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Class War issue 81: No Logo
by Naomi Klein (£14.99, Flamingo)
No Good, No Use, No Class
This is a must read for the movement at the minute - not because it's any good but because of the hype surrounding it. It is meant to be the bible of the new anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movement and ironically is published by Rupert Murdoch's stable. We wonder what the old Wapping printworkers would have to say about this?
In her introduction Klein in the journalist way waffles away in a meaningless manner, and occasionally puts forward her main ideas carefully hidden in the text. On page xvii she says we have a "world-wide style culture...this post national vision...another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing." On page xviii and xix she finally manages to say "this book is hinged on a single hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition...simply put, anti-corporatism is the brand of politics capturing the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers."
To prove that this is true Klein would just have to describe the local cases throughout Western Europe where people are busily campaigning against brand names. You'd imagine managers of the Gap, sports shops, designer shops and McDonald's would have trouble getting to work in every town where there is a store. This is obviously nonsense.
On a national level in Britain there is no anti-Asda movement now they have been bought by Wal-Mart, a bete noire for Klein. One local example of this is the Northern city of Sunderland. This is a developing university town with a Gap, Asda and, most of all - a successful football team with crowds of 47,000 sponsored by Nike who Klein spends a lot of time campaigning against. Sunderland FC has 3 shops selling its wares, and countless other sports shops throughout the North sell Sunderland Nike clothes. Nike has a 4 year contract with Sunderland FC, and on Klein's model this is a made to measure campaign for her 'new wave of troublemakers' to engage in.
However, on the ground in the real world what is there? Answer: NOTHING. There is no anti-Nike campaign in or around Sunderland, nor any identifiable anti-Nike sentiment in even a small proportion of the population. What there is, is a vast working class army of people who have felt the force of class society for generations who elect monkeys in suits as Labour politicians time and time again.
There was the case of Newcastle United director (Shepperd) calling Newcastle's women supporters "dogs" and calling supporters generally "mugs" for buying Newcastle strips for £40 when they are made in the Third world for £4 but this has still not led to any long term campaigns. The people in the North East know this is exploitation but are engaged in the struggle for survival in the ways they know. Both alcohol and tobacco smuggling are carried on in huge quantities, and also there is the retail of counterfeit clothing (Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesborough tops) at substantially cheaper prices. Even Arsenal is sponsored by Nike yet there is no anti-Nike campaign within the fan base.
Klein's work (and it is boosting her media career) has all the flaws you'd expect from an expansionist North American foreign policy (albeit a left wing one). She talks in great detail about American brand names and how production in the West has been replaced by production in the Third world and temps in the First world (Ch.10). These descriptions and of the First world investment in so called "free trade zones" (Ch. 9) are the best parts of the book and we would refer people directly to them.
It is substantially weaker when talking about how the class struggle has changed as a result (and working class, or protest history as a whole), and doesn't talk about any Marxist, neo-Marxist or anarchist theorists or their models at all. This means that the description of a new anti-brand movement in America is put forward as the model of anti-capitalist growth in the West as a whole and in particular Britain, which she mentions in the text often, devotes a specific chapter to, and she also takes inspiration from the McLibel case. This is absurd on the evidence presented by Klein and easily disproved. Funnily enough, it is only after the publication of her book that activists have taken to targeting the well-known brand names in Britain.
Also the evidence Klein presents is often too general and employed without sufficient grounding to be useful. Further like the academic trend to take the class politics out of situationism, Klein constantly avoids the notion of class her fleeting discussions of working class politics are inane. As is her annoying habit of throwing things in whose relevance is not only contestable, but useless e.g. the Chumbawamba quote on p. 77. We think Klein is neither new, illuminating nor beyond middle class indignation. That's how grateful we are.... Finally there are no ideas about the way forward for struggle throughout the world, nor should we expect any for as she says on page xviii it is a book based on "first hand observation". She is a journalist who is merely mediating our movement and history in the bourgeois press, for the bourgeois press.
In the last paragraph of the introduction (page xxi) Klein insists: "the book is an attempt to analyse and document the forces opposing corporate rule, and to lay out the particular set of cultural and economic conditions that made the emergence of that opposition inevitable. Part I, "No Space", examines the surrender of culture and education to marketing. Part II, "No Choice", reports on how the promise of a vastly increased array of cultural choice was betrayed by the forces of mergers, predatory franchising, synergy and corporate censorship. And part III, "No Jobs", examines the labor [can't these Yanks spell?] market trends that are creating increasingly tenuous relationships to employment for many workers, including self employed, McJobs and outsourcing, as well as part-time and temp labor. It is the collision of and the interplay among these forces, the assault on the three social pillars of employment, civil liberties and civic space, that is giving rise to the anticorporate activism chronicled in the last section of the book. Part IV, "No Logo", an activism that is sowing the seeds of a genuine alternative to corporate rule."
In reply we would say that the tendencies Klein writes about in parts 1 and 2 were virtually identical to those written by another "spokesperson of a generation" Herbert Marcuse in 'One Dimensional Man', and the lack of knowledge of this is shocking. Knowledge of this would have greatly improved the book. Klein says "a picture of corporate space as a fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests." The similarities between this and Marcuse are there for anybody who has read both; Marcuse was the first to spot the irrationality of this society as a whole. "We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction", and chapter headings like "The Closing Of The Political Universe" and "The Closing Of The Universe Of Discourse" are themes stolen by Klein in her ignorance. Today this manifests itself in the fact that people are laid off in one country only to make more work for us all by re-importing the goods back into the areas where there is now unemployment after they have been made abroad.
Klein is at her weakest when talking about the political situation in Britain and her chapter on Reclaim The Streets is particularly poor. Of the Birmingham anti-capitalist action in May 1998 she states (happily knowing and freely admitting that she wasn't there) that "instead of rocks and bottles, the weapon of choice was that increasingly popular piece of slapstick ammo: the custard pie."
This is total bullshit! We were there on the day and not one custard pie was spotted. Instead there was a large number of up for it types and local youths who were doing the normal "policing" of these events by keeping the cops at arms length, and away from the sound system and dancing hippy fools. We saw cops getting kicked and one was trapped as a cry of "piggy in the middle" went up, though he got out with only minor damage unfortunately.
The weapon of choice for those who were actually there, was anything to be found from the Bullring Street market - tons of veg, boxes and so on were thrown as well as the usual bottles and bricks, with a camera crew getting attacked as well. Despite a media blackout at the time, several months later this was billed by the Daily Mirror as a serious riot and photos were published of those who were wanted by the police. So much for the fluffy nonsense.
These events are only successful because of the way the law works in Britain - they could quite easily be smashed off the streets and what would the hippies do then? Go back to their fucking teepees never to be seen again cos they can't handle political realities.
In conclusion, No Logo is at its best on a descriptive level in the shift from product to brand, and the employment relations in "Free Trade Zones". However it is weaker and actually wrong on a number of other fronts. Notably economics, attempts to impose what's happening in America onto Britain, history, political analysis and arguments to do with mobilising issues. We were parodying the Nike swoosh logo nearly 10 years ago! Klein is totally ignorant of this and several other things that matter. As per usual with academics, it's a case of too little too late.
Back to issue 81 contents
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