I was pleased to hear that the political book club had selected for its next book  Naomi Klein’s  No Logo, which has been sitting on my TBR shelf waiting to go join its friend  This Changes Everything on my read shelf for a few years.

While I generally like Klein, I had a few apprehensions going into this. The book is more than 20 years old; would it be so dated as to be useless? Would it uncritically endorse trends in activism that have since become so played out they’re ineffective (or worse, counterproductive), like parodying stuff or adjusting your personal consumption habits?

In retrospect I probably should have given Klein more credit; she’s not stupid, even if a lot of other loud online voices on the “left” are. I had my critiques of this book (mostly to do with finger-wagging about property destruction at protests), and certainly some of it is a bit of a time capsule (how long has it been since MTV was culturally relevant?), but overall it is, unfortunately, still very educational reading. We are still living in in the world of brands and megabrands and their endless colonization of public space–even the internet, which was basically the frontier of anti-corporate activism when this book was written because anybody could set up a website or listserv, has devolved into like four social media sites and seven streaming services that are all chock-full of ads and can nuke whatever content they want whenever they want to.

The book is split up into four sections: “No Space,” about the aggressive intrusion of branding into every nook and cranny of our lives and the megabrands’ attempts to become art, culture, spirituality, education, and the public square; “No Choice,” about corporate consolidation and the effects of monopoly power; “No Jobs,” about offshoring, “McJobs,” union-busting, and the other labor issues in both the global North and South associated with the megabrand model; and “No Logo,” about anti-corporate activism. In each section Klein does a pretty good job of taking us through the various recursions, co-optations, ironies, and contradictions of both brand behavior and the various attempts to fight back against it.

Klein discusses some things about brand co-optation of social justice that I think should be required reading for anyone trying to do cultural activism, especially around issues of media and representation. I also appreciated very much that in the section of “culture jamming,” she discussed the critiques and pitfalls of it as well as its successes (although, since the book came out 20 years ago, it doesn’t include one of my main critiques of it, which is that these days everyone thinks they’re terribly clever and good at it and most of them aren’t). She also has some not particularly original but nonetheless very important things to say about dressing up modest demands in radical language; the efficacy of lawfare (high) versus making people feel guilty about buying clothes and food (low); the uses and limitations of boycotts and selective purchasing agreements; and the commodification of rebellion (“Extreme sports are not political movements and rock, despite its historic claims to the contrary, is not revolution”).

There’s some solid reporting on how evil Disney is that is, distressingly, even more important now than it was when it was written, as Disney has made great strides in the past 20 years in acquiring every single fucking piece of video media ever produced and wiping the insufficiently “family-friendly” ones off the face of the earth (RIP Nimona) while dicking queer audiences around with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, easily-editable-out-for-China “first gay characters” every six months or so to keep audiences so hyperfocused on representation issues that we’ll never get around to noticing that special effects, practical effects, costuming, set design, lighting, and sound mixing have all gone completely down the toilet in the movie industry over the past several years, making most movies fucking unwatchable regardless of how diverse the cast is. I’m not going to judge anyone for being entertained by entertaining things (I have been entertained by many Disney products over the years), but all the same: Fuck Disney, fuck Marvel, fuck Netflix, fuck Warner Brothers, fuck every streaming site, fuck every TV station, fuck every major movie studio that buys up smaller movie studios just to fuck them over, fuck big retailers like Wal-Mart that can pressure studios out of making stuff by refusing to carry it, fuck Amazon, and while we’re at it, fuck everything that’s going on in the book industry too.

*ahem* Sorry, where were we?

Anyway, how to take on extremely large brands is always going to be difficult, because extremely large brands are… well, extremely large, and generally very deep-pocketed. But I think despite its age this book has some good strategic thinking on display that can help inform readers not only about what they’re dealing with, but what factors contribute to resistance being effective or ineffective. And for that, it’s still well worth reading, even if it does talk about MTV and Blockbuster a lot.

Currently, if you want to do something material to push back on at least one megabrand, Starbucks stores all over the U.S. are unionizing–you could go find the one nearest you and sign up for a picket shift or donate to the strike fund. And don’t cross any picket lines!

Originally posted at Brands, big business, and bad behavior.

Blog comments:

I have decided to start reading no logo by Naomi Klein cause I think it will be amusing to take it in to work for breaks. I am having quite the literate summer, but needed a break from fiction after having a bit of an overdose in the past three weeks. I wish there was some sort of funky book club around-I think it would be fun. I just own sooooo many unread books.

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I've never seen Zorba the Greek, or read it in fact. Perhaps I will add it to my list, though the list has not been moving so quickly what with all the jobs. No Logo is taking me forever, interspersed with small amounts of the women travel anthology. I tried three times to read the Hobbit and never got more than 100 pgs through it. Don't know why really.

Work is very, very depressing. A read a quote once that people who do menial, boring work tend to have menial boring personalities. Ha, no doubt. I keep myself sane by reading no logo on my breaks cause it makes me feel somewhat intellectual and keeps my moral outrage working, rather than stagnating like most of my brain.

Reading this book more than ten years after it came out is hard. It's difficult to realize how momentous it was at the time. It's hard to understand that this book is one of the cultural underpinnings of the anti-sweatshop movement, the WTO protests, Occupy Wall Street. The cynicism about brands that Klein documents is so pervasive now it's hard to remember how much people just loved brands blindly and completely at one point. THis book completely changed things.

Having read several Klein articles in recent years - as well as the revised forward to the ten year edition - you can see that Klein has moved away from using the concept of brands as a fulcrum for her intellectual arguments against certain aspects of globalization, corporatism, etc. But not completely - Brands are still the most visible component of a company, and, thus, serve as a mechanism to attack them. That is still useful.

In some ways, though, the brand approach to anti-globalism seems a bit dated. Many of the sinister examples Klein listed didn't pan out, and some of the companies are hardly massive brand juggernauts these days, just a little over ten years later. I almost laughed out loud about the panic Klein bestows on Celebration, Florida. I had just visited last summer and it was nothing like she described. This, of course, is because of the fall of one of the villains of the brand portion of the book - Michael Eisner.

However, in reading many economists' work on brand and advertising, Klein has come up more than once, and indeed, her concept of Brand disconnects the concept of Brand from its original economic form. This can have some profound ramifications, and many modern academic economists have explored it further. Concretely, a brand no longer symbolizes a specific origin or quality, in fact it could signal just the opposite. It's a weird thought.

Finally, having worked in advertising for 15 years, I can say that Klein definitely intentionally or not distorts the motivations of many of the creatives she lists. I know because there are a few places in the book where she references campaigns I worked on, and we were thinking nothing of the sort of plots and schemes she attributed to us. Whether in the end that matters may be immaterial - the effect is the same - but the book does read substantially more like it's all a big single plot than, in my experience, any of it really is.

The cover page reads "No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo" and that's how the book is broken up, into those four sections. It starts off relatively strong, avoiding a number of pitfalls you expect her to get caught up in. Unfortunately, as it progresses it becomes rather uneven, mostly the last section, "No Logo." The section starts off with a ridiculous chapter about "culture jamming," which is essentially the use of graphic design skills to subvert advertising. This is a perfect example of how she can sometimes come across as a stoned art school girl gushing in a coffee shop about how this ultra-cool hip thing the cool kids are doing is going to save the world. It's a strange contrast to some of her more sober, reality-based commentary. It's worth reading but parts of it may try your patience. That being said, I found some of her (to me) misplaced optimism compelling. I wondered if maybe we Americans aren't too cynical sometimes. Maybe we should be like the Canadians. Of course, Canadians aren't perfect either. It got me wondering though about how a lot of us in the midwest think that people in other parts of the country, especially in the West, tend to be pretty dippy and I couldn't help but think maybe we in the midwest might be too grizzled and world-weary for our own good? Or is it just me? Maybe the whole country is dippy. Maybe vandalizing billboards will put a dent in the corporate oligarchy. I don't think so but it's something to believe in, I suppose, and makes about as much sense as Jesus getting crucified so we can go to heaven, which according to the historian on NPR Christians did not even believe until centuries after Jesus's death. Anyway, I think part of what's going on here is that there are no simple solutions. You can't really propose a solution to the problems discussed in the book in few hundred pages. I mean, you could in general terms, but how will you engage people to get them to focus on something outside of entertainment land? She does seem very conscious of the difficulties. I just get to wondering why she goes overboard gushing about anti-corporate zines and things. Maybe she she didn't want a bleak book, I suppose. I also disagree with her contention that subverting corporate logos can strip them of some of their power. If anything I think it adds a new mystique to the logo and in the long run probably adds more value to the brand. I guess I've mostly talked about the problems with the book. There is value in the book, it just reads like a first book. I think it's pretty clear she'll be remembered for the Shock Doctrine, which is next on my list. I know she has a great capacity for reflectiveness and nuance and I hope she was able to put that to more sustained use over the many pages of The Shock Doctrine...

I read this after the horrible time of post-9/11. This is an excellent anti-corporate militancy, which gave me a hell of a lot informations about the political discourse of the time. Reading Chomski, and then Naomi Klein, I become familiar to political analysis of Arondhati Roy and Goenawan Mohamad and many others in connection with invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Naomi Klein in the begining page refers to Indonesian writer Y.B. Mangunwijaya; "You might not see things yet on the surface, but underground, it's already on fire."

نمی دانم ترجمه ی فارسی عنوان این کتاب، چه می شود؛ "نه علامت مشخصه"!؟ اثر شگفت انگیز خانم "نوامی کلاین"، یکی از همین کتاب های "نسوخته" اما "گم شده" در انبوه رسانه هاست. "نو لوگو" مجموعه ی مقالاتی ست که بصورت روایی در چهار بخش تنظیم شده: "نه قضا"، "نه انتخاب"، "نه شغل" و "نه علامت مشخصه"، که در سفیدی میان سطور درخشان و ارقام هول برانگیزش، بسیاری ناگفته ها در مورد امپراطوری انحصارات بزرگ نهفته است. خانم "کلاین" در این کتاب 480 صفحه ای روایت می کند که چگونه رشد و بالندگی انحصارات فراملیتی که جملگی از قوانین "دنیای آزاد" بهره می برند، به استثمار بیش از سه چهارم مردم دنیا و تقریبن هفتاد درصد اقتصاد بازار آزاد دنیا می انجامد! به این صورت، شهروندان این جهان هم چون "فاوست"، شیره ی زندگی خود و فرزندانشان را هر روز در مقابل یک لبخند، به شیطان انحصارات بین المللی می فروشند!
خانم "نوامی کلاین"، نویسنده و مبارز آزادی بیان و حقوق بشر، در 1970 در مونترآل (کانادا) به دنیا آمده و ساکن تورنتو (کانادا)ست. و کتابش؛ "نه علامت مشخصه" که از کتاب های "نسوخته" اما "دفن شده" در جهان تولید و "بازار آزاد" است، در سال 2000 در لندن به چاپ رسیده است!

um, read this book.

it has an unfortunate problem: written in the late nineties, detailing the then-prevailing juggernaut of unbridled globalization, its analysis was almost immediately dated once sept 11 changed the topic of the conversation. in my 2002 edition klein adds a slim afterword/nonupdate that, from the vantage point of 2007, fails to properly reargue her original and very persuasive terms.

that said, this is a staggeringly broad and well-researched book. it doesn't just rehash what we (already back then, of course) knew about the unholy troika of brand-based multinationals, cheap third-world labor, and regulatory failure. it combines sophisticated cultural analysis of what branding is (the colonization every piece of life with ideologically imagined products) with a description of the labor and capital conditions of the late 20th century.

in particular, klein argues that the companies have ceased to see themselves as holding responsibility for any of their workers, whether skilled or unskilled. workers' lack of security, combined with resentment at shrinking public spaces and the encroachment of marketing, have produced and will continue to fuel anticorporate movements.

we all remember the late 90s antiglobalization movement. ten years later it's a different globalization and the media is thankfully paying attention. anyway, read this book to understand a period of recent history that (for me) is hard to remember, because i was a teenager and because of the shocks that have followed.

This is one of those perfect books, along with "Zinn's People's History". Basically its a evaluation of corporations shift from manufacturing to marketing. From creating products to creating a brand. It addresses the social impact these decisions have had on American labor movement, manufacturing base. It also evaluates of how we see ourselves through the products we buy. It is extremely easy to read, well written, and good stories. I read alot of political books, but Naomi find so many stories I have never heard about. And writes about topics like marketing and advertising in a very entertaining way. And for once there are stories of victories for the good guy (yes the workers win a few once in a while!). There are extremely depressing stories as well, nothing that affects the labor force across the world is usually good. But Naomi strikes a balance.

You want to learn about who runs this world, and how power works, this is the book.

لفترة ما في التسعينات، كانت ناعومي كلاين هي الصوت الأميركي الأكثر غضباً ورفضاً لكل نتائج العولمة والثقافة الاستهلاكية التي أصبحنا نعيشها في كل دقيقة وساعة من حياتنا. تحكي كلاين عن طفولتها ومراهقتها قائلةً أنها كانت مهووسة بالموضة والأزياء وأغلى السلع والبضائع، وأنها كانت تقيم نفسها والآخرين من خلال ما يمتلكونه. وكانت تحلم بالعمل في إحدى الشركات الدولية الكبرى.

ولكنها تغيرت فيما بعد، وهذا التغير الذي نضج أثناء عملها في مجلة "تايم" الأميركية الشهيرة جعلها ترى أضرار العولمة نمط الحياة الاستهلاكية على حياة البشر وأخلاقهم ومعاملاتهم اليومية، وكذلك مستويات الفقر والمعيشة في بلدان العالم الثالث.

نشرت ناعومي كلاين هذا الكتاب في العام 2000، ينقسم الكتاب إلى 4 أقسام وهي: بلا مكان، ويتحدث عن غزو الاعلانات التجارية للفضاء العام في أي مجتمع. أم القسم الثاني من الكتاب وهو : بلا اختيار، ويتحدث عن الأساليب المختلفة التي تستعملها الشركات العالمية العملاقة للقضاء على صغار التجار وأصحاب المحلات والأعمال الصغيرة المستقلة. أما القسم الثالث من الكاتب وهو : بلا وظيفة، فيتحدث عن الطريقة المشابهة التي يقترب فيها العمل في الشركات الكبرى من العبودية، بدون أن يشعر العاملون هناك بذلك. ويتحدث القسم الأخير من الكتاب وهو : بلا ماركة، عن الحراك العالمي ضد سيطرة الشركات الضخمة المتعددة الجنسيات والثقافة الاستهلاكية على حياتنا.

يتميز الكتاب بأسلوب الكاتبة السهل الممتنع (باللغة الإنجليزية) ويتميز كذلك بالأمثلة الواقعية التي صاحبت جميع أقسام الكتاب. كما أن الكاتبة لم تعتمد فحسب على خبرتها كصحفية، بل قامت بمقابلة عشرات العاملين في الشركات الكبرى التي أضحت توجه أسلوب حياتنا، وتقوم ناعومي كلاين بكشف تفاصيل الفساد الأخلاقي وفساد الذمم المنتشر في هذه البيئة.

الكتاب يستحق القراءة وخاصة لمن يريد أن يزيد معرفته عن العالم الاستهلاكي الذي نعيش فيه اليوم.

While reading, I could split the book into two parts: the first one, which describes how the brands became the center of today's marketing and capitalism, how they entered the our public and private lifes and what werethe main consequences of the change of thinking of MNC's, and the second one, which provides the thoughts on the such anti-corporational movement. Whereas the first part delivers at almost all aspects of my liking, the second one is quite sloppy and way too negative to be enjoyed, i.e. the negative tone is exaggerated with respect to the problems identified.

Klein outlines a painful issue, which may not be as obvious for us as the consumers, therefore the book is highly recommended for both, people, who consider themselves as socially responsible, and for the other one, who do not practice that consciously.

Book is not just well researched - it provides millions of facts, cases and other examples regarding the issue of branding (and the consequences thereof - no choice for customers, no places untouched, limited number of jobs in the developed world due to transfer of capital/outsourcing to the developing world). I would just keep my expectations in check as the second part of the book did not deliver (at least for me) as much as Shock Doctrine.

This was a very interesting read. If I was more in agreement with the author's position (or if she had been able to convince me of more of her arguments) it might've ben a five-star review, but I found so many flaws in her reasoning, it's an appreciative three out of five.

Klein writes intelligently about anti-corporate feelings and actions, focussing on various aspects of the 'threat' of big corporations as she sees them, and also discussing how others with her views on these big businesses have shown their feelings and taken action.

The book was thorough and well-researched, and intelligently written. Some of the book was more convincing and agreeable than others - the importance of basic labour laws ensuring the health and safety of workers, the danger of political influence where large corporations are concerned. Some of the book I wasn't very swayed by, however, and I thought some of the promotion of vandalism and vigilantism to be irresponsible.

I guess my problems lay with Klein not answering some of the things I was more worried about. Large corporations were painted as inherently evil when this is clearly not the case - they are just successful businesses producing options and employment and economic benefits. It seems very easy to target big names when essentially they are just the result of some firms doing better than others in a capitalist economy. I'd personally prefer schools be given branded computers and equipment by corporations than not have it at all, and there was a pointless repetition of the difference between what a Filipino seamstress earns, and what Nike sells shoes for - two completely different costs of living. Likewise comparing powerful corporations with democracies and saying "Shouldn't the former be accountable in exactly the same way?". No - because they aren't elected representatives.

I just found it all a bit 'off target' in places. It didn't make me angry because I could see past it, but I thought the left-wing leanings all a bit 'right on'. It seemed a little wrong for the Canadian author to criticise the capitalist system that has befitted her and so many like her - idealistic and questionably motivated. I don't disagree that there are a lot of aspects she mentions which really need to change (so that profit doesn't completely overpower morality) but there is a part of me which assumes that consumers will vote with their cash and choose not to patronise certain businesses, which'll hit profits and force change via evolution. There seemed a lot of this book which came over as suggesting big businesses have money to advertise and market themselves, and the poor consumer somehow has no free will at all to resist.

Ok ok ok, I know the hype surrounding this book. Your dreddy activist friend keeps recommending this to you. That dirty hippy that is a total vagabond is doing the same.

Well, what sold me on this book was an image taken from a busy street with all of the logo's removed using Photoshop. Striking.

And the book is long, interesting and at times redundant. Naomi Klein is hot, first of all, but mainly she's right. Advertising ruined the planet. Basically. We could argue that human desire and the weakness of popular opinion is the culprit, but advertising exploited those weaknesses, and replaced them with pollution, child labor, illegal labor and DMZ bullshit, globalization, and all of the things we were warned about happening by Orwell, PKD, Huxley, and movies like Alphaville, 1984 and Brazil.

It's not exactly like any of those things, but it could be...right? Klein is a muckraker that is very biased. But she has to be. Extreme situations call for extreme measures, and her suggestion is to not conform to consumerism. George Washington and Jesus were non-conformists, too.

This work is a very well documented effort with lots of references to the author's own investigations, published papers, actual interviews, etc. it is an amusing read if you read it with the right mindset and no preconceptions. Having said that I found the book has two major faults: one being it is highly biased and partial towards the author's own ideologic notions; everything in this book seems to have a black/white, good/evil sense, with no shades of gray, and it never tries to even take a look at a different viewpoint (in this case, the one of "evil" globalized corporations); by the way, all this whinning gets really repetitive throughout all of the book, same concepts and ideas, same targeted corporations, same whines over and over.

The second major fault I see with this work is its naivety, it doesn't take onto account that exacerbated consummerism is really propelled by a very extended human trait: selfishness and greed at all levels of our society, we are a selfish species on the core, corporations as well as governments are only a reflection of what we are as a society, corporations respond to market conditions only and not to an obscure world-domination agenda.... to put it in other words we always have the tyrants that best suit our way of living, and it is not probable we will have a sudden extended enlightment era of the human race soon.