In his recent book, The Tipping Point, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell calls it "stickiness." "The hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn't go in one ear and out the other," he writes. "Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can't get it out of your head." According to Mr. Gladwell, the concept helps explain why some writers toil in obscurity and others "tip" into runaway celebrity.

Canada's Naomi Klein, just about the stickiest anti-globalization pundit in the world, has definitely tipped. Her anti-corporatist manifesto, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, has been translated into nine languages. When she speaks publicly -- which is often -- throngs of gushing fans tell her the book has changed their lives. Last month, she began a fortnightly column in The Guardian to complement her weekly Globe and Mail gig. She's been the subject of long feature articles in the London Observer, Maclean's, The New York Times and the London Independent. Naomi Klein is eloquent. And, curse it, she is just 30 years old.

Given its timing, Ms. Klein's tipping act is doubly impressive. No Logo was released in January, 2000, at the height of the longest economic boom in North American history. Half of Canadians now own corporate stock -- up from a quarter 10 years ago. Nike's advertisements are fêted by art critics and used as programming on MTV. Across the continent, corporations are subsidizing sports stadiums, promoting diversity and staging fun-runs against breast cancer. Business leaders are stepping over one another in the race to become "responsible corporate citizens." The term "military-industrial complex" can now be used only in satire.

So why did Ms. Klein tip when conditions were ripe for her to tank? The answer lies in the fact that she is one of the only thinkers who has been able to bridge the differences that separate the West's two species of globaphobes.

The primary beneficiaries of free trade are the workers of the Third World, who will get the chance to put their cheap labour to profitable use; and First World knowledge workers, who will sell their intellectual property and high-tech gizmos to a global market. The West's high school educated blue-collar workforce can offer neither knowledge nor cheap labour. This is why unions have suddenly become so concerned with human rights and working conditions in Asia and Latin America. They hope to destroy trade agreements by saddling them with labour and environmental standards -- climate-controlled factories, 40-hour-work weeks, state-of-the-art pollution controls -- that poor countries will be unable to meet for decades.

In other words, the union-led protectionist campaign against globalization is based on a desire to ensure that the North American way of life -- with its SUVs and 16-oz. steaks -- remains open to the working class. Yet this way of life is precisely what the environmentalists, vegetarians, Third Worldists and feminists who are protesting in Quebec City oppose. Free trade, like capitalism itself, they argue, will enrich us in a nominal sense, but only at the expense of our environment, health, human rights and cultural diversity.

Ms. Klein has bridged this fundamental schism between materialist and anti-materialist globaphobes. With her message that brand-name transnational corporations are suspect entities in and of themselves, she has staked out the tiny patch of common ground shared by both camps. In No Logo, she blasts Nike and other clothing producers for fleecing brand-obsessed North American kids with the fruits of sweatshops; Wal-Mart and McDonald's for aggressively fighting the unionization of their workforces; Shell Oil for allegedly abusive production practices in Nigeria; and Disney Corporation for offences against the No Logo ethos too numerous to mention. There's something for everyone, in other words, all of it layered over with a set of endearing personal anecdotes. Protectionists and unionists find grist for their cause in Ms. Klein's tales of Third World working conditions, and hip counter-culturalists groove to the sophisticated denunciation of corporate-inspired consumerism and conformity. Nowhere does Ms. Klein alienate readers by slipping off-message into fringe ideologies. The fragile coalition between Joe Six-Pack and Johnny Tofu is maintained.

Of course, Ms. Klein did not invent anti-corporatism -- though she has certainly strengthened it. At its core, it's a vestige of the Marxist belief that the battle between workers and capitalists is a zero-sum game, and that a corporation's profitability should be taken as prima facie evidence of the proletariat's exploitation. This economic fallacy is the specious mantra at the core of globaphobia. In a well-known 1997 speech excoriating the "neoliberal order," for example, Noam Chomsky denounced globalization as a process dominated by "corporate entities that are totalitarian in internal structure," "unaccountable tyrannies" and a "highly class-conscious business community, dedicated to class war."

As one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities, Chomsky is globaphobia's true leader. Ms. Klein does not even pretend to argue matters at his level of erudition. But given his impenetrable Marxist-era jargon, it is easy to see why Ms. Klein gets letters from fans who praise her as "easier than Chomsky." Ms. Klein was a teenager when the Soviet Union started falling apart. Though she is greatly beholden to a stale dogma, she is not encumbered by the lexicon it sprouted. Even the most devoted Chomskyite must admit No Logo is far more entertaining -- not to mention sticky -- than such works as Chomsky's Democracy in a Neoliberal Order: Doctrines and Reality.