Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses, support of ecofeminism and organized labour, and criticism of corporate globalization, fascism and capitalism. In 2021, Klein took up the UBC Professorship in Climate Justice, joining the University of British Columbia's Department of Geography. She has been the co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice since it was launched in 2021.
Klein first became known internationally for her alter-globalization book No Logo. The Take, a documentary film about Argentine workers' self-managed factories, written by her and directed by her husband Avi Lewis, further increased her profile. The Shock Doctrine, a critical analysis of the history of neoliberal economics, solidified her standing as a prominent activist on the international stage and was adapted into a six-minute companion film by Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, as well as a feature-length documentary by Michael Winterbottom. Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate was a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
In 2016, Klein was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize for her activism on climate justice. Klein frequently appears on global and national lists of top influential thinkers, including the 2014 Thought Leaders ranking compiled by the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, Prospect magazine's world thinkers 2014 poll, and Maclean's 2014 Power List. She was formerly a member of the board of directors of the climate activist group 350.org.
Family
Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, into a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents were self-described hippies who emigrated from the United States in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is an author and the former director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.Before World War II, her paternal grandparents were Communists, but they began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. In 1942, her grandfather, an animator at Disney, was fired after the 1941 strike, and had to switch to working in a shipyard instead. By 1956, they had abandoned communism. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called red diaper baby.
Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, was born into a political and journalistic family. His grandfather, David Lewis, was an architect and leader of the federal New Democratic Party, while his father, Stephen Lewis, was a leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party. Avi's mother is Michelle Landsberg, journalist, feminist, and campaigner. Avi Lewis works as a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. The couple have one son, Toma.
Early life and education
Klein spent much of her teenage years in shopping malls, obsessed with designer labels. As a child and teenager, she found it "very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother," and she rejected politics, instead embracing "full-on consumerism".She has attributed her change in worldview to two catalysts. One was when she was 17 and preparing for the University of Toronto, her mother had a stroke and became severely disabled. Naomi, her father, and her brother took care of Bonnie through the period in hospital and at home, making educational sacrifices to do so. That year off prevented her "from being such a brat". The next year, after she had begun her studies at the University of Toronto, the second catalyst occurred: the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students, which proved to be a wake-up call to feminism.
Klein's writing career began with contributions to The Varsity, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. After her third year at the University of Toronto, she dropped out of university to take a job at The Globe and Mail, followed by an editorship at This Magazine. In 1995, she returned to the University of Toronto with the intention of finishing her degree but left to pursue an internship in journalism before acquiring the final credits required to complete her degree.
Works
''No Logo''
In 1999, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. In it, she attacks brand-oriented consumer culture and the operations of large corporations. She also accuses several such corporations of unethically exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of greater profits. In this book, Klein criticized Nike so severely that Nike published a point-by-point response. No Logo became an international bestseller, selling over one million copies in over 28 languages.''Fences and Windows''
Klein's Fences and Windows is a collection of her articles and speeches written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement.''The Take''
The Take, a documentary film collaboration by Klein and Lewis, concerns factory workers in Argentina who took over a closed plant and resumed production, operating as a collective. The first African screening was in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban, where the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement began.An article in Z Communications criticized The Take for its portrayal of the Argentine general and politician Juan Domingo Perón arguing that he was falsely portrayed as a social democrat.
''The Shock Doctrine''
Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published in 2007. The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile under Pinochet, Poland, and Russia under Yeltsin. The book also argues that policy initiatives were rushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters, upheavals, or invasion. The book became an international and New York Times bestseller and was translated into 28 languages.Central to the book's thesis is the contention that those who wish to implement unpopular free market policies now routinely do so by taking advantage of certain features of the aftermath of major disasters, be they economic, political, military or natural. The suggestion is that when a society experiences a major 'shock' there is a widespread desire for a rapid and decisive response to correct the situation; this desire for bold and immediate action provides an opportunity for unscrupulous actors to implement policies which go far beyond a legitimate response to disaster. The book suggests that when the rush to act means the specifics of a response will go unscrutinized, that is the moment when unpopular and unrelated policies will intentionally be rushed into effect. The book appears to claim that these shocks are in some cases intentionally encouraged or even manufactured.
Klein identifies the "shock doctrine", elaborating on Joseph Schumpeter, as the latest in capitalism's phases of "creative destruction".
The Shock Doctrine was adapted into a short film of the same name, released onto YouTube. The original is no longer available on the site; however, a duplicate was published in 2008. The film was directed by Jonás Cuarón, produced and co-written by his father Alfonso Cuarón. The original video was viewed over one million times. The director Michael Winterbottom, alongside Mat Whitecross, also produced a documentary on the book which premiered in 2009.
The publication of The Shock Doctrine increased Klein's prominence, with The New Yorker judging her "the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago." On February 24, 2009, the book was awarded the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing from the University of Warwick in England. The prize carried a cash award of £50,000.