Book review: Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Chicago: Haymarket, 2017.

Naomi Klein wrote a book called "No Logo," around the concept that capitalism is oppressive, and then two eye-opener books: The Shock Doctrine in 2008 and This Changes Everything in 2015. Her most recent is No is Not Enough, an attempt to suggest some proactive organization behind the opposition to Donald Trump and his crap regime.

Perhaps this review is a bit late (the book came out in June), but I did find a copy in the local library's book sale for a couple of dollars. It's got its good points but there are so many books and there's only so much money to spend. (NB: when you're writing a book yourself, you end up consuming a lot of other people's books, if for no other reason than that you need a lot of models for what it is you intend to do.) The strong parts of this book are the parts at the end, where she discusses the relationship between disaster and utopia, and where she suggests that utopian dreaming is "back by popular demand." I thought those parts could have been expanded further, perhaps in another book -- although I'm hoping to write that book myself. I wanted to read more about the Vision for Black Lives (255), about the "Resistance School" (202), about "Indivisible" (202), and so on.

Generally, though, I found upon reading this book that, even though Klein came out meaningfully in support of Bernie Sanders, and in opposition to Hillary Clinton's policy neoliberalism, she has perhaps become a bit too polite toward neoliberals, who aren't going to like what she has to say anyway and who need to be opposed whether they're Republicans or Democrats. Perhaps the appropriate tone toward such people is set by Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste or some other such book revealing how thoroughly such a group could dominate society in such a destructive way.

Klein also shows a naive willingness to take the "Left" in the US at face value. In reality the "Left" isn't what it says it is and so the struggle at hand is really to recognize the extent to which the "Left" is a form of "Right." As I suggested recently on Facebook: "'The Left' is a cultural trope owned and operated by the center-right in order to keep politics entertaining while they pick our pockets."

In opposing Trump, Klein wants to "build a common agenda, and with it a wining progressive coalition - one grounded in an ethic of deep social inclusion and planetary care" (20), but the real problem in the American political context is that such rhetoric is likely to be integrated into what is sometimes called "Minnesota nice." Klein's previous books show she's capable of dissent against the prevailing consensus, which is that all of our nice goals can be achieved without disturbing capitalism in the least. Some of that dissent is shown in No Is Not Enough.

Klein spends some ink going after the "disaster capitalism cabinet" (pp. 145 et seq.), and yes we know the people staffing Trump's cabinet are corporate predators, but many of the criticisms of this bunch are also criticisms which can also be levied against the neoliberals who staffed Obama's administration and who would have staffed the second Clinton administration had she been elected. Thus when Klein attacks Trump's cabinet as a "gang of unapologetic plutocrats, with open disdain for democratic norms" (103), we should rightfully ask if there has been an American ruling class within the past thirty-plus years to which this epithet did not apply. And when she argues that "the same system has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House," one wonders if she noticed that the Clinton campaign spent twice what the Trump campaign spent on the election, but she lost anyway.

In this regard, another telling weakness can be found in a passage, from p. 91 of No is Not Enough, about "identity politics":

... it's short-sighted, not to mention dangerous, to call for liberals and progressives to abandon their focus on "identity politics" and concentrate on economics and class -- as if these factors could in any way be pried apart.

Identity politics in the US, however, is based on a series of misrecognitions of identity, in ways which pry apart identity from economics and class and thus which empower hegemonic neoliberalism. Here I'm going to discuss this in depth (although it plays a very small part in Klein's book) because a mere examination of any of the pillars of American political ideology will reveal how screwed up we are, and thus how far we have to go. Identity politics in the US context is based on lumping the rich and the poor together as "the same" by constructing "common" identities around them. Barack Obama made a career out of this misrecognition: as the progeny of a white anthropologist mother and a world-traveler from Kenya, he didn't quite have the same "Black" identity as those whose ancestors came to the US through the brutal "Middle Passage," whose later ancestors encountered decades of slavery and ninety years of Jim Crow segregation, and who are duly entitled to reparations for their families' mistreatment across the generations, but he was nonetheless lumped together in an "identity politics" with this other group.

There are of course different misrecognitions embedded in other categories besides "Black," and so for instance the identity politics controversy about "immigrants," of great currency during the Trump administration, revolves around a term which lumps together refugees from war, refugees from patriarchy, cheap laborers (skilled and unskilled), rich world-travelers who like living here, and a number of other groups which can be identified based on the reasons they're in the US. Or here's a fun one: "Hispanics," a term lumping together people whose families are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba and so on. Identity politics starts with these misrecognitions, because a "politics" is about large groups of people who must be lumped together somehow. The point of going "back to class" is that lumping people together by class enables us to work politically with realities of money and power to benefit everyone. "Race," handled outside of specific historical wrongs, isn't amenable to a political solution in quite the same way as class.

Without doubt Klein's specific opposition to Trump has to do with her involvement in the Standing Rock protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, as should be supported by all who want any sort of preliminary attempt to mitigate climate change (and yes, this is discussed in detail in the book, on pages 222-230). The problem with starting and ending with Standing Rock is that, even though opposing Keystone XL is about mitigating climate change, choosing battles around specific development projects will in the end save nothing. The denial of Keystone XL under Obama was at best a temporary victory, for the capitalists will continue to make a mess of the planet as long as there's profit in it, and that which is saved now may be destroyed later if the profit motive is allowed to make it so. Klein knows this -- yet neither she nor anyone else in this era has a solution that goes beyond "opposing Trump" or opposing whatever manifestation of capitalist malice appear at any particular moment in the neoliberal social drama. Sure, oppose Trump, and oppose the Democrats too, in their capacity as the faux opposition that mesmerizes the public while the Republicans take over.

Toward the end of her book Klein documents how she and a number of other Canadian activists came together to create "a platform without a party" (236-238), which became the Leap Manifesto, subtitled "A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth And One Another." Such a manifesto is a good thing, especially given its concrete proposals, though I can think of some educational proposals and some utopian notions of alternative technology and of a different economy that could be added on. It's good to have people get together to determine what they stand for. Parties, however, are necessary (as Jodi Dean points out in her book Crowds and Party) to contest the state on the grounds of the state, though a successful party will also make clear the hoped-for relationships between people in the social order of the other world that is possible.

In the middle of this book a useful metaphor emerges, to suggest a basis for expanding Klein's better ideas. Pp. 190-191:

On the day Trump signed the permit approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline, Ponca Nation member Mekasi Camp Horinek shred a version of this theory with reporter Alleen Brown:

I want to say thank you to the president for all the bad decisions that he's making -- for the bad cabinet appointments that he's made and for awakening a sleeping giant. People that have never stood up for themselves, people that have never had their voices heard, that have never put their bodies on the line are now outraged. I would like to say thank you to President Trump for his bigotry, for his sexism, for bringing all of us in this nation together to stand up and unite.

But will we stand up and unite? What will the sleeping giant do, and will it be effective at all? No is Not Enough, as regards these questions, is a start.