Naomi Klein’s latest book, Doppelganger, makes for an uneasy read as she tracks the coming together of two groupings in Western society: the right wing paranoid conspiracy theorists and the New Age wellness, fitness, diet faddists obsessed with self. Both groups are hyperventilating on individual rights and so called freedom in what they see as an oppressive society fronted by a domineering state. Social media tools allow disinformation to easily circulate and instant gurus to surface. The shared view is flavoured with racism, eugenics and protofascism. It’s a spin off of neoliberalism and spawns political monstrosities like Trump.

And they are clever as they pick up on absences and contradictions that should be material for the Left: covid combatting programmes promoted both isolation of the individual and state imposed collectivism; rust belt bitterness felt by mainly white workers betrayed across the political spectrum; affirmation for sectors of society who at the neighbourhood level are not seen as particularly disadvantaged; income inequality; small business versus transnationals; climate and refugee stresses…

Klein uses the doppelganger paradigm (Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde is the best known instance) to embody the mirror images and shadows that are at play as identity becomes ever more fluid and yet people become ever more obsessive in the need for recognition. Information and disinformation play a distorted mirror game – remember those sideshow mazes at the old A&P shows? Klein finds herself stalked by another Naomi (Wolf), a 1980s feminist writer who has turned neo con anti vaxer and readers confuse the two women.

While able to understand the motivation of this new phenomenon (in a society that is obviously falling apart you get your physical and emotional self together as a whole, beautiful high achieving person who lives above the chaos), Klein writes that they never acknowledge the cause of the chaos: the capitalist system which has always walked hand in hand with colonialism and the genocides of the colonist. This in turn reveals that Hitler simply colonised Europe, with the Jews becoming the ‘indigenous people’ needing to be cleared.  This in turn becomes a new doppelganger taking us to Israel as a colonial venture and the deeply disturbing distorted mirror of the genocide being played out in Gaza and the West Bank with the victim Jew turning into the militant soldier.

Is there any way  out of this panorama of evil which begins to have colourings of original sin and homo sapiens as a deeply flawed species? Or is the problem identity whether religious, ethnic or national leading to this evil? Or is it the economic system of capitalism which exacerbates to an intolerable degree? And now identity politics sees it entering a more personal realm which is obviously being played out with great intensity in the North. She suggests a solidarity which takes account of diversity is the only solution and that this can only be achieved at the community level.  She suggests we need to blur the edges of identity in order for a blending to take place. As with other writers, an anarcho syndicalist model is the favoured ‘genre’ to see us through the potentially apocalyptic 21st century.