Naomi Klein's New New Left

After spending 24 hours trailing thousands of protesters, scores of journalists and hundreds of riot gear-clad cops through the hot streets of L.A., Naomi Klein was not as upbeat as she would like to be. "There is a danger here of launching into laundry list activism," she said, taking a breather in a makeshift cafeteria full of lefties. "It's called a coalition, but it's really everything in the kitchen sink."

Klein, a Canadian journalist and activist, had come to Los Angeles to join the protests surrounding the Democratic National Convention. And like many on the street she was convinced that a new radicalism was underway. Yet unlike the scores of the dreadlocked, pierced, black-clad radical youth, Klein's enthusiasm was muted by a sharp critical edge; she was not so certain that this movement of protests wasn't just running in place.

"Ever since Seattle, the American Left surprised itself by being alive," she said with her characteristic no-nonsense force. "And now this weird psychology has set in where the Left is so afraid of losing the momentum of Seattle they have to keep organizing the next Seattle or the whole thing will dissipate."

Klein wishes the demonstrations had been more organized or, even better, focused on corporate power, which is the subject of her book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

"Corporate greed is what connects The Gap and campaign finance reform," she argued. "It's where the connections to all these diverse groups -- the sweatshop activists, the environmentalists, the drug war protesters -- meet."

Klein warned that it is "very, very dangerous for activists to be sloppy right now," since corporations and institutions like the World Trade Organization are excelling in "doublespeak" and "obfuscation" to the point where they can successfully undercut their critics.

"Everything's being repackaged," Klein said. "The World Bank is being repackaged as an AIDS elimination program; the WTO is being repackaged as an anti-poverty organization." This means, she insisted, that there is a burden on the Left to sharpen its analysis and not just fall back on old rhetoric. "Otherwise, we'll even lose our language."

Klein, at 30, is an expert in the use and abuse of language by corporations and financial institutions. No Logo has been described by the Village Voice as "one of the anticorporate movement's best hopes yet." And even the New York Times -- hardly on the cutting edge of activism -- has called it "a movement bible." The reason for these accolades is that Klein shows with ruthless clarity how companies have shifted from being purveyors of products to marketers of brands, of "ideas." The Gap sells cool minimalism, not t-shirts. Starbucks sells community first and coffee second. And most of what they sell, however patriotically American, is made abroad.

Among Klein's main points is that brand-centered corporations have created a new Organization Man, except this time he is a part-timer who by day pumps out Starbucks cappuccinos to the rhythm of the Gypsy Kings and by night cruises the mall. And just like William Whyte's Organization Man of a generation ago, Klein's Starbucks barrista is a person on the brink: stunted by a system, which now is not excessively conformist or homogenizing but craftily accommodating of cultural differences.

Klein convincingly argues that corporations today not only pay the bulk of their employees miserable wages, they coopt whatever dissent could be used against them -- through hip multimillion dollar advertising campaigns. Tommy Hilfiger's use of black street culture to sell sweatshop clothing is one of her favorite examples.

Klein is certainly on to something. Like Thomas Frank, editor of the cultural journal The Baffler, she is adamant that corporate branding and advertising have put her generation into a mesmerizing cultural and political stranglehold. But unlike Frank, she believes this is not a permanent or inevitable condition.