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| Birth Name(s) : Naomi Klein |
Date of Birth: 1970 |
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Full Naomi Klein Biography
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.
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."
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. |
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Additional Naomi Klein Biography
Naomi Klein is a Canadian journalist, author and activist well known for her political analyses of corporate globalization.
Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec. Her family has a history of activism, as does her husband's family. Her grandfather was fired for labor organizing at Disney in the United States. Her father Michael, a physician, was a Vietnam War resister and became a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her film-maker mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein, won fame with her anti-pornography film, Not a Love Story. Her brother Seth is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Her in-laws are Michele Landsberg and Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis. An aunt is married to Daniel Libeskind, the architect.
Klein's writing career started early with contributions to The Varsity, a University of Toronto student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. She credits her wake-up call to feminism as the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics.
In 2000, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-globalization movement. This movement had shut down the WTO Meeting of 1999 one month before the release of No Logo. The book lambasts brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations. These corporations are also often guilty of exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of ever-greater profits, she writes. Klein criticized Nike so much in the book that it became one of the first publications to receive feedback from the company.
In 2002 Klein published Fences and Windows, a collection of articles and speeches she had written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement (all proceeds from the book go to benefit activist organizations through The Fences and Windows Fund). Klein also contributes to The Nation, In These Times, Canada's The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, and The Guardian.
She has continued to write on various current issues, such as the war in Iraq. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine entitled "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia", she argues that, contrary to popular belief and criticisms, the Bush administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a fully unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals.
In October 2005, Klein was ranked 11th in the The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll, a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals compiled by Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine. She was the highest ranked woman on the list. Prospect based the list and its rankings entirely on an Internet poll. |
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Naomi Klein Quote(s)
| 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. |
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