Read a review of Naomi's book by clicking on the related link below

Uh-oh: Naomi Klein is back with an angry new book. She’s that greenish, Canadian leftie who suddenly, astonishingly, grabbed hold of the western world seven years ago with her book No Logo – a passionate and extremely well-timed broadside against globalisation, corporate branding and the exploitative tendencies of multinational corporations such as Nike.

Somewhere near you right now there is a 20-year-old kid with unwashed dreadlocks stroking a tree with one hand while reading aloud from his battered copy in the other.

It has become a sort of bible for the eco-left and, having sold more than 1m copies, made Naomi an awful lot of money. And why shouldn’t she have an awful lot of money? There’s no law against making a lot of money while writing about people who don’t have two pennies, or rupees, to rub together. There’s a lively swing to her prose, no matter how bitterly The Economist may brand her “adolescent” and “incoherent”.

Somehow, subconsciously – she denies that it was calculated – she tapped into that postteenage reservoir of angry disenchantment with global capitalism and, particularly, America, and wrapped it all together in a punchy book. As a branding exercise you have to say it was pretty unbeat-able: No Logo has become the defining logo for an awful lot of people, not all of whom live in stick constructions known as “benders” next to proposed airport runways.

She smacked the corporations around good and proper, so now almost all of them at least pretend they don’t exploit their world labour force and their public advertisements usually have an agreeably greenish tinge to them. No Logo was that rare thing: a book that had an immediate effect.

The new one is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and has that similarly timely, zeitgeisty feel to it. Disaster capitalism is what happens when fundamentalist neocon economists, of the kind running the United States right now, descend upon a country that has found itself suddenly traumatised by war or the collapse of its economic system or a natural disaster such as a tsunami.

A disaster is what the free-market fundamentalists yearn for, she asserts, because it gives them a blank slate upon which to work. All those years of suffocating, “socialistic” state regulation can be wiped away overnight and the country subjected to what they – and she – call the shock treatment of unrestrained market economics. It happened in Chile, after the CIA helped to overthrow Salvador Allende; in Russia and Poland with the collapse of communism. Most pertinently it is happening now in Iraq.

When disasters don’t happen as a convenient act of nature, you see, the United States has a penchant for making them happen, as in Chile and Iraq – precisely so this shock treatment can be applied. More contentiously, she ties the torture of dissidents in these stricken countries directly to the economic shock treatment applied to the country as a whole.

She sits in the Soho hotel in London sipping coffee; neat, cool and full of humour, very petite. Naomi Klein, little Naomi, taking on the global corporations and the idiot King Bush.

Born in Montreal 37 years ago to leftish American parents, her political radicalism took root while at university in Toronto. Before that she was a mall brat hanging out in shopping malls buying stuff with logos.

She describes herself as merely a “cultural commentator” which is why, this time, she gave herself a crash course in economics, being untrained in the discipline herself. If her radicalism has an ideological base (I’m not sure it has) then it would be grounded in the idiosyncratic, greenish, writings of Slavoj Zizek and Fritjof Capra.

She is sharp, canny and acutely media aware. I tell her that in the seven years since No Logo, an awful lot of mainstream thought has come to agree with her and she doesn’t demur (although, charmingly, she also doesn’t want to take the credit).

With beautiful irony, there are even restaurant chains and clothes shops called No Logo – but Naomi laughs of the suggestion that she should rake in a commission. I also suggest she seems to be reflexively and uncompromisingly antiAmerican – partly a consequence, maybe, of her Canadian upbringing. “Well,” she pauses, “it’s not about being antiAmerican, as such, as being in favour of another economic model. But I suppose it is very much about being a Canadian. It’s the perspective of the one-way mirror: I can see them across the border, but they can’t see me.”

When push comes to shove, though, she is not that left-wing. A down-the-line Keynesian dressed in deceptively wolfish clothing; her stance on capitalism would have put her on the right wing of the British Labour party 25 years ago, along with yer Hattersleys and yer Healeys; she is no old-fashioned, hard-left Bennite.

She supports the moderately leftish NDP in her home country and does not rule out standing for election one day. That being said, as soon as she has not ruled the prospect out, she gets nervous about having not done so and takes a gulp of coffee. She is a very big deal indeed back home and such an admission will have the phone ringing off the wall. For a brief moment the media veneer has gone and she looks slightly embarrassed.

All she wants, she says, in response to the usual criticism levelled at her – that we know what she is against but not what she is for – is better regulation of these damnable corporations; not their absolute destruction. Nike and co merely need to be reminded that they are human and, as she might put it, occupy a public space.

Corporations behave in the manner they do because that is what they were constructed to do, not because the individuals who run them might be amoral or immoral. “I think the individuals and the corporations privately want stricter regulation,” she says. This is an eminently humane leftism.

Iraq she sees as an “insane plan” by free-market US ideologues to strip the country not merely of Saddam Hus-sein and the Ba’athists, but of everything, to wipe the state clean and free it up for the shock doctrine. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld she cites as “venture capitalists” indulging in “country creation”; the seed money represented by the massive investment required by the invasion of Iraq – and the companies now making a killing are in many ways indistinguishable from the government itself.

Again, the torture analogy is brought into play. Describing the “liberation” of Baghdad by allied troops, she says: “Baghdad’s residents could not speak to each other, hear each other or see outside. Like a prisoner destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was shackled and hooded. Next it was stripped.”

I wonder if this continual allusion – emotive, bordering on hysterical – does not overstate and eventually demean her argument? She will concede that the sudden “shock” of radical market ideology being imposed upon a country does not of necessity lead to the government goons in torture chambers applying rather more literal shocks to captive dissidents.

“Of course not,” she says, citing the Thatcher revolution over here. “The ideologues believe that a totally free market is a prerequisite for democracy, but also that it is more important than democracy and that given the choice between the two, therefore, the free market is preferable.”

It has not escaped her attention, either, that the left has, over the years, accrued an enviable reputation for imposing a shock doctrine all of its own: Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and so on. One which easily exceeded in its brutality anything dreamt up by her chosen villains Friedman, Kissinger, Rumsfeld et al. The problem, she says, lies with any doctrinaire, absolutist, closed system of thought, from the left or the right. Like Islam, I venture. Oh no, she shakes her head. She’s not going down that particular road. Not today.

Then, having signed my copy of her book, she is off to the next interview, signing or debate; a clever woman who has cornered the market in prêt-à-porter radicalism.

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