No fury (No Logo - Naomi Klein)

Name: maz

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Product:	No Logo - Naomi Klein
Date:	26/07/01 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cogent arguments, Human approach

Disadvantages: Not angry, Not concerned with aesthetics

Will ‘No Logo’ go down in history as the book that popularised anti-globalisation? Published on the cusp of a series of media circuses which dealt, however ineptly, with the issues involved, and heavily promoted by chain bookshops in both the US and UK, it’s become the touchstone for a kind of liberal disaffection – the kind of protest book you could buy your parents for Christmas. Or should it be seen more as an attempt to defuse the radicalism surrounding anti-globalisation by accommodating its message and selling it in a funky £15 paperback – a prime example of the book’s exposé of radical slogans being co-opted for commercial use? Klein’s book resists such black and white interpretation; it’s both, as well as an astute political memoir and well-researched piece of investigative journalism – a synergistic work, as Klein might describe it. I don’t doubt the author’s sincerity for a second, but ‘No Logo’ might finally be the victim of its own success: anything that’s fashionable quickly becomes unfashionable. Look out for copies of ‘No Logo’ coming to a charity shop near you soon.

The three things that struck me most while reading the book were the following:

~ many of the arguments used here are now so familiar that the reader glazes over while scanning the text. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Shell and McDonalds typify the ugly face of late capitalism. Where ‘No Logo’ is more relevant is in explaining the links between single issues such as labour reform and branding, as well as pointing out that academia’s obsession with the politics of representation during the Eighties left the doors wide open for exploitation of a far more serious kind. Klein’s mixture of personal memoir and political attack makes, moreover, for a far warmer and approachable read than most theory-ridden anarcho-political material, and happily
lacks the ‘holier than thou’ attitude which has always dogged Leftist writing.

~ the ‘youth of today’ is not, as has been erroneously repeated ad nauseam for the last two decades, politically apathetic. Youth culture pundits have long confused party politics with politics itself – but the former’s amalgam of business interests, media exploitation and enthusiastic divesting of power should make it only too clear why people are deserting it in droves. Nor have the failure of Sixties revolutionary thought or the collapse of the Soviet bloc led to political anomie; on the contrary, monoculture and the attendant communications explosion have given birth to a radicalism arguably more focussed and better armed than that of its forebears.

~ the exploitation of the Third World is nothing new. The conditions of the export processing zones described by Klein are similar to factories explored by Claude Levi-Strauss in ‘Tristes Tropiques’, written towards the beginning of the twentieth century. Go back further still, another few hundred years even, and consider the treatment of indigenous labour in the colonies. The dangers of monoculture are, similarly, not expressed here for the first time – Levi-Strauss, again, devotes a chapter in ‘Tristes Tropiques’ to just that. The issues explored here are not as fresh as Klein makes them seem.

But there are things missing from ‘No Logo’ too. No real alternatives are posited, and you could read the book as a textbook for branding – the case studies aren’t far different from those in a ‘Build your brand’ business publication. There’s no mention made of Marcos’s Zapatista movement, possibly the most important anti-globalisation organisation of the past decade. And finally, it’s not nearly angry enough. This helps its approachability, but there’s a sense in which the reader might feel that
everything’s being done – people are protesting, the multinationals have been caught with their pants down and the world is now a safer, cosier place. Hmm. I’d point people towards Hakim Bey or even The Baffler (for which Klein has written) for some of the righteous rage that’s lacking here. Mention of Bey brings up another issue – that of aesthetics. Klein’s position is almost exclusively fixed throughout on labour issues – there’s no exploration here of the colonisation of the imagination through branding and saturation advertising, or the apotheosis of capital, key themes in Bey’s poetic terrorism.

But these are, by and large, minor criticisms. ‘No Logo’ is without a doubt an important work, and wherever you stand on issues relating to globalisation this will help to hone your arguments. Just don’t leave it at that, and remember that while your vote doesn’t count for much, your wallet does …

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