Click here to access video of the 31:58m interview with Naomi Klein on the Bill Moyer's PBS program.
I only post this video featuring Klein's views to illustrate how some people can use radical rhetoric to disguise a liberal critique which then suggests only very limited and futile forms of activism. I think that it is an attempt to co-opt radical thinking and to steer it into safer, reformist channels of thought that do not threaten the system of capitalism. Hence, the headline.
But, once one gets into the meat of her comments, clues start appearing that give away her liberal position. For example, at one point in the interview she said “one of the things about deregulated capitalism is that it is a crisis-creation machine." (my emphasis) Then, in the interview she goes on to target the "fossil fuel industry" as the problem. She continues to give her liberal position away when she explains that she wants to restore government regulation and control of capitalist operations. She ignores the fact that the government is sponsored by capitalists and must serve their interests. In other words, she expects the foxes to guard the hen-house of the economy in a sustainable way. And, her activist project of choice is to put pressure on universities to withdraw their investments in fossil fuel corporations.
It is precisely this liberal critical strategy that permits her to have access to the quasi-governmental TV program of PBS.
While liberals such as Klein and Chris Hedges, online websites like TruthDig, publications like The Nation all perform a service by taking issue with the many crises of capitalism, they also perform a service to the One Percent beneficiaries of capitalism by steering all criticism away from a fundamental critique of the system, and by favoring solutions that do not threaten the system.
