So it might surprise some to find out that Naomi Klein has a doppelganger, who now holds diametrically opposed beliefs. In 1990, Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, a feminist study of beauty, capitalism and patriarchy. But today Wolf is mostly known for her contrary and right wing positions on everything from guns to coronavirus conspiracies. Formerly a feminist icon of the mainstream media, Wolf is now beloved of the right, including figures like Steve Bannon.
Klein opens by showing how the two Naomi's were commonly mistaken for each other. She gives a number of examples, some humerous and trival, the others deeply concerning and insulting, where she is mistaken for Naomi Wolf. There's much to be said about why this happens and its not just about the same forename - I suggest it is in part because there are so few female spokespersons in the media. But this aside, Klein explores what has happened to her doppleganger to take such a shocking and stunning trajectory. It involves, as the book's subtitle says, a trip to the "mirror world", a place where conspiracy, scapegoating and distorted pictures of reality dominant - and where the real cause of societies' problems - capitalism - is let off the hook.
Klein's books about capitalism, disaster and climate change are frightening. But I actually think that Doppelganger is truely scary and discomforting for leftwing activists to read. Because what it shows is how the failure of the left to relate to wider working class concerns in the United States has opened the door to some very reactionary people and even a figure like Naomi Wolf can become part of that.
What is most illuminating is Klein's exploration of right-wing policies, and how she shows they get a hold precisely because they speak to real concerns and are often rooted in real problems. Take the question of vaccine conspiracy:
The words she [Wolf] was saying were essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to the many people now listening to her, they clearly felt true. And the reason they felt true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.
It is not enough, Klein argues, to mock the right or laugh at the ignorance on display, one has to go further. And this requires building real movements that speak to, and address concerns, while tackling misinformation and errors. The rug must be pulled out from beneath the right. Klein describes the sort of massmovement that is needed, but points out it "does not yet exist", and "it is inside this vacuum that my doppelganger is currently wreaking havoc". Wolf, "not only validates those latent tech fears but also, along with her new partner Steve Bannon, has something progressives lack: a plan for what to do about it, or at least a facsimile of one".
Some might quibble about the nature of the movement that is needed. This is to miss the point. Klein describes being heavily involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign. I wouldn't agree with that strategy, but Klein is honest enough to acknowledge the limitations of a movement based on a specific election. The important thing is that she wants much more than that.
This, I think, really comes through when Klein writes about Palestine. She makes this a central part of the argument because it shows how the right is organising, and the particular trajectory of Wolf who broke from her Synagogue to oppose an attack by Israel on Palestine, bravely stood in solidarity with the victims, but then moved away to the right. Klein argues that it is on the question of Israel and Palestine "where so many forces we have encountered on this winding journey converge and collide."
Not least with the issue of antisemitism. Klein opens this discussion by relating how her mother blamed the confusion between her and Wolf on antisemitism - "They see you both as a type". There's no doubt this is true, but Klein doesn't keep this discussion in the realms of the relationship between her and her doppleganger. She uses it to explore how and why marginalised groups are oppressed and how they resist. Her discussion on what happened to Jewish people and how they responded is powerful (and incidently mirrors some of the discussion in a new book I reviewed here recently on The Radical Jewish Tradition). Klein ties this to more contemporary racism, antisemitism and rightwing ideas. QAnon, for instance, whose antisemitic arguements are "cursing and combining and morphing in our culture".
Why is this important? Because it is in this "mirror world" where conspiracies "detract attention from the billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies - deregultation, privatisation ,austerity - that have stratgied wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era." The mashing together of antisemitism, with a resurgent right, neoliberal economics and a left that is inadequate to the task has created a situation where the likes of Wolf can rapidly evolve into significant figures, abandoning principles and raising dangerous arguements.
What then is needed? Here I was excited that Klein looked back to a period when socialist politics was counterposed to right-wing movements and was powerful enough to win, at least temporarily. She looks at the Revolutionary era after World War One, and in particular the radical Jewish socialists of the next few decades that tried to find a way forward that took on antisemitism and created a new set of ideas to appeal to working class people. Among the figures and groups she mentions, Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, the Bund, Walter Benjamin and so on, she identifies a set of ideas that rose and fell with the fortunes of the Russian Revolution. It was in the aftermath of this failure that Zionism became the only answer to the "Jewish Question" and embedded the idea that antisemitism could not be defeated by "getting at its roots" and instead by "holding a gun to its head." Building on this analogy Klein says:
Partitioning and performing and projecting are no longer working. The borders and walls don't protect us from rising temperatures or surging viruses or raging wars. And the walls around ourselves and our kids won't old, either. Because we are porous and connected, as so many doppelganger stories have attempted to teach us. So there has to be another way. Another portal, to another story of us.
One key figure in this is Abram Leon who wrote deeply on questions of socialist politics and antisemitism while in hiding from the Nazis and then died in a concentration camp. Leon is a major inspiration for Klein and she tells his story and his politics movingly. Developing Leon's ideas further she discusses how antisemitism is not an automatic set of ideas constantly existing in society, but rather it is a racism that rises and falls, can be understood, countered and stopped. It arises from a partiulcar set of politics, and needs another set of politics to defeat it. These are the ideas of the left, and particularly the Marxist left, that Klein argues remain so important.
As an example, Klein tells an interesting story from Canada. It's a story of two trucker convoys. One of outraged and angry drivers disgusted at the latest evidence of the genocide inflicted on the First Nations people by the Canadian state in the aftermath of the discovery of mass graves of indigenous people. The second was also angry - but this time in protest at lockdowns, vaccine passports and filled with patriotism and right wing politics. "One was progress, the other a white-lash." Klein makes the point however that "some truckers participated in both convoys". They were dopplegangers in them. The point is that there is not a comfortable binary, but there is also the potential to win people away from reaction and toward progress. But it takes work.
This story then is one where the left builds movements that can form alternative polls of attraction and can draw people in, who feel alienated, cut off, forgotten and who experience poverty, housing crisis, pay freezes and all the rest of neoliberal capital's impacts. In the process of building those movements and coalitions, we have the chance to break people from reaction. As Klein says, quoting John Berger, this is because protest and demonstration (and class struggle) "people come to realise that they are not merely individuals... but that they belong to a class. Belonging to that class ceases to imply a common fate and implies a common opportunity".
This excellent book begins with a personal story - Klein's shock at having a "doppleganger" whose politics are moving rapidly away from hers. It evolves into an account of how capitalism has created the context, in the midst of multiple crises, for millions of people to be dragged into reactionary politics. Klein's exploration of these crises - from Palestine to the environment - demonstrates the need, and potential - for revolutionary politics that can win significant, and lasting, change. From the personal to the revolutionary. But, most importantly, this book is an appeal for activists to engage and fight to make that real, and not abandon those who are being sucked into a mirror world. It is, perhaps, Naomi Klein's greatest - and scariest - book.
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