For in the early 1990s, corporations and their boosters spoke like utopians—promising wealth and democracy for all, envisioning a new belle époque of global peace and prosperity. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman devised the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” according to which no two countries with McDonald’s franchises would ever go to war (true enough till 1999, when NATO began bombing Serbia). Many of the anticorporate movement’s goals, by contrast, seemed pragmatic, even defensive. They were well in line with the established traditions of the New Deal and European social democracy: winning decent wages, ending child labor, reducing corporate pollution, gaining the right to organize unions. Yet in the post-Thatcher, post-Reagan age, there was no longer anything conciliatory about defending the economic victories social movements had won earlier in the century. To demand a higher minimum wage was to throw down the gauntlet. Believing that governments could sometimes prosper by running large deficits—accepted wisdom twenty years earlier—meant placing oneself outside the spectrum of respectable debate. Ending sweatshop labor began to seem, as it had at the beginning of the 20th century, to require such a profound reordering of culture and society that it challenged the essential morality of capitalism itself. In the 1980s and 1990s, as demands for basic safeguards of material well-being began to run up against the logic of the market, people who might never have seen themselves as radicals were suddenly forced to make new and difficult choices. The mounting radicalism of the anticorporate movement, in other words, was a response to the acceleration of capitalism itself.

Naomi Klein doesn’t look like anyone’s stereotype of an antiglobalization activist: no dreadlocks, no piercings. It’s not that she doesn’t understand the impulse. Punks and anarchists articulate their rejection of brands and consumer society in their very appearance, and their styles reflect a subculture critical of middle-class aspirations to prosperity. “Sometimes I get strong urges to pierce everything in sight and stop looking so acceptable,” she told the Village Voice. But she also recognizes the importance of presenting herself as someone with an intimate knowledge of consumer longings: “I go to an event and there are 17-year-old girls there and I know it’s in part because they’ve seen me as someone they can relate to.” In a debate on globalization with a business correspondent from the Economist, she demolished her opponent—but pleasantly. Instead of making her readers feel guilty about wanting to buy stylish sweaters from the Gap, or Starbucks mocha lattes, she turns their attention to the corporations behind the commodities. She doesn’t wag a finger at the craving to go to the mall and shop (she gives you the feeling that she might even want to come with you) but she turns the oldest of all consumer slogans on its head: Caveat emptor.

Around the world, such plans have met with resistance. Iraq is no exception. In an article for Harper’s, Klein told the story of a soap factory that Bremer sought to privatize. “We were shocked” to hear about the plans to sell off the company, one young employee recalled. “If the private sector buys our company, the first thing they would do is reduce the staff to make more money. And we will be forced into a very hard destiny, because the factory is our only way of living.” Klein asked what would happen if the factory was sold anyway. The worker replied, “Either we will set the factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not be privatized.” By now, everyone has noticed the connection between Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi army and the rise of the insurgency. Klein alone has seemed to recognize a similar link between mass privatizing layoffs and a bottomless supply of desperate young men.

Activists should not, Klein concluded, blame the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq on the “absence of a plan,” but rather, “on the plan itself, and the extraordinarily violent ideology upon which it is based.” This is the neoliberal ideology that has also led to the privatization of water in Bolivia and the denial of AIDS drugs to Africans. It is the ideology responsible for demanding that countries such as Mexico and Indonesia cut their health and education budgets to pay off their debts to wealthy First World investors, and for turning a country where it’s illegal for workers to organize independent unions—China—into the factory of choice for the globe. In a sense, Klein is suggesting that Iraq is simply the most violent of all the economic reorganizations that the United States has helped to sponsor over the past two decades. Economic historian Karl Polanyi, who described the rise of laissez-faire in the early years of the 19th century, argued that liberal economics demanded a millenarian conviction as radical as “any that ever inflamed the minds of sectarians.” Neoliberalism, too, requires the ceaseless subjugation of society to the rule of the market. Its adherents are capable of such great ruthlessness in part because they never have to present themselves as believers. Theirs is a faith all the more powerful for never having to say its name.