This is a very good book about the politics of our contemporary moment, but I'm mostly going to write about where I disagree with it, since agreement amounts to a 200 character post on social media and it takes some element of disagreement to make a work worth writing about at length. I'll generally assume that people reading this have read the book or are at least familiar with its premise: Naomi Klein writes about the ongoing popular confusion between her and Naomi Wolf as if Wolf is her doppelganger, using that as a springboard to write about the whole current right-wing movement and the way that it mirrors elements of leftism.
I. Doppelgangers by Genre
Naomi Klein tries dutifully throughout the book to see the similarities between herself and Wolf in order to examine what lessons her shadow self or doppelganger might reveal. She has to overcome her natural feelings of difference to do so -- Klein prides herself on careful analysis and fact checking, while Wolf is notoriously not careful and a fabulist -- but I don't think that she really seems able to do this well.
_Doppelganger_ is cultural criticism that makes extensive use of the most blighted staple of contemporary writing, the personal anecdote. Reporters and writers never seem to grasp the difference between a scientist writing something as science and what they write, but this is a book that tries to give people a story through which they can think about current events, not some kind of social science description of them. As a poet I appreciate the use of sense words to make anecdotes memorable: there is a scene in which someone gasps that they can smell the sandalwood after meeting a far-out person who one presumably expects to be a sort of hippie but who wants unfit people to die. Is this person representative of a wider trend? People who share vaguely left values certainly feel that this person is representative. Due to the mirrored nature of our society, I could come up with a similar anecdote about how some member of any group wants all members of some other group to die. (I think that this involves Freudian death drive and its rise in our society, but that is going far from the point.)
The point is that Wolf writes books that want to convince readers about societal narratives based on flimsy evidence: so does Klein. It's possible to do this well or badly: Klein's description of why anti-vaxxing as a gateway to rightism became prevalent among "body people" (people who work on individual body improvement such as trainers, supplement providers etc.) is a brilliant set of observations that combine cultural and material analysis in a way that a pro forma "petit bourgeois are right wing" would not. But doing it well is not in some ways a large difference from doing it badly.
Am I mischaracterizing Klein's body of work? I should mention that this is the only book of hers that I've read. I heard about _No Logo_ a while after it was written and my response was an annoyed "read some Baudrillard or something, you can't escape branding by being conspicuously against branding" (something that Klein agrees with in _Doppelganger_) and when I heard about _This Changes Everything_ my response was that people who think that capitalism depends on a single commodity have had a bad run and that a green capitalism in which fossil fuels were eliminated and yet every renewable power plant and large battery array was mysteriously owned by investors so that energy was not free was perfectly possible. But I haven't read these books and I may be doing her general work a disservice.
II. What is a Usable Past?
Now I come to the more serious critique of this work. _Doppelganger_ references among much else a "usable past", an idea which I wish that leftism had never picked up on. What makes a usable past? Retelling past events in a different way to make a narrative that gives someone a foundational feeling that they can build on is something that can be done by any politics. The current right-wing narrative is full of obvious scientific and historical falsehoods such as vaccines having extreme bad effects, Great Replacement theory, and so on. Do these falsehoods make it not usable? No. A settler colonialist story has proven to be extremely usable throughout American history: people are not looking for scientific truth but instead something that justifies an elevated positional status in society.
What is Naomi Klein's politics? She doesn't forthrightly describe it at the beginning of the book, but it becomes clear that it's a fairly standard democratic socialism. That is not a usable past. Democratic socialism has died out everywhere: its advocates will of course say that it is far different from the authoritarian socialism of the USSR but others of course disagree. The USSR took over about a third of the world and then died the most ignominious death possible: not through war or civil war or even really revolution but mostly through a tired sense that no one actually supported it. State socialism survives as the authoritarian socialism of China (with its leader for life) and in various European social-democratic-influenced states whose policies are now neoliberal like any other Western state.
Klein references the core of why her politics is supposed to be preferable through the old "socialism of fools" idea. Playing on the similarity of the words conspiracy and capitalism, she writes that teaching people about capitalism gives people a real sense of how the world works, and without that they make up conspiracy theories to explain what is happening to them. I'm an anti-capitalist, so of course I'm inclined to agree, but really this doesn't reckon with the disaster that the left's attachment to Marxism and Marxist categories has been. The story of how Marxist change is supposed to happen has proven to be just as fake as the right wing conspiracist one.
Why is this? Again, I have my own ideas: surplus value has been defined by Marxists in a tautological way but in a general sense I think it's apparent that surplus value is ecological, always was, and that proles have no world historical role as such, so the whole "scientific" basis of scientific socialism is flatly wrong. Again, this is beside the point: the point is that people have been treating the "capitalism is a real, scientific description so our story is better" as an argument for leftism for a long time but the story has not worked.
III. Do the particular beliefs of leftism matter?
A strength of the book is that Klein agrees that people, even petit b, suffer in our society and seek reasons that explain their suffering and give them a potential way out. There was a very annoying recent moment on left social media where people would cite someone on the right saying or doing something racist and scornfully say that this disproved any suggestion that economic problems under liberalism led to fascism, which of course they do. The problem is that she calls on science -- a science that left usable pasts do not notably participate in -- as the measure of what makes some stories good and some not.
As an anarchist, I think that our stories are better because of moral or ethical reasons and have to be forthrightly presented that way. I see that some people find their deepest meaning in life, their greatest sense of joy and fulfillment, in being genocidaires. You can't really say that this is bad because genocide involves false beliefs, because all of our pasts involve false beliefs: it has to be because genocide is wrong.
Anarchism opposes hierarchy and therefore is more than leftist anti-capitalism: it also includes opposition to all of the failures of state socialism. In this opposition it includes racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and other forms that are only uneasily theorized as related to capitalism but that leftists reject in any case, as well as some things such as democratic elections of representatives or executives, which are used to justify capitalism in contemporary states but which leftists still generally like.
Klein includes a generic appeal to the left not to be sectarian and not to tear each other down towards the end of her book. All right. But this doesn't mean that we should adopt a belief in scientism that has failed us for a century. Moral consistency and clarity does not appeal to everyone but it is a better base for a path forwards than repeating the mistakes of the past.
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