The liberal attack on Naomi Klein and ‘This Changes Everything’

This is an excellent commentary on the attacks by liberals on Naomi Klein's ‘This Changes Everything’.  It is a very positive defense of the book without cheerleading and ignoring some of the book's weaknesses. I have not yet read the book although I am getting to it.  It is in this month's edition of Monthly Review. There is a link to it on Climate and Capitalism below. RM

The liberal attack on Naomi Klein and ‘This Changes Everything’

John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark: Why Naomi Klein’s inspiring book frightens capitalism’s liberal defenders, making them desperate to blunt and undermine its message.
John Bellamy Foster is editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review (subscription highly recommended!) and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate professor of sociology at the University of Utah and co-author of The Tragedy of the Commodity (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming). 

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CROSSING THE RIVER OF FIRE
The liberal attack on Naomi Klein and This Changes Everything
by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark
(Republished, with permission, from Monthly Review, February 2015)

The front cover of Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything, is designed to look like a protest sign. It consists of the title alone in big block letters, with the emphasis on Changes. Both the author’s name and the subtitle are absent. It is only when we look at the spine of the book, turn it over, or open it to the title page that we see it is written by North America’s leading left climate intellectual-activist and that the subtitle is Capitalism vs. the Climate.[1] All of which is clearly meant to convey in no uncertain terms that climate change literally changes everything for today’s society. It threatens to turn the mythical human conquest of nature on its head, endangering present-day civilization and throwing doubt on the long-term survival of Homo sapiens.

The source of this closing circle is not the planet, which operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary scale, destroying in the process the earth as a place of human habitation. Hence, the change that Klein is most concerned with, and to which her book points, is not climate change itself, but the radical social transformation that must be carried out in order to combat it. We as a species will either radically change the material conditions of our existence or they will be changed far more drastically for us. Klein argues in effect for System Change Not Climate Change—the name adopted by the current ecosocialist movement in the United States.[2]

In this way Klein, who in No Logo ushered in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in The Shock Doctrine established herself as perhaps the most prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism, signals that she has now, in William Morris’s famous metaphor, crossed “the river of fire” to become a critic of capital as a system.[3] The reason is climate change, including the fact that we have waited too long to address it, and the reality that nothing short of an ecological revolution will now do the job.  Continue reading the full article at Climate and Capitalism