Si tuviera que definir este libro con una frase, utilizaría aquella que dice que "el infierno está empedrado de buenas intenciones". No Logo es el resultado del trabajo titánico de una autora, Naomi Klein, en su búsqueda por desenmascarar la verdadera faz de las multinacionales. La exhaustividad con la que están documentadas y ejemplificadas las tres primeras secciones del libro, la manera en que formula cómo las grandes empresas nos despojan de nuestro espacio público, nuestra libertad y nuestro trabajo, y la pasión y la intensidad con la que afronta esa tarea, resultan francamente formidables. Aún así, todo se viene parcialmente abajo cuando llega a la última sección por la sensación que transmite de quedarse a medias en sus postulados. Con todo, como libro de denuncia, esto es, atendiendo al valor de sus tres primeras secciones, No Logo supone un trabajo sensacional, totalmente recomendado para aquel que quiera profundizar en los mecanismos culturales, políticos, económicos y psicológicos con los que operan las grandes empresas.

Resto de la reseña aquí

I first read this book in 2003 and when I took it out of storage I decided to give it another look. I'm glad I did because it's better than I remember, and encouraged me to pick up Klein's more recent work.

Klein's target at first glance seems to be the big name companies' aggressive and ubiquitous branding of our public spaces and institutions. She explains the shift from owning the means of production and manufacturing goods to outsourcing and pumping the massive savings into brand building, stuffing the psyches of target markets with recognition, affection and even passion for faceless corporations. The worst excesses of branding shade into censorship, as whole university campuses and courses accept sponsorship deals loaded with gagging clauses forbidding brand criticism and demands that students be exposed to their advertising material.

Squashing free speech is disturbing enough, but this would be a shallow critique if Klein didn't go much, much further. The second section of the book points out what brands like Wal-Mart and Starbucks spend their huge profits on: blanketing towns and cities with their outlets, suffocating the competition as they go. As other options wither, nothing is left but the corporate vision of 'choice', presenting culture as something mindlessly consumed, never answered or created by its 'market'.

Still, this is all about Westerners' lifestyles and comfort; pretty trivial compared to the painstaking work Noam Chomsky, for example, has done in documenting multinationals' manipulation of US foreign policy under cover of propaganda at home: installing puppet dictators, engineering brutal crushing of popular uprisings and attempts to nationalise or retain local control of resources and systematically denying the rights of indigenous populations to land, liberty, free association etc etc etc etc etc. But Klein is not done. The third section tells how the brands can afford to pay celebrities millions to endorse them, saturate public spaces and clog high streets and malls: by exploiting their workers. CEOs collect their six & seven figure salaries and are lauded for 'streamlining' the business - cutting jobs. This happens at both ends of the chain: in the underpaid and insecure temporary 'McJobs' in outlets, and far more shockingly, in sweatshops and resource-extraction & processing sites in production. The stories of sub-subsistence wages, physical and psychological abuse, sexual harrassment, child labour, exposure to toxic chemicals, brutal suppression of attempts to unionise and other horrors that Klein documents became common knowledge in the brand backlash of the nineties

The final section of the book is all about that pushback against corporations, as consumers came together to tell the brands they would not stand for starvation wages and child exploitation. This is a very multi-layered resistance, and Klein is highly critical of multinationals 'greenwashing' and code-of-conduct writing, which she points out is all about the comfort of consumers to buy without guilt. The people fighting for basic rights in Export Processing Zones are 'too busy organising factory workers to bother with Western lifestyle politics'. She also faults the 'unthreatening' (academic) critique of brand-culture that treats people as stupid and 'unable to police their own desires'. Ultimately, change has to come from the bottom: workers making branded goods must be empowered to organise and negotiate wages they can live on and conditions that don't destroy their health.

Klein writes in an engaging journalistic style that's persuasive and easy to read. This is a long book and it could be shorter to make its point, but it would be less entertaining, less accessible, and less quotable.

Dużo ciekawych wiadomości, jednakże nagromadzenie ich w jednym rozdziale może sprawiać czytelnikowi trudność. Kilkaset nazwisk, dat, firm, liczb, wykresów, haseł. Do tego kilka tematów podjętych równocześnie i pozostawionych bez refleksji, wyciągnięcia wniosków, podsumowania czy konkluzji. Po prostu przedstawiono nam fakty, kilkaset analiz, mnóstwo przykładów i tysiące danych, jednakże nic z tego nie wynika. Sami mamy wyciągnąć wnioski? Taki rodzaj Biblii bez morału?

I to co boli najbardziej- Autorka nie starała się w ogóle być obiektywna. Przedstawia swoje racje i spojrzenie na daną sprawę. Brak tu neutralności i bezstronności. Coś ją boli i nie pozostaje obojętna- w porządku, ale jej przekonania i ideologia przybierają monstrualne rozmiary. Napisała więc ‘Ewangelię antyglobalizmu’ na potrzeby własne, czy chce czytelnikowi przybliżyć funkcjonowanie międzynarodowych korporacji oraz ich wpływ na nasze życie?

I had been wanting to read this book for years and perhaps, having read it 13 years after it was published, I felt that most of the facts that Klein cites are common knowledge nowadays.

However, the book provides an insider's perspective into what must have been hellish years for the world's most powerful corporations.

Moreover, Klein's exploration of the evolution of the brand concept was probably the most interesting element throughout the books: branding surrounds us all, but understanding how branding and advertisement have become focal issues in the strategies of some of these corporations, relegating production and workforce to the background, explains many of the developments in the global market.

This book would require an updated edition, or perhaps even a follow-up, because my perception is that branding is slowly receding back into the active hands of corporate superpowers who are progressively colonising the life-force of social ideals (I am specifically thinking of Big Organic in the United States, for example).

All in all, a must read for anyone interested in the disproportionate power and influence of corporate power.

Whew! I finally finished this dense and comprehensive look at how our lives have been reduced to corporate sponsorship (this message brought to you by Nike! Enhance your intellect, strive, go further, Nike.). Naomi Klein leaves no angle unexamined, no critique left unexplored. From the way that branding has affected our daily lives (utter ubiquity and overkill) to the way that it has effected our jobs, (loss of manufacturing jobs... jobs moving overseas to contract laborers) to the way those laborers are mistreated and exploited (sweatshops) to the fact that everyone is doing it, not just "name brands", to the eventual backlash and counter movement this book covers a lot of ground in 458 pages. Although some of this information is a little dated (the bulk of it was written in 1998) the movement against corporate hegemony still persists. Hopefully the current economic shakeup will partially reset the standard mold of business as usual, only time will tell. A good companion read to Shock Doctrine if you really want to dive down the Rabbit Hole

"No logo" zostało wydane w 1998 roku. W tamtym czasie była ta książka przełomowa. Czytając "No logo" 21 lat od publikacji pierwszego wydania, sama zastanawiałam się na ile (i czy w ogóle) ta pozycja jest nadal aktualna? Otóż, moim zdaniem, tak. Pomimo tego, że niektóre przykłady mogą wydawać się nieco przestarzałe (chociaż... czy aby na pewno?), mechanizmy, o których pisze Naomi Klein nie zmieniły się tak bardzo jak mogłoby się wydawać. "Żyjemy w kulturze niepewnego zatrudnienia, a przesłanie o samowystarczalno��ci dotarło do każdego z nas". Czy brzmi przestarzale? Nie sądzę. Myślę, że "No logo" nadal w wielu kwestiach pozostaje i jeszcze długo pozostanie aktualne.

I never really minded the Honda Civic Tour or the Coca-Cola Tutoring program at my old school in Brooklyn, but this book makes it clear how these sponsorships have become out of control. The branding of our everyday lives now extends to education, public spaces, and the banner I recently saw directing people to a COVID testing site that emphasizes it's next to Walmart and has a picture of a Pepsi. This goes even further into corporations influencing foreign policy, a loss of jobs, and sweatshops in third world countries. I thought I always knew corporations are fucked up and sweatshops are bad, cheap places probably make their clothes in sweatshops etc.....but this book really shows you how these corporations are making their profits off the exploitation of labor in other countries, mostly young women and LEGALLY. These very same corporations will sell feminism and empowering young women back to you on their future advertisements. Everything in this book is so well documented with plenty of evidence and over a hundred pages of citations......would have given it 5 stars if I hadn't read it after The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, probably the most influential non-fiction book I've read so far.

I want to be a culture jammer!!! Interesting how the internet and social media have changed corporate marketing over the past 20 years, but the phenomenon has stayed the same. Taking a big fat shit on the lawn of Nike World Headquarters, might delete later!

This book for me really brings the phrase "ignorance is bliss" to life. No, I do not want to support a mega, multi-billion dollar operation that ships its jobs over-seas so that it can pay pennies (if that) on the dollar for labor. And low wages aren't the worst of what's offered to the Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Chinese workers etc.(usually women) who wove together my Gap top and glued the sole onto my favorite old school Nikes. "Hey! Check out my new kicks! I'm keeping it real, yo!"

But then, what the fuck am I gonna do? Becoming politically and socially aware takes effort. And I'm lazy.

Still, just like when I go to spend money I don't have on something I don't need I hear my nagging boyfriend's voice in the back of my head saying "You don't need another pair of jeans," now that I've read this book I'll be more conscious of where the item was made and what that means to me.

"No Logo," much like "The Jungle" and "Fast Food Nation" is less about the end result (i.e. finger in the can of beans or 16 year old factory worker who isn't allowed to take a break to change her tampon and to ensure that her "monthly gift" doesn't interfere with production her pay comes every 28 days {just like her Aunt Flo} and is dependent on her ability to either stave off bleeding all together or just sit and bleed in her clothes like a good little worker) and more about how the decisions various corporations make to skimp on labor (i.e. people) affects that corporation's local workforce and, ultimately, the global economy.

What really gets my panties in a wad in this book (and in general) is the fact that the money these heroes save (The Gap, Nike, Levi's, Apple--your usual suspects) on production costs goes into constructing their "brand". What Klein emphasizes throughout the book is that these days it's no longer about what you sell, but how you sell it that brings in the big bucks. So fuck you Mr. and Mrs. American Worker. We don't give a shit how you're gonna make a life for yourself. We've got some ipods and iphones to sell. We need glitz, gloss, gimmicks and cool so that our profits can soar and our stockholders can continue to afford high priced (male) hookers--and those things don't come cheap.

Another depressingly shitty aspect to this idea that profits should promote brand over worker is the fact that most American corporations not only offer low wages with no benefits, but often--even in times of profit-- lay off workers to keep a steady stream of income flowing into the marketing department. Hooray! Now we can get Lebron James, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Mohammed Ali and that hot Russian chick that plays tennis for that new G campaign! Gatorade is so 2006! You have to evolve to stay ahead in THIS game.

Guh! It's all so vomit inducing. And frustrating. And aggravating. And I just feel so helpless to do anything about it. Plus, Old Navy jeans are fucking cheap and I'm a temp for Apple so they're all I can afford. Besides, isn't turning a blind eye The American Way? Three cheers for denial!


:(

Reading this book for the first time, almost 20 years since its publication, it's striking to see how much has changed in the world - and how much has not changed, or simply withered into irrelevance.
Many important issues and interesting points are raised by the author, and for that it makes good reading. Although I differ in many places from her outlook on life, I enjoy hearing an opposing or new argument made well. And there are some real nuggets here.
That having been said, this was a very disappointing read on many counts. The text contains factual inaccuracies and is flabby (it could comfortably have been reduced to a half or even a quarter without losing anything); the author seems unable to decide whether this is a manifesto or a piece of investigative, vox pop, journalism; the moral framework seems set in a bubble where the world originated in 1950s Canada, and that this should be a starting point for global benchmarking; axiomatic points are poorly stated or assumed and conclusions veer off in unjustified directions; the text is rich in quote from local heros about specific local issues, but makes sweeping and unjustified statements about actions at national or corporate level; the author frequently gives the impression this is all just one big hippy rave, getting distracted by trendiness and avoiding consequences or even feeling any obligation to sketch out a viable alternative to the system she appears to condemn; and so on.
I suspect the original is better written; there are several indications that some of the above failings may be due at least in part to the quality of the German translation which I read.
Nonetheless, a 20-years-on rehash might not be a bad idea.

Some good points are made although I found it somewhat tiresome, corporate evils and all that, without any productive or realistic alternatives. It lacked depth or an investigation into the more human components. It's reminiscent of "Fast Food Nation," although this book did come before. Sut Jhally is pretty interesting in his presentation of the same topic, "Advertising and the End of the World," although he's prone to histrionics and glosses over individual complicity in consumerism. Michael Jackson said it best, "I'm Starting With The Man In
The Mirror, Hoo!"

Twenty three years since this book was published and sadly progress has been limited with sweat shops, greenwashing and brands still manipulating us. There also exists social media which brands use to their advantage.

Named and shamed in the book were the usual suspects McDonalds, Shell, Nike, Starbucks, Microsoft, Chevron and the list goes on. New culprits not existing at scale then are not mentioned such as Amazon and Apple.

There is now a new code. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing refers to a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments. However, there are several systems with all having weak monitoring and even weaker penalties. Although it is progress.

I am glad I finally read this book although dated the examples of Cavite in the Philippines, Honduras, Indonesia and other countries are still relevant. Sadly little progress has been made.