[lbo-talk] NYRB review of Naomi Klein

[Marv Gandall]

Here’s a link to another review of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, this one by Elizabeth Kolbert in the latest New York Review of Books. Kolbert is sympathetic to Klein’s analysis of the climate crisis and her indictment of governments and liberal green organizations who offer misleading reassurances that the looming catastrophe can be averted without major changes to the status quo. 

But, like some other reviewers, Kolbert thinks Klein’s various proposals to resolve the crisis through “managed degrowth” and “regeneration” are too vague to be meaningful or, like carbon taxes, “hardly seem to challenge the basic logic of capitalism.” This, despite the fact that Klein is avowedly anticapitalist, although her rhetorical flourishes about “changing everything” though a global environment movement are arguably aimed not at the system’s overthrow as purging it it of its rapacious, unregulated, “neoliberal” character which thwarts popular efforts to rid it of its worst features.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/04/can-climate-change-cure-capitalism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nybooks+%28The+New+York+Review+of+Books%29