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

"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 had almost finished that before my business trip to China. I managed to read the last 50 pages only today.
The books is good but it's a kind of report. It is so full of data - almost 90% - that it's tiring to read.
So if you're not a "strong reader" give it up the idea of starting to read it. That's why I think it's not so good.
The writer should have used the data to take a stronger position. The average reader won't go on reading all those figures.

In my opinion there isn't enough developing of concepts like branding and the social issues connected with it. For instance that the public opinion doesn't care about children labour unless it is connected with a famous brand it's true.
As long as the consumer feels his conscience clean he doesn't really care.
As a matter of fact even being No Log is a marketing matter.

I think the book is a bit out of date right now. Multinationals can even help democratic processes as I've seen in China. Point is we always think as Westerns who know the only "truth".

ইরাক যুদ্ধ, অকুপাই ওয়ালস্ট্রিট, রানাপ্লাজার অনেক অনেক আগে লেখা বই। একটা জায়গায় একটা খুব দরকারী কথা বলা আছে, এই বড় বড় কর্পোরেশনগুলির গ্লোবাল নড়াচড়া। সেই গত শতকের শুরুতে আমেরিকার মূল ভুখন্ড থেকে শুরু করে। তখনকার মানে ১৯১২ তে একটা দুর্ঘটনায় যদি নিউ ইয়র্কে ১০০ জনের বেশি শ্রমিক মারা যায়, তার সাথে ২০১৩ তে ১০০০ এর বেশি শ্রমিক বাংলাদেশে মারা গেলে এই দুই দুর্ঘটনা আমাদের মনোজগতে কী কী প্রভাব ফেলে? এখন এই "আমাদের" বা আমরা ধারণাটিকেও ভেঙ্গে দেখতে হবে। আমেরিকার ধনী, ইউনিভার্সিটি ছাত্র, বেকার, কমিউনিটির সুনাগরিক, রাজনীতিবিদ, তৃতীয় বিশ্বের মানে নাইজেরিয়া, হন্ডুরাস, ফিলিপাইন বা বাংলাদেশের পুঁঁজিপতি, ফ্যাক্টরি মালিক, রাজনীতিবিদ, শ্রমিক, শিক্ষিত সমাজ, বেকার, ছাত্র, কৃষক এই সব "আমরা" ধারণাটির মদ্যে আছে। সেই যে আরো চল্লিশ-পঞ্চাশ বছর আগে গ্লোবাল ভিলেজ নামের এক কল্পগল্পের কথা শোনা গিয়েছিল, সেই গ্রামে প্রত্যন্ত কিনারায় শুরুতে ছিল তাইওয়ান, কোরিয়া, এরপরে দৃশ্যমান হয়েছে ইন্দোনেশিয়া, ফিলিপাইন, ধীরে ধীরে চীন, ভিয়েতনাম, বাংলাদেশ। এইটাই কর্পোরেশনগুলির সেই নাড়াচাড়া।এখন এই বৃহৎবপু বিশ্বপুঁজি নাইজার নদীর তীরে বা সাব সাহারান আফ্রিকার দিকে যাচ্ছে। এখনো বিশ্বগ্রাম কঠোর বর্ণাশ্রমে আবদ্ধ। তার মধ্যেও অনেক সাফল্যের কথা আছে, অনেক আশাবাদ আছে।

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.

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.

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.

I'll admit I was a little afraid of starting this book, fearing that it would trigger feelings of wanting to move to the woods Walden-style to escape this odious corporate culture.

So far no escape feelings and I'm on Chapter 2. I like Naomi Klein's very accessible study of brand expansion in the 90s. She isn't opposed to all advertising, which she says is simply about selling products. Branding instead sells a lifestyle or even further a "philosophy".

Thanks for loaning this book to me Steve.

I respect Klein so much. Full disclosure: I didn't make it through the entire book - so dense and intense. Also mine wasn't a newer edition with updated afterwards and all and it's somewhat dated - a lot has happened since 2000. That said, she completely predicted the economic crash to come. The stuff about advertising and politically correct culture really spoke to me - I'm not far from her in age - when she was in college in the 90s, I was in high school, so I could really relate to her descriptions of marketing at that time and "identity politics."

Out of the anti imperialist authors of the 00s, this is my favourite book for articulating the movements cause. More approachable than Chomsky, less rhetorical than Roy and more thorough than Moore. I especially got a lot out of the insights to economic processing zones or EPZs and the fallacy that low taxation to encourage multinationals isn't the recipe for domestic growth. The western fetish for brand loyalty is also explored and the methods to which the MNCs go to indoctrinate the new empowered consumerist youth.

Reviewer Marc states "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", which is precisely the flawed reasoning Klein takes on and demolishes in her beautiful yet tragic portrayal of the post-industrial United States in her well-written and easy to read No Logo. Obviously, neo-con, pro-free trade leaning people will find this book trite simply because of the beliefs Klein holds (it would be like a liberal reading Ann Coulter). Klein proves that the jobs that people are "happy to have" in the developing world are actually forced upon them, and shows a plethora of other atrocities corporations commit daily. What a good book!

For an understanding of what's going on in the current social sphere, No Logo should be required reading. Not that the book is perfect, but it contains a wonderful analysis of how the corporate sphere has expanded to fill virtually all areas of public space and dialog.

One of the most surprising aspects in reading the book is the realization of how complicit we have all been in our own corporate takeover. In the early 90s, major companies (Nike being the paradigm, but for from the only example) shifted their focus from manufacturing to brands - from selling objects to selling "lifestyles." It might seem like a ridiculous concept, but even well-educated, critical people have fallen for it. I've never bought into the idea that Nike embodies the sports ethos, but I am one of the legions of computer geeks who have gotten into long, heated arguments about the merits of Microsoft vs. Apple. Apple's ads push the idea that what it sells is innovation and hipness - but Apple just sells electronic equipment. To believe otherwise is to have fallen for their marketing ploy hook, line, and sinker. Not a electronics nerd? Chances are, then, you've probably shopped at The Body Shoppe because of its family-eco atmosphere, or in some other way unknowingly bought into some company's lifestyle image.

The first section of the book deals with the fallout from this switch in focus by the major multinationals, divided into three chapters. The first, "No Space", deals with how branding is encroaching on all aspects of life (most insidiously, education - if you want to convert minions to your brand, best to start them young). The second, "No Choice", talks about how the spread of branding restricts public dialog (brands are, after all, privately owned and subject to copyright/trademark, allowing the companies to control who says what about them - while at the same time expanding to control more of the media and public spaces). The third, "No Jobs", deals with how the switch from products to branding creates a logical divorce from manufacturing, and therefore from any need to support workers in an ethical fashion. Each one of these chapters is persuasively argued and incredibly well-researched. It is these chapters that make No Logo a must read, and the reason it gets five stars.

It is in the final section, "No Logo", that Klein struggles a bit more. This chapter covers the rise of anti-corporate and anti-branding advertising in response to the encroachment of the multinational. While Klein makes a convincing argument that there are a growing number of activists joining the movement, she makes a few serious omissions.

One error is an issue of methodology - many of the anti-branding activists act by appropriation: taking a brand and then twisting or subverting its meaning. This can be used to deliver a stinging indictment of the brand, and can be thought of as leveraging the brands power against itself. Yet what Klein and the other activists fail to consider is the possibility that ANY repetition of the brand, even one that is ostensibly critical, may in fact extend the brands power. I'm reminded of a recent NY Times op-ed (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opi...), that posits that denouncing a message may reinforce it simply by repetition. Klein never considers the fact that brand appropriation may, in fact, be counterproductive.

Klein's biggest flaw in "No Logo," however, is her refusal to acknowledge individual responsibility. In fact, in several parts of the book, she chastises activists for veering towards what she calls "consumer-watch finger-wagging." Yet a large part of the problem, as I pointed out at the beginning of this review, is that we have been 100% complicit in this takeover. Corporations can only sell us a lifestyle if we continue to buy it (and buy it and buy it and buy it). If we refuse to buy products made in sweatshops, refuse to succumb to corporate control of dialog, then the power of the multinational will wain - but doing so requires that we ALL take full responsibility for our purchases. Protests and activist design are great, but it's only real lifestyle changes that are going to free us from the power of the brand - a point Klein stops short of making.