No Logo has won plaudits a-plenty for exposing the activities of our corporate rulers. But, asks MATTHEW BROWN, is it really as radical as it’s made out?
Branding big business is big business these days. In this age when image is everything a change of identity is seen as the fix-all solution for any organisation’s failings. Name changes at the Post Office and Anderson Consulting are only the most recent of these corporate metamorphoses. AfteaNo Logo has won plaudits a-plenty for exposing the activities of our corporate rulers. But, asks MATTHEW BROWN, is it really as radical as it’s made out?
Branding big business is big business these days. In this age when image is everything a change of identity is seen as the fix-all solution for any organisation’s failings. Name changes at the Post Office and Anderson Consulting are only the most recent of these corporate metamorphoses. After all, not long ago we had a Labour Party; now we have new Labour.
![ds95nol1[1].gif](https://www.independentlabour.org.uk/ds95nol1%5B1%5D.gif)
Armies of design and marketing consultants make fortunes from thinking up clever new names for everything from countries to companies. Labels and logos line our increasingly homogenised high streets, badge our clothes for peer approval, and mark our identities into safely sealed categories. Adverts saturate our media, colour our buses; corporate slogans infiltrate our brains. However much we ignore them, they just do it.
These are the bright, shiny signs of western economic success, the all too visible power of global corporations.
And it’s on these “brand bullies” of 1990s corporate capitalism that journalist Naomi Klein trains her acidic aim in her much-heralded book, No Logo. This 450-page tome for our times has been lauded far and wide, praised almost continuously since it was first emerged on the book review pages last year, just as the ringing battle cries of the Seattle anti-world trade protests were dying in our ears.
It is a “timely, vivid and trenchant analysis of the globalised international economy”, according to one reviewer; “a complete, user-friendly handbook on the negative effects that ’90s überbrand marketing has had on culture, work and consumer choice”, according to another. It has been described, variously, as “top quality reporting”, “an attack on the excesses of capitalism”, “a call to arms” for the direct action generation, and a “sophisticated cultural commentary”.
No Logo is already a publishing phenomenon, and Klein has become the newest star of radical social commentary. Twelve months after her book was published, the former Toronto Star columnist is still doing the rounds of the media circuit, popping up on Radio Four round table discussions on the power of brands, or being interviewed on Radio Five Live about globalisation and the World Trade Organisation. During the last few weeks alone No Logo narrowly failed to win the Guardian’s annual first book award, and sat smartly on the top of the paper’s on-line sales lists. It was proclaimed paperback of the week in the Observer this January, described by Robert McCrum as “a thrilling achievement, a genuine thought provoker”. Go into almost any major bookshop and it’s there on the bestseller shelves, next to the latest John Grisham novel and David Beckham’s biography.
Astonishing success
This is success on an astonishing scale for any political publication, but especially for a book that explicitly intends to “fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations”.
At a public meeting organised by the World Development Movement in London last November, where Klein was speaking, No Logo was even described as “the Das Kapital of the anti-globalisation movement”, a kind of communist manifesto for the millennium generation.
Comparing a 30 year-old Canadian consumer journalist with Karl Marx may be ridiculous at one level, but it is quite revealing at another. For while Marx’s genius, and lasting value, was to dig below the surface of the system, to excavate its historical sources and expose the economic underpinnings of capitalism’s power, it is Klein’s failure to place 1990s capitalism in historical context, or to delve far behind its corporate faces, that is her biggest weakness.
Klein’s argument is based on the notion that the growth in wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations, such as McDonalds, the Gap, Nike and many others over the last 15 years, is largely due to a shift in corporate priorities from “making things”, that is products, to creatin g brands or images with which people can identify. It is this consumer identification, they claim, that gives them their market power. The Nikes, Microsofts and Tommy Hilfigers of this brave new world were “pioneers”, says Klein, who “made the bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations”.
“What these companies produced primarily were not things … but images of their brands,” she writes. “Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing.”
She argues that the trade liberalisation and anti-labour laws of the 1990s encouraged corporations to get their products made by franchised overseas contractors, leaving them to concentrate on building their brand identities. They are engaged in what she calls “a race towards weightlessness”, a race in which the winner will be “whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products”. Klein musters an impressive arsenal of statistics to back up her claims, showing how the weight of corporate budgets has tipped from manufacturing to marketing.
Battle of the brands
Much of No Logo concentrates on this battle of the brands, diligently documenting how corporations and their images have crept further and further into more and more areas of our lives, privatising public spaces and incorporating private ones. Klein describes how brands have colonised, and in some cases even control, areas of human activity, like sport and music, once associated with freedom and leisure.
She shows how they have encroached on government and education, winning exclusive sponsorship deals with schools and universities in north America, and have even begun to direct individuals’ values and sense of themselves. Klein points out how we are all now expected to think of ourselves as a kind of “brand”, how we must market our “selling points” to the highest bidder – whether we’re after a job, a college place, or the most eligible partner.
Everything, it seems, has been turned into profit-fodder by the power of the marketers, as they “built corporate empires around brand identities”. Youth and street cultures are scoured by teams of corporate “cool hunters” desperate to pick up on the latest inventive craze of the kids on the block. Ideas once thought to be a threat to the mainstream are lapped up by new firms keen to establish their niche.
Ideas like “diversity”, for example – the darling concept of late eighties left wing identity politics – has been transformed into the defining images of a string of multinational firms, such as the Gap, Benetton, and the Body Shop, all keen to play the politically correct marketing game. According to Advertising Age, the coffee shop chain Starbucks became on overnight success precisely because, “for devotees, the Starbucks’ ‘experience’ is about more than a daily espresso infusion; it is about immersion in a politically correct, culture refuge”.
Klein’s research is nothing if not thorough, and her prose moves with a kind of breathless energy. The fountain of anecdotes and examples of intrusive sponsorship are almost overwhelming, and often entertaining. For example, in a chapter on how American companies have begun to brand schools and classrooms, offering sponsorship and equipment for exposure to young people, she relates the story of a pupil in Georgia who was suspended for wearing a Pepsi shirt on his school’s official “Coke Day”.
She goes on to show that, far from increasing consumer choice, the corporate fight to monopolise both commercial and cultural space has led to mergers, franchises and corporate censorship which leaves many people with virtually no choice at all. Whether you’re in Leeds, London or Washington, the brands on the high street, and in the shopping malls, are always the same.
Sweatshops
Meanwhile, of course, someone, somewhere is making Adidas’s shoes and track suits, Microsoft’s CD Roms, and the Gap’s khaki pants. More often then not these are desperately poor young women in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Haiti, hired for a pittance to slave in sweatshop firms making goods to order until someone, somewhere else, can do it even cheaper.
In the most impressive section of the book, Klein describes her visit to an “export processing zones” in the Philippines, a 682 acre free trade zone in Rosario, a town 90 miles from Manila, where 207 factories are crammed into a walled-in industrial area, employing 50,000 workers to produce goods exclusively for the export market. These are “windowless workshops” where visitors aren’t allowed. “If Nike Town and the other superstores are the glittering new gateways to the branded dreamworlds,” says Klein, “then the Cavite Export Processing Zone … is the branding broom closet.”
There are 52 EPZs in the Philippines alone, employing 459,000 people; China has 124 zones, employing 18 million people. These are virtually tax free areas, where there are no import and export duties, where working days last between 12 and 16 hours before overtime (which is often compulsory), where wages are subsistence, the work low-skilled and tedious, and the management military in style. In some factories, refusing to do overtime is a cause for dismissal. Klein tells the story of one seamstress in Rosario who died “of overwork”. It goes without saying that union organisation is virtually impossible – in some factories even talking discussions is prohibited.
“Fear pervades the zones,” writes Klein. “The governments are afraid of losing their foreign factories; the factories are afraid of losing their brand-name buyers; and the workers are afraid of losing their unstable jobs. These are factories built not on land but air.”
Klein’s argument throughout is that there is increasing public and political disillusionment with the activities of corporations – their encroachment onto public and private space, their betrayal of the promise of greater consumer choice, and their “decision” (as she calls it) to “bankroll their innovative branding forays by slashing jobs” and moving production abroad. This has led to a rise in anti-corporate activism. There is, she contends, a real movement of resistance, “an activism that is sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule”.
In last section of the book Klein describes the work of the various anti-corporate initiatives and groups that she puts so much faith in, from so-called “culture jammers” and “ad busters” undermining corporations’ images and logos with graffiti and graphics; to campaigns by environmentalists against the likes of McDonalds and Shell; to protests by human rights and labour movement activists against Nike and other companies whose contractors use child labour to make their trainers, footballs and clothes. For Klein and others the Seattle “riots” – and similar recent protests in Washington, London and Prague – were merely the most visible expressions of this “movement’s” disparate attempts to wrest some public control from the seemingly all powerful multinationals.
Major flaws
Yet, by locating the origins of this resistance in the mid-1990s, Klein highlights one of No Logo’s major flaws. For, despite the huge amounts of detailed research and an impressive grasp of her material, Klein often comes across as naive as she gets carried away by the oldest marketing trick of all – believing that everything she sees and describes is new and different. In her scramble to emphasise the radical departures of 1990s marketing and consumerism, for example, she pinpoints 1993 as the birth date of the “super-cool extra-premium ‘attitude’ brands that provide the essentials of lifestyle”. As if companies haven’t always employed logos and built identities within their markets to entice their customers, as a recent exhibition on brands at the V&A museum in London confirmed.
Trademarking, it pointed out, dates back several hundred years, and battles for brand recognition have always been part of industrial capitalism, part of the process of establishing market prominence in the endless competition for profits that is capitalism’s driving force. In 1917, for example, there were more than 300 brand name rivals to Coca Cola registered in the USA, all making similar products. Are we really to believe that Coke won its current global dominance simply because it tasted that much better than all the rest? We are left with “the real thing” because it won, and continues to win, the endless marketing war.
Klein implies that the growth of “brands over products” marks a new phase in capitalism, but she neither explains why capitalism began to structure itself that way, nor attempts to distinguish it from any proceeding phase. She sees the politics, but never the political economy.
As Robert David Sullivan of the Boston Phoenix put it, in one of the few critical reviews of No Logo: “Workers’ conditions are being forgotten, Klein seems to say, because corporations are increasingly run by executives who never even see the factory floor. Maybe, but … strip away workers’ rights here at home, and Nike will be more than happy to make its sneakers in Lowell or Fall River. When has the mass production of clothing ever been anything but a horrific experience for almost everyone involved? (Do the words ‘cotton picking’ ring a bell?) We can’t blame the originators of the ‘Just do it’ slogan, as Klein implies we should, for the continued exploitation of labour.”
Klein fails to see the modern emphasis on branding, and all that goes with it, as a continuation of capitalism’s searching need to reach more markets and make more profits. As Sullivan puts it: “No Logo is an attack on the excesses of capitalism, hidden inside a less-threatening critique of the hard sell … Klein would have been more convincing if she had depicted these outrages as part of capitalism’s evolution, rather than as part of a conspiracy less than a decade old.”
This has important political consequences. Klein talks of a “genuine alternative to corporate rule” sought by the activists of her new “movement”, groups like Reclaim the Streets. But neither she nor they seem able to say what that alternative is, nor how it can be achieved. It’s tempting to say they know what they are against, but not what they are for. But even this is unclear, for Klein conveniently ignores the fact that within her so-called movement there are many disparate voices, sometimes with competing aims, and often with very different reasons to protest against quite different enemies.
Hard questions
It’s not that Klein doesn’t understand the system within which the giant corporations operate. As she herself says: “The conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a bi-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investment and outsourcing. If companies make deals with brutal dictators, sell off their factories and pay wages too low to live on, it’s because there is nothing in our international trading rules to prevent them.”
Yet, while she seems to recognise the limits of “brand based politics”, ultimately, Klein sidesteps the hard questions of how to make change. She both underestimates the ability of the corporations to absorb opposition, and overestimates the significance of actions taken by Reclaim the Streets and their ilk. “Eliminating the inequalities at the heart of free market globalization seems a daunting task for most of us mortals,” she writes. “On the other hand focusing on a Nike or a Shell and possibly changing the behaviour of one multinational can open an important door into this complicated and challenging political arena.”
True, but opening the doors alone won’t bring the house down.
In Rosario there’s a Workers’ Assistance Centre, which campaigns for workers’ rights and provides education to the employees of the Cavite EPZ. During Klein’s visit to the Philippines she argues with a leading member of the centre who doesn’t believe the codes of conduct imposed on some cororations in recent years will make any difference. “Haven’t you read Marx?”, he asks, to which she replies: “It’s different now”.
And, of course, it is. It always is. But Klein has consumed so much of what is apparently so new that she is blind to how much is just the same. Marx himself, in the Communist Manifesto over 150 years ago, best described how capitalism’s need for “constantly expanding markets for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”; how “its exploitation of the world market has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”; how “in place of old wants … we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes”; how, indeed, “it creates a world after its own image”. Globalisation? It’s an old idea.
No Logo, like its message, is easily absorbed, mediated. A new coffee shop opened in north London recently – the latest of many competitors to the Starbucks chain, and the other lifestyle cafés of modern city life. It has its own logo, evocative name, and shop front slogan. Inside it’s decked out in sleek beech and chrome, with high stools, airplane-style reclining seats, and its own range of coffee pots, cups and trays. The workers wear matching designer shirts and serve from art deco coffee machines. The music system plays the Byrds’ sanitised version of Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom while the customers tap away on their laptops, read the Guardian, and wait for their next meeting.
Down one side, against the wall, there’s a row of shelves and a glass fronted cabinet. And there, beside the ’60s LPs and model scooters, is the cool black designer cover of Naomi Klein’s book – on sale for £14.99. No Logo, another lifestyle accessory for our corporatised world.
Matthew Brown is a member of the ILP National Adminstrative Council
r all, not long ago we had a Labour Party; now we have new Labour.
<p align=”center”><img alt=”ds95nol1[1].gif” src=”https://www.independentlabour.org.uk/ds95nol1%5B1%5D.gif” width=”250″ height=”255″ />
Armies of design and marketing consultants make fortunes from thinking up clever new names for everything from countries to companies. Labels and logos line our increasingly homogenised high streets, badge our clothes for peer approval, and mark our identities into safely sealed categories. Adverts saturate our media, colour our buses; corporate slogans infiltrate our brains. However much we ignore them, they just do it.
These are the bright, shiny signs of western economic success, the all too visible power of global corporations.
And it’s on these “brand bullies” of 1990s corporate capitalism that journalist <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein”>Naomi Klein</a> trains her acidic aim in her much-heralded book, No Logo. This 450-page tome for our times has been lauded far and wide, praised almost continuously since it was first emerged on the book review pages last year, just as the ringing battle cries of the Seattle anti-world trade protests were dying in our ears.
It is a “timely, vivid and trenchant analysis of the globalised international economy”, according to one reviewer; “a complete, user-friendly handbook on the negative effects that ’90s überbrand marketing has had on culture, work and consumer choice”, according to another. It has been described, variously, as “top quality reporting”, “an attack on the excesses of capitalism”, “a call to arms” for the direct action generation, and a “sophisticated cultural commentary”.
<em>No Logo</em> is already a publishing phenomenon, and Klein has become the newest star of radical social commentary. Twelve months after her book was published, the former Toronto Star columnist is still doing the rounds of the media circuit, popping up on Radio Four round table discussions on the power of brands, or being interviewed on Radio Five Live about globalisation and the World Trade Organisation. During the last few weeks alone No Logo narrowly failed to win the Guardian’s annual first book award, and sat smartly on the top of the paper’s on-line sales lists. It was proclaimed paperback of the week in the Observer this January, described by Robert McCrum as “a thrilling achievement, a genuine thought provoker”. Go into almost any major bookshop and it’s there on the bestseller shelves, next to the latest John Grisham novel and David Beckham’s biography.
<strong>Astonishing success </strong>
This is success on an astonishing scale for any political publication, but especially for a book that explicitly intends to “fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations”.
At a public meeting organised by the World Development Movement in London last November, where Klein was speaking, <em>No Logo </em>was even described as “the <em>Das Kapital </em>of the anti-globalisation movement”, a kind of communist manifesto for the millennium generation.
Comparing a 30 year-old Canadian consumer journalist with <a href=”http://www.marxists.org/”>Karl Marx</a> may be ridiculous at one level, but it is quite revealing at another. For while Marx’s genius, and lasting value, was to dig below the surface of the system, to excavate its historical sources and expose the economic underpinnings of capitalism’s power, it is Klein’s failure to place 1990s capitalism in historical context, or to delve far behind its corporate faces, that is her biggest weakness.
Klein’s argument is based on the notion that the growth in wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations, such as McDonalds, the <a href=”http://www.gap.com/”>Gap</a>, <a href=”http://www.nike.com/”>Nike</a> and many others over the last 15 years, is largely due to a shift in corporate priorities from “making things”, that is products, to creatin g brands or images with which people can identify. It is this consumer identification, they claim, that gives them their market power. The Nikes, Microsofts and Tommy Hilfigers of this brave new world were “pioneers”, says Klein, who “made the bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations”.
“What these companies produced primarily were not things … but images of their brands,” she writes. “Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing.”
She argues that the trade liberalisation and anti-labour laws of the 1990s encouraged corporations to get their products made by franchised overseas contractors, leaving them to concentrate on building their brand identities. They are engaged in what she calls “a race towards weightlessness”, a race in which the winner will be “whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products”. Klein musters an impressive arsenal of statistics to back up her claims, showing how the weight of corporate budgets has tipped from manufacturing to marketing.
<strong>Battle of the brands</strong>
Much of<em> No Logo </em>concentrates on this battle of the brands, diligently documenting how corporations and their images have crept further and further into more and more areas of our lives, privatising public spaces and incorporating private ones. Klein describes how brands have colonised, and in some cases even control, areas of human activity, like sport and music, once associated with freedom and leisure.
She shows how they have encroached on government and education, winning exclusive sponsorship deals with schools and universities in north America, and have even begun to direct individuals’ values and sense of themselves. Klein points out how we are all now expected to think of ourselves as a kind of “brand”, how we must market our “selling points” to the highest bidder – whether we’re after a job, a college place, or the most eligible partner.
Everything, it seems, has been turned into profit-fodder by the power of the marketers, as they “built corporate empires around brand identities”. Youth and street cultures are scoured by teams of corporate “cool hunters” desperate to pick up on the latest inventive craze of the kids on the block. Ideas once thought to be a threat to the mainstream are lapped up by new firms keen to establish their niche.
Ideas like “diversity”, for example – the darling concept of late eighties left wing identity politics – has been transformed into the defining images of a string of multinational firms, such as the Gap, Benetton, and the Body Shop, all keen to play the politically correct marketing game. According to Advertising Age, the coffee shop chain <a href=”http://www.starbucks.com/”>Starbucks</a> became on overnight success precisely because, “for devotees, the Starbucks’ ‘experience’ is about more than a daily espresso infusion; it is about immersion in a politically correct, culture refuge”.
Klein’s research is nothing if not thorough, and her prose moves with a kind of breathless energy. The fountain of anecdotes and examples of intrusive sponsorship are almost overwhelming, and often entertaining. For example, in a chapter on how American companies have begun to brand schools and classrooms, offering sponsorship and equipment for exposure to young people, she relates the story of a pupil in Georgia who was suspended for wearing a Pepsi shirt on his school’s official “Coke Day”.
She goes on to show that, far from increasing consumer choice, the corporate fight to monopolise both commercial and cultural space has led to mergers, franchises and corporate censorship which leaves many people with virtually no choice at all. Whether you’re in Leeds, London or Washington, the brands on the high street, and in the shopping malls, are always the same.
<strong>Sweatshops </strong>
Meanwhile, of course, someone, somewhere is making Adidas’s shoes and track suits, Microsoft’s CD Roms, and the Gap’s khaki pants. More often then not these are desperately poor young women in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Haiti, hired for a pittance to slave in sweatshop firms making goods to order until someone, somewhere else, can do it even cheaper.
In the most impressive section of the book, Klein describes her visit to an “export processing zones” in the Philippines, a 682 acre free trade zone in Rosario, a town 90 miles from Manila, where 207 factories are crammed into a walled-in industrial area, employing 50,000 workers to produce goods exclusively for the export market. These are “windowless workshops” where visitors aren’t allowed. “If Nike Town and the other superstores are the glittering new gateways to the branded dreamworlds,” says Klein, “then the Cavite Export Processing Zone … is the branding broom closet.”
There are 52 EPZs in the Philippines alone, employing 459,000 people; China has 124 zones, employing 18 million people. These are virtually tax free areas, where there are no import and export duties, where working days last between 12 and 16 hours before overtime (which is often compulsory), where wages are subsistence, the work low-skilled and tedious, and the management military in style. In some factories, refusing to do overtime is a cause for dismissal. Klein tells the story of one seamstress in Rosario who died “of overwork”. It goes without saying that union organisation is virtually impossible – in some factories even talking discussions is prohibited.
“Fear pervades the zones,” writes Klein. “The governments are afraid of losing their foreign factories; the factories are afraid of losing their brand-name buyers; and the workers are afraid of losing their unstable jobs. These are factories built not on land but air.”
Klein’s argument throughout is that there is increasing public and political disillusionment with the activities of corporations – their encroachment onto public and private space, their betrayal of the promise of greater consumer choice, and their “decision” (as she calls it) to “bankroll their innovative branding forays by slashing jobs” and moving production abroad. This has led to a rise in anti-corporate activism. There is, she contends, a real movement of resistance, “an activism that is sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule”.
In last section of the book Klein describes the work of the various anti-corporate initiatives and groups that she puts so much faith in, from so-called “culture jammers” and “ad busters” undermining corporations’ images and logos with graffiti and graphics; to campaigns by environmentalists against the likes of McDonalds and Shell; to protests by human rights and labour movement activists against Nike and other companies whose contractors use child labour to make their trainers, footballs and clothes. For Klein and others the Seattle “riots” – and similar recent protests in Washington, London and Prague – were merely the most visible expressions of this “movement’s” disparate attempts to wrest some public control from the seemingly all powerful multinationals.
<strong>Major flaws</strong>
Yet, by locating the origins of this resistance in the mid-1990s, Klein highlights one of No Logo’s major flaws. For, despite the huge amounts of detailed research and an impressive grasp of her material, Klein often comes across as naive as she gets carried away by the oldest marketing trick of all – believing that everything she sees and describes is new and different. In her scramble to emphasise the radical departures of 1990s marketing and consumerism, for example, she pinpoints 1993 as the birth date of the “super-cool extra-premium ‘attitude’ brands that provide the essentials of lifestyle”. As if companies haven’t always employed logos and built identities within their markets to entice their customers, as <a href=”http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/BrandNew_Site/intro.html”>a recent exhibition on brands at the V&A museum in London</a> confirmed.
Trademarking, it pointed out, dates back several hundred years, and battles for brand recognition have always been part of industrial capitalism, part of the process of establishing market prominence in the endless competition for profits that is capitalism’s driving force. In 1917, for example, there were more than 300 brand name rivals to Coca Cola registered in the USA, all making similar products. Are we really to believe that Coke won its current global dominance simply because it tasted that much better than all the rest? We are left with “the real thing” because it won, and continues to win, the endless marketing war.
Klein implies that the growth of “brands over products” marks a new phase in capitalism, but she neither explains why capitalism began to structure itself that way, nor attempts to distinguish it from any proceeding phase. She sees the politics, but never the political economy.
As Robert David Sullivan of the Boston Phoenix put it, in one of the few critical reviews of <em>No Logo</em>: “Workers’ conditions are being forgotten, Klein seems to say, because corporations are increasingly run by executives who never even see the factory floor. Maybe, but … strip away workers’ rights here at home, and Nike will be more than happy to make its sneakers in Lowell or Fall River. When has the mass production of clothing ever been anything but a horrific experience for almost everyone involved? (Do the words ‘cotton picking’ ring a bell?) We can’t blame the originators of the ‘Just do it’ slogan, as Klein implies we should, for the continued exploitation of labour.”
Klein fails to see the modern emphasis on branding, and all that goes with it, as a continuation of capitalism’s searching need to reach more markets and make more profits. As Sullivan puts it: “<em>No Logo </em>is an attack on the excesses of capitalism, hidden inside a less-threatening critique of the hard sell … Klein would have been more convincing if she had depicted these outrages as part of capitalism’s evolution, rather than as part of a conspiracy less than a decade old.”
This has important political consequences. Klein talks of a “genuine alternative to corporate rule” sought by the activists of her new “movement”, groups like Reclaim the Streets. But neither she nor they seem able to say what that alternative is, nor how it can be achieved. It’s tempting to say they know what they are against, but not what they are for. But even this is unclear, for Klein conveniently ignores the fact that within her so-called movement there are many disparate voices, sometimes with competing aims, and often with very different reasons to protest against quite different enemies.
<strong>Hard questions </strong>
It’s not that Klein doesn’t understand the system within which the giant corporations operate. As she herself says: “The conduct of the individual multinationals is simply a bi-product of a broader global economic system that has steadily been removing almost all barriers and conditions to trade, investment and outsourcing. If companies make deals with brutal dictators, sell off their factories and pay wages too low to live on, it’s because there is nothing in our international trading rules to prevent them.”
Yet, while she seems to recognise the limits of “brand based politics”, ultimately, Klein sidesteps the hard questions of how to make change. She both underestimates the ability of the corporations to absorb opposition, and overestimates the significance of actions taken by Reclaim the Streets and their ilk. “Eliminating the inequalities at the heart of free market globalization seems a daunting task for most of us mortals,” she writes. “On the other hand focusing on a Nike or a Shell and possibly changing the behaviour of one multinational can open an important door into this complicated and challenging political arena.”
True, but opening the doors alone won’t bring the house down.
In Rosario there’s a Workers’ Assistance Centre, which campaigns for workers’ rights and provides education to the employees of the Cavite EPZ. During Klein’s visit to the Philippines she argues with a leading member of the centre who doesn’t believe the codes of conduct imposed on some cororations in recent years will make any difference. “Haven’t you read Marx?”, he asks, to which she replies: “It’s different now”.
And, of course, it is. It always is. But Klein has consumed so much of what is apparently so new that she is blind to how much is just the same. Marx himself, in the <a href=”http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html”>Communist Manifesto </a>over 150 years ago, best described how capitalism’s need for “constantly expanding markets for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”; how “its exploitation of the world market has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”; how “in place of old wants … we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes”; how, indeed, “it creates a world after its own image”. Globalisation? It’s an old idea.
<em>No Logo</em>, like its message, is easily absorbed, mediated. A new coffee shop opened in north London recently – the latest of many competitors to the Starbucks chain, and the other lifestyle cafés of modern city life. It has its own logo, evocative name, and shop front slogan. Inside it’s decked out in sleek beech and chrome, with high stools, airplane-style reclining seats, and its own range of coffee pots, cups and trays. The workers wear matching designer shirts and serve from art deco coffee machines. The music system plays the Byrds’ sanitised version of Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom while the customers tap away on their laptops, read the Guardian, and wait for their next meeting.
Down one side, against the wall, there’s a row of shelves and a glass fronted cabinet. And there, beside the ’60s LPs and model scooters, is the cool black designer cover of Naomi Klein’s book – on sale for £14.99. No Logo, another lifestyle accessory for our corporatised world.
<p align=”center”><img alt=”ds95nol3.gif” src=”https://www.independentlabour.org.uk/ds95nol3.gif” width=”104″ height=”140″ />
<em>Matthew Brown is a member of the ILP National Adminstrative Council </em>
22 October 2010
[…] William Brown wades through the myths and realities of the ‘new economy’. No logo, no solutions Matthew Brown finds Naomi Klein’s aim at the corporate brand bullies somewhat off target. […]