Naomi Klein
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2017
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The writer and activist Naomi Klein reached an international audience with her first book, the best-selling No Logo, a rallying cry against the power of corporate brands and the replacement of traditional manufacturing jobs with sweatshop labour.
Since then, she's turned her intellectual ire on to even bigger terrain - the political and economic systems underpinning capitalism and climate change. The way to save the planet, she says, requires a radical rethink which will address what she calls the "unresolved tensions" between big business and over-consumption.
It's no surprise then that her fierce broadsides against the free market ideology have attracted plaudits and opprobrium in equal measure. But, coming from a family steeped in political activism, such polarized reactions come with the territory. Her grandparents were fervent Marxists and she was born in Canada to American activist parents who fled the US in protest against the Vietnam War. Her mother is a feminist filmmaker while her doctor father was heavily involved with the natural birth movement.
Growing up in the 1980s, she was a committed shopper and self-confessed "teeny bopper." But at 19 she experienced a dramatic political awakening - after that, she says, "you had to call yourself a feminist."
Presenter Kirsty Young Producer Paula McGinley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item |
| 0:12.0 | that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
| 0:16.0 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
| 0:22.0 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
| 0:30.0 | Music |
| 0:50.0 | My cast away this week is the author and activist Naomi Klein. |
| 0:54.0 | Her challenging terrain is the ideological battleground of ideas, globalization, hyper-consumerism, climate change, the democratic deficit. |
| 1:03.0 | Big problems, she says, that require radical solutions. |
| 1:07.0 | If there were a gene for social conscience, her preoccupations would be easily explained, making the political personal is something of a family trait. |
| 1:15.0 | Her grandfather and animator at Walt Disney in the 1940s lost his job for organizing a strike. |
| 1:21.0 | Her mother was a celebrated feminist filmmaker, and her father avoided the Vietnam draft by moving the family to Canada, later becoming a member of physicians for social responsibility. |
| 1:32.0 | She says having a big idea is a fairly arrogant thing to have. |
| 1:37.0 | There aren't that many women who are brought up with a sense that they have the right to occupy that space. |
| 1:42.0 | I was brought up by a feminist mum, and I think that's part of the reason why I'm arrogant enough to put my big ideas out there. |
| 1:50.0 | You're looking as though you're wondering if you actually said that, Naomi Klein, but I can guarantee you it is a quote. |
| 1:54.0 | You're a first book there, no logo, which really put you on the map as an author and a sinker. |
| 1:59.0 | It was published in 1999. I should remind people it was about this idea of globalization and branding and how much branding was really dictating the way we lived our lives and affecting the lives of people. |
| 2:11.0 | Very far away who were caught in the chain of actually manufacturing these brands hit a nerve in a particular moment. |
| 2:20.0 | Was there a moment when you thought my goodness, I'm clearly onto something this is bigger than just the book. |
| 2:26.0 | The book was at the printer when these protests in Seattle happened in 1999 against the World Trade Organization. |
... |
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