Eine Klein "Nicht!" musik

[bloodygranuaile]

I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein's latest, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need at a Haymarket sale, because they have sales, like, all the time. I got it in conjunction with Angela Davis' Freedom Is a Constant Struggle and Rebecca Solnit's The Mother of All Questions, which I feel like was a thematically cohesive pack of books. It might still be sitting on my bedside table if it were not for a joint DSA/ISO reading group, the last meeting of which is next Tuesday. So far I've only made one of the prior three meetings, so I'll be at 50% attendance if I make next Tuesday's meeting. That's fairly OK for me, sadly.

 

No Is Not Enough is largely a synthesis of the other stuff Klein has written, covering corporatism/branding, climate change, and the political habit of using crises as cover to ram through unpopular political changes, which she popularized under the term "shock doctrine" (I believe in traditional politics the idea of "never letting a good crisis go to waste" has been in play for a long time, but shock politics carries a connotation of using the crisis to push through ideas that you know are really unpopular for the specific purpose of enriching small groups of people). If you're familiar with Klein's writing, a lot of these concepts won't be particularly new—and if you want a deeper understanding of them than Klein provides here, well, she's got three other books and hundreds of articles.

 

The book is divided into four parts: One explicates the trends that are how we got here; two discusses where we are; the third part talks about the ways in which things could get worse (either on purpose or by accident); and the fourth part talks about how people can work together to fight back and build a better future. The fourth part is the least distressing to read, obviously; at some points it was downright inspiring and I teared up, although that might have more to do with my exhausted emotional state at the time than anything else.

 

While the book covers a lot of ground and therefore doesn't tend to dig super deep into the particular subjects, Klein does do quite a good job of tying what initially looks like a host of unrelated issues together, which is something that's really important for left organizing these days. She's certainly not the only person talking about that kind of stuff—"intersectionality" has become a bit of a buzzword lately, with all the misunderstandings and semantic bleaching that usually goes along with an idea going mainstream, but also with a lot of genuine progress and coalition-building—but she does it accessibly and compassionately, as a clear call to action.

 

I'm looking forward to the next discussion section and kind of bummed that I missed the ones for parts 1 and 3, but that's what I get for having too many interests in life and not nearly enough spare time or money or energy to engage in all of them. (And, y'know, for banging my head on my own car, which is why I missed the third section instead of just turning up a bit late like I'd been planning to. But that's neither here nor there.) Overall it's a pretty good snapshot and analysis of our particular moment in time here in The Dumbest Timeline, and should provide a bit of motivation and direction for people who want to not just sit around and be stupefied by just how dumb this timeline is.