Book Review: Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate”
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Rebecca's Sunday morning book club podcast show. This week I will be providing you with a book review of Naomi Klein’s 2014 book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism V The Climate.” I was excited to read this book after absolutely loving her work “The Shock Doctrine,” both its elucidation of history as well as the strength of its thesis, that economic, political, and natural disaster shocks are utilized by predatory capitalism to accumulate political power and capital into the hands of the evil elite who rule our lives.

“This Changes Everything” start strong but falls flat. I feel that this book is redundant given the 2006 work of the radical visionaries of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, who wrote “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.” We, grassroots organizers and community members who are trying to save ourselves from the toxic legacy of industrialism and fossil fuel extraction, are well aware from our efforts that NO, the non-profit industrial complex is NOT going to effectively challenge the institution of capitalism, because all of its funding comes from foundations owned by capitalists.

Naomi Klein does share with us her insight that climate change will never be solved by free market mechanisms, and illustrates the failures of carbon trading and cap and trade markets. Great. She also shares the track records of intellectuals and academics who, though once effective in their work to pass legislation and regulation, no longer had success after the Reagan era tactic of de-regulating everything became gospel. Okay. But the problem with this book is not what it illustrates, it is what it leaves out.

And this book’s glaring omission is the grassroots environmental justice movement led by communities of color across the united states who have, time and again, fought and won through bottom up grassroots organizing that lasts for DECADES, do not get the media they deserves, and are funded by the communities themselves and staffed by volunteers who have to do the work because their children are being poisoned. While rightly placing the onus of climate change on multinational corporations and western civilization, she leaves out the little guy.

Indigenous struggles: Actually there’s a whole chapter on this part nevermind i just didnt read it coz i got mad

This book also omits the history of anti-capitalist environmentalists who have been organizing clandestinely in the woods for decades. The book mentions the work of Earth First! twice, but does not offer up any details about their tactics, their successes, or analysis of their failures, even though Earth First! has been doing the work for generations that Naomi Klein says we need so badly. Place your body between the point of extraction and the means of extraction, the bulldozer, the oil rig, the logging team. Cut it off at the source and stop capitalism at the point of extraction. As they say, “No compromise in defence of mother earth!” Go to jail, work with local communities, have strong legal support, utilize a diversity of tactics that includes pushing for legislation, but most importantly, you have to directly confront extraction by stopping it with your BODY.

I don’t like her injection of a new term, BLOCKADIA, onto the work of the grassroots environmental movement. It erases the locality of each movement, the organizations that put in the work to clean up their neighborhoods, hold corporations accountable, and pass legislation to keep it from happening in the future. This could have been a powerful history of the anti nuclear movement, the environmental justice movement, animal rights activists now being targeted as terrorists under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, or anti capitalist environmentalists who have time and time again risked bodily safety by sitting up in a tree stand, spiking trees, and chaining themselves to anything they can get a hold on to stop resource extraction.

Instead it just rehashed the shit I went through as an environmental activist in losing all faith in non profits and the people who work for them to make meaningful change, knowing that money and capital corrupts everything it touches. Okay and maybe i take it personally that i was unsupported by those people and busted my ass volunteering for free to make cool shit happen, but also it is just a rock fact that if you try to make a living actually saving the world from capitalism, you will die poor and hungry in an anarchist squat fire.

Klein’s central premise that capitalism must be destroyed is absolutely true. Can we give credit where credit is due though? To the people who have been fighting that fight for generations? Can we shine a spotlight on the struggles around the world that have won, and use their stories to educate activists on tactics that work? Movement building requires extreme networking and solidarity, not another glossy website for a well funded environmental org (350.com, of which Klein is an organizer) that helicopters in an anti-fracking protest once a decade to the Ohio statehouse. Movement building requires digging in and investing yourself into the community where you live, making allies, building affinity with unlikely neighbors, bridging gaps, forming coalitions, and importantly, having an intimate knowledge with the lay of the land and its people. This isn’t done while jet setting around to Climate Conferences.

Maybe Naomi Klein will convince foundation funded conservation orgs to join her foundation funded environmental org in destroying capitalism. Or maybe, one day, the grassroots movement will come knocking on their door and ask why they haven’t done jack shit to support the sick and dying poor people who have been struggling for environmental justice for decades, but never seem to get enough media attention to make it into the official narrative.