THE battle to save the world is an arduous and paradoxical one. Today's most visible scourge of globalisation and brands is herself an inexhaustible globetrotting brand: a 32-year-old Canadian journalist, armed with little more than a portable computer, a plane ticket and Internet access. Naomi Klein is the pre-eminent figure (she would deplore the term “leader”) in a worldwide protest movement against companies, free trade and global integration—in effect, against capitalism—that has no name or organisation, but is the most vigorous expression of leftist sentiment since the 1960s.
The movement burst on to the scene in Seattle in December 1999, with protests against the World Trade Organisation. With uncanny timing, Ms Klein's first book, “No Logo”, was published weeks later. Since translated into 15 languages, “No Logo” has become a manifesto for the loose network of activists who now ritually disrupt global summits. Ms Klein is currently promoting a second volume, “Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalisation Debate”.
The views of this brand-basher—part pop star, part crusader—on what is wrong with the world are studied avidly by street mobs and boards of directors everywhere. At a recent debate with The Economist in New York, Ms Klein drew a sell-out crowd of 1,000, with hundreds more turned away. As her fame spreads, admittedly, there are small signs of resistance. “Fences and Windows”, comprising selections from speeches and articles, has had some tepid reviews, at least by the standard of adulation that greeted “No Logo”. Now and then somebody dares to write that she is all brand and no content. But for the moment she continues to command a wide following.
Ms Klein, by her own account, was a late developer as a social revolutionary. Growing up in a family of activists and campaigners, her teenage rebellion took the form of devotion to the shopping mall and willing enslavement to the tyranny of the logo. When her youthful idealism kicked in, its strength and durability more than made up for its delayed onset. In her 30s, Ms Klein has all the incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent.
As she looks around the world, she sees nothing she likes, no redeeming features—except for “the movement”. The rule of corporations, as she sees it, is inherently repressive and exploitative of powerless citizens. Democracy is a sham. She gives capitalism no credit for the extraordinary progress seen in recent decades in reducing poverty and other measures of deprivation (notably child mortality) in the world's poor countries. She measures the growing-pains of capitalist development not against real-world alternatives but against a Disneyesque utopia in which no poor person ever loses his job or chooses to work in a multinational factory at low wages (by rich-world standards). As the world's poor move from farm to factory to office, jobs are inevitably lost and people uprooted. The countries that change the least, where the costs of growth are closest to zero, are those where poverty and disease are worst. This basic trade-off is never addressed.
Not her job
What is the superior alternative to capitalist development that Ms Klein proposes? She feels under no obligation to say. It is not her job to dictate to the movement. The most she can do, in all modesty, is to offer indications and observations; the people, thus empowered, must do the rest. True, one essay in “Fences and Windows” is all aflutter over Subcomandante Marcos, masked leader of Mexico's Zapatista insurgents—but this lead turns out to be a dead end when Ms Klein says approvingly that the Subcomandante is interested not in “the Revolution” but in “a revolution that makes revolution possible”. Right.
Certainly, Ms Klein is for justice, “deep” decentralised democracy (not the false kind currently practised), autonomous spaces and diversity of every kind. All these things can presumably be reconciled with the ambitious goals she would doubtless wish to see pursued in welfare spending, environmental protection and income redistribution—aims which, on the face of it, call for a high degree of centralisation and some reduction in the amount of autonomous space—but readers and listeners are never told how this contradiction might be resolved.
Ms Klein's oddest assertion is that multinational companies are more powerful than governments and consumers. Plainly, they are not. Governments regulate business as they choose, and have far more power over their citizens' lives than even the biggest multinational does. Another oddity: Ms Klein deplores freedom to trade as one of the vilest manifestations of the neoliberal tyranny. Yet in “Fences and Windows” she is very keen on taking down fences and opening windows. Surely a trade barrier is a fence and economic openness is a window. What makes trade an exception to the rule that fences are bad and windows good? We may never know.
In training her guns on free trade and big multinationals, Ms Klein is attacking the best means for reducing poverty and, for that matter, extending justice and a political voice to the world's poorest people. When companies, properly regulated and acting within the law, pursue profits, they end up increasing prosperity. This is not a theory but an easily observable fact. The result, unintended though it may be, is social good. Ms Klein denies all this at every turn—and the tragedy is that her denials have an effect.
Ms Klein's harshest critics must allow that, for an angry adolescent, she writes rather well. It takes journalistic skill of a high order to write page after page of engaging blather, so totally devoid of substance. What a pity she has turned her talents as a writer to a cause that can only harm the people she claims to care most about. But perhaps it is just a phase.
