Naomi Klein

• Born: May 8, 1970

• Naomi Klein

Is an author, activist, and filmmaker. In late November and early December 1999, massive protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, Washington, made international headlines. The WTO (which then had 135 member nations) was founded in 1995 “to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business,” according to the organization’s Web site. The protestors complained that the WTO promotes commercial interests at the expense of sustainable development, preservation of the environment, and human health and safety; that its policies have destroyed jobs and contributed to a widening gap between rich and poor; that less prosperous countries are forced to join the WTO in order to trade with wealthier member nations; and that the organization is the tool of corporate and other special-interest lobbies. Although the activists opposing the work of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international financial organizations as well as the WTO had staged protests in several other nations before that time, the Seattle protests, which marked the first large demonstrations in a developed country, were proclaimed the birth of a new political front, which is described most often as the antiglobalization or anticorporate movement. Several weeks later, Klein’s book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which has been called the bible of anticorporate activism, was published. That international best-seller turned Klein, a young Canadian journalist and self-confessed former “mall rat,” into the unofficial leader of the new movement. At the core of Klein’s message is the need to distinguish between advertising and “branding,” or the marketing of brands—and, by extension, viewpoints—instead of products; it is crucial, she feels, to stop corporations from taking over more public space with such marketing. Klein’s book contends that the marketing of brands homogenizes culture and curtails free expression by creating monopolies that effectively limit what consumers can buy, and that branding in the form of corporate sponsorship has infiltrated everything from music to education. In addition, No Logo maintains that companies that undertake massive branding campaigns have increasingly relied on underpaid workers to ensure that profits will remain enormous even as ever-larger sums are spent for advertising. “It’s the most basic tribal impulse, to invest a symbol with meaning,” Klein told Michael Bullock for Index Magazine (2002, online). “To mark yourself, and to build identity and belonging around that. Religions do it, political parties do it. And so do corporations. The issue is that they sell false community.” In 2002 Klein published the book Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Globalization Debate.

Naomi Klein was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1970, the second of the two children of Bonnie Sherr Klein and Michael Klein, an American couple whose left-wing sympathies led them to move to Canada in the late 1960s to avoid the US military draft during the Vietnam War. Bonnie Klein is an advocate for the disabled and a filmmaker, best known for directing Not a Love Story (1981), an influential documentary about the life of a stripper that has often been called an anti-pornography film. Michael Klein is a physician and a professor of family-practice medicine at the University of British Columbia. Naomi Klein’s paternal grandfather, Philip Klein, was an animator who worked on Disney films including Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia; he was also a Marxist and the first man to lead a strike at Disney, and was subsequently fired and blacklisted in the industry. Unlike her older brother, Seth, an economist who is now the British Columbia director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a left-wing think tank, Naomi Klein did not embrace her parents’ political values when she was growing up. “My mother was really involved in the anti-pornography movement, and when I was at school I found it very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother—it was a source of endless embarrassment,” she told Katharine Viner for the London Guardian (September 23, 2000). As a teenager Klein suffered from bulimia and experimented with drugs and alcohol; during this period she distanced herself emotionally from her family. Her attitude changed when she was seventeen, the year her mother had a life-threatening stroke. After Klein completed high school, she took a year off from her studies to care for her mother before enrolling at the University of Toronto, where she studied English and philosophy.

The murders of 14 female students at the University of Montreal, which occurred in 1989, during Klein’s college years, shocked her into political awareness. “A man went into the engineering school—he had failed to get a place—and he separated the men from the women, shouted, ‘You’re all a bunch of f***ing feminists,’ and opened fire,” she told Viner. “He killed 14 women. There was nothing like that incident in Canadian history—this is not America, where serial murders happen all the time—and it was a hate crime against women. It was a cataclysmic moment. It politicised us enormously. Of course, after that you call yourself a feminist.” Klein became active in campaigns against gender and race discrimination and began to write about those issues in the student newspaper, the Varsity. “I’ve always believed that writing is part of activism,” she told the Guardian (December 5, 2000). “The analysis and argument and research are all fodder for activism and what changes people’s minds is argument and experience.” Klein, who did not complete her college degree, edited the campus newspaper during her fourth year; she subsequently became an intern with the Toronto Globe and Mail and spent two years as editor of This Magazine, a leftist publication in Toronto.

When she returned to college in 1995 in an unsuccessful attempt to earn a degree, she noticed a change in the students. “This was the generation that grew up with ads in their high schools and all over their university campuses,” she told Michael Bullock. “What they wanted from advertising was not for it to be more progressive, or for it to represent them accurately. They just wanted advertising to shut up once in a while. It was the beginnings of an articulation of a politics about reclaiming public space, as opposed to changing the pictures. I thought, This is the shift. Even though it looks completely insignificant right now, even if it’s just five people defacing billboards in the university bathrooms, I think this is actually the beginning of a new political movement.” Students, Klein noted, were concerned that their education was being compromised by corporate funding of universities; they complained that schools were becoming, in effect, market-research venues for large businesses. In response to expanding advertising, some students became “culture jammers,” altering ads to make political points. (For example, the Nike slogan “Just Do It” was changed to “Justice. Do It,” and pictures of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were affixed to ads for Apple Computers, whose tag line, “Think Different,” was changed to read “Think Really Different.”) During that time Klein began to write a weekly column for the Toronto Star, in which she voiced her objections to all forms of exploitation, whether economic, environmental, or political.

Klein spent four years researching her book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000), which her brother helped edit. “Basically, I realized we’re in an era of selling brands instead of products,” she told Bullock about the impetus for the book. “Brands were no longer a mark of the quality of a product—the true product became the brand idea, the brand identity. The measure of a successful brand is how well it stretches into as many different areas as possible.” According to Klein, there is an important difference between advertising and what she calls branding. “Advertising wants to interrupt,” she told Bullock. “Your ads in this magazine are interrupting your articles. Right? They’re hitching a ride on your cultural product. Branding would want to have the whole magazine. . . . The goal of branding is seamless integration. The brand becomes the cultural infrastructure, and as journalists and artists we become brand content. We are in their structure, not they in ours.” Klein has repeatedly pointed out that anything can be turned into a brand, including criticism of brands, and that branding itself is not inherently evil. The problem, she has said, is that many global companies seek through their branding to “sell false community” and influence as many aspects of our lives as possible, for the sake of profit. On the other hand, some large companies actually use branding in campaigns purportedly designed to oppose globalization; the Gap, for example, has sent out peel-off stickers, which resemble graffiti and read “Freedom,” to put in its store windows, and Sony sells a PlayStation game called “State of Emergency,” based on the WTO protests. In fact, in Italy a company has started marketing a No Logo brand olive oil, and there are also No Logo brand cell phones.

Klein traveled around the world to do research for her book, in the process attending part of a 313-day trial in London involving a libel suit against the fast-food chain McDonald’s; she also visited factories in the Philippines and Indonesia. Her book was published just weeks after huge protests in Seattle, Washington, in November and December 1999, against the World Trade Organization. The protests brought the movement worldwide attention for the first time, and in large part because of that, Klein’s book became an international best-seller. In a reference to the seminal work by the 19th-century German political philosopher Karl Marx, No Logo has often been described as “the Das Kapital of the anticorporate movement” and has been read by antiglobalization protesters and activists around the world. Klein believes that the movement with which she has become identified needs no official agenda. “There is no Das Kapital for the anti-corporate movement,” she told Gaby Wood for the Observer (November 12, 2000, on-line). “One of the best things about this movement is that no one is handing down a manifesto from on high.” No Logo has been translated into 14 languages and is a top seller in the United Kingdom, Italy, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey, in addition to the United States and Canada. There has been talk of its being adapted for a documentary in Britain.

One of the key points in Klein’s book is that as companies’ marketing budgets continue to grow, the companies increasingly employ underpaid workers in the world’s poorest countries—or “sweatshop laborers”—in order to lower expenses and maintain their profit margins. Most of those workers cannot afford to buy the products they help to make; in addition, when labor is moved to sweatshops, workers in developed countries lose jobs. The book relates a number of facts about corporate marketing campaigns, revealing, for example, that the $20 million Nike paid the basketball superstar Michael Jordan to endorse its shoes was more than the total amount paid to the company’s 30,000-person workforce in Indonesia. “Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers, increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic wages, and the continual erosion of workers’ rights,” Gary Marshall wrote for Spike Magazine (April 2000, on-line). In a review for the Ecologist (September 2000), Gard Binney called No Logo “witty and well-written” and added, “Klein’s book is a scathing indictment of corporate global branding, and a vivid account of the mounting worldwide backlash against it. . . . Armed with a strong thesis and a light literary style, she shows how corporations like Nike, Reebok, Microsoft, Disney, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Shell and the Virgin Group have abandoned traditional product advertising and instead poured billions into brand imaging.” James Ledbetter, writing for the New York Times Book Review (April 23, 2000), offered a different view: “Klein is a gifted writer; her paragraphs can be as seductive as the ad campaigns she dissects. . . . And she is careful not to equate her criticisms with a false nostalgia for an ad-free past; instead, Klein takes the fairly unassailable position that our lives ought to have at least some ‘unbranded space.’ Yet there’s a strange selectivity in Klein’s examples that leaves you wondering if she’s told the whole story. She spends immense amounts of time analyzing the ‘cool’ brands of the early 90’s—Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike—but fails to train her microscope on such industries as tobacco, liquor, financial services and petroleum (except Shell), none of which have been shy about branding in recent decades. And there are sections, particularly where Klein ventures into macroeconomics, that cry out for greater rigor.” A reviewer for the Economist (January 29, 2000) found the premise of No Logo to be fallacious: “[Klein’s] book is a wistful plea for the world before Burger King. . . . The trouble is that, while protesters of her parents’ generation had a real threat to combat—a misguided war fought by reluctant conscripts—Ms. Klein’s contemporaries fight mainly against the forces that have made them wealthy and spread a bit of that prosperity to poorer parts of the world.”

No Logo is credited with getting millions of young people interested for the first time in political action. The book also inspired the music group Radiohead to ban corporate advertising from its 2000 British tour. Klein is heartened to see young activists working with older, more established groups, including the umbrella labor organization AFL-CIO, church-affiliated organizations, the National Labor Committee, and the Campaign for Labor Rights. “This is not a youth movement,” she told Wood. “There’s a great deal of co-operation going on—for instance, in the States, college-age students against sweatshops are working with labour leaders their parents’ age. There isn’t that vanguardist, don’t-trust-anyone-over-30 [mentality] that was so much a part of the Sixties.” Klein has, in fact, downplayed comparisons between her activities and the antiwar campaigns of the 1960s, saying that the new movement has more in common with workers’ political activities of the 1930s, which brought together in a strong coalition people of various ages and backgrounds. She wrote in a piece for the New York Times (December 2, 1999), “This is the most internationally minded, globally linked movement the world has ever seen. . . . When protesters shout about the evils of globalization, most are not calling for a return to narrow nationalism, but for the borders of globalization to be expanded, for trade to be linked to democratic reform, higher wages, labor rights and environmental protections.”

Thus far the anticorporate movement has primarily targeted international financial organizations and individual corporations rather than governments. “People are talking about corporations rather than politicians, because their politicians have been bought,” Klein told the Daily Summit (August 25, 2002). “There’s no better example than the United States. Its government represents an absolute and complete merger between the corporate sector and the people running the country. . . . I object to the idea that the nation state is going to stand up to corporations. Nation states made the deal with business in the first place. Nothing is going to change until there are radical democratic reforms in our countries, along with a much deeper understanding of what democracy is.” She believes, however, that activists must go beyond looking exclusively at corporations when seeking change. “All of this has been about following the money . . . ,” she told an interviewer for a Web site called The Experiment (November 13, 2000). “I think there’s been a kind of layered effect.” The antiglobalization movement, she said, has led the mainstream media to focus more on the role of corporations in campaign finance. “And I think it’s getting at the root causes of the erosion of our democracy. Because just going after corporations is by no means enough. It’s a very short sighted political strategy. You don’t change the world one corporation at a time, it doesn’t work. So I think what we’re doing is . . . following a logo all through the economy and the political system.” Klein looks to developing nations for a new model of democracy. “Across Latin America, there’s a revolution going on against privatisation. In the US, it’s being covered [in the press] as a rise in anti-Americanism, but this is a very shallow appreciation of what’s going on,” she told the Daily Summit. “Now some people think this stuff is just cute and don’t think it offers real solutions. But I believe these people’s movements will form the building blocks of a different kind of globalisation.”

Klein has said that those who do not protest in the streets can still be a vital part of the movement. “Nobody has the luxury not to see themselves as an activist,” she told Julie Polter for Sojourners (March/April 2001). “That’s what I would say to those who may support the general goals of social justice and are very concerned about poverty around the world and the failures of this economic model, but don’t see themselves as activists. That doesn’t mean that everybody is going to be on the front lines, getting arrested. . . . To me the common thread that runs through all the anti-corporate activism that I’ve covered for the past five years is this idea of reclaiming the public from the privatized. That can be physical space, resources, education, water, . . . the town square, the streets—but it’s also within the individual. It’s about reclaiming the part of ourselves that’s a citizen and not a consumer.” Indeed, she thinks that in some ways the movement has placed too much emphasis on people’s roles as consumers, making them feel they should question every purchase they make. “This is not a consumer issue; it’s a political issue. There is a way for us to respond as citizens that is not simply as consumers,” she told Viner. “Over and over again, people’s immediate response to these issues is: what do I buy? I have to immediately solve this problem through shopping. But you can like the products and not like the corporate behaviour; because the corporate behaviour is a political issue, and the products are just stuff. The movement is really not about being purer-than-thou and producing a recipe for being an ethical consumer. That drains a lot of political energy.”

In 2002 Klein published her second book, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Globalization Debate, a collection of essays, most of them previously published. “Her incisive analysis and on-scene reporting covers the globalization issue, and, in doing so, gives context to the strategies and tactics of the [political-corporate alliance] in the United States,” an article on the Buzz Flash Web site (December 4, 2002) stated. In a review for the Guardian (November 9, 2002, online), Stuart Christie called the collected pieces “powerful wake-up calls from a committed libertarian” and went on to say, “This is a book to be savoured and referred to every so often, even if just to recharge one’s moral batteries. Klein is a fine writer with the gift of conveying much with little, and the ability to put her finger on the social pulse every time.” Anis Shivani was much less complimentary in a review for Counterpunch (November 25, 2002): “Just as the anti-globalization movement seems to be on the ropes—struggling to find a coherent message to unify the disparate groups constituting it, and to resolve the inherent paradoxes of the anti-globalization message—so does Klein’s book frustrate for its lack of a sophisticated understanding of economics and culture. . . . Even if these are in-the-moment reports from the front lines, there ought to be the suggestion that behind them is a synthesizing intelligence—and there isn’t.”

In Fences and Windows, Klein attacked what she saw as the efforts of President George W. Bush’s administration to “brand” America and sell its image around the world. Such efforts included the hiring of the well-known advertising executive Charlotte Beers to promote the United States’ policies abroad. “Democracy implies the ability to come up with your own judgments, whereas branding is an exercise in controlling people’s judgments, and managing them, and shaping them,” she told the Buzz Flash Web site. “Obviously governments are always involved in marketing, but this is going deeper in the way one understands the entire perception of the nation’s foreign policy, and really, I guess, treating people like morons around the world, insisting on responding to life-and-death policy differences with sloganeering and marketing.”

Some have accused Klein of hypocrisy, pointing out that while she purports to be “anti-brand” and to distrust “big media,” she writes a column for the Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s largest international papers, and admits to buying brand clothing (though she removes the labels before wearing such items). “I’m comfortable with all the contradictions involved in this project—publishing with a multinational corporation, writing a column for the Globe and Mail, flying all over the world talking about local democracy,” she told Brian D. Johnson for Maclean’s (March 12, 2001). “The issue to me is: if you are made a token, what are you doing to push the envelope, to not be as acceptable as they think you are? I feel I’m able to control that.”

Klein—whom the British journalist Celia Brayfield, writing for the London Times (November 10, 2000), called “probably the most influential person under the age of 35 in the world”—has identified the feminist leader Gloria Steinem and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy as two of her heroes. “I . . . think feminists were some of the original culture jammers,” she told Bullock. She also admires Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, a group of armed revolutionaries who have fought for land reform and the rights of indigenous peoples and against the polarization of wealth in Mexico, among other goals; Klein applauds Marcos’s advice to those who want to help the Zapatistas—which is that they work for change in their own communities. Klein has traveled widely to speak at universities and at protests and other gatherings around the world, but she has said that she does not relish those public appearances. “I’m really a hermit. . . . It’s a struggle for me to do all the public speaking and protests, even though I have had moments of pure exhilaration,” she told Bullock. Ms. Magazine named her one of 13 Women of the Year in 2001, the same year that No Logo won Canada’s National Business Book Award, which carries a $10,000 prize. Klein is frequently asked to give presentations to corporations but has refused to do so, for fear that her words could be taken out of context and used for ad campaigns. She became a columnist for the Nation in 2002; her pieces have appeared in publications throughout North America and Europe.

Klein has gone on to write a number of other books, including: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), a bestseller in which Klein claimed any meaningful climate change could not be accomplished in a capitalistic society; On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019), a collection of essays on the ways the economy and climate issues converge; How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other (2022), a guide to the climate and activism for teens; and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), a book equal parts memoir and analysis of the role of social media in today's world. The book, in part, explores Klein's experiences being mistaken for American feminist and author Naomi Wolf, whose views are essentially the opposite of Klein's. The book earned Klein the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024.

She has been married to Avi Lewis, host of the Canadian nationally televised debate show counterSpin, since 1998. The couple live in Toronto.

Despite the monumental task she thinks the anticorporate movement faces, Klein remains upbeat in most of her speeches and columns. “I see optimism as a really conscious choice,” she told Polter. “There have been points where I’ve lost it and written critical things that have felt like a slap in the face to people who are involved on the ground. I’m not a propagandist. But on the other hand, I don’t want to indulge too much in negativity, because I do believe that optimism is contagious. Just hearing about what other people are doing gives people permission to do things differently, to try and claim some space back.”

For further reading see Buzz Flash (December 4, 2002), Index Magazine (2002), (London) Guardian (September 23, 2000), Sojourners (March/April 2001), Spike Magazine (April 2000), Klein, Namoi, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, 2000, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Globalization Debate, 2002.

Hooper, Rowan. "Naomi Klein on the Rise of Misinformation and Conspiracy Influencers." New Scientist, 17 July 2024, www.newscientist.com/article/mg26335004-000-naomi-klein-on-the-rise-of-misinformation-and-conspiracy-influencers/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Naomi Klein, naomiklein.org/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Saunders, Emma. "Naomi Klein wins first Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction." BBC, 13 June 2024, www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj778nj9ez8o. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.