- The Observer,
- Sunday January 23 2000
No Logo
Naomi Klein
Flamingo £14.99, pp490
Have you ever been to Nike Town? It is as close to hell on earth as any modern shopping experience outside Ikea can conceivably get.
Inside the gigantic flagship megastore on Oxford Circus, ordinary citizens drift, lost, from themed section (trainers) to themed section (other trainers). They stumble into one another like unhappy zombies, numbed by the pounding music. You see them browsing on shelved displays (more trainers), many already carrying bags emblazoned with the brand's trademark 'swoosh'.
And nearly all of them are actually wearing Nike trainers, even as they shop for more. They are Just Doing It.
Naomi Klein is a brave woman indeed. For this is the grim heart of the subject she has undertaken to investigate. No Logo contains her findings: a riveting, conscientious piece of journalism and a strident call to arms.
Her starting point is a paradigm shift that she identifies as having taken place in the first part of this century: corporations changed from selling products to selling brands. Coke, Nike, Disney, McDonald's. The continuing profitability of these corporations is invested in an immaterial set of 'brand values'; in associating their products with a lifestyle.
Klein doesn't claim that selling snake-oil - or 'value-added' to use the corporate jargon for why the orange tick sewn on to your trainers costs you 60 quid - is a new phenomenon. Her project instead is to make clear the extent to which the Brand now supersaturates our everyday lives - and to chart the implications that has for freedom of speech; labour relations and, ultimately, political authority.
It is axiomatic to Klein that the economic logic of the branded corporations is savagely inflationary. Advertising spending is subject to a law of diminishing returns. She quotes one ad man saying: '[Consumers] are like roaches - you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while.'
The insatiable search for virgin, unbranded space has dovetailed neatly with a contraction of the public sector on both sides of the Atlantic. Corporate sponsorship has crept into schools and universities - in the process creating conflicts of public or academic interest as well as solving funding problems. At the same time, the corporations in question are expanding aggressively, and across international boundaries. Starbucks cluster-bombs the competition out of the High Street; Microsoft gobbles up rivals or levers them out of the market with software bundling.
The results: profits are ploughed back into advertising and expansion while the proportion of investment in boring bits such as the product and the workforce plummets.
Factories are closed, production is contracted out to un-unionised sweatshops in stinkingly corrupt regimes, and Western shopping centres are filled with easy-hire, easy-fire temps paid well under the odds.
The book is packed with enlightening statistics and extraordinary anecdotal evidence. All 50,000 workers at the Yue Yen Nike factory in China would have to work for 19 years to earn what Nike spends on advertising in one year. The $181million in Disney stock options Michael Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for 14 years.
In her book, Klein says there's evidence to suggest that - in order to build brand cachet in the inner cities (whence it trickles down to the all-important white suburban kids who think they're Ali G) - Nike and Hilfiger turn a blind eye to piracy.
Klein herself went through American higher education at a time when student politics focused overwhelmingly on issues of representation and speech; on the race and gender issues stigmatised by the right as 'political correctness'. She now feels they missed a trick: 'The need for greater diversity - the rallying cry of my university years - is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital.'
The second half of the book looks at resistance, and Klein joins the dots to argue for an increasingly coherent anticorporate movement. At its crux is indignation that international branded corporations are starting to behave like privatised governments, bringing us closer to William Gibson's vision of a world in which they actually more or less supplant local or even national governments.
Many of these companies actually turn over more money than all but a few nation states. Internationally through the WTO and locally through lobbying and the threat of job losses, they exert decisive pressure on political policy.
The question is how to make them publicly accountable. The insight is that it is precisely the visibility and the transnational nature of the big brands which makes them vulnerable. It's that old theorist's favourite, 'immanent critique' (Klein, peppily, prefers 'political jujitsu') - using the momentum of a larger enemy against them. 'Adbusters' turn 'Joe Camel' into 'Joe Cancer' with a spray can; human rights groups fly a teenage sweatshop worker in for a televised tour of Nike Town. Co-opting the opposition works both ways.
Klein is aware of an important irony: her book is published by Flamingo, which is an imprint of HarperCollins, which is owned by a certain, um, ravenous global media monopolist. Her mentions of Murdoch are few and timid; but she'd no doubt argue that this is jujitsu in action.
This isn't the work of a scattershot anticapitalist, or a flaky apologist for some hippy Utopia. At its best, No Logo is fluent, undogmatically alive to its contradictions and omissions, and positively seethes with intelligent anger.
• Sam Leith edits Peterborough for the Daily Telegraph.
