. I don’t really like to read those books, either. I’m  
just much more comfortable talking about things that are.” The only  
time she has ever felt a whiff of utopia was in Buenos Aires, in 2002,  
when the political system had virtually disintegrated—during the time  
that she and Lewis were filming “The Take.” “That moment in  
Argentina was an incredible time because a vacuum opened up,” she  
says. “They had thrown out four Presidents in two weeks, and they had  
no idea what to do. Every institution was in crisis. The politicians  
were hiding in their homes. When they came out, housewives attacked  
them with brooms. And, walking around Buenos Aires at night, there  
were meetings on every other street corner. Every plaza where there  
was a streetlight, people were meeting under it and talking about what  
to do about the external debt, I swear to God. Groups of one hundred  
or five hundred people. And organizing buying groceries together  
because they could get cheaper prices, setting up barters because the  
currency was worthless. It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever  
seen.”

Klein believes that change comes about only when social movements  
become so large and disruptive that politicians can no longer ignore  
them. This is another of her ongoing arguments with her in-laws:  
whether social movements can really change things. Stephen Lewis is as  
susceptible to their allure as the next new leftist—he drove down to  
Little Rock in 1957, when Orval Faubus called out the militia, to  
witness the civil-rights movement firsthand—but in the end he remains  
a politician. “Naomi’s and Avi’s profound skepticism is not a  
skepticism I share, even though they have far more evidence than I  
do,” he says. “There was a period when people like Avi and Naomi  
actually thought that the social movements could sort of take over.  
But you may have a green movement which has influence on carbon tax,  
you may have a campaign for nuclear disarmament which lowers the  
temperature over the arms race, but you never have an over-all gestalt  
which can do everything from day care to foreign aid and see it as  
part of an over-all pattern to change the world. That has to come  
through politics.”

Both Klein and Lewis are skeptical about Barack Obama. “I’ve been  
at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one  
feels,” Lewis says. “It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to  
allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak  
life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama  
creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you  
actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the  
right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set  
things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting  
engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned  
is very, very damaging.” Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any  
politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more  
progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first  
saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first  
response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as  
good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means  
whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you  
hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture  
and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait  
a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is  
he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan.  
He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the  
back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if  
people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To  
this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the  
nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to  
move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy  
stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians  
to take riskier positions.”

For someone who places so much weight on social movements, though,  
Klein can get dyspeptic when she finds herself in the middle of one.  
Activists are so earnest, so dedicated, so—like her parents.  
“Marches depress me,” she says. “Going for a walk and chanting— 
I get nothing out of it.” When she began participating in the anti- 
globalization movement, she understood that protests outside trade  
summits were the main way that the movement was making itself heard,  
but they still seemed a little comical to her. “Is this really what  
we want?” she wrote in a column in the summer of 2000. “A movement  
of meeting stalkers, following the trade bureaucrats as if they were  
the Grateful Dead?” The World Social Forum in Brazil ought to have  
been a place where she felt at home, but there was too much chanting,  
and José Bové went around with bodyguards to protect him from the  
paparazzi, and the activists kept accusing one another of racism and  
classism, and the cultural interludes were hard to take. “A line of  
dancers appeared on stage, heads bowed in shame, feet shuffling,” she  
wrote, describing one. “[Then] the people on stage began to run,  
brandishing the tools of their empowerment: hammers, saws, bricks,  
axes, books, pens, computer keyboards, raised fists. In the final  
scene, a pregnant woman planted seeds—seeds, we were told, of another  
world.”

The only kind of protest she likes is the Yippie kind, theatrical  
enough to be entertaining and self-mocking enough to dilute the  
earnestness to a level that she can tolerate. At the protests in  
Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, for example— 
when the officials surrounded themselves with a tall protective fence,  
a group of activists built a medieval-style wood catapult and lobbed  
Teddy bears over the top. “Quebec City was just madness,” she says.  
“It was one of those times when nobody knows what’s going to  
happen, and there are these breakthrough moments, these liberated  
moments, these moments of euphoria. It was mostly young people, and  
they were getting gassed, but they were still enjoying themselves  
tremendously, playing cat and mouse with the police. What I loved  
about it was that the whole city joined in—people working in cafés  
on the main streets, and neighbors got buckets of water to wash out  
people’s eyes. It was like an alternative reality.”

After the death of Milton Friedman, in 2006, the University of Chicago  
decided to set up an institute in his honor. The institute was opposed  
by many professors, who formed a group to protest it. Klein offered to  
debate someone from the institute’s board, but nobody would do it, so  
she agreed to go to Chicago and talk about her own objections to the  
project.

The evening was sponsored in part by the Platypus Affiliated Society— 
a student-teacher reading group that focusses on the Frankfurt School  
and the Second International period of Marxism—and a few of  
Platypus’s members, tall, thin, pale young men, had set up a table  
out front. Platypus was founded on the idea that the left didn’t have  
a proper sense of its own history, especially the bad bits, and that a  
study of that history would help it emerge from the troubled state in  
which it found itself. (“Protest has devolved into an insular  
subculture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a  
pathological attitude towards social integration,” a typically morose  
editorial in the Platypus Review declares.) Given its emphasis on self- 
criticism, Platypus was not a natural constituency for Klein’s work,  
but because she was coming to the campus the group read “The Shock  
Doctrine,” and also Hayek and Friedman. “The conservatives engage  
the questions of freedom and utopia directly,” Ian Morrison, the  
editor of Platypus’s newsletter, said. “We were very struck that  
Klein seemed to back away from utopianism, because we feel that the  
left has liquidated itself in part because it’s conceded talk about  
freedom to someone like Bush.” Platypus’s interrogation of the past  
has led it in a variety of directions. Several of its members also  
belonged to the new Students for a Democratic Society, a revival of  
the new-left group from the sixties. In August, Platypus participated  
in a historical reënactment, in Grant Park, of the 1968 Democratic  
Convention, minus the police. “As a group of young, largely  
inexperienced activists it was the only organizing framework we could  
find which emphasized active participation,” read a writeup of the  
event in the Platypus Review. “Other forms seemed linguistically and  
ideologically flaccid. . . . We didn’t want to view our history—our  
radical history—as if from a riverbank, we wanted to jump in and  
splash around in it. . . . We debated, for instance, the ethics of  
nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed it, and  
where would it stay?”

The Platypus men filed into the front row of Assembly Hall, and Klein  
stood at the lectern. There was a good crowd, not just people from the  
campus. Three anarchists had driven up from St. Louis specially to see  
her. “What we have been living since Reagan is a policy of liberating  
the forces of greed,” she declared. “I don’t think the project  
has actually been the development of the world and the elimination of  
poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against  
the poor, I think that they won, and I think the poor are fighting  
back.”

Klein never tempers her arguments in search of converts from the  
center; she rallies her base. She’s not interested in making the left  
part of the mainstream; she wants to convince the left that it  
doesn’t need the mainstream. “Part of what makes us less strong  
than we should be,” she says, “those of us who don’t believe that  
profit should govern every aspect of our lives, is that part of us  
accepts the narrative that neoliberal ideas have triumphed around the  
world because they were popular and our ideas failed.” For this  
reason, it is important to her, in “The Shock Doctrine,” that there  
be virtually no exceptions—that is, instances where radical market  
reforms are enacted with the consent of a people. (In passing, she  
concedes Reagan and Sarkozy.) But some of her examples are less  
plausible than others. She argues that the Falklands War—a ten-week  
venture whose main impact on Britain was an outpouring of jingoistic  
glee—was “a large enough political crisis,” creating sufficient  
“disorder” to enable Margaret Thatcher to “impose” her economic  
agenda. (It is true that, without the glee, Thatcher might not have  
won the next election, but ill-gotten popularity and traumatized  
regression are not the same thing.) Klein dismisses as a “propaganda  
exercise” a referendum held by Boris Yeltsin in which a majority of  
voters supported his reforms, on the odd ground that it was  
nonbinding. She maintains that the war in Chechnya was waged not in  
order to crush secessionism but in order to protect Yeltsin’s  
economic policy. Thus, she concludes, it “contributed significantly  
to the Chicago School crusade death toll.” “Naomi is a pattern  
recognizer,” Lewis says. “Some people feel that she’s bent  
examples to fit the thesis. But her great strength is helping people  
recognize patterns in the world, because that’s the fundamental first  
step toward changing things.”

Throughout “The Shock Doctrine,” Klein is at pains to portray  
Friedman as a quasi-Satanic figure. The first chapter of the book  
describes the horrifying psychiatric experiments performed in the  
nineteen-fifties by one Donald Ewen Cameron, in which subjects were  
tortured by electroshock. She characterizes this work as a metaphor  
for the economic shocks performed in Friedman’s name; the next  
chapter, about Friedman, is titled “The Other Doctor Shock.” The  
promotional film that Klein made with Alfonso Cuarón is even cruder— 
a pastiche of disturbing footage of patients receiving electroshock  
treatment, images of prisoners being tortured, and the sound of a  
child wailing in an echoey room. “Unable to advance their agenda  
democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of  
shock,” Klein says in the voice-over, in the calmly terrorizing tone  
of a campaign attack ad. “Friedman understood that, just as prisoners  
are softened up for interrogation by the shock of their capture,  
massive disasters could serve to soften us up for his radical free- 
market crusade.”

Why does Klein place such emphasis on Friedman? Perhaps because she  
wants to draw a parallel between capitalism and Communism, to make  
their two histories look as similar as possible, and for that she  
needs not the messy, pragmatic, ad-hoc capitalism of corporations but  
the purist, utopian capitalism of the Chicago School. Violent  
autocrats of the free-market persuasion, though there have been many,  
have not soiled Friedman’s name in the way that Stalin soiled Marx;  
somehow, the misdeeds of a Pinochet or a Suharto or a Yeltsin are  
attributed to these men as individuals—to their lust for power, their  
greed, their drinking. But Klein holds capitalism guilty of all their  
sins. Friedman’s followers must no longer get away with shaking their  
heads when their advisees start killing people, she believes. They  
should feel themselves dupes, fellow-travellers, accessories: they  
should acknowledge their willed ignorance and complicity, as her  
grandparents and the Communists of their generation were forced to do.

“My grandparents were pretty hard-core Marxists, and in the thirties  
and forties they believed fervently in the dream of egalitarianism  
that the Soviet Union represented,” Klein told the audience in  
Chicago. “They had their illusions shattered by the reality of  
gulags, of extreme repression, hypocrisy, Stalin’s pact with  
Hitler. . . . The left has been held accountable for the crimes  
committed in the name of its extreme ideologies, and I believe that’s  
been a very healthy process. . . . When you start issuing policy  
prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer  
have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will  
affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually  
affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your  
utopian theories.”

The day after the Chicago event, Klein taped an appearance on “The  
Colbert Report,” then went directly to the airport for a flight to  
France. She came back and went on a speaking tour to Texas, Colorado,  
California, and Wisconsin, did two panels in New York, and then later  
flew to Chicago for its humanities festival and to Miami for the book  
fair. She spent a week in Poland. Everywhere she went, she stuck to  
her theme. “The crash on Wall Street should be for Friedmanism what  
the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian Communism, an  
indictment of an ideology,” she says. It was clear to her that the  
past month had proved what she’d been saying for years. Now, if she  
could only speak often enough, to enough people, and explain things  
persuasively enough, maybe the left would stop wringing its hands and  
the right would start apologizing. It seemed unlikely, but she would  
try all the same. ♦