[nettime-fr] hommage à, a tribute to : Naomi Klein

[Louise Desrenards <louise.desrenards@free.fr>]

Vive les manifs pour soutenir les négociations en cours ; criticalsecret qui
n'a jamais reçu de fric pour autant est labellisé au statut des
Intermittents, comme société de presse édition et de rédacteurs et de
production audio-visuelle...

J'espère que les intermittents auront toujours cours quand enfin il y aura
trois sous pour se payer par ici au rythme asynchrone de nos productions en
ligne... en attendant, on signe.

Comme je ne peux pas bouger de la maison, non pour raison X mais pour X
raisons, j'en profite pour regarder le monde tourner ailleurs et j'espère
vous en faire d'autre part profiter...

A+
Louise
------------

Naomi Klein : vous la connaissez déjà.
Franchement : c'est quelqu'un !

Son site
http://www.nologo.org

où aujourd'hui on peut y lire en édito du 5 juin
son article sur l'Irak
³Downsizing in Disguise²
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030623&s=klein

Le livre en anglais-US : Paperback.

Le livre disponible en Français : Actes Sud.
(2è édition en poche)
(Fnac):
http://www.fnac.com/Shelf/article.asp?PRID=1275278&SID=ddc1e47f%2Dd08e%2D690
b%2Db30b%2D3f2b46ea1ae7&UID=0c6c1981e%2Dd235%2Db063%2D9c28%2Dcfa8725ad051&AI
D=&Origin=GOOGLE&Pe=1&No=1&Fr=0&Mn=2&Ra=-1&To=0
Plus court pour le lien (Amazon):
http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/171-7786788-2312234

---------------

On pourrait dire, la Noam Chomsky de l'identité (tous corps propres
compris :  des marques, du fric, du graphisme, de l'art,  de la communauté,
de la famille, du citoyen).

La fin de l'engagement de l'Esthétique corrélative de l'Ethique à l'acte de
l'événement mondial de la communication par les signes... Cinquante ans
après Mac Luhan, quarante ans après l'inscription prémonitoire de
Baudrillard inspiré par Simondon et Barthes, nous voici au fait concret
incontournable...

On pourrait donc se poser la même question sur la fin de l'Ethique (dans la
disparition du couple dialectique de la fin et des moyens, à l'horizon de la
fin des utopies matérialistes comme projet social révolutionnaire ‹ tout
simplement parce qu'on éprouve bien historiquement, dans une sorte de
mémoire et de conscience cognitives collectives, qu'elles se réalisent en
leur contraire ou en pire réalité) : intégration du moyen et de la fin à
l'acte révolutionnaire lui-même. Cet acte,  dans un rapport d'influence de
l'environnement qui le fait évoluer : et réciproquement cet acte d'inspirer
des changements de l'environnement, changements prédictibles à l'acte même,
quoique non définissables en propre.

Point n'est besoin de violence dans ce cas... Dans l'azur pollué des villes:
patience d'être. Retrouver le sens du risque et de l'aventure ce n'est pas
péter les plombs ni mettre du plomb dans l'aile, c'est apporter de l'oxygène
à la vie.

Naomi Klein, elle est partie d'un truc hyper simple, un pragmatisme critique
de son origine et de son éducation particulières, mais aussi de ses propres
faiblesses ressenties, sous influence de l'appel de l'environnement,
conditionnant ses points de vue d'adolescente...

... et voilà : 
Entre autre : active à Prague (Meeting de la Banque mondiale).

Le site de Radiohead (groupe musical est solidaire) :
http://www.radiohead.com

---------------
Une critique singulière du communautarisme...
elle n'est pas rétro existentialiste pour autant ;-)

http://www.greatquestions.com/f/q2_klein_2.html  
    
Deuxième article de Naomi Klein

La semaine dernière, Neil Bissoondath écrivait qu'au Canada nous avons fait
un tel fétiche des cultures et traditions autres que les nôtres que chez la
plupart d'entre nous, "la Canadienneté est très superficielle." Notre "vrai"
moi est enraciné dans la vision irréaliste d'un ailleurs, n'importe où sauf
ici. 

Cette description touche chez moi une corde sensible. Enfant de deux Juifs
américains issus de l'Europe de l'Est, j'ai souvent regardé ce qui se
passait aux États-Unis, en Israel ou en Europe, et senti à quel point la
question de la nationalité était étrangement arbitraire et en fait,
abstraite. 

M. Bissoondath suggère que l'irréalité de notre Canadienneté découle de
l'ignorance : nous souffrons d'un manque d'identité comme nation, faute de
liens avec le passé. Mais qu'advient-il quand, tentant de forger ces liens
plus profonds avec le pays, le passé se révèle non pas notre ami, mais notre
ennemi ? Qu'advient-il si en apprenant l'histoire du Canada - pas la version
rassurante et héroÏque, mais la vérité, sale et souvent brutale - nous
découvrons que notre inclusion dans ce pays n'a jamais été que superficielle
? 

C'est exactement ce qui attend plusieurs Canadiens, surtout ceux d'origine
britannique ou française, s'ils examinent non seulement le passé de notre
nation, mais aussi une large portion de son présent. Le Canada s'est inventé
une identité à partir d'un mythe. S'il faut en croire cette fiction, nous
possédons un caractère national essentiel, au delà de l'histoire familière
de territoires volés et d'immigration, nous serions autre chose qu'une
nation de fieffés bâtards, d'exilés et d'aventuriers.

Au centre du discours nationaliste canadien, au coeur du débat sur l'unité
nationale et des querelles persistentes au sujet de ce qui constitue
vraiment un Canadien, c'est le mensonge que véhicule la notion des "deux
peuples fondateurs". Selon le regretté Robert F. Harney, historien et
professeur d'études ethniques à l'Université de Toronto, l'histoire qui
raconte la façon dont s'est développé le multiculturalisme officiel, donne
"l'impression d'une intrusion des groupes ethniques au coeur de l'ancienne
lutte opposant les vrais Canadiens/ Canadians." Le czar du français, Camille
Laurin, résumait le phénomène quand il décrivait le Canada comme étant une
"nation complètement réalisée" à laquelle les immigrants pouvaient se
joindre, mais qu'ils ne pouvaient altérer.

L'idée d'un Canada essentiel et invariable, devant être protégé des hordes
étrangères importunes, a été présente tout au long de notre histoire et a
inspiré quelques une de nos plus ignobles politiques nationales. Une quête
de pureté ethnique se cache derrière la Loi sur l'immigration chinoise de
1923 qui a radicalement restreint l'immigration des Chinois au Canada
jusqu'en 1947. Pendant trois décennies, c'est elle qui a arraché les enfants
autochtones à leur foyer pour les confier à des familles blanches, pratique
qui a atteint son apogée dans ce qu'on a appelé le "Sixties Scoop." Elle
s'est traduite par des examens médicaux falsifiés pour empêcher plusieurs
Africains-Américains d'immigrer au Canada avant la Première Guerre mondiale,
par la politique du "aucun c'est encore trop" pratiquée envers les réfugiés
juifs pendant l'Holocauste et par l'internement de 21 000 Canadiens
d'origine japonaise pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

Les exemples plus récents abondent, indiquant clairement aux Canadiens
minoritaires qu'ils ne sont ici qu'à titre d'invité. Le cas d'un Jacques
Parizeau et de son "nous savons qui nous sommes" révélateur le soir du
référendum, n'est pas unique. La même xénophobie est apparue lors des crises
de colère provoquées par le port du turban dans la Légion canadienne et la
GRC et, plus récemment, dans le débat à savoir si un dieu, et lequel, avait
sa place dans la constitution canadienne. Elle est présente aussi quand nous
nous lamentons de "l'exode des cerveaux" aux États-Unis tout en exilant au
siège avant de nos taxis urbains d'innombrables détenteurs de doctorats
venus de l'Inde et de l'Afrique dont nous refusons de reconnaître les
diplômes. 

Cette douleureuse histoire de petites et grandes exclusions est la raison de
l'absence au Canada du territoire commun du "nous", pour reprendre les
termes de M. Bissoondath. Trop souvent, au premier signe de trouble, ce
"nous" se fragmente en "nous" et "eux". Pendant la première moitié de ce
siècle, l'opinion canadienne et les politiques sur l'immigration étaient
déchirées entre le besoin de peupler et de développer ce vaste pays et
celui, tout aussi pressant. de protéger la pureté ethnique du Canada.
Faut-il s'étonner que plusieurs minorités ethniques, victimes d'une telle
duplicité, hésitent à considérer le Canada comme leur vraie patrie ?

Si plusieurs Canadiens n'éprouvent qu'un sentiment d'affection superficiel
envers leur patrie d'adoption, c'est peut-être parce qu'ils n'ont jamais été
invités à aller plus loin - à entrer dans le club privé de la Canadienneté
essentielle, encore largement définie par les hauts et les bas des relations
entre Anglais et Français, Est et Ouest. Les gens rationnels réagissent à
cette inclusion des beaux jours, à moitié consentie, de la seule façon
logique : en créant et en défendant des enclaves sécuritaires et
confortables. 

La seule vraie faute du multiculturalisme n'est pas qu'il encourage la
ségrégation, mais qu'il contribue à la camoufler en permettant à nos élites
politiques de présenter les étalages haut en couleur d'une ethnicité
commanditée officiellement, comme étant la preuve qu'à titre de nation, nous
avons dépassé le stade de la mentalité colonialiste. Le multiculturalisme ne
consiste pas à "payer les gens pour qu'ils conservent leurs racines
étrangères" comme le suggèrent ses critiques. C'est un pot-de-vin : on paie
les groupes ethniques pour qu'ils demeurent à l'écart. En encourageant la
création de parcs à thème ethnique bien délimités, les gardiens du Canada
distraient la concurrence et protègent le territoire.

Si le multiculturalisme a échoué, c'est que nous avons tenté d'accomplir
l'impossible : épouser la diversité tout en s'accrochant aux vieilles idées
de supériorité ethnique. Avec comme résultat qu'au Canada, le
multiculturalisme est à peine plus qu'un exercice de commercialisation.

Il pourrait en être autrement. Le Canada doit son existence aux bâteaux, non
à un droit acquis de naissance. Notre passé est en fait une collection de
passés; sans sa diversité, le Canada n'existe pas. Il n'y a pas de
Canadienneté essentielle, ensevelie dans un glorieux et lointain passé,
perdue par inadvertance. Tout ce qu'on retrouve, c'est la Grande-Bretagne et
la France - d'autres rêves d'un ailleurs. La Canadienneté est là, en face de
nous : c'est le flot constant d'immigrants qui ont choisi de venir ici, ce
sont les gens dont c'était le pays avant notre arrivée.

La possibilité qu'émerge une culture à partir de notre passé est à la fois
stimulante et merveilleuse. Mais pour ce faire, nos écoles doivent enseigner
l'histoires des Polonais et des Ukrainiens qui ont colonisé les Prairies,
des Italiens qui ont bâti nos villes, des Chinois qui ont construit le
chemin de fer transcontinental, des Loyalistes noirs qui ont contribué à la
colonisation de la Nouvelle-Écosse et des Japonais qui ont développé
l'industrie de la pêche sur la côte ouest. Ces histoires ne doivent
cependant pas être racontées sous forme de dramatiques moralisantes ayant
pour thème notre hospitalité et notre grand coeur. Elles doivent traduire
exactement ce qui s'est passé : un pays a voulu profité de l'aubaine que
représente une main-d'oeuvre étrangère bon marché, sans être contaminé par
l'influence corrosive de cultures "étrangères". M. Bissoondath croit que
connaître notre histoire peut nous transformer en nation, mais cette
connaissance pourrait avoir une autre fonction, tout aussi importante : elle
peut nous aider à comprendre pourquoi nous sommes parfois si divisés. Si
nous acceptons sincèrement d'affronter le passé, nous apprendrons peut-être
comment devenir un pays plus uni, possédant une identité pleinement
intégrée, sufisamment généreux pour inclure tous les Canadiens. Sinon,
jamais nous n'échapperons à la ségrégation actuellement présente sous
couvert de multiculturalisme ou à la querelle binaire qui passe pour la
création d'une nation.

-------------------

Qui est Naomi Klein ?

http://www.greatquestions.com/f/bio_q2_klein.html    

Naomi Klein est une journaliste torontoise fréquemment invitée à commenter
les questions sociales à la télévision. Ancienne collaboratrice de rédaction
au magazine Elm Street, ses articles ont parus dans Toronto Life, Ms et The
Village Voice. Son livre, NO LOGO : SOLUTIONS FOR A SOLD PLANET, sera publié
à l'automne. 


Published on Saturday, September 23, 2000 in the Guardian of London
http://www.guardian.co.uk

Hand-To-Brand-Combat:
A Profile Of Naomi Klein
As a teenager, Naomi Klein was a dedicated mall rat, fixated on designer
labels. A bare decade later, the author of a life-changing book on
anti-corporatism and the new politics, she is at the heart of the protest at
the current World Bank summit in Prague. She tells Katharine Viner how
everything turned around for her


by Katharine Viner

 
>From the age of six, growing up in Canada, Naomi Klein was obsessed with
brand names, and what she could buy. She had a thing about the bright signs
she saw from the back-seat window of the family car: McDonald's, Texaco,
Burger King and, especially, the fluorescent yellow gorgeousness of Shell:
"So bright and cartoon-like I was convinced that, if I could climb up and
touch it, it would be like touching something from another dimension - from
the world of TV." She used to stitch little fake alligators on to her
T-shirts so they would look like Lacoste, had a Saturday job in Esprit (they
had the best logo), and her biggest fights with her parents were over Barbie
and the price of designer jeans. In her high-school yearbook - where some
are labelled "most likely to succeed" - she was "most likely to be in jail
for stealing peroxide". She was defined by the products she used to change
the colour of her hair.


Naomi Klein/CBC Photo
But now, aged 30, Klein has written a book, No Logo, which has been called
"the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement". The teenager
fixated on brand names has become a campaigner against our over-branded
world, and a populariser of the kind of anti-corporate ideas that are
currently fuelling protesters against the IMF/World Bank meeting in Prague.
The book has been a word-of-mouth sensation, giving voice to a generation of
people under 30 who have never related to politics until now. The band
Radiohead were so inspired by No Logo that they have banned corporate
advertising from their British tour, deeming all venues "logo-free" - Ed
O'Brien, the guitarist, says, "No Logo certainly made me feel less alone.
She was writing everything I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was
very uplifting." 

As a chronicler of what she calls "the next big political movement - and the
first genuinely international people's movement" - Klein writes that Nike
paid Michael Jordan more in 1992 for endorsing its trainers ($20 million)
than the company paid its entire 30,000-strong Indonesian workforce for
making them; why, in her opinion, this makes people angry; and why that
anger is expressed in rallies outside the Nike Town superstore, rather than
outside government buildings or embassies. She shows how globalisation has
hit the poor the most, and how this new political movement is both
historically informed and absolutely of the moment, like nothing that has
gone before. 

And, as we shall see, it was bound to be some- one such as Naomi Klein who
would be both at the heart of anti-corporatism and interpret it for everyone
else. The anti-corporate movement is resolutely disparate, and has no
leaders; but it is no coincidence that its most prominent populariser should
be a 30-year-old woman from North America (the heart of wealth and power),
whose political background is a leftwing family and a teenage rebellion
through shopping. As we shall see, she is perfectly placed to reflect these
times. 

Klein's argument starts with what we all recognise. Logos, she says, are
"the closest thing we have to an international language, by force of
ubiquity". Most of the world's six billion people could identify the
McDonald's sign, or the Coca-Cola symbol - we are united by what we are
being sold. And the selling, these days, isn't just in magazines or on
billboards: Gordon's gin fills British cinemas with the smell of juniper
berries; in some Scandinavian countries, you can get "free" long-distance
calls if you consent to ads cutting into your telephone conversations; Nasa
has solicited ads to run on its space stations. There's no escape.

Furthermore, advertising today is not merely about selling products; it is
about selling a brand, a dream, a message. So Nike's aim is not to sell
trainers but to "enhance people's lives through sports and fitness". IBM
doesn't sell computers, it sells "solutions". And as for Polaroid, well,
it's not a camera - it's a "social lubricant". You sell the message of your
brand, not your product, and you can expand as widely as you like. As
Richard Branson says, you "build brands not around products but around
reputation" - and leap from record shops to cola to banking to trains.

But Branson's trains show how fragile this strategy might be - if Virgin
trains don't run on time, why should you trust his bank? Or look what
happened to Nike - from being "the spirit of sports" in the early 90s, the
campaign against its use of atrocious sweatshops in developing countries led
CEO Phil Knight to confess in 1998 that his shoes "have become synonymous
with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse". When it's no longer
just about trainers, when the corporations have promised so much more - a
way of life! - they have very much more to lose.

What's more, says Klein, people start to resent the colonisation of their
lives. Fine, they say, I'll buy my shoes from you, but I don't want you to
take over my head. Young activists, says Klein, feel that their cultural and
political space has been taken away and sold back to them, neatly-packaged,
as "alternative" or "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". So Seattle grunge
(including its star, Kurt Cobain) implodes through commercialisation, and
the designer Christian Lacroix says, "It's terrible to say, very often the
most exciting outfits are from the poorest people." So the Body Shop
displays posters condemning domestic violence and Nike runs an ad saying, "I
believe high heels are a conspiracy against women." So Nike signs up black
stars such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and then adorns the walls of
Nike Town with quotes from Woods saying, "There are still courses in the US
where I am not allowed to play, because of the colour of my skin." It's
anti-racism without the politics; 50 years of civil-rights history reduced
to an anodyne advertising slogan.

Next, the big brands effectively force out small businesses and take over as
much physical space as possible, with mergers and synergy being the business
buzzwords. Starbucks coffee shops (once they have co-opted a right-on,
third-world-loving, world-music-playing milieu) operate by "clustering": an
area becomes saturated with branches, local cafes close down (preferably
well-liked independent ones in groovy areas) and the big brands take over.
Meanwhile, McDonald's wages a 26-year battle against a man called Ronald
McDonald whose McDonald's Family Restaurant in a small town in Illinois was
founded in 1956. How dare he be born with the same name as a corporate
giant? 

And while the corporations are busy doing what they think is important -
branding a way of life, putting the squeeze on independent shopkeepers, and
the like - someone, somewhere, has to make the stuff. This may be a time of
"degraded production in the age of the superbrand", as Klein puts it, but
corporations do tend to need a product somewhere along the line. The "death
of manufacturing" is only a western phenomenon - as we're consuming more
products than ever, someone must be making them. But it's difficult to find
out who. As Klein says, "the shift in attitude toward production is so
profound that, where a previous era of consumer goods corporations displayed
their logos on the facades of their factories, many of today's brand-based
multinationals maintain that the location of their production operations is
a 'trade secret', to be guarded at all costs." Very often, it seems, they
are produced under terrible conditions in free-trade zones in Indonesia,
China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The sweatshops Klein visited in Cavite, the largest free-trade zone in the
Philippines, have rules against talking and smiling. There is forced
overtime, but no job security - it's "no work, no pay" when the orders don't
come in. Toilets are padlocked except during two 15-minute breaks per day -
seamstresses sewing clothes for western high-street chains told Klein that
they have to urinate in plastic bags under their machines. Women like
Carmelita Alonzo, who sewed clothes for the Gap and Liz Claiborne, had a
two-hour commute home, and died after being denied time off for pneumonia, a
common illness in these factories. As Klein says, people are now demanding
to know why, if the big brands have so much power and influence over price
and marketing, they do not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical
labour standards from such suppliers.

And don't think, says Klein, that the developing world is the only place for
exploitation by western industry. "Cavite may be capitalism's dream
vacation, but casualisation is a game that can be played at home," she
writes. Europe and North America have played host to the most extraordinary
rise in impermanence at work over the past two decades. The "McJob" is a
contemporary template: low-paid, no benefits, no union recognition and no
guarantee that your job will be there in the morning. At Wal-Mart, the
world's largest retailer which opened its first British shop in July after
buying Asda, "full time" in its US branches means just 28 hours a week; the
average annual wage is a barely-livable $10,920. "You can buy two grande
mocha cappuccinos with my hourly salary," says Laurie Bonang, a worker in
Starbucks. Microsoft, the gleaming testament to the hi-tech products of our
future, has an extraordinary one-third of its workforce working as temps. As
Klein says, "It was Microsoft, with its famous employee stock-option plan,
that developed and fostered the mythology of Silicon Gold; but it is also
Microsoft that has done the most to dismantle it."

So what happens when working conditions and modes of production fail to
match up to a glorious, positive, right-on brand identity? People start to
get angry. 

Anticorporate activism is on the rise precisely because branding has worked
so well, believes Klein, in a neat example of the Marxist idea that
capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
"Multinationals such as Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become
the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture:
art, sport, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this
project is, the more vulnerable these companies become. When they do wrong,
their crimes are not dismissed as the misdemeanours of another corporation
trying to make a buck. This is a connection more akin to the relationship of
fan and celebrity: emotionally intense, but shallow enough to turn on a
dime." Having lived that relationship with consumer goods herself, Klein
knows just how it feels.

She says that anti-brand activism is taking place on two fronts. "On the one
hand, it's throwing bricks through McDonald's window in Seattle. On the
other, it's saying that we actually want the real thing, the real 'third
place' [not home, not work] that Starbucks tries to sell to us, the real
public space. People are saying: 'I do want real community, this is a strong
and powerful idea, and I resent the fact that this idea has been stolen from
me.' You've got these products that are held up on insane pedestals - all of
the collective longings of our culture have been projected on to lattes or
trainers. So there's a process of actively denting the facade of the brand
with the reality of the production."

This deconstruction takes many forms, some more successful than others. The
activism includes "culture jamming", whereby ads are subverted by "guerrilla
artists" to send anti-corporate messages out to the public; jammers paint
hollow skulls on the faces of Gap models, or change an Apple ad featuring
the Dalai Lama and the slogan "Think Different" to "Think Disillusioned". It
includes the campaign group Reclaim The Streets, which started in Britain
partly in response to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act and which focuses its
concerns on environmentalism and the removal of public space; they stop
cars, block a road and have a party on it. Reclaim The Streets is now an
international movement - on May 16, 1998, 30 Global Street Parties took
place around the world.

Students in North America, meanwhile, have been active in anti-sweatshop
campaigns, most noticeably since 1995-96, which Andrew Ross, author of
anti-sweatshop textbook No Sweat, calls "the year of the sweatshop". It was
a year that brought many revelations. One typical example: a factory manager
making clothes in El Salvador for a major US clothing firm announced that
"blood will flow" if anyone joined a union. And another, more shocking for
the American public: the named-brand clothes line of TV presenter Kathie Lee
Gifford (a bit like Lorraine Kelly, only cheesier) was manufactured by child
labourers in Honduras and in illegal sweatshops in New York. (She cried on
TV and became an anti-sweatshop campaigner herself.) Guess, Mattel, Disney
and Nike were the targets of similar exposés.

The tactics of many of these anti-sweatshop groups involve "head-on
collisions between image and reality", says Klein, whether it is filming an
Indonesian Nike worker gasping as she learns that the trainers she made for
$2 a day sell for $120 a pair in San Francisco Nike Town, or comparing the
hourly salary of Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney ($9,783), with that of a
Haitian worker who stitches Disney merchandise (28 cents).

Other brand tactics simply hit companies where it hurts most. Nike didn't
seem too bothered about the campaign against it that took off so vehemently
in the US in the mid-90s, until a group of black 13-year-olds from the
Bronx, the company's target market and the one exploited by it to get a
street-cool image, learned that the trainers they bought for $180 cost $5 to
make, which led to a mass dumping of their old Nike trainers outside New
York's Nike Town. (One boy, reports Klein, looked straight into the TV news
camera and, showing a brand understanding that should alert his elders,
said, "Nike, we made you. We can break you.")

The UK's McLibel trial, which began in 1990, hurt McDonald's so seriously -
even though the firm eventually won the case - because it forced the
hamburger giant to be open about its business practices. After suing two
British environmentalists for libel, the firm was forced to spend a
humiliating 313 days in court, the longest trial in British history,
defending every last detail of its business and making a number of
spectacular gaffes along the way, such as one executive's claim that
Coca-Cola is nutritious because it is "providing water, and I think that is
part of a balanced diet"; and another's that McDonald's burial of rubbish in
landfill sites is "a benefit, otherwise you will end up with lots of vast
empty gravel pits all over the country".

Some activists use the courtroom; others, such as those opposed to Shell's
involvement with the Nigerian military government that devastated the Ogoni
lands and executed their champion, the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1994, focus
on issues of freedom of expression. Others humiliate corporations on TV,
take over roads, jam ads, gather wherever there is an international summit
(Auckland, Vancouver, Manila, Birmingham, London, Geneva, Kuala Lumpur,
Cologne, Washington DC, Seattle, Prague), wreck a McDonald's before it has
even been built (the Peasant Confederation in Millau, France). And in the
developing world, home to the main victims of the global economy, rural
activists burn GM seeds and hold laughing protests (Karnataka state farmers
in India, who claim to number 10 million), revolt against the privatisation
of the water system (Bolivia), strike and take over the national university
over a World Bank edict to raise student fees (Mexican students). The
protest in Seattle was so huge because it was diverse; the US union movement
marched side by side with the head of the Filipino peasant movement. It is
global, anarchic and chaotic, like the internet it uses to organise; it is,
says Klein, "the internet come to life".

When we meet, Klein serves a fruity drink that, its maker's claim, is packed
with intelligence-boosting herbs. (I don't remember the brand name.) She is
shy at first, and then not shy at all. She doesn't wear Gap or drink
Starbucks, and is a lively and witty speaker (in public, too); her
conversation is full of pop culture vernacular and jokes against herself. We
sit in her backyard in Toronto, which has a flourishing 'No Logo' clematis
(named to celebrate finishing her book), and are interrupted a couple of
times: first by her husband, Avi Lewis, a big TV star in Canada for his
hugely successful, four-times-a-week political discussion programme; then by
his mother, Michele Landsberg, one of Canada's foremost radical feminists,
bearing gossip and a salmon. Klein and Lewis married because they wanted to
"have a big party", but they don't wear rings because they don't want to be
branded as married. Entertaining, political, down-to-earth, they clearly
have a great time together; Lewis says that, since he met Klein, he's "got a
lot more serious and had a lot more fun".

Klein grew up with politics all around her. Her grandparents were American
Marxists in the 30s and 40s; her grandfather was an animator at Disney who
was fired and blacklisted for organising the company's first strike. Her
parents, who are also American, moved to Canada in protest at the Vietnam
war. Her father is a doctor and her mother, Bonnie Klein, made the seminal
anti-pornography film, This Is Not A Love Story, in 1980. "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. When This Is Not A Love Story came out,
there was a lot of backlash against my mother. The headline in the Toronto
Globe And Mail was "Bourgeois Feminist Fascist", and she was made Hustler
magazine's asshole of the month; they took my mother's head and put it on
the back of a donkey. It was not cool in 1980 to be making films about
pornography. Not at my elementary school, anyway."

This, she says, is part of the reason she wanted nothing to do with politics
when she was growing up. "I think it's why I embraced full-on consumerism. I
was in constant conflict with my parents and I wanted them to leave me the
hell alone." Her brother, who is two years older, did not go through the
same kind of rebellion: "I don't think he was quite so much a victim of the
80s as I was. We had no culture growing up. We had Cyndi Lauper."

So, after years of obsession with Barbie, Girl's World and Disneyland, what
brought about the change? "I know the only way that I escaped the mall -
which is not to say that I don't ever go, or enjoy it - the only way I got
consumerism and vanity into a sane place in my life, though I don't think we
are ever rid of them, was just by becoming interested in other things. It's
that simple. Saying that you're a bad person for buying this or wanting this
only turns people off." Klein was all set to go to the University of Toronto
to study English and philosophy when her mother had a very severe stroke
aged 46. She took a year off to care for her. "I think that's what stopped
me from being such a brat."

When she went to university a year later, a major news event ensured that
her politicisation was inevitable. "The pivotal moment politically for me
was in December 1989, when there was a massacre at the University of
Montreal. 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 fucking feminists', and opened fire. 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."

It was also at university that Klein learned what it's like to be attacked
for her opinions. She is Jewish, and during the intifada she wrote an
article in the student newspaper called Victim To Victimiser, in which she
said "that not only does Israel have to end the occupation for the
Palestinians, but also it has to end the occupation for its own people,
especially its women". As a result of this one 800-word article, Klein
received bomb threats at her home and at the newspaper office - "and to this
day I have never been more scared for my life".

"After the article came out, the Jewish students' union, who were staunch
Zionists, called a meeting to discuss what they were going to do about my
article - and I went along, because nobody knew what I looked like. And the
woman sitting next to me said, 'If I ever meet Naomi Klein, I'm going to
kill her.' So I just stood up and said, 'I'm Naomi Klein, I wrote Victim To
Victimiser, and I'm as much a Jew as every single one of you.' I've never
felt anything like the silence in that room after that. I was 19, and it
made me tough." 

Klein became an outspoken feminist activist at college, campaigning on
issues of media repre- sentation and gender visibility that constituted
feminism at the end of the 80s - she received rape threats as a result -
and, rather than finish her degree, she dropped out to work as an intern on
the Toronto Globe And Mail. She left to become editor of an alternative
political magazine, This Magazine. "When I was there [in the early 90s], I
did not feel that we were part of a political movement in any way - in that
there was not a left. We had to kind of invent it as we went along. The
stress of it was the stress of the left. It burned us out." The left that
did exist Klein found depressing. "The only thing leftwing voices were
saying was stop the cuts, stop the world we want to get off. It was very
negative and regressive, it wasn't imaginative, it didn't have its own sense
of itself in any way."

It was around this time that advertising and branding started to co-opt
alternative politics and culture. "On the one hand, there was this total
paralysis of the left. But, at the exact same time, all these ideas that I
had thought were the left - feminism and diversity and gay and lesbian
rights - were suddenly very chic. So, on the one hand, you're politically
totally disempowered, and on the other all the imagery is pseudo-feminist,
Benetton is an anti-racism organisation, Starbucks does this
third-world-chic thing. I watched my own politics become commercialised."
This imagery was, she says, a "mask for capitalism. It was making it more
difficult to see the power dynamics in society. Because this was a time when
there was a growing income gap between rich and poor that was quite
staggering all over the world - and yet everything looked way more
equitable, in terms of the imagery of the culture."

Klein went back to university in 1995 to try to finish her degree, and
something very clearly had changed. "I met this new generation of young
radicals who had grown up taking for granted the idea that corporations are
more powerful than governments, that it doesn't matter who you elect because
they'll all act the same. And they were, like, fine, we'll go where the
power is. We'll adapt. It didn't fill them with dread and depression. When I
was at university before, we thought our only power was to ban something -
but they were very hands-on, DIY, if you don't like something change it, cut
it, paste it, download it. Even though I don't think culture jamming by
itself is a powerful political tool, there's something about that posture
that's impressive - it's unintimidated hand-to-brand contact. The young
activists I know have grounded their political activism in economic analysis
and an understanding of how power works. They're way more sophisticated than
we were because they've had to be. Because capitalism is way more
sophisticated now. 

"I think I'm lucky because I got to witness a significant shift, something
that changed, and I wanted to document that shift. And it seemed very, very
clear to me that if there was going to be a future for the left it would
have to be an anti-corporate movement."

And so, Seattle in November last year - where 50,000 demonstrators actually
prevented a major WTO meeting from happening - did she expect it to be so
big? "Oh no. Seattle surprised me with its militancy. It surprised the
organisers. It surprised everyone. I mean, this was the States . There were
all these underground networks of activism, and it just came to life. Right
now, the movement is at the stage of grassroots ferment - and it'll either
degenerate into chaos or it'll come together organically into something
new." 

The first thing people tend to ask Klein is where she shops. Does she buy
Nike trainers? Does she never nip into Starbucks for a grande cappuccino? Is
her wardrobe certifiably sweatshop-free? "I'm the worst person to ask these
questions," she says, "because since the book came out people really are
watching what I buy. If I walked around Toronto with a Starbucks, it would
be seen that I was endorsing that brand." But, she says, for anyone who
hasn't written a book about corporations and sweatshops, it's a different
matter. "I firmly believe that it's not about where you shop. I'm lucky in
that I happen to live a few blocks from some great independent designers, so
I actually can shop in stores where I know where stuff is produced. But I
can't say that to a 17-year-old girl in the suburbs who can only shop at the
mall. It's not a fair message.

"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. 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-thousand producing a recipe
for being an ethical consumer. That drains a lot of political energy."

Is this why she published in Britain with Flamingo, part of the
Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, a major corporation if ever there was one? "To
be honest, I really did not have my pick of publishers in Britain. Only one
wanted the book. What I said when I signed with HarperCollins was that I was
going to go out of my way to write about Murdoch, more than I would have
done otherwise. I did, and they didn't touch it."

As a populariser of the movement's arguments, does Klein consider herself an
activist or a journalist? "I see myself as an activist journalist," she
says. "I became a journalist because I'm not comfortable being an activist.
I hate crowds - I know, great irony - and I'm physically incapable of
chanting. I'm always slightly detached, so I write about it to feel more
comfortable. I like to believe that I can be part of this movement without
being a propagandist. There's a really strong tradition of this, like Gloria
Steinem, Norman Mailer, Susan Faludi. I do think that there's so much
fragmentation in this movement that if someone tries to work out a coherent
thesis - even if you don't agree with all or even much of it - it can be
helpful by making something more solid."

In Prague, at the protests against the IMF/World Bank, she will be speaking
at today's counter-summit, but she is concerned that the media has already
portrayed the protesters as mad terrorists crossing continents with the sole
intention of kicking some Czech police. "Months ago we were already seeing
the most extreme attempts to criminalise protest. This is a protest about
the IMF and the World Bank, and the effects they're having on poorer
countries. We must not let the reaction of the state and the police entirely
define the message. I'm going to Prague because I believe it is a crucially
important opportunity to show the world what this movement really is - the
first genuinely international people's movement."

There are some who wonder, though, whether the IMF and corporations are the
right target. Isn't it governments that we should be aiming at, since it is
governments, initially led by Reagan and Thatcher with their dramatic
lowering of corporate taxes, which gave the corporations such power in the
first place? "I think these corporations are not really targets, they are
metaphors," says Klein. "They're being used by this generation of young
activists as a popular education tool to understand the global economy. When
I was at university, we were intimidated and didn't understand anything
about globalisation. So we tuned out from that and turned in on ourselves
and became more and more insular - which is the great irony of those years,
because that was when all this accelerated globalisation was happening. We
weren't watching. And what I see happening with, say, the campaign against
Nike is a tactic on the part of activists who've decided to turn these
companies into metaphors for the global economy gone awry."

In other words, when the global economy is so huge, so forbidding, the
corporations are an accessible way in. "When the WTO was created in Uruguay
in 1995, there were no protesters outside. These trade bureaucrats created a
world of incredibly complex institutions and arcane trade agreements written
by policy wonks with no interest in popularising. So I believe that
anti-corporate campaigns are the bridge: they're the first baby-step to
developing an analysis of global capitalism."

Indeed, an important and fascinating aspect of the movement has been popular
education - groups holding mass teach-ins on global politics, international
economics, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO (the "iron triangle of corporate
rule"); Naafta, the EU, Gatt, Apec, G-8, the OECD, structural adjustment. At
Seattle, activists in their 20s sat for eight hours at a stretch listening
to speakers from around the world decode globalisation for them.

Is this a re-invention of left politics? After a decade in the wilderness,
is anti-corporatism the post-cold war new New Left? "I think it is," says
Klein, "but it's only at the early stages of re-invention. Sometimes, I
think it's moving towards creating a global new deal, and sometimes I think
it's way more radical than that. And it might be - I don't know." I mention
the impact of the very word "capitalism", which had gone resolutely out of
fashion until June 18, 1999, when demonstrators staged an "anti-capitalist"
demonstration in the City of London. "Since June 18, the comeback of the
word 'capitalism' is just extraordinary," laughs Klein. "It's like Santana -
what the hell's going on? Suddenly they're talking about 'capitalism' on
CNN, and in Washington there are all these little girls wearing caps with
'Capitalism Sux' on them. For a long time, the very word has been invisible
- it's just the economy, the way the world works." And that change has
happened in little over a year. "That's why I feel optimistic, and I'm not
impatient about the pace of change."

The trouble is, we're used to thinking that something that is
anti-capitalist must be straightforwardly socialist or communist, which is
not the case with this movement. It is, instead, "an amalgam of
environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anarchy and the kitchen sink", says Klein
- which leads us to the central criticism levelled at all the anti-corporate
protests. What do they stand for? What are their goals? Where is their
vision? 

"I think I have more patience for finding this out than most people," says
Klein. "I've been following this movement for five years, and I know where
we were at five years ago and I know where we are now. We were nowhere. That
a genuine political movement can begin to emerge in that timespan,
organically, on its own - it's extraordinary. I think a lot of those
demanding a manifesto or a leader are people of a different generation who
have an idea in their mind of what a political movement looks like, and they
want Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem and where are they?"

Even such diverse campaigns - from groups fighting against Nike, or
agribusiness, or world debt, or the Free Trade Area of the Americas - "share
a belief that the disparate problems with which they are wrestling all
derive from global deregulation, an agenda that is concentrating power and
wealth into fewer and fewer hands". And the fragmentation of the campaigns,
says Klein, is a "reasonable, even ingenious adaptation of changes in the
broader culture". The movement, with its hubs and spokes and hotlinks, its
emphasis on information rather than ideology, reflects the tool it uses - it
is the "internet come to life". This is why it doesn't work well on
television, unlike the anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s with their leaders,
their slogans, their single-issue politics.

When people say that the movement lacks vision, believes Klein, what they
really mean is that it is different from anything that's gone before, that
it is a completely new kind of movement - just as the internet is a
completely new kind of medium. "What critics are really saying is that the
movement lacks an overarching revolutionary philosophy, such as Marxism,
democratic socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy, on which they all
agree." But the movement should not, says Klein, be in a hurry to define
itself. "Before they sign on to anyone's 10-point plan, they deserve the
chance to see if, out of the movement's chaotic, decentralised, multi-headed
webs, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge."

No Logo has been leapt upon by some commentators who are thrilled by Naomi
Klein's rejection of the identity politics of her youth, and so see it as
anti-feminist. "This is not a rejection of feminism," she says. "It is a
return to the roots of feminism - early feminism was very involved in
anti-sweatshop action, and the current anti-sweatshop movement very much
sees it as a feminist issue, since it is overwhelmingly women of colour who
are being abused by the systems. I feel that we lost our way in the late
80s, when feminism became disengaged from its roots, which originally had
critiques of capitalism and of consumerism. I am a feminist and this is a
feminist book." 

This, I believe, is crucial to understanding both why the movement is so
popular with young people and why Klein is so perfectly placed to be its
chief populariser. In the 60s and 70s, activists concentrated their
anti-racism and feminism on matters of equality - equal rights and equal
pay. In Klein's 80s and 90s, they campaigned instead on issues of culture
and identity: portrayal in the media, who gets to the board. But the new
generation of activists is taking the best bits of both: developing a
radical critique of the global economy, while incorporating identity
politics as a matter of course. So, whereas Sheila Rowbotham was greeted
with a barrage of wolf-whistles and guffaws when she got on stage to speak
about education at a leftist conference in 1968, no one is surprised that
this movement's main theorist is a woman. This is a far more inclusive
movement than those that have gone before.

There's a personal recollection in No Logo in which Klein talks about being
17 and wondering what to do with her life. She was frustrated, because if
you wanted to be a traveller Lonely Planet had got there first; if you
wanted to be an avant-garde artist, someone had done it all already, and put
the image on a mug for you to take home. "All my parents wanted was the open
road and a VW camper," she writes. "That was enough escape for them." Now it
feels as if there is "no open space anywhere". It is as if this generation's
culture is being sold out as they are living it; there is nothing left to
discover. 

Her thesis is about trying to find some space that hasn't been bought up by
anyone; trying to rediscover our identities as citizens, and not just
consumers. It is about globalisation, and the power corporations have over
our lives. But it is also about being 30, having spent your youth in a
disaffected age. Her grandfather, the animator blacklisted by McCarthy,
would be proud: Naomi Klein might just be helping re-invent politics for a
new generation. 

No Logo, by Naomi Klein, is published by HarperCollins. For links, visit the
book's website. 

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000

-----------------

Livres écrits par Naomi Klein
   et
Ouvrages qu'elle recommande (en outre du sien)

No Logo: Solutions for a Sold Planet


    If One Were to Write a History
Robert F. Harney
    
    Imagined Communities
Benedict Anderson

     Nation and Narration
Homi Bhabha
          
    None is Too Many
Irving Abella, Harold Troper

     Semiotext(e)
     The Concubine's Children: Portrait of a Family Divided
Jordan Zinovich
              
       Click: Becoming Feminists
Denise Chong
       

----------------------
Complément d'info et réf :
Semiotext(e) est la revue et la maison d'édition de Sylvère Lotringer et
Chris Kraus ; 
Pour Lotringer avant 1968, voir les archives de Recherches
in criticalsecret N°8 ;
sommaire html, à Anne Querrien :
http://www.criticalsecret.com/n8/htsum/index.html
directement dans le navigateur :
http://www.criticalsecret.com/n8/quer/3rec/index.html

----------------------


 
 
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