Naomi Klein: On fire Allen Lane 2019, 309pp £20.00 (hardback) and No is not enough, Penguin Books 2018, 273pp £9.99 (paperback)
Over the last two decades, Naomi Klein has built a global reputation for radical books such as No Logo (2000) and This changes everything (2014). She writes with a clarity and commitment which has influenced many, among them Greta Thunberg, who says ‘Naomi Klein’s work has always moved and guided me. She is the chronicler of our age of climate emergency.’ Klein does not just write books, however: she would regard herself as an activist, first in the anti-capitalist movement, and then in the movement against climate change. Both No Logo and This changes everything are examples of her compelling style of writing, the first addressing the brand competition behind which multinationals brutally exploit workers in underdeveloped countries both directly and through their supply chains of sweatshops, the second dealing with the role of fossil fuel and other extractive multinationals in driving eco-destruction and global warming.
However, in our review of No Logo, we pointed out that Klein did not ‘offer a theoretical framework to examine the likely developments within a crisis-ridden global capitalist system which will accelerate the process [of finding political solutions – RC]’, adding that ‘In one sense the questions she raises inescapably lead to an issue that has been off the mainstream agenda since the collapse of the Soviet Union – of an alternative to the capitalist system and the fight for a real socialist society.’ (David Yaffe: ‘People against multinational corporations’, FRFI 154, April/May 2000)
Capitalism, not just capitalists, is the problem
Nearly 15 years later, we were more critical, describing This changes everything as ‘a politically cowardly book because while Klein gives an account of the ruthless global destruction of multinational corporations, she ignores the question of their relationship to capitalism. This is a fault that limits the reader’s understanding of the enemy.’ Why? ‘Because Klein analyses the many forms of capitalist greed, but shifts her gaze from the war-mongering imperialist states that shelter them, she evades the obvious conclusion that it is not just capitalists but capitalism that has to be overthrown and replaced by socialism’ (Susan Davidson, revolutionarycommunist.org/3834-review-this-changes-everything-capitalism-vs-the-climate). In other words, capital must of course exist as many capitals, but to limit our attention to its appearances, we miss the points first, that capital is a social relation, and cannot be limited to individual capitals and capitalists alone; second, that the social relation expresses itself in the existence of a capitalist class which monopolises the ownership of the means of production, and a working class which owns nothing but its labour power; and third, that as the ruling class, the capitalist class collectively exercises its social control over the working class through its possession of state power.
Just what is neoliberalism?
With the two books under review, the question we have to ask is, has Klein moved on? Has she developed her position politically to more adequately represent today’s reality, and to provide a clear and uncompromising direction for the masses of young people who have been actively engaged in building a mass movement against climate change and its impact? The answer is a resounding ‘no’; her critique of what she calls neoliberalism remains superficial; her theoretical understanding of capital as a whole remains as underdeveloped as it was 20 years ago, and when she comes to advance strategies for dealing with the crisis the question of state power is not even a consideration for her – class is not a factor in any of her thinking. So she writes in No is not enough:
‘There is a lot of confusion around the word neoliberalism, and about who is a neoliberal. And understandably so. So let’s break it down. Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world’s elites, regardless of partisan affiliation…Neoliberalism is shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere and anything that’s not either the workings of the markets or the decisions of individual consumers.’ (pp79-80)
She offers no explanation as to why this development took place in the 1980s. She identifies its key elements as ‘privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sphere, and low taxes paid for by cuts to public services, and all of this locked in under corporate-friendly trade deals’ (ibid p80). Yet what is its purpose? Klein cannot tell us. She says later: ‘Neoliberalism is a very profitable set of ideas’ – a fetishised concept if ever there was one – ‘which is why I am always a little hesitant to describe it as an ideology. What it really is, at its core, is a rationale for greed.’ (p82) But the greed of the capitalist as the personification of capital has existed since the dawn of capitalism – why since the 1980s has there been a need for this extra rationale? It does not make sense, because like so many who use the term neoliberalism, Klein treats it as a policy pursued by capitalists, one that has arisen as if from nowhere. The corollary of this is that the solution to the problems of humanity is to change this policy – in other words – to keep capital but to tame or change the capitalists.
How is this to be achieved? Through politicians who are ‘willing to inflict … losses on fossil fuel companies and their allies’ and who are ‘up to the fight of the century – and absolutely clear about which side must win’ (On fire, p261). Klein does add ‘But even then, there is one more element we must never forget: any administration attempting to implement a Green New Deal will need powerful social movements both backing them up and pushing them to do more’ (ibid). But then opportunists always say this when they paint a picture of system change which excludes state violence: they imagine that resistance by the monopolies and their political representatives will dissolve in the face of the moral superiority of the social movements. Klein is keen to point out the science that informs her writing on climate change; she does not point to any historical experience which supports her political strategy. This cannot be oversight: she has had 20 years’ experience of writing on the struggle against the multinationals – but it seems she has learned nothing.
No socialism here!
The problem is that so many movements, especially those connected to fighting climate change, speak generally about the need for system change. But rarely do they specify what that system change entails, let alone its end point. They are terrified of the ‘s’ word – socialism. They are equally terrified of the sort of movement that a struggle for socialism entails. Hence the vagueness that is typical of movement like Extinction Rebellion about means and ends, but where there is one absolute certainty: the movement must be non-violent. This, an example of extreme historical illiteracy, may not be explicit in Klein’s work, but neither is there any discussion of the inevitability of state violence against social movements and how it should be dealt with. And there is certainly no serious discussion of socialism; indeed in the more recent On fire, the references to socialism are characterised by their infrequency, brevity and frankly, their shallowness. Thus she claims that ‘the reality of Soviet-era socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and the Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia.’ (pp79-80). There is not the slightest attempt to understand the problems the Soviet Union faced, constantly under threat from the imperialist world. This is just dismissed as ‘autocratic industrial socialism’ (ibid). Nor is there recognition of the pioneering work of Soviet ecologists from the 1960s onwards when they led the world in developing an understanding of global warming (see, for instance, ‘Late Soviet Ecology and the Planetary Crisis’, John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review, Vol 67 No 2 June 2015). And it is just dishonest to cite carbon footprints per capita when much of the real carbon footprint of countries such as Britain, and indeed Canada and Australia is in fact attributed to the countries from which they extract raw materials and import finished goods.
Least of all does Klein offer the reader any reference to the Cuban experience despite the fact that it widely acknowledged that Cuba is leading the world in terms of building a society with a high level of human development on an ecologically-sustainable basis. Indeed it is quite extraordinary to find that Klein has said hardly anything about Cuba over the past 20 years: she seems to treat socialism and capitalism as equivalent in their assault on the environment, and Cuba just does not fit into this rigid and abstract schema. In her address to the September 2017 Labour Party conference, she used the appalling destruction of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria which left nearly 3,000 people dead, and the total absence of any US federal response which would then leave the island without power for months to highlight the broader crisis (On fire, pp235-36). But Klein did not attempt to contrast this with the Cuban response to Hurricane Irma three weeks earlier, where 10 people lost their lives and power was restored within five days. Not even the BBC could avoid making the comparison in a report three days before Klein’s speech; however grudging its plaudits for the Cuban response were, its journalists were not to know at the time that the official Puerto Rican death toll of 13 dead they reported was later shown to be a brazen lie.
Attacking the Bolivarian revolution
Her further claim that ‘Venezuela’s petro-populism is a reminder that there is nothing inherently green about self-defined socialism’ (p251) is just reactionary: underpinning the Bolivarian Revolution has been a conscious attempt to diversify the economy away from oil-dependency while using the proceeds in the short term to improve the lives of the Venezuelan masses through vast social campaigns – literacy, the building of three million new homes, the establishment of new schools and universities and the creation of a decent health service. Just weeks after Juan Guaido launched his campaign against the Bolivarian Revolution, Klein tweeted in February 2019 ‘If you have been looking for a nuanced and very smart discussion of what is actually happening in Venezuela, I highly recommend taking some time this weekend to listen to @thedig [a podcast host – RC]. Turns out it’s possible to stand firmly against US destabilisation and petro-populism …’ What can one say? The arrogant tone, the equivalence she draws between the US and Venezuela, express a deep contempt for the Venezuelan working class and poor who have time and again shown their support for the Bolivarian Revolution.
Imperialism in crisis
There is a thread in all of this: Klein’s refusal to recognise that her understanding of capital remains mired in its superficial appearances can no longer be described as political weakness, but is resulting in positions which are downright reactionary. As we have pointed out, the concept of neoliberalism she employs has no substantial theoretical foundation: rather than lay bare the contradictions within capitalism, it obscures them by implying there is a form of capitalism which is not ‘extreme’, one that in the past enabled the New Deal and the Marshall Plan, and one which under some form of democratic control could implement the Green New Deal of the future. She cannot talk rationally about socialism since she does not see, and certainly cannot prove, its necessity, and she therefore cannot talk sensibly about state power. Contrast therefore her impoverished concept of neoliberalism with that put forward by Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel when, in a speech on 14 December 2019, he explained that
‘Neoliberalism has forced the world economy to move from production to speculation. While the world Gross Domestic Product is growing at an annual average of 1% to 2%, financial profits grow more than 5% a year. While eight hundred and twenty million people are threatened with death by hunger, twenty trillion dollars are stashed in tax havens! Neoliberalism produces what Marx foresaw: people have no value as human beings, but on the basis of the commodities they hold. This is brutal dehumanisation. Neoliberalism does not promote globalisation, but global colonisation. Its purpose is to make the world a great market to which only the rich have access, the rest are excluded; they are disposable beings, condemned to an early death. Neoliberalism is based on competition, socialism on solidarity. Neoliberalism in the private accumulation of wealth; socialism in the sharing of wealth. Neoliberalism in defending the interests of capital; socialism, human rights and those of nature… We don’t build models for the 1%. We don’t build exclusion models. We are building solidarity models and practising integration.’
For Diaz-Canel, neoliberalism is the face of imperialism in crisis. The alternative is therefore clear: socialism. Klein complains that ‘most of us have been trained to avoid a systemic and historical analysis of capitalism’ (On fire, p267), but in her case, the training has been so thorough that although she says then that the crises we face can be ‘overcome only with a holistic vision for social and economic transformation’ (ibid), she cannot say how such a transformation will take place, and crucially, how it will be made permanent – because that would mean dealing with state power. In No is not enough, she writes of the process to produce a blueprint for a Green New Deal in Canada in which she participated, the Leap Manifesto. The Manifesto puts forward many praiseworthy policies, but the real question of course is how they will be realised – and here we enter familiar political territory of the petit bourgeois left with the claim that ‘the money we need to pay for this great transformation is available – we just need the right policies to release it’ (No is not enough, p270). Those policies include financial transaction taxes, cuts to military spending, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, the ‘oligarch ruling class’ which she says earlier ‘cannot continue to run riot without rules’ (ibid, p82) – but who is going to enforce these rules or policies? And will the oligarch ruling class just accept the ‘bottom up revival’ of local democracy the Manifesto demands, one which it says ‘will lead to a renewal of democracy at every level of government’ (ibid, p271)? There is no cautionary note anywhere which posits the possibility let alone the inevitability of ruling class resistance, the tools at its disposal, and how the movement would address such a challenge. It is salutary to remind ourselves of Engels’ description of the state as a ‘special, public power’ ‘necessary because a self-acting armed organisation of the population has become impossible since the split into classes … This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds.’
The question of the state is not an abstract one: it is a reality for any movement standing against climate change. Even today, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, the military has been drafted in not just to help the NHS or in food distribution, but explicitly on stand-by in the event of looting or civil disorder. It is a ‘public power’ in the hands of one class, the ruling class, precisely because of the irreconcilable division between the ruling class and the working class. How does Klein imagine fossil fuel multinationals, agribusiness giants and other extractive industries will react when threatened with the massive destruction of their capital that will accompany the implementation of the Green New Deal? How will the giant banks react when they too face the losses that would accompany the cancellation of the debt of underdeveloped countries, a precondition to them being able to address their climate change crisis? The Leap Manifesto does not make any concrete proposals as to how to deal with the massive interests of Canadian mining internationals in, for instance, Latin America, and it does not mention the role of the banks. These are not oversights: such omissions are the symptoms of a petit bourgeois social chauvinist position, one which cannot arrive at an internationalist position because it will not accept socialism as the answer let alone understand that we live in a world dominated by imperialism. By refusing to consider these questions, by opposing socialism, Klein is miseducating a climate change movement already dominated by petit bourgeois ideas. She cannot play a positive political role, so she must be challenged as we build an effective movement against climate change which challenges the system of imperialism which has brought us to this crisis.
Robert Clough
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 275, March/April 2020
