People who spent a working life explaining how the economy actually runs. We read them, we argue with them, and this is where we say which parts we use.
We farm 4.6 acres in Wetzel County and we sell seed. Almost everything that decides whether that works is settled somewhere else: who owns the land, who sets the price of a bag of feed, who gets to build a data centre on the ridge. You cannot run a small farm well and stay ignorant of that.
So we keep a short shelf of people who have done the reading so we don't have to. This section credits them and sets out what we take from the work. It also records what they have been criticised for and what they have been arrested for, because a reader deciding whether to trust somebody deserves the whole record. We are not here to judge. We are here to give you enough to make up your own mind.
Two of them, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, wrote a book together in 2026. We profile them on this page. Thinkers working in a particular tradition get their own section, starting with solarpunk.
Naomi Klein
b. 8 May 1970, Montreal · writer, journalist, activist
A Canadian journalist who has spent thirty years documenting one mechanism: how crises get used to hand public wealth to private owners, and why the people who lose most are the ones with no way to leave.
Born 8 May 1970 in Montreal. Both parents were Jewish Americans who left the United States in 1967 as Vietnam War resisters, arriving shortly after her father received his draft notice.
Her grandfather Philip Klein was an animator at Walt Disney, working on Fantasia, Snow White and Pinocchio. He helped organise the 1941 Disney animators' strike, and was fired afterwards for being an "agitator" and blacklisted.
Her mother, Bonnie Sherr Klein, is a documentary filmmaker. Her father, Michael Klein, was a physician appointed to the Order of Canada in 2016. Her brother Seth Klein is a climate policy author.
She edited the student paper The Varsity at the University of Toronto and left before finishing the degree.
Married the filmmaker Avi Lewis in 1998; one son, Toma, born 2012. She lives in a wild part of British Columbia and holds a professorship in Climate Justice at UBC, where she co-directs the Centre for Climate Justice.
No Logo has sold over a million copies in more than twenty languages. Doppelganger won the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024.
The work
No Logo
1999 · Knopf Canada
The book that made her name
The argument is that the brand, not the factory, became the core asset of late twentieth-century capitalism. Production moved to low-wage export zones while the value collected in the logo, and brands then colonised public space. It came out of the anti-globalisation years and the sweatshop and culture-jamming campaigns aimed at Nike, The Gap, McDonald's and Shell.
The Shock Doctrine
2007 · Knopf Canada
The one that matters most to us
Her central claim: the free-market programme associated with Milton Friedman and the Chicago School was never won at the ballot box. It advanced in the disoriented aftermath of shocks — coups, wars, financial crises, hurricanes — when a population is too stunned to resist and unpopular privatisations can be pushed through quickly. Pinochet's Chile, post-Soviet Russia, Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, New Orleans after Katrina. She named the pattern disaster capitalism.
This Changes Everything
2014 · Simon & Schuster
Capitalism versus the climate
Climate change cannot be solved inside market fundamentalism, because the same demand for limitless growth that drives emissions has to be dismantled to bring them down. She argues the three pillars of neoliberalism — privatisation, deregulation, and tax cuts paid for by cutting public spending — are each incompatible with the actions the physics requires. Won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize. Popularised the anti-extractivist movement she calls Blockadia.
Doppelganger
2023 · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The mirror world
Built on the running public confusion between her and the writer Naomi Wolf, the book examines how digital life splits people into doubles. Political argument stops being about different readings of the same world and becomes a fight over who is real and who is a simulation. She extends it to whole societies, which can become their own alter egos.
End Times Fascism
2026 · with Astra Taylor · FSG
The book we started from
Their definition, in Klein's words from the New York Times interview: "a fascism that is very much in conversation with planetary-scale existential crises; a fascism that is taking the end of this world for granted." They name three camps that have converged: religious end-timers who expect to be saved by faith, tech billionaires who expect to be saved by escape, and ethnonationalists who expect to be saved by fortressing a nation. All three accept or actively speed up collapse while building a way out for themselves. Klein and Taylor's term for the latter is traitors to creation. Their definition of fascism itself is blunt: capitalism with bared teeth.
Also
2002 · 2017 · 2019 · 2021
The rest of the shelf
Fences and Windows (2002) collects her anti-globalisation journalism and speeches. No Is Not Enough (2017) argues that resisting Trump is not sufficient and a credible alternative has to be offered. On Fire (2019) gathers a decade of climate reporting behind the Green New Deal. How to Change Everything (2021, with Rebecca Stefoff) is her version for young readers. Her own site counts End Times Fascism as her tenth book.
Where she runs into trouble
We put this section on every person on this site. It is easier to trust an account of somebody that includes the parts their supporters would leave out.
Israel and Palestine. She endorsed the BDS campaign in 2009, writing that Israel should become the target of the kind of global movement that ended apartheid in South Africa. A 2009 remark that some Jews "get one get-away-with-genocide-free card" was attacked by Jerusalem Post columnist Noam Schimmel as trafficking in an old stereotype of Jews as malicious. In April 2024 she described Zionism at a Brooklyn seder as "a false idol," drawing pushback including open letters in the Israeli press. Her positions on Israel are long-documented and have drawn sustained criticism from Jewish and pro-Israel commentators; some of that criticism comes from campaigning organisations and should be read as advocacy.
The October 2023 headline. Days after the 7 October attacks, The Guardian published her piece under the headline "Why are some of the left celebrating the killings of Israeli Jews?" The headline was later changed to "In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun." Klein conceded the point publicly: she had heard from movement friends who objected to the original characterisation, called it a fair critique, and noted that writers do not choose headlines. She later said there "were missteps on everyone's part, including mine."
The Shock Doctrine drew heavy fire. The libertarian Cato Institute published a paper calling it built on misconstrued statements and a misleading reading of economic history. The economist Tyler Cowen called the arguments "ridiculous" and alleged fabricated claims. Jonathan Chait in The New Republic wrote that she pays strikingly little attention to right-wing ideas. Stephen Holmes in the London Review of Books called it naïve. The Financial Times review called it "a deeply flawed work." Klein published a detailed point-by-point rebuttal, and acknowledged one significant error about Halliburton stock profits.
No Logo was answered directly. The Economist called its premise fallacious; Nike published a point-by-point rebuttal of the sweatshop claims; and the 2004 book The Rebel Sell argued that No Logo turns improving working-class life into an anti-market ideology.
Venezuela. She signed a 2004 petition supporting Hugo Chávez and in 2007 described Venezuela under him as a zone of relative economic calm. Critics including James Kirchick attacked her silence as the country's crisis deepened.
The 2012 medal. She publicly refused the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in protest.
What the record shows
Where the evidence is thin
Publication detail for End Times Fascism differs by territory. The US edition is Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Canada is Knopf Canada; the UK is Allen Lane, which The Guardian dates to 15 September 2026. Several online listings give other dates. We have not confirmed a page count anywhere.
Where she lives depends on which year you read. Older reference works place her in Toronto. UBC, her own recent interviews and her 2026 work place her in British Columbia. Both are true of different periods.
One child, best-supported. Most references give a single son, Toma. Some databases phrase it as "first child." We have followed the majority reading.
Some criticism is advocacy, not reporting. Several of the Israel-related items above come from campaigning or partisan outlets. They are legitimate as evidence of what the criticism is, and they are not neutral assessments. We have labelled them accordingly.
Our take
We keep Quinault strawberries, a wood stove and a seed business that pays for itself. We have decided we have enough. Klein is the writer we hand to somebody who wants to know why a place like Wetzel County keeps losing ground while the people at the top of it gain.
Her shock doctrine is the most useful single idea we have found for explaining our own county. Land gets cheap when an industry leaves, and the people who buy it cheap are never the ones who worked it. The pattern repeats because it is the pattern.
Where we part company is the remedy. Klein's answer runs through bigger public programmes delivered by institutions that have spent forty years being captured. That may be the only route at national scale, and we are not certain it isn't. Our route is smaller: fewer purchased inputs, fewer bills, a shorter distance between the work and the eating. Enough, for us, is something you practise. We do not think a government is going to deliver it, and we are not waiting on one.
She still earns her place on the shelf. She named the machine, she got arrested over a pipeline, and she has kept saying it plainly for thirty years. We can disagree about the exit and still say that.
Sources
Naomi Klein, official site: End Times Fascism and The Shock Doctrine. Source for her own framing of the books and for FSG, Knopf Canada and Allen Lane as the publishers.
"Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor Say the End of the World is Now on the Table." The Interview, New York Times, 12 September 2026. Source for the definition of end times fascism quoted on this page. The video version is Do Tech Billionaires Want the World to Burn? with host David Marchese.
"End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor — review." The Guardian, 14 September 2026. Source for the phrase "capitalism with bared teeth" and for the UK publication date of 15 September 2026.
"End Times Fascism." NPR, 28 September 2026. Source for the three camps converging on the belief that they are part of an elite destined to survive.
The Canadian Encyclopedia, Naomi Klein; Wikipedia, Naomi Klein. Source for the birth date, the family history, her parents' 1967 departure from the United States, the Disney strike and her grandfather's dismissal, her education, her marriage and one son, the 2011 arrest, and the book-by-book criticism.
ACLU, FISA lawsuit. Source for her role as a named plaintiff.
UBC Geography, faculty profile. Source for the UBC professorship, the Centre for Climate Justice, and her own description of her work as an inverse shock doctrine.
The Guardian, interview, 12 September 2026. Source for her 2026 description of living close to nature in British Columbia.
Astra Taylor
b. 30 September 1979, Winnipeg · writer, filmmaker, organiser
A filmmaker turned organiser who built a debtors' union out of Occupy Wall Street, and who has argued for twenty years that debt is a political arrangement rather than a personal failure.
Born 30 September 1979 in Winnipeg, raised in Athens, Georgia. Canadian-American.
Unschooled until thirteen — what she has called a radical anarchist strain of homeschooling. She left high school at sixteen to sit in on classes at the University of Georgia, briefly attended Brown, dropped out, and holds a master's in Liberal Studies from The New School. She has no high school diploma.
She carried about $40,000 in student debt and defaulted on it in 2008. That experience sits directly behind her later work.
Her sister is the painter and disability-rights scholar Sunaura Taylor, who appeared alongside her in Examined Life. She is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.
Co-founder of the Debt Collective, the debtors' union that grew out of Occupy Wall Street. She helped write the Debt Resisters' Operations Manual and launch the Rolling Jubilee, and was the leading public voice of the Corinthian Colleges debt strike.
The People's Platform won the 2015 American Book Award. The Age of Insecurity was delivered as the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award.
She lives in New York City. She is a member of the DSA and sits on the council of the Progressive International.
The work
Zizek! · Examined Life · What Is Democracy?
2005 · 2008 · 2018
Her filmmaking, before the organising
She began as a documentary director. Zizek! premiered at Toronto in 2005. Examined Life (2008) put philosophers including Cornel West, Judith Butler and her sister Sunaura on camera walking and talking, and is still the most accessible introduction to the tradition she works in. What Is Democracy? premiered at Toronto in 2018 with a wider release in early 2019, and asks the question in Athens, Georgia and in the refugee camps of Greece.
The People's Platform
2014 · Metropolitan Books
Taking on the internet as an industry
Written before most people had noticed what the platforms were doing. Her argument is that the internet did not flatten cultural and political power; it concentrated it. Ad-driven gatekeepers rebuilt the same bottlenecks the open web was supposed to destroy, and wiped out the middle of the cultural economy in the process. It won the American Book Award the following year.
Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone
2019 · Metropolitan Books
Democracy as an unresolved argument
She treats democracy as a set of paradoxes that are never finally resolved rather than a system you either have or lack: freedom and equality pull against each other, and the tension is the point. The book grew out of the film of the same name. Reviewers found it idiosyncratic, which is roughly the reaction she was inviting.
The Age of Insecurity
2023 · House of Anansi · CBC Massey Lectures
Her best single argument
She argues insecurity is the organising condition of the present, deliberately produced: work that can vanish, housing you rent, debt that never clears, a climate that is moving. Capitalism, in her phrase, is an insecurity-producing machine. Her sharpest point is that the thing we reach for — more security for me and mine — is self-defeating, because security built on exclusion escalates exactly the fear it was meant to answer.
Solidarity
2024 · with Leah Hunt-Hendrix · Pantheon
The how, rather than the why
A history and a practical argument for solidarity as a practice rather than a feeling, written with the organiser and funder Leah Hunt-Hendrix. It is the most directly useful of her books if what you want is something to do on a Tuesday.
End Times Fascism
2026 · with Naomi Klein · FSG
The book we started from
See the entry on Klein above for the argument. Taylor's contribution is the organising half: what the coalition is held together by, where it is weak, and the case that its central offer to ordinary people is thin. Her phrase from the New York Times interview is the one we keep coming back to: you are not in debt because you live beyond your means, but because you are denied the means to live.
The Debt Collective
2012 to now
The work, not the writing
Founded out of Occupy Wall Street. The Rolling Jubilee, launched in 2012, buys defaulted debt on the secondary market for pennies on the dollar and cancels it — the group's own figure is more than $32 million abolished. In November 2014 it bought $13,384,642.14 of Corinthian Colleges student debt, owed by 94,381 people, for $1. In February 2015, fifteen Corinthian students declared the first student debt strike in the United States. It grew to hundreds, and the Collective built the first online tool for filing borrower defence claims — 82,000 claims by late 2016.
Her precise role: co-founder, co-author of the manual, one of the organisers of the Corinthian campaign, and its most visible spokesperson.
Where she runs into trouble
The debt-cancellation credit is contested, and the numbers matter. When the Education Department cancelled all remaining Corinthian loans in June 2022, the figure was $5.8 billion for 560,000 borrowers — the largest single discharge in the department's history. A widely repeated smaller figure of $1.7 billion for that campaign is wrong. The department's own announcement credits Kamala Harris's 2013 suit against Corinthian as the origin of the case, while the Debt Collective credits its organising; Inside Higher Ed's account is that the Collective helped the students apply.
The Debt Collective did not bring Sweet v. Cardona. That 2019 case was filed by seven borrowers through the Project on Predatory Student Lending and the Harvard Education Review Association, and settled in 2022 for roughly $6 billion covering around 200,000 borrowers across 151 schools. The Collective's own account is that it organised alongside it. Anyone crediting the Collective with the suit itself is overreaching, and the Collective's broader headline figures include government programmes it did not run.
Criticism from the left came early. Doug Henwood called the Rolling Jubilee purely symbolic. Mike Konczal wrote in Jacobin that a debt strike was the wrong target. Yves Smith at naked capitalism called it a gimmick with tax risk. Washington Monthly asked whether it was a distraction. An internal forum critique argued the Collective's central flaw was refusing to politically threaten the Democrats it needed.
Criticism from creditors and the right. The objection is moral hazard and unfairness to people who repaid. In May 2023 the House Oversight Committee wrote to the Education Department attacking the Sweet settlement as a six-billion-dollar debt transfer scheme and alleged a conflict of interest.
Her books have taken real reviews. Emilie Bickerton in the New Left Review on The People's Platform; the New York Times calling Democracy May Not Exist idiosyncratic; Democracy Journal finding several deficiencies in it; Commonweal on The Age of Insecurity; and mixed-to-critical reviews of Solidarity in Autostraddle and the Christian Century. End Times Fascism drew a notably hostile review from Josephine Lee in the Texas Observer, who called it too bleak and unfocused and argued the target of resistance never becomes clear, and from Judy Cox in Socialist Worker, who called it far too meagre.
On Israel she is a long-standing supporter of cultural boycott. She signed letters in 2014 against Israeli sponsorship of the Brooklyn Book Festival and in 2024 the "Refusing Complicity" statement, and speaks on the subject with Klein.
What the record shows
Where the evidence is thin
The Corinthian figures are the most misreported thing about her. We have used the Education Department's own numbers. The $1.7 billion figure that circulates widely does not match any official release we could find; the nearest real number is $1.76 million of Bennett College debt the Collective bought for $50,000, which may be where the mix-up started.
The Debt Collective's largest headline numbers cover government programmes. Its own history page cites nearly $200 billion and five million people helped between 2020 and 2025. Those totals include public cancellation schemes, so they are not a measure of what the Collective's own campaigns won.
Two claims we could not verify. We found no source for a grandfather who was a Canadian union leader, and none for a 2016 Israel-related controversy of the kind often described. What is documented is 2014, 2024 and 2026. We have left both out rather than repeat them.
Her filmography dates are festival premiere dates.What Is Democracy? premiered at Toronto in 2018 and reached cinemas in January 2019. Both years are cited depending on the source.
Our take
Of the two authors on this page, Taylor is the one whose work we can act on directly.
Debt is the thing that keeps people on land they cannot afford to keep and in jobs that do not pay for the land. We sell seed to people who are carrying it. Her line about being denied the means to live rather than living beyond your means describes almost every small farmer we know, and it is worth saying out loud in a county where the standard story is that people like us overspent.
The Rolling Jubilee is the cleverest piece of direct action either of them has been involved in. Buying a debt for a dollar and cancelling it teaches something no pamphlet does: the debt was never worth what they said it was worth. We like it for the same reason we like saving our own seed. Both take a claim of ownership and show it to be an arrangement.
Where we are less sure is the scale. Debtors' unions are national and urban, and most of our neighbours' problem is not a student loan. It is a truck payment, a mortgage on land that will not pay it back, and a feed bill. We would like to see the same thinking pointed at farm debt, which is where it would change this valley.
She is the one on this shelf who is actually building something rather than describing something. We have time for that.
Sources
Debt Collective, history and victories and debt abolition figures. Source for the Rolling Jubilee total, the Corinthian purchase figures, the February 2015 debt strike, the borrower defence tool and the 82,000 claims.
US Department of Education, press release, 1 June 2022. Source for $5.8 billion and 560,000 borrowers, and for the department's attribution to the 2013 Harris suit.
Project on Predatory Student Lending, Sweet v. Cardona settlement. Source for the roughly $6 billion and 200,000 borrowers across 151 schools, and for who filed the case.
Wikipedia, Astra Taylor. Source for the birth date, the unschooling and education history, her family, her filmography and book list, her awards, and the debt-default detail. Used for biography where it agrees with the primary sources above.
New York Magazine, profile, 2015. Source for having no high school diploma and for the roughly $40,000 debt default in 2008.
The New Yorker, "Astra Taylor's Age of Insecurity". Source for the unschooling family background and for her account of manufactured insecurity.
US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, letter to the Education Department, May 2023. Source for the creditor-side criticism of the Sweet settlement.