Fighting dragons: Review of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger

The Kelvingrove Review: (Re)Creation (Issue 17), 2017

he seventeenth issue of The Kelvingrove Review decided to break the mould. Following our theme of (Re)Creation, we proposed reviews of work that, by nature of their inclusion in this issue, interrogate and, we hope, redefine traditional academic review journal conventions. As an Arts and Humanities journal, we wanted our reviews to reflect the vast fields of research and work in our area of study. This issue includes reviews of television programmes, films, fiction novels, and scholarly texts. Ranging from political upheaval, to alien invasion, to human memory, this collection of reviews presents you with ideas and questions that we hope encourage your own paths of re(creation). P32-P36

Static: The Journal of the London Consortium, 2008

Adam Kaasa reviews Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Allen Lane, 2007). Klein’s thesis that over the past 50 years, shock is the context within which unpopular free-market policies are able to penetrate democratic institutions and buffer themselves from democratic resistance is explored using the concept of newness and responsibility.

When a new Naomi Klein book comes along it is certain to be a part of the zeitgeist. So the recent publication of No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics is no exception. This is a book review of Naomi Klein, No is not enough: defeating the new shock politics ([London]: Allen Lane, 2017. Originally published on the Bristol Radical History Group website: http://www.brh.org.uk/site/book-reviews/no-not-enough/

Fast Capitalism, 2009

In a lively interview cyberfeminist Angela Washko explains how “digi-feminism” is currently challenging cybersexism and existing conditions of the web; she discusses her past and current video projects and how to fight harassment against cyberactivist on the web. And if you ask her what the political aspect of her work is, she will say “all of it is political”.

Bookforum, 2019

Revisiting in the midst of the shock of Coronavirus COVID-19..... In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein rightly critiques capitalism in its repressive ‘market fundamentalist’ avatar. But she does not problematise ‘democratic capitalism’ or the very form of capitalist democracy. Instead she advocates the latter. Thus for her the role of social movements is limited to the extension of democracy, from the political sphere, to the economic. No problem as such there – until we find that her advocacy for social movements derives from the need to make sure “disillusioned citizens would not go looking once again for a more appealing ideology, whether fascism or Communism” (p. 54). It is hard to overlook her liberal rationale. Neoliberalism must be challenged, since it is a bad candidate to keep the ‘hard left’ in check. Klein functions within the paradigm of the ‘end of ideology’ and the ‘end of history’: anything beyond liberal capitalist democracy takes us to ‘totalitarianism’, where fascism and communism merge. Social movements and people's subjectivity that tend towards the ‘hard left’ (for example, those on the left of Allende's democratic socialism in Chile who were fighting the coup), finds mention in her analysis, if at all, only to be repudiated as a danger.