Naomi Klein: Beyond the Brand

By Marc Cooper, AlterNet. Posted May 23, 2001.

There's a whole new generation of young activists on our campuses and streets. But few seem to be able to make any sense of them, almost inevitably measuring them up -- or down -- against the yardstick of the '60s. Thirty years have passed sinced the days of Kent State and the Chicago 8 and, therefore, many of the comparisons don't jibe. For one, the overwhleming majority of the new protestors were born long after the war in Vietnam was concluded.

So if it's not against a war, or for civil rights for which these young people are coming into the streets, what is it they want? A clue to what motivates them can be found in what they read. And if you peek into their backpacks, it's unlikely youi'll find Mao or Guevara or even Marx. More likely you will find Klein -- Naomi Klein. the 30-year-old Canadian journalist burst onto the scene last year with her highly acclaimed book No Logo: Taling Aim at the Brand Bullies. No less than a manifesto against the encroachment of corporate values into every aspect of modern life, the book has become required reading in activist study circles across the continent.

Nation magazine contributing editor Marc Cooper recently spoke with Klein...

Marc Cooper: The protests of the '60s against the Vietnam War were very easy to grasp. The war was a simple, black-and-white issue, and you were on one side or the other. The issues of free trade and globalization are much more complex. Yet, these issues have sparked activism in a lot of young people who previously weren't activists. Why?

Naomi Klein: People went to Quebec City looking for lots of different things. It was incredibly chaotic and decentralized. It wasn't one protest or two protests: It was hundreds of protests. But I think that everyone was looking for some direct participation in the political process in the face of a feeling that power is being delegated to points farther and farther away from where we live, and that power is increasingly in the hands of less-transparent, more-distant institutions. That, I think, was the feeling that united this disparate protest -- a desire to kind of reclaim democracy. Which is the same desire we heard expressed in the streets of Seattle in 1999 and in Los Angeles during the Democratic convention.

MC: Is it just trade pacts, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, that this new generation of activists is rejecting?

NK: I think that people definitely are questioning more than trade. There is a questioning of some fundamental capitalist principles, including trickle-down economics. We have lived through an economic boom. Tremendous amounts of money have been made under NAFTA. But, at the same time, we see great economic disparity. Seventy-five percent of the Mexican population lives in poverty. The minimum wage buys less now than it did pre-NAFTA. Economic disparity has clearly increased in Mexico. Nor has the agreement raised environmental standards as promised. According to the Sierra Club, net pollution in Mexico has doubled under NAFTA.

MC: You've been an advocate for this movement, but you've also offered your own criticisms of it, suggesting that it has, to quote you loosely, the potential to become like a Grateful Dead tour, with a group of young people trailing from one summit to another, protesting outside the fences. What problems does this movement face in growing into a mature political movement that can clearly articulate both its objectives and its solutions?

NK: I think there is an awareness that summit-hopping is unsustainable. The real task of this movement now is to connect the global and the local, so that it doesn't look like a roving band of Deadheads. Essentially, every so-called global issue can be boiled down to a local issue, to something like whether you have the right to decide whether there is going to be a toxic-waste dump in your backyard. The movement today has two basic types: There's this roving band of activists enjoying triumphant moments, of which I suppose I'm a part. And then there are all the people who are working at the local level against homelessness, gentrification, racism, police violence. That group is asking the other, "What the hell are you guys so happy about?" It's clear that the two groups need to meet somewhere in the middle. I believe that process is happening, and that we started to see it happen with the protests around the FTAA last week. Because even though Quebec City got all the attention, there were protests against gentrification and its relationship to economic disparities in San Francisco. There were protests at the San Diego-Tijuana border. There were protests in Detroit. There's a consensus that what needs to happen next is that the movement needs to be radically decentralized and localized. And I believe that's already happening.

MC: You've spoken a lot on college campuses. Talk a bit about today's students.

NK: These kids have grown up in an era when the role of marketing is to cool-hunt, to find and co-opt the latest, most cutting-edge, most radical ideas coming out of this culture. But I think that growing up in that context has pushed some people in this generation to think about what isn't co-optable. And that's in part why I think we're seeing a deeper questioning of the way capitalism works.

MC: Were you encouraged by what happened in Quebec City?

NK:There is something really inspiring about the fact that in the face of this radical individualism and atomization of our time, people still show that they want to be part of something larger than themselves. And I think that's fundamentally where we're at right now. I can tell you that the thousands of people who were in Quebec City last weekend were radicalized by their experience there, in part by how dramatically they were shut out of the political process. A fence was built around the city, and police used the pretext of a cou ple of people throwing rocks at the fence to douse the entire city in tear gas, basically making all assembly impossible.

MC: Your critics say that you're tilting at windmills, that this process of economic globalization is inevitable. How do you respond to that?

NK: I think the most significant thing about these protesters is that they reject that sort of fatalistic passivity. I call it the end of the end of history. And it's really significant because the young people who are on the streets grew up with this idea that ideology was dead, that self-determination in the face of market forces was obsolete. And that's precisely the passivity that they are rejecting. Just to be more concrete, I think we've also seen some real victories. I think probably the most significant one that came down just before the protest in Quebec City was the fact that the multinational drug companies were forced to drop their lawsuit against the South African government over AIDS drugs. And that was precisely because of this tilting at windmills.

MC: Has this movement had any effect on the way global trade pacts are being negotiated and implemented?

NK: Well, it's very hard to measure. I do think the FTAA is clearly under threat. But it's just a slowing down of the process, not actually changing the course. Still, there is no doubt that the protests have changed the way politicians talk about globalization. There has been a re-branding process that's gone on. Globalization is now portrayed as a vast poverty-elimination program. The World Bank exists solely to eradicate AIDS in Africa. This is what we've seen as a response to the protests. But what is becoming more and more difficult to ignore, of course, is the track record. A lot of people in Quebec were talking about the flagrant act of unilateralism made by George W. Bush right before the Quebec summit, which was to abandon the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. People are losing faith in the idea that we're creating a rules-based system that everyone abid es by. The U.S. is acting more and more unilaterally, and so is Europe. What's being created is a set of rules that's forced by the richest countries onto the poorest ones. It's almost like unilateralism has become the new luxury item, and only the very rich are allowed to cling to it.

Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to The Nation. He is author of Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir.

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