The new anti-establishment

>> Naomi Klein on corporate resistance

by JULIET WATERS

 If there were such a thing as an official New Anti-Establishment, along the lines of Vanity Fair's annual New Establishment, Naomi Klein would rank pretty high. She's married to Newsworld talk show host Avi Lewis, of the NDP Lewis dynasty; daughter of NFB documentary filmmaker Bonnie Klein (Not a Love Story); long-time editor of This Magazine; omnipresent feminist freelancer once referred to as "that malignant woman" by the wife of neo-conservative David Frum; and author of a first book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Released within weeks of the Seattle WTO protests, it documents the rise of a disorganized but powerful wave of young anti-corporate activism. In town last week, Klein answered a few questions about the new left.

 Mirror: You end No Logo with a vision of a grassroots, high-tech movement that is as global and "as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert." Who would you list as leaders in this kind of movement?

 Naomi Klein: A lot of the people I've quoted in the book, like Jesse Hirsh who runs the Tao Network--although I shouldn't say runs because they're anarchists, so he's one of the workers... Definitely [Montreal activist] Jaggi Singh... John Jordan, one of the founders of the Reclaim the Streets movement in England. He came to Seattle to teach them how to take over the streets... And I'd say Maude [Barlow of Council of Canadians] would be there too. Even though she's been around for a while, it's interesting how she can still really pack a hall full of 22 year olds.

 M: Although you write about certain anti-corporate strategies like adbusting, you're obviously ambivalent about them. What do you think are the limits of that kind of movement.

 NK: I think that adbusting is a great tool, but the idea that it's an end in itself--defacing a billboard--not only is it not true, but for the people who are drawn to it, it will become frustrating after a while. Marketing just rolls on and nothing really changes. I mean, when I was younger we just had this endless faith in the power of the media to change things. And I'm even the daughter of an anti-porn feminist from a circle who believed they were going to eradicate violence against women by exposing the porn industry... I think that the belief that if you change the representation of reality everything else will all fall into place, that's behind this misplaced faith in adbusting. The Internet is kind of like that. The fact of being connected is sometimes seen as being an end in itself. But I'm not as concerned about it, because I think we're steadily moving in the direction of being real world active. So adbusting is better than just being a media critic, which is what came before it. And brand-based campaigns are more active than adbusting and taking on the WTO is more active than taking on Nike.

 M: What about boycotting? Should we stop shopping?

 NK: What seems like the quickest route is not always the quickest route. Making people feel bad about what they buy--there's also a real problem with that strategy. When I was interviewing workers in export processing zones in the Philippines and Indonesia, their single biggest fear was that I was going to go home and tell people to boycott the products they were making and that they would lose their jobs... They would get really confused by this consumer-based response. Their attitude was "this is supposed to be about the right to organize unions. Stop talking about shopping."

 M: If someone wanted to get hooked into this movement on the Internet where would they go?

 NK: Funny you should ask that. We just put up the Web site for the book yesterday and there are a lot of links to the organizations I write about. So that would be a good place to start. :

 

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein, Knopf Canada, hc, 490pp, $35.95