[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Naomi Klein profile

[Patrick Bond]

New Yorker
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.”

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

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. ♦