Naomi Klein Gets Global

By Michelle Chihara, AlterNet. Posted September 25, 2002.

“I think that we should be a lot angrier. I think there's too much politeness in our response to mass theft and mafia politics.”

As the unofficial spokesperson for the anti-globalization movement, Naomi Klein wants everyone to quit calling it the "anti-globalization movement."

"The irony of the media-imposed label, 'anti-globalization,' is that we in this movement have been turning globalization into a lived reality, perhaps more so than even the most multinational of corporate executives," she writes. Klein and a globeful of protesters are building connections from "landless farmers in Brazil, to teachers in Argentina, to fast food workers in Italy... to migrant tomato pickers in Florida."

While she's at it, Klein is also not quite comfortable with being called a spokesperson. "This movement doesn't have leaders in the traditional sense," she writes, "just people determined to learn, and to pass it on."

Either way, Klein is one of the most articulate champions of the movement's history and drive. She narrates the evolution of thousands of different groups around the globe, that are working toward their vision of a world free of neo-liberal market orthodoxy and full of vibrant, local participatory democracies. Her new book is "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate." She spoke with AlterNet while in San Francisco.

AlterNet: On the one hand, these are hard times for activists. You write about the criminalization of dissent with the war on terrorism. But these are also good times for anti-corporate activists, as public sentiment is turning against greedy executives. Are these the best of times, or the worst of times, or both?

Naomi Klein: I would say... We're winning the arguments but losing the war... (laughter). I do think that a lot of the arguments that were being made by activists, almost exclusively, are now becoming mainstream accepted opinions.

About deregulation, for example?

About deregulation, about corporate self-regulation. This was really clear in Johannesburg [at the Earth Summit]. The thinking that has been in vogue in government and UN circles in the past 10 years has been the "carrot not stick" idea about political change. Provide incentives, positive PR, and reward best practices but don't try to regulate worst practices. This requires an extraordinary amount of credulity on the part of the public. And as we know credulity has been in great supply in the past decade. I think that's definitely on the wane.

But that said, even though the idea of corporate self-regulation is an absurdity right now, that realization isn't translating into regulation in the people's interest, into setting binding standards. In Johannesburg it was still all "voluntary targets" and "partnerships." It was like a trade show. The only regulation we're seeing is regulation that protects shareholders, not regulation that protects workers or the environment. So, we're winning the argument but losing the war, because we have I think failed to really think seriously about power and how political change happens.

I think a lot of us on the left still believe that it is about winning arguments, it's about marshalling facts, being damning, just kind of auditing the record. And maybe we're not thinking about the fact that nothing's going to change until we really start organizing counterpowers that can be countervailing forces to the impunity we're seeing from corporations or from the state.

Where do we start? What does that look like?

What does that look like? We have a few examples of powerful movements. The movements that are having the most serious effect on power are in Latin America. Just in the last six months, it's starting to be reported in the New York Times and Washington Post: There is a huge backlash against neo-liberalism in Latin America. It's often reported on in really sloppy ways, like as a rise in anti-Americanism, as part of a war on terrorism narrative. But what it really is is a total discrediting of these economic policies based on their track record.

Argentina is the best example of that. Argentina was the model student through the '90s, with booming economic growth, huge amounts of private investment. But what we didn't hear was that behind these good new stories, disparity was widening. Money was being made through mass layoffs in state plans to privatize, and it was a paper boom much like the other paper booms of the 1990s, much like the dotcoms and Enron.

So, the response in Latin America has been to develop really interesting new organizing models. These models are able to contend with the reality of the effects of these economic policies, they don't just rely on stale Marxist rhetoric. It's not workers of the world unite, because what does that mean when you have 40 percent unemployment and you have a whole generation of people who have never had a job, or only ever had a contract?

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