Just Don’t Confuse Her with Naomi Wolf

I missed my blog-a-day commitment yesterday, I have a week’s worth of work to do in, like, one day, and my stomach has been killing me for at least 36 hours straight. But I feel obligated to get something up about Will Wilkinson’s post on Naomi Klein.

First a quote from the New Yorker profile on Klein that inspired Wilkinson’s post:

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.

Wow. What long-suffering, self-sacrificing activism for the anti-globalization movement. Just why is it that lefty anticapitalists get a free pass when it comes to celebrity status? People like Klein, Al Gore, Michael Moore, etc. are feted and highly paid, and generally just all-around recipients of gross amounts of cultural as well as pecuniary capital, and it seems like no one blinks an eye. Yes, I know, some people do blink an eye at the hypocrisy, but only a jealous handful on the right, it seems, who most likely would just as eagerly lap up accolades if given the chance. There seems to be a secret but widely observed pact among leftists, the same one that endorses persecution of all CEOs and successful businessmen as evil vampires, but never questions the lavish salaries paid to, say, Hollywood celebrities—especially when the politics of those celebs are in a neat liberal line, as with Brad Pitt and countless others.

I suppose this is a tired argument, however, and perhaps that is why Wilkinson does not bring it up. He instead zeroes in on Klein’s vague anarchism (and I am going to paste a quote-within-a-quote):

I think this passage nicely sums up Klein’s romantic, anti-intellectual, solidarity-craving rejection of the extended order of impersonal exhange:

“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 has no picture of an ideal society. She doesn’t like to read books about it, either. What she knows deep down (not in that book-knowledge sort of way), what she’s really got to work from, is this: that the sight of nervous people thrown together by crisis, deliberating under streetlights about what to do next in order to make ends meet is… profoundly inspiring. Her objection to “disaster capitalism” is not so much that it is capitalism that follows the disaster, but that the engaged community of disaster eventually comes to an end.

So, Klein finds her life’s inspiration in Buenos Aires. Of course. Latin America seems to be the favorite of many a contemporary Western anticapitalist, now that the USSR is an embarrassing, inaccessible failure. And Wilkinson is correct to seize on Klein’s romance with disaster itself: she finds panicked assembly of the disenfranchised infinitely more “inspiring” than boring bourgeois peacefulness. And she admires them for making like good natives and “bartering” collectively rather than soiling their hands with filthy capital like their northern neighbors. Would she have really been so thrilled to see such freaked-out people thronging closer to home?

Basically, Klein exhibits a pathological obsession with local organization that I have observed among the lefty anarchists of her stripe. As a libertarian/market anarchist myself, I also happen to favor the local, but I do not simultaneously exhibit a passionate love of big government. And, frankly, I am perhaps not in the best position to critique Klein’s position because I simply do not understand how one can hold such contradictory beliefs side-by-side. The closest I can come to making sense of it is that Klein and similarly-minded leftists want a very specific performance of local organization. It’s supposed to take place “under streetlights” and in great tension and under extremely restricted conditions of trade, which ensure that no one gets unduly rich or leaves the group or dilutes the culture of a similarly endearing small mass huddled somewhere far away. And if this performance of the local is threatened by the buildup of capital, or unseemly consumerism, or evidence of inequality, then, by God, big government is entitled—obligated—to step in and correct the deviation.

At least Klein is spot on about Obama and his very corporatist campaign (and impending rule):

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. 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.

The gimmickiness of the “Yes We Can” campaign has long been evident to me, but her comparison of it to the Nike ads demonstrates that Klein is more fluent in capitalist-speak than I am. I mean, seriously: how is it that people who are supposedly oh-so-critical of the corporate takeover of our existence, and the ubiquity of advertising, could be so taken in by what was so blatantly a mere slogan? One intended to sell you on a product far more obscene than a pair of sneakers? Dislike Nike though you may, they’re not going to be sending troops anywhere anytime soon.

Of course, the cloud to that silver lining is that Klein, and others of her ilk, mostly dislike only what is corporate, and perhaps centralized, about Obama, but probably not what is “Keynesian” about him: that is, his professed interest in redistribution. As Wilkinson quotes from the article:

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.

If she is operating on Keynesian principles, how does she avoid telling others what to do? Wide-scale redistribution from rich to poor does not come about through “small, local, ad-hoc, spontaneous initiatives”; it requires equally wide-scale government apparatus. Wilkinson thus summarizes Kleinism as “[t]he yearning that massive benevolent government initiatives will somehow emerge from within Temporary Autonomous Zones.”

But the best gem of all in Wilkinson’s piece is found in the comments:

Great analysis. I was watching Naomi Klein spewing vacuities on the subject of ‘third-wave feminism’ only yesterday on the bigthink RSS feed: http://www.bigthink.com/features/935

And there you will find a video of Naomi Wolf, whose third-wave feminist politicking is more well-known than Klein’s. Women public intellectuals all look alike, I suppose, and they’re all named Naomi.