We were editors in Canada's student press at the same time -- 1992-93. Even then, Klein was in a league of her own. Well, Doug Saunders was up there, too.

If I'm going to be honest with myself, I have not yet read this book for very selfish reasons: while Naomi's star continued to climb, I chose alcohol, drugs and self-absorption. Klein's fame arose from a commitment to serious journalism and leftist politics. I was jealous.

At an ORCUP Conference in 1993 (Ontario Region Canadian University Press), I arranged for a group of student journalists to head to U of Toronto to join in. The Varsity Blue, UofT's paper, edited by Naomi, were hosting.

One night, while hanging out in some pub on Spadina, with members of the still white-hot Kids in the Hall quaffing pints at the bar, I realized that I didn't have a place to stay.

My writing had gotten some attention through the Canadian University Press wire -- a precursor to the internet (my age!), and Naomi seemed to be a fan. She jumped up, handed me a key and said, "That's the key to my apartment. You can stay there."

I passed out on her living room floor, waking up just briefly enough to see her staring over me, shaking her head. I was too drunk to fuck, too drunk to engage in all-night political discussion with Naomi Klein.

No regrets, right? But what the fuck was I thinking?

Naomi, please keep doing what you're doing. And, for what it's worth: I'm enjoying your book (so far lol).

No Logo had a profound impact on my worldview when I first read it ten years ago. Then I went to University and took economics courses taught by Indian professors who genuinely believed globalization is a "rising tide that lifts all boats" rather than a "race to the bottom." Their compassion and concern for their homeland was genuine and they would get choked up when talking about farmers who committed suicide after going broke. I didn't really know what to think after that, they didn't fit my preconceived notion about neo-liberal economists.

One of their major critiques of No Logo is that the slave wages paid by US multi-nationals were a raise compared to what domestic firms paid. I think that omission is worthy of criticism. One professor said he met a Pakistani orphan that couldn't understand why western activists wanted to deprive him of the "best job he ever had" sewing soccer balls. When activists successfully shut down that industry in Pakistan it wasn't like there was a school waiting to enroll him.

I've come around and I think those defenses of capitalism are pretty lame. No Logo is a nostalgic snapshot of a time when it was cool to give a shit about third world working conditions and intrusive advertising. The economic rise of China and India and apathetic hipsterism have made those issues seem tired. But as I re-read the 10th anniversary edition that I got for Christmas, I see ominous foreshadowing about conditions today. Eliminating all those manufacturing jobs in the US is a factor in its current high unemployment. Companies who took advantage of Haitian labor without paying living wages or taxes are indirectly responsible for the carnage of the earthquake. There are Mexican women being brutally murdered near maquiladoras. The gap between the rich and poor isn't getting any smaller--anywhere. Companies passing the blame buck to sub contractors hasn't stopped, people have just stopped caring.

Yeah it's a little dated, even Klein talks about how she's moved on in the updated introduction. But I think it is one of the most important books of the 90s and will be a historical treasure.

Klein surely had good intentions when she wrote this book. Unfortunately it does not take long to realize that she has no idea about what she is actually talking about. Her understanding of economic processes can be labeled as highly flawed. The impressions she is giving about production facilities is dangerous. To think it is for the best interest for developing countries to close these factories is arrogant and plain wrong. Despite what Naomi Klein is trying to imply, the vast majority of the factory workers is happy to have these jobs and nobody is forced to take them. The big bad international corporations did not lower the working standards, if anything they raised them. Workers are still treated the worst in native enterprises. That being said, there is still a lot of room for improvement.
For some reason she further confuses every kind of vandalism with an organized, big time anti-globalisation campaign.
I still gave the book 2 stars, because the chapter about lowered working standards and marketing strategies in the western world was interesting enough.
This is no good book by any means though and does not earn half the acclaim it is given.

Maybe only a 4.5 and I'm factoring out that it is really a bit overly long.

It's hard to summarize it really. The book is a huge 'mood board' of different corporate practices to get in the customer's mind and it doesn't seem to end, ever. Whereas many defenders of capitalism might be ok with a few practices criticized, you'd have to go pretty far to find it ok when schools get branded or how corporate responsibility texts are engineered to avoid actual change or how workers are treated in sweat shops, domestic or e.g. in South-East Asia. It's really daunting because there is so much going on and one company is worse than the other. I found that Klein made a good compromise in her narrative between people that feel "overwhelmed" and strive for more revolutionary action and want to overthrow the system vs. people that might be a bit optimistic and want to change the system from within or by good consumer choice. I was happy to see that she didn't dismiss the former camp even though she ended on sort of a positive note, "we can do this if we, the people, just consume correctly and force corporations to do such and such" (not exactly that but it felt a bit like it). The funny thing is that it was written in 2000, where the biggest chunk of advertising was still ahead of us, which is crazy. Her more optimistic outlook feels really not vindicated looking back the last 20 years and I'd be curious to read a foreword of a 2020 edition of the book. Branding has gone an order of magnitude more nuclear since then and it's not clear where we go from here. This warrants, from my point of view, more the revolutionary camp mentioned earlier. But even from there, it's hard to stake out a way how to exit this nightmare of ever more corporate control. Soon we will start privatizing nations and water rights and climate or maybe even judicial systems and it's not clear how the small consumer can change anything. "If we just all worked together" is statistically 1/N less likely than a company which is essentially a single agent. The least revolutionary yet still effective way would be to vote laws into existence to ban all sorts of colonial sweatshopery for instance such that we have sane defaults and not every single citizen has to own the burden of the world alone. But as we know, corporations are usually one or two steps ahead of any democracy, so I'm not sure.

Certainly worth the read for me. It delivers a huge arsenal of concrete bad practices to keep in mind when discussing leftist thought.

definitely some good information, but something about the books style turns me off. i feel a little preached to, or manipulated. I guess my recent-college-student self wants more of an attempt to appear objective. objectivity may be an illusion, but it is one of my personal favorites.

This book furnishes the "other side" of globalism and neoliberalism, this time grounded on consumer experience, and worker experience. Klein draws a depressing but well documented picture in her thick book, explaining how cheap labor and cheap goods are crafted through market domination in order to enslave workers while giving consumers little to no choices.

This book is interesting but fairly dated as it does not address the food (GMO) wars, nor does it cover the housing bubble of 2007 and the debacle of baby boomer's 401ks and how that degrades worker experience throughout the world. What is missing here, I feel, is the financial angle of neoliberalism. What I mean isn't that greed or multinational corporations that farm work out to factories -- what I mean is the high finance drama of derivatives and how that also contributes to the degradation of our lifeworld.

All in all this is a fairly good book. It provides a kind of "companion" angle to Robert Reich's work by going further in depth to worker degradation, product/logo nonsense, producer malfeasance and consumer blinding. Klein is particularly good at getting at the logo/social aspect at the beginning of the internet age. The only thing I found kind of annoying is that she ends the book with a positive note on how consumers are trying to stop all these problems. Obviously that has not worked, did not work and she is right -- 9/11 changed the game so that as consumers we care less about the world and its other people and more about our access to cheap stuff. Today our desires for cheaper stuff and more wonderous tech is leading us into a world of degraded wages, lower standards of living (there is more stuff, we just can't afford most of it anymore) and uncertain financial futures as our jobs are slowly becoming less relevant in an increasingly automated world.

My advice is, if you are not familiar with this topic at all or heavily interested in it, then read this book as there are plenty of interesting hooks/stories/angles to digest. If you are kind of familiar and not that interested then you should read something you find more interesting.

This is one of those books – like Infinite Jest or Manufacturing Consent that I would've been much better off reading when it came out, or when I was in my 20s. (Whichever was earlier.)

Reading it today, I can only think that my mind would've been blown a lot more comprehensively if I'd encountered the ideas within before precision-strike ads and 'unbranded' clothing were such a part of daily life.

The book is important, still, as it provides a good overview of why capitalism is shithouse, in ways the regular schlub can understand because it's presented through the lens of sneaker consumption. Certainly, it remains a fairly effective prompt to consider one's own purchasing decisions – to think about the provenance of the shirt on your back or the shoes on your feet, and the fact that it was possibly (or likely) made my someone close to childhood for cents an hour.

That's not the only thing in here, but for my money it's the most important. There's a lot of information about the rise of the brand (as opposed to the product) but it reads almost as quaint these days – in the 20 years since publication, the world has come to be run by brands and logos to the point that it's pretty difficult to imagine the world without their insidious reach.

In the end, this is an easy-reading trawl through capitalism by paths economic, sociological and philosophical (to an extent). It provokes thought still, even though you probably take a lot of the stuff in here for granted these days. As I say, I should've read it long ago, but it still has some thoughtful rewards for the curious reader.

post-hippy slacker attempts to make virtue out of necessity.

3.5

Some good analysis of globalized industry and brands but also very 90s. Not necessarily the books fault, but that made ot less effective for me, reading in 2024

Twenty years from its initial publication, No Logo remains sadly relevant in its diagnosis of the adverse effects of brand culture. It is a lament for the public and private space being invaded by consumer brands and a warning about the effects of globalization on the "undeveloped" countries blessed by the economic wellspring of Western industry. The discussion of the ways brands (and, by extension, most limbs of capitalism) co-opt youth culture and identity politics is especially on point. It's distressing to see a call from the past to move beyond issues of representation and focus our collective struggles on issues of material conditions, given how much of "progressive"/liberal discourse remains mired in the former. I appreciate that a significant portion of the book is devoted to how people have fought back against rampant branding, even though the strategies discussed aren't entirely convincing. Encouraging people to leverage their collective buying power to reprimand corporations is admirable, and it's true that corporations can wield more influence than the government, but dismissing the idea of closely analyzing and seeking to change the political systems which enable the corporate abuses discussed seems shortsighted. While there is some early discussion of how neoliberal reforms opened the gates for brands to run wild and free, I would have preferred a more in-depth analysis of how the extractive nature of capitalism made the outsourcing of jobs and exploitation of international workers inevitable. Klein seems to believe there is some ethical version of capitalism that can exist, which I'm not especially convinced of. Nonetheless, I was informed and entertained by this book and it is excellent food for thought as someone going into a field that worships brands and branding.

No Space:
Public space is being branded at an ever increasing rate. From sports stadiums and athletes to concerts and educational institutions. These brands have an extraordinary influence over public policy and our lives.

No Choice:
As companies gain power they are taking over entire segments of the marketplace and ‘synergizing’ their brand. The classic example is the publishing company, which owns the distributing company that gets the product to the stores, the communications outlets which provide the marketing and advertising and the retail outlets which sell to consumers. To a large extent, these monopolies get to pick and choose what you see, hear and read. The free exchange of ideas is limited and the scope of public conversation restricted.

No Jobs:
Companies are increasingly outsourcing all manufacturing operations to 3rd party vendors which primarily reside overseas in impoverished countries. In free trade zones around the world individuals work in sweatshops for slave wages to produce overpriced branded products for the developed world. As more companies adopt this model of production, there is a race to the bottom as good manufacturing jobs in the US are exported.

No Logo:
Student groups, universities, unions, shareholders and municipal governments are fighting back by holding companies responsible for the work practices of their suppliers. They are leveraging the power of the company brand as a means of shaming these institutions into behaving responsibly. Will it work? At the time the book was written (late 1990’s), the author seemed to sense a global movement building. Ten years later, it’s hard to see any appreciable change. If anything, companies have only grown stronger and have increased their hold over federal lawmakers and their visibility in the public sphere.

Yea but no but...

It was a nice try, and while I could probably agree on many levels with the author, I still call Klein a hippie.

I have always thought it to be wholly unreasonable to demand and to sincerely expect anyone and everyone to offer their own plan as to how things should be done as opposed to how we do things now. This is preposterous. Anyone who can come up with valid arguments why things currently are amiss and why they should be remedied, must be allowed to voice their opinion despite not necessarily being able to personally formulate (then and there, or even at all) an alternative, better, way of doing things.

It's cool if you can, but it shouldn't be a qualification for even being allowed to enter the debate. There isn't a single person on this planet who could come up with a perfect plan because there are no perfect plans! Almost no one will admit that capitalism is without glitches, but many will assert with gusto that capitalism just requires a little bit of tweaking and some tender loving care.

This is absolute nonsense.

Of course we could always have better democracy. People could easily be given more and better options to vote for changes, for example. We could have "local governments" with localized budgets within different parts of cities to enable those people living there to make concrete decisions and plans that will affect their everyday lives directly. We could do loads to improve democracy, trust me.

We could also find ways to actually sustain businesses and private individuals to operate in a free market reality - not just in free market make-believe. This would most likely mean that players who began to dominate markets need to be split in one way or the other to enable other and especially up-and-coming individuals and companies to compete against them in much more fairer conditions. Unlike now, no one could really rest on their laurels and/or just buy off competition. Everyone wanting to play the game would have to be innovating and reinventing themselves constantly. Not now and then, or once in a blue moon, but every single day.


Stuff that I personally can't accept is:

a) corporations aiming to change schools' curriculums and subtly trying to greenwash their own history and business practices - in a word their public image.

b) corporations cornering smaller competitors by dumping prices until local/regional competition is snuffed for good.

c) corporations gaining even bigger share of the markets simply because they can buy other competitors out if they can afford it. This is the exact opposite of what Adam Smith called free market economy. This is rule of the few and finally rule of one.

And if and when corporations reach a status where they can effectively sensor what people can and can not buy, should be called totalitarianism because that's what it is when you can't buy a book or some other product from anywhere else simply because those few corporations still left will refuse to take them up for sell.

d) allowing corporations to grow so big and powerful that they can effectively land in places where they are not taxed, where they can disregard local laws and regulations at will, where they can effectively treat their labor force and the environment any way they want.

Even if some poor, underprivileged, schmuck wouldn't mind how the company does business, I abso-f*cking-lutely do, and I'm not the only one! If you pollute the environment (or treat your employees like dirt), you clean up the mess, pay hefty fines, and take some time off from doing business for the time being because you clearly are not a responsible and trustworthy player and the society as a whole can and will not tolerate such behavior. Simple and fair, and not complex or mean at all.

If this what we have today is free market economy, we might as well reintroduce chains and just revert to calling workforce as slaves again. I mean why not? We already love to call unemployed people - I'm sorry, "job seekers" - as cancer, vermins, and so on. I don't know about you but to me it echos 1930's Germany.

I think it's pretty vile view on life if and when (read In Defense of Global Capitalism) people in effect say that it's still miles better to be working in a sweatshop somewhere and get paid at least something than having to resort to selling one's own ass to anyone keen on buying or just starving to death.

This line of thinking not only legitimizes wretchedness and indecency. It guarantees that nothing will ever change for the better.

Now, I may think that hippies are moronic bunch of people, but folks who try to reason the above scenario disgust me to no end. Especially coming from a guy who got all the chances in the world provided by the society in a socialist paradise called Sweden. I wonder if he would have had the same tolerance for pain, strength of character and general will power to take it up his small boy's ass from some anonymous older, charming Swedish gentlemen, had he been born in the slums of India, Brazil or Vietnam and be asked to help his family and relatives by all means necessary - and there either not being any sweatshops around or all just refusing to let him work?

I'm sure he would have.