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.

Excellent read on ruthless corporatism, unethical and anti-human behaviours of giant corporations and modern activism against it. Full of vivid piece of evidence, many practical examples and enlightening actions by social activists, students and other groups, this is a must read. The author herself embarks on a journey to understand the principles of corporate giants such as Nike, Starbucks, McDonald's, Shell, Levis and many others and to raise a voice about their harsh and unethical principles that need immediate and decisive counter action. Even though the book was written nearly 20 years ago, it opens the door to a world that we should be familiar with.

(drastically condensed reaction)

It's a good start to a larger, overarching leftist critique of the way we live now. Klein does a fine job of explaining and exhuming many of the classic discontents of Capitalism, let alone the free-market nuttiness we've come to know. It's worth reading simply for the shedding of some further light on many of the social conditions we seem to take for granted.

The trouble is, she doesn't seem to have much to offer in the way of a viable, significant response- an alternative program.

She makes the point (sort of over-makes it, to my mind) about culture jamming and such and it sure sounds cool and interesting and worthwhile. It's just that it's also more than a little cosmetic and somewhat self-congratulatory and ultimately rather ineffective.

There isn't much in the way of *constructive* criticism, not to patronize the book to death, in that there are many ills correctly and articulately diagnosed but not much in the way of remedy. This is a problem, especially since the argument is known pretty widely in a general way and therefore the need for some kind of counter-program is all the more pressing.

I am going to try Disaster Capitalism one of these days and maybe it will have more of a bolder, tougher, more necessary impact.

ten years after this book's breakthrough success, we've seen many of its concerns rear their ugly head and make so huge and unmistakable and infinitely complex a mark that, discouragingly, it seems we're (people of the left, that is, those may take a lot away from this book and the already converted it preaches to) still standing at square one- acknowledgment- and gazing up at this monolith, and taking the temperature....

I skimmed most of this. Not that anything was wrong with the book, it just felt like it was stating the obvious to me. Maybe this would have seemed like newer information at the time of publishing. Right now, in 2016, with my anti-capitalist mind, this didn't tell me anything I wanted to know.

No Logo appealed to me because as a kid in the nineties, I was aware of an anti-corporate sentiment that the Gen X-ers were bandying around along with high tops and grunge. I didn’t really get it all at the time, eventually there were aspects which I grew to agree with and some I disagreed with. Ironically, most of this ‘Fight The Power’ was brought to me by MTV – a definite front-runner in corporate branding back then.

Without sounding like a lecture or a tree- hugger rant, No Logo briefs on how big brands are built (smoke, mirrors and adverts) and more interestingly, focuses is on who is exploited for these brands to succeed. Throughout, Klein highlights how the whole process has bred public resistance and protest. From some angles it’s a clear attack on capitalism as a whole but indirectly, it does make you think about the role we play in all this personally- mostly enabling by forking over cash. Every day.

full review: https://charoflondon.com/2016/08/08/b...

No Logo a été publié en 1999 et, malgré que l'oeuvre ait près de 20 ans, le propos est encore tellement d'actualité...

Cet ouvrage ambitieux aborde les stratégies marketing employées par les entreprises au tournant des années '90. C'est à cette époque que l'idée que "la marque est primordiale" prend le dessus, qu'une entreprise vend un mode de vie, une image, plutôt qu'un produit. Ce virage, encore bien présent aujourd'hui, provoque un investissement majeur dans la publicité et le marketing au détriment des travailleurs, auprès de qui les corporations se désengagent radicalement depuis la fin des années '90.
Ce livre rappelle tristement le pouvoir immense dont disposent les grandes marques, souvent plus puissantes que les gouvernements locaux, et qui, sans surveillance, sombrent dans des abus terrifiants qui s'apparentent clairement à l'exploitation humaine et les régimes de terreur. ⚖⛓

No Logo s'intéresse aux débordements des corporations et au mouvement anti-corporatiste qui s'est formé en réponse à ces dérapages qui, loin d'être l'exception, sont malheureusement la règle pour parvenir à un maximum de profit et de contrôle du marché.

C'est stupéfiant de constater que 20 ans plus tard, les mêmes enjeux sont encore présents, notamment quant aux structures toutes puissantes et, ma foi, assez anti-démocratiques que sont les grandes entreprises. Aussi, il est assez effrayant de constater que la pub absorbe encore plus promptement et insidieusement tout mouvement culturel marginal qui tente de lui résister ou de se protéger de la rarification d'espaces non privatisés/marchandisés.

Je l'aime beaucoup Naomi Klein ❤.

My rating for this book is closer to 4.5 stars than 4 stars.

"We become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity."

"The abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully trained a generation of activists in the politics of image, not action."

"Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift." - Noam Chomsky

"David Green, senior vice president of marketing, expressed his opinion that Coca-Cola is nutritious because it is 'providing water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet.'" The mind truly boggles.

RB: Dad, Francoise

I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and have only now gotten around to it. Her Shock Doctrine was one of the most important books I’ve read in years, so there really has been no excuse for leaving this one quite so long. A while ago I read Marx’s Capital and one of the things I thought while reading the horror stories of Victorian labour practices was just how lucky we are today that trade unions have made sure capitalism couldn’t get away with such disgusting practices – because I’ve always known that capitalism can only maintain a human face when it is forced to. Well, this book makes it all too clear that the monstrous face of capitalism has never really disappeared. All of the standard stories/lies about how gross exploitation is the price poor nations have to pay for economic development are exploded here. The countries that receive factories as a kind of gift from multinational corporations are not ‘developing’ in any sense that we might like to imagine that might make us feel a little better about the horror they experience. The factories are kept isolated from local and international labour laws, the conditions the workers live under provide wages that are below subsistence and if they try to do anything about it they are killed.

The whole thing is an exercise in ‘plausible deniability’ – corporations in the ‘liquid modern world’ don’t produce anything any longer. Everything is subcontracted out, so that brands today only put their names on products, rather than actually produce them. That means that they can pretend they are not responsible for the gross violations of basic human rights done to produce the products they name and sell.

In part this book was somewhat disheartening. It is about 15 years since this book was written and if anything things today are infinitely worse. The anti-slavery campaigns around sweatshop conditions too often seem to be only about sating the consciences of western consumers who still define themselves by the brand names they wear on bodies. Meanwhile, the system is rotten to the core. It isn’t at all clear how it can be ‘fixed’ since these issues are global and there is no global democracy that allows ‘citizens’ to have a voice though regulation. Campaigns invariably are about reducing us to ‘customers’ who should use their ‘buying power’ to bring about change – but this is totally ineffective and a huge step back. If you get to choose, be a citizen rather than a customer every day.

Given that it isn’t clear how we will be allowed to be global citizens and that the global is dominated by pirates and thieves, the only alternative seems to be to tear the entire edifice down. The idea that we should believe in the ‘self-regulation’ by global corporations, that this is going to suddenly become a reasonable option would be almost funny, except of course it is not – you know, we are talking about corporations like Coke that have been proven to kill union organisers across the world – and we are expected to believe they are going to suddenly self-regulate to protect the rights of their employees. If you drink any of their products you are endorsing murder – simple as that.

We live in a dystopia worse than the worst of those imagined by our most creative writers. Where corporations are destroying the basis upon which we can sustain human life on this planet while apologists like Hans Roslin puts everything on a logarithmic scale to lie that things are getting all so much better.

Perhaps one day we will awaken and force our societies to be more humane, focus on protecting the planet instead of turning it to ashes and operate under the simplest of moral maxims – that a harm to one is a harm to all – but then again, perhaps we will just go on buying Nikes, Apple, McDonald’s hamburgers and other poisons that kill us and our planet.

This was published in 2000, coming out during the time when the internet bubble was riding high but before the fall of the Two Towers (the ones in NY, not Tolkein's).

Its subject matter was Shell, McD's, and Nike. Social awareness was getting a second wind after languishing in general and now it was all about sweatshops. Multinational corporations became our favorite bogeymen (again), and this was when we could throw our weight behind small-time activists and FEEL like we could accomplish some great-seeming things... like getting all the exploiters out of Burma so as to take away the support of that regime.

Remember those times?

Add awareness to the whole Banding idea, the feeling that Corporations are real people with souls (ha), and see this as a way to stop bad practices by attacking their PR image.

Then realize that the problem goes sooooooo much deeper. Much deeper than this book is prepared to take it, except to realize that these highly visible multinational corporations were great as a rallying point but even if anyone could break them down and hold them accountable, it was EVERY OTHER corporation doing the exact same thing that makes the situation seem rather hopeless.

So, and rightly so, this book does not delve into the economics and politics that made the rape of underdeveloped countries possible: the policies and the greed and the perfectly legal practices that can ravage whole countries, their land, and devastate indigenous peoples.

It can't. It's a problem that requires widespread awareness everywhere... and the knowledge of all the interrelated contributing factors... to combat.

We all need to be aware and awake to not just the fact of injustice, but the causes. The only real way we can combat this problem is by waking the real slumbering beast of humanity from its ignorant dream. :)

Can not enjoy anything under capitalism. Klein gives a great analysis of how companies have been using branding to suck the life out of everything possible and how movements are resisting corporate domination. Yet she fails to provide a Marxist and anti-imperialist analysis that corresponds with neoliberalism and globalization in the late 90s. Interesting to see how this book would look in 2023.

L'importanza della consapevolezza

Quando facciamo la spesa al supermercato, quando andiamo a cena fuori, quando ci vestiamo, quando facciamo il pieno, quando andiamo in vacanza, quando vestiamo i nostri figli o li mandiamo all'università o quando insegniamo loro i valori importanti.

Sempre, in tutta la nostra vita e la nostra società, modalità di sfruttamento del lavoro e delle risorse naturali che non accetteremmo mai consapevolmente sono dietro alle nostre scelte. E allora la consapevolezza dei meccanismi del mercato globale, dei suoi protagonisti e dei loro metodi ci può aiutare a scegliere e forse, grazie a queste scelte, a cambiare un pochino il trend inumano nel quale ci siamo infilati.

'No logo', per quanto un poco datato, ci aiuta in questo processo di formazione delle scelte consapevoli, nella conoscenza dei meccanismi inaccettabili che governano il mercato mondiale e che quotidianamente offuscano le nostre capacità di analisi e critica. E ci indica metodi e storie di riscatto personali e collettive.

Insomma, un libro importante per chi vuole provare a mantenere gli occhi e la mente aperti. Si potrebbe anche far finta di nulla, ma io non ci riesco.

I have the highest regard for Naomi Klein, for the research she does for her books and for bringing up serious issues and covering them from multiple perspectives in cohesive and a matter of fact way, which makes you trust what she’s writing, while keeping the tone from reaching a state of tediousness.
In No Logo Klein tackles something huge. Brands and consumerism as whole, the way commercialism surrounds us everywhere from education to public spaces. She writes about history, the different consequences and the resistance those consequences have evoked. And the examples used to make her point feel more than comprehensive.
Unfortunately No Logo doesn’t give a very current view on the topic (being written in 2000), but it inspires me to learn more on my own. I'm curious to know how the the resistance culture has developed - and how I can be a part of it. Anticonsumerism is an integral part of environmental movemements that I'm involved in, but the 'No Logo campaigns' I wasn't familiar with.
If you haven’t yet woken up to how unjust our consumerist culture is for us, other people and the environment, this book will open your eyes.