The Truth about Globalisation? (2003)

Book Review from the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Open World: the Truth about Globalisation. By Philippe Legrain. (Abacus £7.99.)

This book has been touted as the definitive response to the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement and writers such as George Monbiot and Naomi Klein (author of No Logo). Essentially, Legrain argues that globalisation is A Good Thing, delivering jobs and a better standard of living to poor countries and cheaper goods to the developed world. Coupled with free trade, and appropriate government action to prevent any unwanted side effects, it can benefit everyone.

Legrain begins by arguing that globalisation has not proceeded as far as many people may feel. For instance, three-quarters of the goods in British shops are made in the UK, and most people work for British companies; in the US, the corresponding figures are around 90 percent in both cases. He also has a genuinely useful chapter on the history of globalisation, suggesting that it was already well under way when the Industrial Revolution started.

But he then goes on to claim that workers in poor countries benefit from globalisation. In Vietnam, for instance, foreign-run factories pay around double the average local wage, and technology and management skills are transferred inwards. Yet sometimes he is astonishingly naive: he visits a Nike contract factory there, and describes it as “bright, airy, clean and safe”, but says nothing about the many other reports of low wages and appalling working conditions in sweatshops. He justifies the vast difference between what the workers earn per shoe ($2) and what the shoes sell for ($72) by noting all the other costs and the need for Nike to make a profit. In fact, this is his general argument: though he hardly uses the word “capitalism”, he is really defending globalisation as part of capitalism, and on the same grounds that capitalist supporters defend the profit system.

Nor, he claims, do brands really rule the world, as Naomi Klein implies. Rather, consumers hold the whip hand, as the brands have to cater to their whims. We still have a choice: if we don’t like Nike, we can buy Adidas (some choice!). Klein is described as virtually fascist for suggesting that ordinary people are manipulated into buying things they don’t really want, while she of course is intelligent enough to see through it all. It is true that people cannot be manipulated in any simplistic way, but they can certainly be influenced, which is why the global brands spend millions on advertising. Legrain also blithely ignores advertising to children, who are clearly far more manipulable than adults.

Equally, companies are supposedly not all-powerful, being at the beck and call of those who buy their products and call the shots. Some of Legrain’s arguments here are just plain silly. For instance, he states that Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation programme was introduced because she thought it made economic sense, “not because she was taking handouts from big business”. But capitalist politicians do what seems to be good for capitalism, and to suggest that such actions would only be taken if they were corrupt is missing the point completely.

Basically, Legrain’s book is a hymn to capitalism and to profit-making. If you think that capitalism is basically a nice, friendly system—though it may need a bit of adjustment from time to time—then it may well be logical to support its globalising aspect. After all, it means more customers, more profits. But the anti-capitalist or anti-globalisation movement, for all its confusions, is a sign that increasing numbers of people are rejecting the idea that profit is good for everyone and that a small number of parasites should control the Earth’s resources. Open World may make the capitalists and their supporters happy about what their system is doing to the world, but in truth it is no more convincing than any other attempt to defend the profit system.

Paul Bennett

Marketing the Revolution (2002)

Book Review from the September 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marketing the Revolution by Michael Mosbacher (Social Affairs Unit, 2002.)

Before we can have socialism a majority of the world’s population will have to stop supporting capitalism and become pro-socialism. But what if the “anti-capitalist” movement proves to be a precursor, not of a fundamentally different form of society (socialism) but simply of another form of capitalism? If the “revolution” is de-fused, emasculated, diverted, usurped, hi-jacked, betrayed – if it is marketed by people who want, not socialism, but a reformed capitalism, then things will change a little but not much. Capitalism will have eaten “anti-capitalism” for breakfast.

According to Mosbacher, something like that is actually happening. Of course, he doesn’t put it quite like that. He writes for the Social Affairs Unit, a body that has good capitalism-supporting credentials. His main theme is that those who support the anti-capitalist movement (and in particular those who attack corporate brands) talk the language of capitalism because “it is the only game in town”. But arguably the most useful function his little book serves is to quote some dreadful statistics from The United Nations Human Development Report 2001 :

“. . . much of the world still lives in horrific poverty: in the developing world 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day . . . 2.8 billion live on less than $2 a day; 325 million children do not go to school; more than 8.5 million are illiterate; 11 million children under five die each year from preventable causes; nearly a billion people do not have access to improved water sources; and 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation” (p.71).

Mosbacher seeks to take the sting out of these awful figures by arguing that “the only countries in which we have seen large-scale poverty reduction in the 1990s are the ones that have become more open to foreign trade and investment”. He quotes some figures of poverty reduction which “may seem trivial to some in comparison with the overall scale of the problem . . .” Yes, they do.

Returning to the theme of marketing the revolution, the author lays into Naomi Klein’s No Logo. We, too, were under no illusions when we reviewed this best-selling book in our December 2000 issue: “Klein appears to believe that something worthwhile can be done within the system of capitalism.”

Mosbacher is scathing about the “success” that the anti-branding movement has achieved. He notes that Klein has been a star turn at international anti-corporate gatherings. Anti-capitalism and anti-branding are fashionable and popular but they aren’t daring, subversive, edgy. They take on board the culture, ethos, language and techniques of branding, and they use these to attack the brands themselves.

Mosbacher says the anti-capitalists have “no clear end-vision of where they want to be, except away from where we are.” But he likes being where we are, and doesn’t like or want revolution. For him, branding is a good thing: it “is an extremely useful invention in that it transmits a vast amount of information to the consumer in an instant.” So that’s all right, then.

Stan Parker

Anti-capitalism or just anti-capitalists? (2001)

Book Review from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naomi Klein’s book No Logo has been widely proclaimed as a manifesto for the anti-capitalist movement. Klein herself disclaims any notion that she has written a manifesto, but the book is still well worth examining. It deals with the development of enormous global corporations and some of the resistance to this; the title reflects a general anti-corporate attitude.

It is common to observe that all high streets look very much the same nowadays, with Next, Virgin, Pizza Hut and McDonalds being found more or less everywhere, and not just in the UK. This illustrates the rise of the brand or superbrand, which is constituted by an image or a logo much more than just a range of products. Marketing gurus see the brand as crucial – companies should create a brand, not just sell a product. For instance, John Grant’s The New Marketing Manifesto argues that a brand is “a popular idea or set of ideas that people live by”. Brands “add value to people’s lives”, and are the new traditions (now that older traditions such as a sense of community have decayed). This kind of celebration of brands shows an uncritical acceptance of capitalism’s values.

In contrast, Klein looks behind the logo and the label to expose the darker side of branding. The logo has expanded in size and importance with items of clothing just being empty carriers for the brand. She quotes the boss of Nike:

“For years we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”

Companies such as Nike, Gap, McDonalds, Disney and Starbucks are not simply multinational corporations (which would mean they have different brands and products in different countries), but are truly global corporations (with the same brands and marketing wherever they operate). Nike in particular has emerged as a real superbrand: its swoosh logo is an immensely popular tattoo in the US, among both customers and workers. Imagine flaunting your status as a wage slave by having your employer’s logo tattooed on your leg. Some American teenagers are quoted as saying that Nike is more important to them than their girlfriend is.

One theme of No Logo is the way in which advertising, sponsorship and the market have expanded into areas of life which were previously free of them, thus resulting in the loss of what Klein calls “unmarketed space”. A blatant instance of this is in schools, where companies sponsor lessons and TV programmes and all manner of equipment. Sponsorship of sporting and cultural events is now far wider than it has ever been.

But perhaps the biggest effect of the growth of the top brands is on employment. Increasingly, such companies are moving production to developing countries, especially in East and South-East Asia, in pursuit of cheap labour. Countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, China and the Phillipines have been happy to provide so-called free-trade zones or export-processing zones, with tax breaks for companies and no right to union organization for workers, as a means ot attracting the global corporations. Sub-contractors are used, so that, when questioned about wages and working conditions, Nike, Reebok and so on can reply that they do not actually employ anyone in Indonesia or wherever. Their production becomes far more flexible, as they don’t need to own land or factories, and can respond more easily to fluctuations in demand. They will also happily move prodution ftom one developing country to another in pursuit of a cheaper and more docile workforce. Young workers are often drawn into these zones with promises of good pay, only to find appalling wages, long hours, dangerous conditions, and tyrannical bosses, who may lock workers up if they refuse to do overtime. Some of the descriptions are reminiscent of nothing so much as Engels’ accounts in Condition o/ the Working Class in England in 1844—sweatshop conditions have just been exported to the “Third World”.

Companies such as British Airways and Debenhams have relocated much of their call centre work to India, where wages are a fifth of the UK level. The workers are given crash courses in British culture, everything from soaps to football, so they can chat knowledgeably with the callers, who don’t suspect that they are speaking to someone in Delhi or Bombay

However, while workers in Indonesia or Vietnam can make clothes, shoes or whatever, they cannot sell them in North America or Western Europe. Here, the global corporations have led the way in the notorious Mcjobs – part-time or temporary work often on near-minimum wages. In coffee bars such as Starbucks, workers may have to work two or three shifts a day, to coincide with the busy periods. This gives the company the flexibility to cope with fluctuations in business without having to pay people to just stand around, but for staff it is, to say the least, extremely disruptive. In other companies, Microsoft for instance, jobs are contracted out to agencies who (surprise!) pay far lower wages. Again, this boosts flexibility and the ability to respond to booms and slumps in demand, avoiding such problems as redundancy pay. Many “permatemps” have been employed in this way for years, without gaining proper employee rights.

This, then, is the picture that Klein presents, of a world increasingly dominated by global corporations and their cultural and economic impact, where wotkers slave away in sweat shops for a pittance with little ability to fight back, and where temporary jobs hold sway. Profits soar, while the workers suffer.

The final section of No Logo deals with various kinds of opposition and resistance to the superbrands and the kind of society they represent. This can range from the fun but ineffectual – such as parodying advertisements or throwing custard pies at Bill Gates – to to the more substantive responses of Reclaim The Streets and the wider ‘anti-capitalist’ movement. Such activity Klein describes as “laying the foundations for the first truly international people’s movement”. Here are some examples:

• Exposing sweatshop and child labour, including school pupils discovering who made their uniforms
• Local councils entering into selective purchasing agreements, and refusing to buy from companies that (for instance) trade with Burma
• Secondary boycotts against cornpanics that supply other companies rather than the public directly
• Campaigns such as that against Shell in Nigeria
• Klein is well aware of the limitations of brand-based politics, e.g. that boycotts can be counter-productive and that such campaigns tend to miss the broader economic context. Her argument, though, is that “you’ve got to start somewhere”, so you might as well start with aiming your attacks at one big corporation, normally Nike.

However, the idea of “starting somewhere” naturally implies going on to address other issues in the fullness of time, and it’s here that Klein’s ideas become mundane and just plain disappointing For instance, she advocates enforcement of existing ILO treaties, and that employment codes of practice be drafted by the workers themselves rather than by the corporations. All this of course assumes the continued existence of employers and employed, and offers no vision of the ending of class division.

Global capitalism is not a new creature, it is just capitalism writ large and even nastier. A return to pre-global capitalism would be no altetnative, even if it were practical. But it should now be clear beyond dispute that national-based solutions to humanity’s problems are pointless, and that a world movement, leading to world socialism is urgently needed.

Paul Bennett

Blogger's Notes:

Though not listed in the contents of the August 2001 Socialist Standard as a book review let's be honest, to all intents and purposes, this is a book review. No Logo was also reviewed in the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard by Cyril Evans.

Green Lies (2023)

Book Review from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bright Green Lies. How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert. Monkfish Publishing, 473pp.

‘Instead of a movement to save the planet, we have a movement to continue its destruction.’

The quotation above sums up the theme of this book which casts its glance, both politically and ecologically, way back into the past as well as projecting fascinatingly into the future. It’s definitely a must-read, a powerful, eloquent and thought-provoking indictment of industrial capitalist society, in fact of all the hierarchical human societies that have developed over the last 10-12,000 years. In compelling terms it explains – and offers incontrovertible evidence of – how, since the advent of settled agriculture and the surplus production, oppressive hierarchies, urban settlement and militarism that came with it, the Earth has been massively and increasingly despoiled in the name of human exceptionalism. Now is the end game, insist the authors, unless, that is, immediate and widespread consciousness of what humanity is doing in the name of economic growth takes over and leads to action. Yet this is something, so the book’s title asserts, that forms no part of the current ‘green’ agenda, which is seen as no less harmful than fossil fuel use in continuing to extract from the environment resources that it cannot afford to lose and in destroying in the process the earth’s geological fabric and its non-human living creatures and organisms.

The authors bring to bear a mass of sobering evidence to show that even the most proclaimed ‘bright green’ policies and actions can never be more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised capitalism which can see the Earth only as a target for commodification – for producing goods for sale on the market. They go about systematically – and in many cases scathingly – dismantling the arguments put forward to remedy this by ‘deep green’ gurus such as Naomi Klein, Lester Brown and Mark Jacobson (the latter described as ‘someone working hard to kill the planet in order to save it’). And, in the process, they exhibit a breathtaking knowledge, both wide-ranging and detailed, of why all the many attempts at apparently environment-friendly activities amount to anything but and can only serve to add further to both climate change and the destruction of the environment. None of the ‘green’ policies widely presented as beneficial escape forensic – and damning – analysis under their gaze. So their book, in its various sections, takes apart and condemns as ‘lies’ the proclaimed virtues of, among other green ‘solutions’, solar panels, wind turbines, green energy storage, recycling, LED lights, electric cars, hydropower, biomass (described as ‘cutting down and burning forests’), and geothermal energy.

In all these cases, their fundamental argument, backed by abundant evidence and analysis, is that the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain all these ‘renewable’ activities and technologies actually relies on fossil fuels involving at least as much savage exploitation of the Earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as that involved in ‘non-green’ methods of production. In other words these ‘green’ technologies will carry on with what they term the ‘orgy of planetary destruction’. They will continue to rip the Earth apart to procure materials for their projects, will continue to hack to oblivion the planet’s natural structures formed over millions of years, and will continue to blow up mountains, turn forests into mines and poison water, air, soil, wildlife and the human population. These are all, in the authors’ words, ‘assaults against the living world’ causing ‘industrial-scale devastation’, and all claims for saving the environment by their use are dismissed as ‘green veneer’, as ‘cherry-picking’ of the facts and the available evidence.

The point, they argue, is that, much as the ‘bright greens’ may be genuinely concerned for the environment, the reality of what they propose and may do can never amount to more than ‘greenwashing’, given that the current system of industrial production cannot by its nature do other than subordinate real care for the Earth and its flora and fauna to the imperatives of growth and production for profit. It prioritises ‘fuelling the economy over saving the real world’. Attempts to suggest otherwise are, the authors insist, ‘green fantasies’, no more nor less than delusions providing comfort at the expense of reality. All this is summed up in their dictum ‘Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life.’

So are we going to hell in a handcart no matter what? Well, sort of, according to this book, except that there is a chapter toward the end entitled ‘Real Solutions’, in which the authors do suggest how we might reverse or at least mitigate part of the increasing mess they have so painstakingly and passionately detailed and evidenced. The trouble is that this is the least satisfactory and least convincing part of the book. That’s because what they mainly have to offer are appeals to individuals or groups to get together in forms of environmental action (‘find something you love and defend it. A stream, a stand of trees, a struggling songbird’), or a call for ‘massive movements… using every tactic: political pressure, legal challenge, economic boycotts, civil disobedience and whatever else becomes necessary’, or, above all, appeals to governments to adopt various policies that will curb both industrial growth and population growth (eg, ‘governments need to stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities’). This after apparently recognising that governments are an integral part of the problem in their role of managing and supporting the growth/market system that leads to the very problems they abhor and so will not and cannot ‘act against the profit motive’. Or perhaps, despite such words, they somehow don’t take it fully on board and think it can somehow be different, perhaps in the same way as the ‘bright greens’ they criticise don’t want to believe that the profit system will brook no alternative to economic growth and unbridled exploitation of the Earth’s environment. Perhaps, in fact, at bottom Jensen, Keith and Wilbert do think, or at least hope, that governments can somehow be neutral and possess the power to regulate to their heart’s content the system of production for profit and buying and selling.

The reality is that capitalism with its commodification of everything has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. But the way to prevent this going any further and reversing it as necessary is not via tweaks to the way we live and work today but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to collectively organise a leaderless, stateless society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole environment of which we are a part, including its geology and its flora and fauna.

Howard Moss

Proper Gander: Remoulding The Activist (2021)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lurking as embarrassments in the TV archives are the series cancelled after a few episodes following complaints from offended and disgusted viewers, such as the 1930s Berlin-set sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! and the disturbing Minipops. One recently made show has managed to get pulled due to negative reactions even before its first episode has aired, CBS’s The Activist.

Initial publicity bragged that The Activist would be ‘a first-of-its-kind competition series that will inspire real change’. Six specially selected activists campaigning for health, education and environmental issues would ‘go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes’, with tasks such as ‘missions, media stunts, digital campaigns and community events’. Their efforts to win each episode’s challenge would be judged by singer Usher, actor Priyanka Chopra and dancer Julianne Hough, and their success would be ‘measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input’. The series climax would see the activists attending the G20 summit in Italy to ‘meet with world leaders in the hope of securing funding and awareness for their causes’. ‘The team that receives the largest commitment is celebrated as the overall winner at the finale, which will also feature musical performances by some of the world’s most passionate artists.’

The programme-makers and whichever focus groups they tested their ideas on didn’t think that setting important issues against each other and turning activism into Reality TV would sound tawdry and exploitative. Yet this was the overwhelming response from critics and commentators on social media when the series was announced. Several tweets pointed out that the show was like the plot of a Black Mirror episode. One Alejandro Villegas tweeted ‘How corporate America appropriates and trivialises advocacy… monetising the imagery… channelling dissent into meaninglessness’ and made a comparison with the derided Pepsi advert launched during the Black Lives Matter protests which featured model Kendall Jenner healing rifts by handing a cop a can of cola. Some of those involved with The Activist joined in with the criticism by saying how its approach sought to simplify and mould the activists’ work. Clover Hogan of climate change campaign group Force Of Nature withdrew her application for a part on the show when she realised that they wanted marketable activists. She said ‘having been gaslit by this whole process personally, I can absolutely understand why you could be manipulated into saying yes to this type of opportunity’, adding that the competitive element of the format was downplayed when she was interviewed. The backlash against the programme led to Chopra resigning from her role as a judge, while Hough said ‘the judging aspect of the show missed the mark, and furthermore… I am not qualified to act as a judge’.

The series, due to air in America on CBS in late October, was produced by Global Citizen, an international education and advocacy organisation aiming for extreme poverty to be eradicated by 2030, and Live Nation, mostly known for ticket sales. When all the criticism went viral, they released statements solemnly stating that ‘It has become apparent the format of the show as announced distracts from the vital work these incredible activists do in their communities every day’, adding that ‘global activism centres on collaboration and cooperation, not competition. We apologise to the activists, hosts, and the larger activist community – we got it wrong’. For the programme-makers to do a complete U-turn on their stance shows how out of touch with their target market they were, particularly awkward for Global Citizen, which promotes itself as an international educator and advocate. Presumably the lure of publicity and money clouded their judgement.

The programme, which has already been filmed, will now be remade as a one-off documentary, removing the competitive aspect, with the same activists who took part originally. ‘We hope that by showcasing their work we will inspire more people to become more involved in addressing the world’s most pressing issues. We look forward to highlighting the mission and lives of each of these incredible people’ grovelled Global Citizen, CBS and Live Nation. They’ll now be hoping the new version of The Activist showcases, inspires and highlights enough to rebuild any reputational loss, as they would call it.

The Activist’s original format was scuppered because of how distasteful it sounds for campaign groups to be set up to compete against each other for influence, through corporate-driven media. But this is exactly how they have to function in the real world. Campaign groups have to compete for funding, hoping to convince us to support their single-issue campaign rather than any of the other countless single-issue campaigns. If they can package their message so that it’s acceptable enough, without any threat of fundamental change, they can attract more mainstream exposure. They become part of the marketplace because they’re only aiming to work within it and not challenge the system itself. Commodifying activism further by turning all this into a TV show weirdly makes the reality clearer. Writer Naomi Klein made the point with her sardonic tweet, ‘I’m confused: Is this an advanced Marxist critique to expose how competition for money and attention pits activists against each other + undermines deep change? Or just the end of the world?’

Mike Foster

Green reformist (2021)

Book Review from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein (Penguin £10.99)

Klein has written previously on climate change; in This Changes Everything from 2014, she described it as ‘a battle between capitalism and the planet’. Here, in a series of articles and talks dating from 2010 to 2019, she discusses various events (such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 and the ‘summer of fire’ in 2017). She emphasises the interconnectedness of many issues (‘climate, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and misogyny’) and puts forward the idea of a Green New Deal as a way to solve the problems.

There is much useful material here. Oceans are warming 40 percent faster than the UN predicted in 2014. Hotter, drier weather creates the conditions for wildfires, and there is a feedback loop, whereby burning carbon leads to warmer temperatures and less rain, hence more fires, which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere. Climate change hits the poor worst, whether in Africa or New Orleans or the refugees who flee war and drought. The factors destroying the planet are also destroying people’s quality of life. We are experiencing ‘the dawn of climate barbarism’, and individual action is simply inadequate.

But there is also quite a bit that is less impressive. A disappointing (to put it mildly) speech to the 2017 Labour Party Conference suggests that Klein has uncritically swallowed Labour’s reformism and plans for nationalisation. She views incrementalism and moderation as problems, yet does not in fact go beyond these. Her own plan is for the Green New Deal: this is seen as similar in some ways to the New Deal of the 1930s in the US, though as less top-down and not consumption-oriented. It is intended to address ‘the triple crises of our time’: ecological problems, economic inequality and white supremacy. It envisages investment in renewable energy and a minimum global corporate tax rate, so combining the reduction of pollution with improving the conditions of the most vulnerable. (For a UK version, see greennewdealgroup.org.)

Renewables are seen as job creators, so there would still be jobs (and taxes). And Klein is not against capitalism as such, only its supposed ‘unregulated’ variety. She says that ‘autocratic industrial socialism’ has been an environmental disaster, and she clearly equates socialism with the Soviet Union and Venezuela. This is a shame, as she acknowledges that climate science constitutes a powerful argument against capitalism, and discusses the view of some right-wing climate change deniers that the issue is some kind of plot to shackle or even abolish capitalism. They’re wrong, of course, but the climate and other ecological issues do provide yet another reason for doing away with the wages-prices-profits system.

Paul Bennett

Green New Deal: No Go (2020)

Book Review from the February 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have seen wildfires in California and Australia. Hurricanes have been ripping apart areas from New Orleans to the Caribbean leaving devastation and death in their wake. Severe drought has been inflicted on countries from Bangladesh to South Africa. Closer to home, we have witnessed devastating floods in Cornwall and Yorkshire. The increasing frequency and power of these disasters have shaken the notion that these are merely acts of nature, about which we can do very little. These changed weather patterns are clearly evidence of what the majority of climate scientists have been warning for some time that the global warming crisis is upon us and humanity needs to act now to avoid a global catastrophe. Even some representatives of global capitalism are worried. Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, addressed the most recent international climate change conference (COP25) last December and is pushing for a higher carbon tax (‘Tackling climate risk is just what IMF should be doing,’ Observer, 1 December). You need to be either very delusional or be profiting from the fossil fuel industries or just be Donald Trump to deny there is a climate crisis.

So the launch of Naomi Klein’s latest book On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (Allen Lane, £20) can be considered as rather timely. Naomi Klein is a writer, journalist and activist and first made her mark as a leading figure of the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement twenty years ago. The book was published on the twentieth anniversary of her first book, No Logo, which explored the rise of global corporations and their effects on the environment and workers, particularly those who live in poor third world countries. In her new book, she recounts her own experiences as a climate activist and how, two years ago, she was arrested at a protest against the Keystone tar sands pipeline in Washington DC. She is co-founder of a Toronto-based climate project group called Leap, which brings together people from different backgrounds to campaign for climate justice and other reforms.

The book is made up of a collection of essays, reports and lectures spanning the last decade. Its central tenet is that the planet is facing a climate emergency and we are running out of time. To back this up, Klein refers to a report published by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October 2018 stating that global emissions of greenhouse gases need to be cut in half within 12 years (11 years from the date of the book’s publication) for us to stand a chance of keeping global warming within the target increase of 1.5C since pre-industrial times.

Capitalism indicted, but what is capitalism?

As in her previous book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, she blames capitalism for the climate crisis, and consequently argues that tinkering around with the existing economic system, with measures such as increasing the carbon tax, is not enough. Changes in individuals’ personal lifestyles, such as eating less meat and using public transport rather than driving cars, will not avert climate catastrophe. What is required is collective political action by grass-roots movements to achieve a radical overhaul of the current economic systems. She draws inspiration from the campaigning groups against climate change. There are the global school strikes, where young people are demanding more action by politicians on the environment. Klein makes the interesting point that these school children didn’t just read about climate change, but many of them have actually experienced it, whether it is the severe droughts in South Africa or the toxic air pollution in Delhi, India. In the same way socialists argue that workers don’t come to socialism by just reading about it, but by their experiences of the social problems they face within capitalism. She says that it is pressure from this activity, along with other movements, such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, that will bring about change. As to be expected, much of the focus is on Greta Thunberg, the 16-year old schoolgirl who is lauded as a leading spokesperson of this youth movement.

Klein rejects the use of technology, also known as geo-engineering, to fix the environment. This can be done in a number of ways. One way is to inject the upper atmosphere with sulphur with the aim of deflecting some of the sun’s rays into space in order to cool the planet, and another is to fertilise the oceans with iron dust to create algal blooms which would soak up more carbon. However, tampering with nature’s ecosystems, she argues, would be likely to have adverse consequences.

The Earth’s temperature has been rising since the industrial revolution, the cause of which has been the burning of fossil fuels, oil and coal, by capitalist industry, releasing more greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, than can be absorbed by the atmosphere, along with deforestation, resulting in fewer trees to soak up the extra carbon. Over the last thirty years or so, when many countries deregulated and privatised their industries, global trade has expanded and at the same time global emissions have escalated. Klein notes that in the same period, often referred to as ‘neoliberalism’, social and economic inequality has also arisen. She recognises that climate change and other social issues, such as social, gender and ethnic inequalities, have the same cause, which is capitalism which accumulates wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, and therefore does not accept the argument sometimes put forward that the climate issue must take precedence over everything else. Any action to resolve climate change must equally tackle other social problems. This is also known as intersectionality, where separate campaign issues come together in one struggle.

She also makes the interesting point that capitalism has only existed for a small period of human history and that humans can adapt to live in different social orders. She criticises those economists who put forward the view that humans are ‘selfish, gratification-seeking units’ and historians who espouse the Great Man theory of history.

Despite these insights, Klein doesn’t advocate the abolition of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. To see why, we need to work out what Klein means by capitalism. She doesn’t give a specific definition. However, when discussing how some climate change deniers compare action to combat climate change with so-called communism, Klein remarks that ‘the Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate’ (p.79). Again, when referring to the Soviet Union, we learn on p. 251 that ‘we have to be honest that autocratic industrial socialism has also been a disaster for the environment’ and when mentioning Venezuela on the same page ‘Venezuela’s petro-populism is a reminder that there is nothing inherently green about self-defined socialism’. She does praise the environmental policies of countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Uruguay that have a ‘democratic-socialist tradition’. From these comments, we can safely infer that when Klein talks about capitalism she is referring to private capitalism, in particular the large corporations and the banks.

We, on the other hand, define capitalism as a global society where the means of production are owned and controlled by a minority class to the exclusion of the majority of humanity, the working class, who have to seek employment by the owning or capitalist class. Production is geared to profit and businesses compete with each other in the marketplace. Concerns about the environment and human welfare must take second place. Nation states have to look after the interests of their respective capitalist classes and this leads to rivalries between them which can end in military conflict. Socialism, which will need to be established by a socialist working class after taking political action to abolish capitalism, is a society of common ownership, where the means of production are owned by everyone and the state has been abolished and there is no need for the use of money.

Green Keynesianism

Klein advocates the New Green Deal instead. It is clearly not based on the principles of socialism, but, as the name suggests, is inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal drawn up during the 1930s Depression and the Marshall Plan enacted after the Second World. It was mooted as a way of pulling capitalism out of recession during the last economic downturn, a form of ‘Green Keynesianism’. Klein holds up the US Congress New Green Deal resolutions as proposed by US Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey as the way forward. They call for ‘huge investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and clean transportation’ and for the US to reach net-zero emissions in one decade. Workers who transfer from high-carbon industries to green ones have their wages and benefits protected, and everyone who wants to work should have guaranteed employment. No specifics are given, as Klein describes it as a ‘work in progress’ with communities, many of which are indigenous and ethnic minorities, that have borne the brunt of climate change destruction, providing input into the process. They also throw in reforms – free universal care, childcare, and higher education. It is not a politically organised working class that will be the agency of these changes, but the state run by a ‘progressive’ Democrat government headed by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. In the UK it would have been a Labour government headed by Jeremy Corbyn with the British equivalent of the Green Industrial Revolution – that is until the results of the December General Election put paid to this possibility. This progressive state would not abolish the corporations, but bring pressure to bear on them. It may refuse to issue permits for fossil fuel companies to build pipelines and export terminals. Like with the New Deal, the government would be backed and influenced by social movements.

The Green New Deal will not replace the market system, on the contrary, according to Klein ‘Markets play a role in this vision, but markets are not the protagonists of this story – people are’. And as can be seen in the above paragraph, there will be no change to the employer and employee relationship that is a feature of capitalism.

The climate crisis cannot be resolved within a nation state, but requires a global solution. Klein recognises this, and envisages every country will implement their own version of the Green New Deal. When she talks about the rich countries developing their green deal earlier so as to allow for poorer ones to transition more slowly, this implies that there will be global cooperation. This is a tall order in a society where every nation state competes for markets, sources of raw materials and strategic routes. Recent history is not encouraging. The US is in a trade war with China, there is the re-emergence of the cold war between Russia and the West, and the UK is arguing with its European neighbours on how to exit from the European Union. Not to mention that the international climate change conferences over the last thirty years have not exactly been rip-roaring successes.

To curb the pressure on the Earth’s resources, Klein argues we need to end the wasteful consumer lifestyle. To achieve this, she suggests a shorter working week so that workers can enjoy publicly-funded arts and urban parks, rather than spending their wages on cheap disposable consumer goods.

Our vision of socialism is often dismissed as being utopian. There is a lot of informative material and useful analysis in this book, but its contention that the New Green Deal can resolve the climate crisis and social and economic inequalities within the capitalist market system really is utopian. Only the abolition of capitalism and its replacement with socialism can achieve this.

Oliver Bond

Change everything (2015)

Book Review from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate’, by Naomi Klein, Allen Lane, 2014, £20

Oh what a bittersweet day: a book that makes you want to jump for joy about a topic which occasions floods of tears. Naomi Klein’s latest work should be widely read. She is bang on the money: the climate change argument is about capitalism. In short, free markets and sustainability are mutually exclusive, and either capitalism or the ecosystem has had its day. The slew of evidence on display is impressive – Klein is nothing if not a thorough case builder – and the whole book can be seen as a superb illustration of the class system at work.  She catalogues examples of the narratives being bent to suit vested interests and the dominant ideology: many parts of this we could not have written better ourselves. Talk about capitalism bearing the seeds of its own destruction.

It has always struck me as odd that so many of the rich and powerful behaved as if they had another planet to escape to, or that somehow they could end up breathing their own wealth if the atmosphere became problematic. Why on earth were they funding climate change denial movements if they themselves would also suffer when the stuff hits the fan – as 97 percent of those who know have agreed is going to happen? Klein solves this one: the climate challenge is such a threat to their ideology that they simply cannot tolerate it: the measures necessary to forestall disaster require such concerted effort that it would be essential to curtail the very market freedoms so dear to them and their position. Much like the dictators of yore, they’d rather bring all down with them than give up power; or maybe more like Magda Goebbels, the world was not worth living in for her or her family without the primacy of their Weltanschaung. Having spent the last 30 years unleashing the tiger of the neoliberal agenda, they were not going to let some bunch of green eggheads spoil the party.  This would be intolerably bad for business and thereby very bad for their interests.

As someone concerned about the environment since my teens (don’t ask…), I ended up in the Green Party.  However I left a while back as I was unconvinced about their attitude to power: how they would force vested interests to toe the line.  I came to the same general conclusion as Klein – capitalism has to go – and realised that without this step, all else on the environmental agenda is playing for time.  However here is where she and I might part company: the way forward and the alternative political landscape offered in her book is too hazy.  It is as if she pulls her punches in the last round for fear of scaring off the readers – the book is after all aimed at the mainstream  – or perhaps she really has not thought it through properly.

Her suggestion that protests and actions will emerge which must be exploited to promote the agenda is too haphazard and hazy. What is the over-arching political philosophy which will give such emergent forces any direction apart from the environment and opposition to capitalism?  The peg on which to hang the clothing of serious change is lacking in this book. Come on Naomi, at heart you’re one of us, if only you’d realise it – you can’t offer a solution without socialism.  Ducking the real question seems a bit odd after what you have written and what you plainly believe.  But  I still welcome this book like few others. In the current climate anyone who starts asking the right questions has to be congratulated.

Howard Pilott

Economics, Politics and Climate Change (2015)

From the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Damage to the environment is a major threat to the stability of human life on this planet, and moreover this is directly attributable to human activity. The truth is that we as human beings interfere with our environment – and this is not always with the most long-term awareness. From the forest clearances of the Neolithic and early Bronze Age through to the planned exploitation of the melting North Pole, we interact with this planet in a way which has a major impact on existing ecosystems. This is nothing new however – what is new is the extent to which we are now doing things which may be pushing us towards environmental tipping points and which may cause irreversible damage to the world we inhabit.

Human beings are not passively compliant with the environment. We are constantly intervening in and altering it, with profound consequences for other species. By some estimates, 140,000 species are going extinct every year, leading some to describe the modern era as the sixth great mass extinction event. We have to find some means by which we can ensure that this unavoidable interfering activity does not prejudice our continued safe existence on this planet.

Accepting that the environmental problems we face at the moment are as a result of human activity, some important questions arise. Firstly, what kind of economy and what kind of material expectations can we have that would enable us to live sustainably? Secondly, questions relating to the politics of any society that might persist in order to promote such sustainability.

A bit of biochemistry

Material consumption on this planet undertook a step change starting with the industrial revolution in Britain, powered by cheap and accessible coal. Coal is fossilised wood from the Carboniferous period. The reason why there is so much wood from this period is that when trees first appeared on the planet the particular substance which gives wood its hardness, namely lignin, was something which no animal or plant was able to digest, and therefore for many millions of years when trees fell down, there were no bacteria or microorganisms that could recycle the wood into anything else, so they just stayed there and built up generation upon generation of trees on top of each other, finally being covered up and compressed under the earth and turning after millions of years to coal.

Trees and plant life are means of storing carbon. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen, and a simple look at the chemical equation demonstrates that the carbon is missing. The carbon is trapped within the tree and when a tree decomposes or is burnt the carbon is given off and recombines with oxygen to give CO2. The Carboniferous period therefore represents a time when a huge amount of atmospheric carbon was removed and stored. This resulted in a very oxygen rich atmosphere which may in turn have allowed air breathing animals to emerge from the water. Since the dawn of the industrial revolution we have been burning fossil fuels and returning this trapped carbon to the atmosphere.

The foregoing is a quick and dirty outline of what has led us to the problem of the greenhouse effect: the atmosphere acts like glass in a greenhouse, letting in light from the sun during the day, but preventing the resulting heat from dissipating into space at night. This means that, as carbon and other greenhouse gases increase, the planet is warming up… and much of life on Earth is adapted to temperatures below those to which our global temperature appears to be heading. This should sound alarm bells. However this is simply one aspect of the corrosive impact of our activity on this planet. There is also toxicity in the air, earth and water; increasing acidification of the seas and air; degradation of our top soil and loss of drinking water. The list goes on with agrichemicals, hormones, antibiotics, radioactive waste, noise and light pollution…. Suffice to say we have arrived at a situation where we could well be on a downward slide.

Markets and short-termism

As the world has become progressively global and markets especially so, much attention has centred on the actions of ‘hot money’; hot because it doesn’t stay in your hands for very long. Large amounts of this money swoop in and out of particular markets because there is a quick kill in sight. Commodities, financial markets and stock markets, futures, all variety of assets – any of these can be prey to a sudden rush or a loss of interest by investors. Financial investment computer packages are now built to identify these and play them accordingly. These minute fluctuations can result in huge payouts for big investors and large bonuses for the guy executing the deal. It’s the casino economy in operation. This metaphor reveals much about the nature of this business, because few who enter a casino are looking to the longer term. Likewise, those who execute a split second investment decision are unlikely to be thinking about the potential impact it might have on the employees, or anyone else at all come to that. They are almost certainly not thinking about how this will play out in several months, and certainly not in years: rather grab the winnings and get out quick before something goes wrong.

Politicians of all colours repeatedly talk of ‘rebalancing’ this economy because so much of this nation’s earnings arise from exactly this kind of activity and, as the banking crisis showed, it can have its downside. However the power and attraction of City finance, of working on fine margins, of split second deals, are both too attractive and too lucrative: amongst the reasons that the greatly trumpeted market reforms amounted to not very much. Moreover these very financiers are often the funders of political parties and want those parties to reflect their interests in return for the cash donations.

But it reveals something deep about the thinking of our society; the thinking behind the throne in our society. It shows that the precept is to make money today and not think about tomorrow. And supposedly there is a theory to support it: as long as markets are free and traders can do what they want, then what happens will reflect the priorities of the active agents: supply and demand ensures that we get what we want and need. Or so we are told. But how is the future factored into this? How are the interests of our children added into the calculation? Where does their demand figure?

Viewed collectively, we are living in a great mansion where we are ripping out parts of the floor and walls to sling on the fires and are not worrying because the house has not yet fallen down. We are carrying on smoking because we haven’t developed lung cancer yet…

If you have ever looked at a set of company accounts you’ll notice that there is hardly ever anything beyond a five-year projection. Just to add to the mix, governments seldom last for more than 4-5 years. We want results, folks, and we want ‘em now: what government ever swept to power on the ticket that things will be better in 25 years?

Supplying Demand

Adam Smith is the daddy of much capitalist ideology and his view of supply and demand is seen to underpin much of the rhetoric which argues in support of the market system. However, even accepting the theory, for supply and demand to operate correctly all active agents must have perfect information: buyers must know all available options and their relative merits, and this information must be accurate and timely. However Adam Smith was writing in the days before the advent of the PR industry.

Starting in the 20^th century, the science of psychology was utilised in the cause of shaping public opinion, both spawning the PR world and heavily influencing advertising/propaganda. Welcome to the world of false consciousness writ large, a world where in the UK 98 percent of climate scientists assert the reality of human-made global warming whereas many people still think it’s a con. Perhaps as an example the fact that Exxon can offer $10k to any scientist who publicly criticises the International Panel on Climate Change shows the way they can distort the picture…

Fossil fuel companies have an amazing track record of funding genuine-sounding groups with the sole intention of spreading confusion about climate change. In the same way that tobacco companies knew the dangers of their products way before they were revealed by Richard Doll's research in the 1950s, and pharma companies suppress negative test results, so we have fossil fuel giants distorting the debate with misinformation, personal diatribes, threats of legal action, and simple lies. The problem with supply and demand is that it assumes everyone is equally able to access information; it doesn’t work if key players can tilt the playing field to their advantage. And as fossil fuel companies are in the game to make money, and as climate change information represents a threat to their money-making potential, they will use their power to damage it and deflect it; to minimise its impact on their business.

What is hard to understand about the climate change deniers is how they can reconcile their activities with the fact that they are exacerbating a problem which threatens them also, as well as their children and so forth. How can they act as if in some sense they might be able to breathe all this money they have made; or they can buy another planet to live on? If there is anything in this climate change stuff – and everyone must accept it sounds like a risk – then do they not worry about the future at all? How can they park all these potential concerns?

Naomi Klein has suggested, plausibly, that it is because they cannot conceive of a world unlike this one; and so cannot countenance the idea that it has to change. Essentially they grasp that this system and environmental degradation are synonymous but that this system is the only means to support the life style and world view they have and therefore this system of consumption must be defended at all costs, even if that involves bringing down everything with it. Like the crazed old dictators of history who would rather the entire empire collapsed than they relinquished power, these capitalist titans would rather have it all smashed to smithereens than share any of it. Classic dog in a manger attitude, but with far worse consequences: I’d rather watch it all destroyed than hand it over and become like the rest of you…

Where do we go from here

So, to summarise:

(1) Climate change (amongst other environmental threats) is happening and is a serious problem for all of us.

(2) Climate change has resulted from human activity.

(3) Capitalism by focussing on the short term is unlikely to take the longer term, and hence the environment, into account

(4) Capitalists and corporations will seek to distort the facts of the matter so they can carry on as usual

(5) Capitalists are ideologically blinkered against climate change since it exposes the dangers of capitalism as an environmental threat

What does this mean?

Firstly, that we cannot expect the problems to be solved within capitalism; all the powers tilt the opposite way. Consider the fact that this has been on the international agenda for 30 years and nothing has been achieved; emissions have increased over this period (and were only halted as an effect of the global recession). Additionally, note that the government has publicly stated that the environment must come second to the economy – but isn’t that what got us into this mess?

Secondly, we cannot believe much of what we hear in the mainstream media.

Thirdly, the agenda of all Green groups and so-called leftwing parties, who seek to change things without completely scrapping this system, is a hiding to nothing. The approach advocated by the Green Party of tough regulation is a sham. If regulation worked, wouldn’t big corporations be paying their taxes? The legal systems which govern these matters end up as the preserve of well-paid lawyers of whom the corporations have more than the governments.

Ultimately the issue of the environment is an issue of power: who has the power to determine what happens to this planet? Only in a society where we have the power to determine what can and cannot be done will we be able to stop this headlong rush to environmental devastation. That means a world of common ownership and democratic control. Anything else which anyone offers is merely using an Elastoplast to seal a volcano. Only socialism can deliver on the environment.

Howard Pilott

Editorial: Climate Change and Capitalism (2015)

Editorial from the November 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the industrial revolution there has been a significant rise in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and its oceans, and scientists generally agree that the main contributor has been the burning of fossil fuels that generates CO₂ and other greenhouse gases. Not everyone is convinced that this is the case, and there are many who make it their business to deny it. Nevertheless, world governments and other global institutions have taken the issue of climate change sufficiently seriously to come together and attempt to find ways of tackling it.

The major milestones, so far, have been the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992, a non-binding agreement to stabilise the levels of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, and the signing of the Kyoto protocol in June 1997 which committed the developed countries to binding targets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a 5.2 percent reduction from 1990 emission levels by the year 2010.

Yet there is little to show for these efforts. According to Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, preliminary data shows that in 2013, global carbon dioxide emissions were 61 percent higher than in 1990. The United States government, looking after its oil and coal interests, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Canada, one of the original signatories, withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, primarily to avoid possible financial penalties due to its failure to meet its agreed emission targets, mainly because of the extraction processes of its lucrative tar sands industry in Alberta. A clause within the Kyoto Protocol allows countries to meet their emission targets by purchasing quotas from other countries.

The main obstacle to reducing global warming is capitalism, where production is geared to profit, and production costs have to be kept to a minimum. Measures to curb emissions may increase the latter and place firms at a competitive disadvantage. Also, in many cases, it is more cost effective to import materials from abroad, which requires the burning of fossil fuel in transporting them. Nation states and trading blocs also seek to compete with each other on the best possible terms, and in some cases endeavour to protect their profitable extractive industries. Naomi Klein also noted that in the same period that these international summits were taking place, moves were made to expand world trade through the establishment of global bodies, such as the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which would encourage higher levels of fossil fuel consumption.

The 2015 Paris Climate Conference is due to take place this December and will attempt to set up a new binding agreement to control global warming. Judging from the record of previous summits, the prospects do not look too promising. Attempts to tackle climate change in the context of a world market economy will, at best, achieve only limited results. In socialism, where production can be rationally organised according to human need, we'll have the best chance of successfully curtailing global warming.

The image of capitalism (2000)

Book Review from the December 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

We review Naomi Klein's passionate exposé, No Logo. But what does she suggest we do?

In No Logo (Flamingo, £14.99) Naomi Klein tells the story of the rise of the brand name, the way in which this typified in a logo has achieved a position way beyond ordinary advertising and in so doing has had an impact on the lives of many people. Her study is based on researching and exposing the operations of some powerful firms, such as Nike, Wal-Mart, Shell, McDonalds, Microsoft and quite a few more.

What happened was that in the late 70s and 80s the rôle of the logo, in the beginning only seen on clothing, escalated from a small emblem, discreetly placed on say the inside of the collar to a position of prominence:

"Gradually the logo was transformed from an ostentatious affectation to an active fashion accessory. Most significantly the logo itself was growing in size, ballooning from a three-quarter-inch emblem into a chest-sized marque. This process of logo inflation is still progressing, and none is more bloated than Tommy Hilfiger who has managed to pioneer a clothing style that transforms its faithful adherents into walking, talking, life-sized Tommy dolls, mummified in full branded Tommy worlds."

Klein's contention is that this scaling up of the logo's rôle has become a change in substance; "logos have become so dominant that they have essentially transformed the clothing on which they appear into empty carriers for the brands they represent".

This started the process in which the brand names began to divorce themselves from the actual process of manufacturing; their rôle became that of selling, but selling an image, while the making the articles that carried the brand image was given to others. The consequences of this had huge economic and social repercussions, especially in the US, where most of these firms were based. In the first place the manufacturers were going to go for the cheapest manufacturing costs they could, which of course inevitably meant basing their factories in the Third World. In the second place, it meant massive job losses in the factories formerly based in the US and Canada, where thousands of workers were made redundant, with not much hope of getting another job in an economy which was in transition to what is known as "service".

In the Third World factories things were even worse. Industrial estates were set up, managed by all sorts of chicanery, to be enclaves independent of the labour laws existing in those countries, mainly the Philippines, Malaysia and China. Young mostly female labour was and is employed, and any form of workers' industrial organisation ruthlessly discouraged, to the point where the life of a known labour organiser was precarious indeed. If all this reminds you of the early days of working-class history in America and Britain not to mention Europe, you are indeed right, and it only goes to show that nothing is ever gained permanently in the capitalist system and that the lot of the working class is a never-ending struggle to gain small improvements in their wages and working conditions an equally difficult one to hold on to them. Klein personally visited many of these Third-World factories, managed, with difficulty, to talk to people forced to work incredibly long hours, and heard of abysmal working conditions, of pregnant girls who are frightened to reveal their condition for fear of the sack and cases where babies are born at work and mothers who have died because they were pushed too far.

The social consequences of "the brand image" in its country of origin have in the ten years or so since the concept of goods being marketed as a lifestyle in which you are invited to kill to obtain designer labels have been immense and have permeated deep into the Western world. Not content with advertising alone, firms have infiltrated the universities, schools and sport. Deals have been struck with universities for the monopoly to sell and promote such brands, Coca-Cola one of the foremost. Even the educational material offered by the host has been influenced by or actually supplied by commercial companies, one of the worst offenders being Microsoft. All this goes under the name of sponsorship where the benefits supposedly go to the recipients but in actuality are firmly in the hands of the donors.

This has had repercussions on "normal", shall we say existing, labour relations within capitalism. In the highly-skilled creative areas of firms like Microsoft, traditional labour contracts have been replaced by something more akin to supply. Job security, such as it was, is a thing of the past. Whilst some are happy with this the major result has been an increase in mental illness and a rising level of stress-related sickness.

There is much more in Klein's passionate exposé, but inevitably we reach the point where we have to say, what are we going to do about it? What should our reactions and actions be? Capitalism is a social system which has showed a great ability to change yet stay the same. Klein appears to believe that something worthwhile can be done within the system of capitalism. She is an activist, who believes that by a series of demonstrations, street parties and suchlike activities this current trend within capitalism can be contained and we can return to, what? The idyllic days of some non-existent period of capitalism in which everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds?

There is a new dogma which is challenging the social democratic reformists like the Labour Party or the pseudo-revolutionary totalitarian reformists like the "Communist" Party, which is that "global capitalism" has brought about a totally new kind of capitalism which requires new tactics. On examination these consist of making an awfully big fuss and causing a moderate amount of damage to property in the hope of bringing about publicity and public sympathy for their ideas. In some mysterious way this is supposed to halt the profit system from behaving in the way it was always behaved, that is, exploring any avenue legal or otherwise in the hope of maximum profit. It won't work. No reform has ever achieved its aim in the past and this is another one which is doomed to failure, as well as wasting an awful lot of energy. Even the limited aim of achieving favourable press coverage won't work because such coverage as is obtained is reported as the work of "anarchists", "militants" or whatever the current term of abuse may happen to be and the damage to property is reported as the work of "mindless hooligans". Capitalism cannot be humanised, cannot even be slowed down. It will grind its own remorseless way until we organise to replace it with socialism.

CYR

No logic (2003)

Book Review from the May 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fences and Windows. By Naomi Klein. Flamingo, 2002.

The protests in Seattle, London, Genoa and many other places between 1999 and 2001 gave rise not just to labels such as J18 but also to a widespread movement known variously as anti-corporate, anti-globalisation and even anti-capitalist. Naomi Klein's book No Logo came to be seen as a manifesto for this movement, and Klein herself as a spokesperson for it, despite her protestations to the contrary on both counts. No Logo (on which see the Socialist Standard for December 2000 and August 2001) chronicled the rise of massive global companies such as Nike and McDonalds, and of resistance to them. Klein's latest book is explicitly not a follow-up to her earlier work, though inevitably it deals with similar issues.

Fences and Windows consists of a selection of Klein's journalism and speeches, mainly from 2000 and 2001, and this is both its strength and its weakness. It gains immediacy from having been written in the midst or the aftermath of demos, protests and large-scale discussions, but lacks any overall theme or coherence. Nevertheless, a number of topics that it deals with can be singled out. The fences of the title are the (literal and metaphorical) barriers that prevent people from protesting, from using various resources and from gaining access to education and so on. And the windows are the various kinds of opposition, from mass efforts at direct democracy to landless Brazilian farmers cutting down fences around unused land.

A chapter written in Prague is interesting for what it reveals of the views of many young Czechs. They see both capitalism and “communism” (read: state capitalism) as centralising power in the hands of a few and of treating people as less than fully human. The issue is not whether the state or multinationals are in power, but of how power is distributed. As argued in other pieces, poor countries are required to follow the economic rules laid down by the rich – who then disregard them themselves when they see fit. Post 9/11, even Canada has been forced by the US to toughen security at its borders, and give up a great deal of control over them to US security officials.

The power-holders have of course not just sat idly by while the protesters make their protests. As a way to avoid the objectors, they have moved some of their meetings to virtually inaccessible places. More worryingly, protest and dissent have themselves been criminalised, with police violence becoming more or less the norm, with prominent resisters being arrested on trumped-up charges and so kept out of the way during demonstrations, and with all civil disobedience being equated with violence. (This has become worse since the invasion of Iraq, especially in the US, with any protest regarded as helping “the nation's enemies”.)

The final section of the book turns to positive proposals. A chapter entitled “Limits of Political Parties” attacks the New Democratic Party, Canada's nearest equivalent of the Labour Party (Klein is herself Canadian, and this piece originally appeared in a Toronto newspaper). Klein notes that the most socially excluded parts of Canada's population support “an idea entirely absent from the mainstream left: a deep distrust of the state”. While the NDP advocates strong interventionist central government, a true left-wing party should “articulate a different vision, one founded on local democracy and sustainable economic development”. The last chapter proposes a merger of two forces, international anti-globalisation activists and community-based organizations.

But there is still no real picture of a society to replace capitalism, or of what the real implications of local democracy and sustainability might be. These cannot be valued or implemented in a world divided along the lines of class and nation, where profit is the priority. A thoroughgoing change to a world without classes, nations, governments or profit is needed. Sadly, Klein and the rest of the anti-globalisation movement, despite the sincerity and effectiveness of much of their critique of capitalism, have taken the first steps but have yet to see through to the genuine alternative.

Paul Bennett

Disaster capitalism (2008)

Book Review from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. By Naomi Klein

The author of No Logo has written another book strongly criticising features of capitalism while still arguing for reform of the system rather than for its replacement. In her earlier book Naomi Klein concentrated on the spread of globalisation. In The Shock Doctrine she aims to show that disaster capitalism treats natural and man-made disasters as exciting market opportunities.

She illustrates the main theme and associated sub-themes of the book by events in various countries over the last few decades.

In the USA the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that came to be known as 9/11 resulted in some 3,000 deaths. It also led to Bush’s War on Terror, featuring big strides in privatisation, notably of the security industry. 9/11 exposed the security failures resulting from outsourcing government functions to profit-driven corporations: 

“the Bush team devised a new role for government, one in which the role of the state was not to provide security but to produce it at market prices.”

After the New Orleans flood disaster in 2005 the public school system was almost completely replaced by privately-run charter schools. The teachers’ union was shredded, the teachers were fired, and only some were rehired at reduced salaries. “Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors.”

In Chile in 1973 General Pinochet seized power by a coup d’état against the previously elected regime which was called “socialist” but was really welfare-state capitalism. Before the coup Chile’s US-trained economists had tried to introduce a policy of privatisation, deregulation and cuts to social spending peacefully. When that policy was democratically rejected the ruling class resorted to the use of force. Pinochet’s battle was one-sided: more than 3,200 disappeared or were executed, 80,000 were imprisoned and 200,000 fled the country. Government spending was cut by 25 percent, accompanied by a package of pro-business policies.

The Falklands war in 1982 was fought between Britain and Argentina over possession of some tiny islands off the Atlantic coast. It cost several hundred military lives. It also served to boost the reputation of Mrs Thatcher as the Iron Lady. She went into Churchillian battle mode: after defeating “the enemy without” (the Argentine forces) she turned her attention to what she called “the enemy within” – the trade union movement and particularly the National Union of Mineworkers. Between 1984 and 1988 the Thatcher government privatised, among others, British Telecom, Gas, Airways, Airport Authority and Steel.

Klein takes 57 pages and quotes over 200 sources to analyse the complex, chaotic and profit-driven situation in Iraq. Here are some highlights:

“Develop the private sector, starting with the elimination of subsidies… investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country, they would not be required to reinvest, and they would not be taxed… [the Iraq experiment] transformed the invasion, occupation and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market… BearingPoint, an offshoot of the major international accounting and consulting firm KPMG, was paid $240 million to build a ‘market-driven system’ in Iraq.” (pp342-8)

In 2005 a hugely destructive tsunami caused much loss of life, suffering and hardship for many people, especially in Sri Lanka. When the emergency subsided and fishing families returned to where their homes once stood, they were greeted by police who forbade them to rebuild. Hotels were encouraged to expand onto the valuable oceanfront where fishing people had lived and worked. An $80 million redevelopment project was to be financed by aid money raised in the names of the victims of the tsunami. Loans from the World Bank and IMF were offered in exchange for agreements to open the economy to privatisation and public-private partnerships.

Stan Parker