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Showing posts with the label “Naomi Klein”

Liberals Yearning for the Good Old, Bad Old Days

“It's the end of the world. Again. Liberal-democratic Europe, having been abandoned by its American overlord, must now (so say its leaders) fulfil its destiny by vanquishing a twin-headed monster. The first head is the Trump-Putin dyad, united in their loathing of Ukraine and the European Union; and the second, the cabal of Silicon Valley predators threatening humanity. ‘The new axis of the world is Trump-Putin,’ declared Jean-Yves Le Drian. “The  essayist Giuliano da Empoli's  argument in brief is that authoritarian leaders are conspiring with the all-conquering tech oligarchs to introduce ‘an era of limitless violence’. Against such opponents, ‘defenders of liberty appear singularly ill-prepared.’ His regret over this perhaps draws on personal experience; before the ‘age of predators’, there was an Edenic era of social-liberalism and the ‘third way’, whose leading lights included Matteo Renzi and Romano Prodi, both advised by da Empoli. Their brilliance so delighted Italian ...

Egypt’s Cop27: Greenwashing a Police State

A disappointing piece by Naomi Klein , I think. Klein, the critic of ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, fails in a long piece to include a couple of paragraphs analysing the political economy of Egypt in the broader regional and global capitalist relations. Instead, ‘human rights’, ‘civil society’ and the authoritarian regime occupy her analysis. The piece should have been ‘In solidarity with Alaa’.  The interactions of geopolitical powers and capitalist interests are completely absent. There is only a passing mention of ‘anti-capitalist politics’, but not the functioning of capital in Egypt, Israel, the UAE, the US, France, the UK, etc. 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...