An Interview With Naomi Klein

Image: Ed Kashi/Corbis

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Marauding multinationals and their enablers in the U.S. government have a worthy adversary in Naomi Klein, a Canadian social critic whose books puncture the underlying assumptions that have made big business such a dominant, unchecked force in the economy and popular culture.  

Equal parts skilled journalist and clever polemicist—and an unabashed leftist liberal to boot—the 38-year-old Klein is providing an intellectual arsenal for those who would like to replace today's capitalist robber barons with something apparently more benign and people-friendly, and would celebrate what they see as the common good over the grubby business of making a profit.

Klein's latest bestseller The Shock Doctrine, has become a rallying cry for opponents of President Bush's economic and foreign policies, much as her 2000 book, No Logo (which harpooned the brand-worshiping corporate culture that allowed big business to exploit third-world workers) became a focus for the anti-globalization movement. The irony is not lost on Klein that she has become rich herself in the process. In the middle of a tour for the paperback edition of The Shock Doctrine last week, Klein gave an exclusive interview to Portfolio.com.

Lloyd Grove: The hardcover of The Shock Doctrine came out in September. So what has happened since then that sort of puts meat on the bones of your theories? For instance, oil was skyrocketing to $80 when the book was published. 

Naomi Klein: Right, and has continued to skyrocket. I definitely feel that the timing of the paperback in many ways has people seeing The Shock Doctrine in action more vividly, and the best example is the way in which the oil shock is being so cynically exploited by the Bush administration, and a lot of people in the media who are reporting the talking points of the oil and gas industry, to use people's desperation essentially to push for these policies that were already on the books, but that were politically impossible when oil was even at $80. And that's off-shore drilling, and drilling in [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], so what we're hearing, I get a ton of emails from readers saying, "look, they're doing it again." But we started a website when the book came out,  and the idea for the website was for it to be a companion to the book and just put a lot of the resources online. But it ended up being this great way for me to follow the evolution of this thesis, because readers were sending e-mails all the time saying, "look, they're using this food crisis to push genetically modified foods," and "they're using the subprime mortgage crisis to go after the remaining rent control apartments in New York." So almost all of the news articles that we post on the website come from readers actually.

N.K.: Well, The Shock Doctrine is the phrase I use to describe the political strategy of deliberately using a crisis—not deliberately creating a crisis, but deliberately using the fear, panic, and desperation that is induced by a cataclysmic event, whether it's a natural disaster or war or terrorist attack or an economic crisis, to very rapidly push through economic shock therapy. And so that's what The Shock Doctrine is—using one shock to push through an economic shock.

N.K.: Yes, which is the way in which The Shock Doctrine plays out on the ground. It's the harnessing of disasters to push through extreme, unregulated forms of capitalism like we saw in Iraq immediately after the invasion. Paul Bremer coming in and rewriting the country's entire economic architecture, for instance. I look at how the tsunami in Asia was used to push through a range of privatization laws to relocate the small-fishing people from the desirable coastal land and hand it over to resort developers. But I'm also looking at the fact that the final frontier for privatization are those basic state functions, those core state functions, that actually are there to respond to disasters. So it's also the creation of the disaster industry, and that's everything from private security to corporate fire fighters, which is another thing that we're hearing a lot about from readers, the explosion of the private fire-fighting industry.

L.G.: Let me ask you a cheap question. Your book in hardcover has sold more than a million copies by now, hasn't it?

N.K.: I don't actually know the numbers. [Laughs]

L.G.:  The checks are coming in regular, or your agent will know the reason why. And I'm sure the paperback will do equally well. But if you're not a disaster capitalist yourself, to what extent are you the beneficiary of this phenomenon?

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