No Logo : taking aim at the brand bullies.
Naomi Klein Harper Collins 2000

We come to praise and, if we can, to bury a little too.

No Logo is by far the best intellectual distillation of the evil that big brands can, notoriously, do in our globalised world order. We will not bother with trivial criticisms. Yes, it's too long, too referenced and too footnoted. Yes, it's repetitious and anecdotal. But, hey, if you think you can defend the praxis of modern branding and the globalisation that gives it so much new life, then this is the place to do your worst. Naomi Klein writes like she wants to knock you out of the ring.

So, seconds out.

Round One. We were appalled at the manipulation on display, the cute little elisions, all that sleight-of-hand in the off-the-cuff. Some of Naomi Klein intellectual devices mimic those used by one Francis Fukuyama in his book The Great Disruption - delivered, of course, from a much different (that much different?) ideological position . To make his case cut it, Fukuyama has to exaggerate all notions of decline and crisis that the modern world might offer. He speaks of "seriously deteriorating social conditions in most of the industrialised world"; he also talks of how "trust and confidence in institutions [has gone into] a deep, forty-year decline". Whatever is wrong in the world around him has to be painted as industrial-strength barbarism. Detachment just cannot make the case that hyperbole can. (Fukuyama has, by the way, no objective proof for either of the two statements).

We feel sure Ms. Klein will not appreciate the comparison. But let's quote freely from the heart of her arguments.

"There is mounting evidence…that workplace transience is finally eroding our collective faith, not only in individual corporations but in the very principle of trickle-down economics".

And later :-

"…despite the much-discussed disappearance of the middle-class in the West, the attack on jobs and income levels is probably not the most serious corporate offense we face as global citizens…………".

As with Fukuyama, the most potentially devastating conclusions - about the end of faith, the disappearance of an entire class, the oh-so-real crise de jour - all come with a sudden flight from data, a noisily abrupt absence of fact. Where is the mounting evidence? Who actually, authoritatively says that the middle-class has disappeared? Just how should we measure the deterioration in jobs and income levels (in contemporary USA or EU!!!)? We never learn. Footnotes come there none. The detail-devil suddenly dozes. Strange.

Naomi Klein is one magnificent evangelista. Her anger about the bad doings of big brands is shrill with righteousness. Hers, as old Jimmy Maxton once put it, is a gospel of discontent. And, inevitably, she has a long list of the ungodly to condemn. Like Fukuyama, she has ire to glut - perhaps even before she has facts to examine.

Listen to her treatment of her ideological enemies :-

"…in the US under Ronald Reagan and in Britain under Margaret Thatcher…corporate taxes were dramatically lowered, a move that eroded the tax base and gradually starved out the public sector. As government spending dwindled, schools, museums and broadcasters (sic) were desperate to make up their budget shortfalls……". (Emphasis added.)

Though readers are referred to a chart to confirm all this, no validating figures are actually given for the UK (see page 30). Hold this thought while we let Ms. Klein update her views to include the contemporary UK Government.

"Exiled to the economic margins by decades of Tory rule, and given little reason to return by the right-of-center policies of Tony Blair's New Labour Party, a largely self-reliant infrastructure of food coo-ops, illegal squats, independent media and free music festivals has emerged across the country".

Now let's get with it. Under Mrs. Thatcher, the total volume of public spending in the UK did not fall (see UK Treasury figures passim). Moreover, in the last twenty-five years of the UK's existence, the total volume of income has risen by 100% with the vast majority of people enjoying at least some take - at least some stake - in the new income growth. Pensions and health spending increases in real terns in contemporary UK with virtually every year that passes; by the second year of Tony Blair's first term, social security spending had exceeded a doubling in real terns over the last year in office of the last (old) Labour Prime Minister. Whatever you think of McDonald's and Coca Cola and Nike and Shell and all the gang, you cannot think - because it just is not true - that most British households have suffered sustained impoverishment, partly or wholly due to a decline in public spending, within the last generation.

Like Fukuyama, Naomi Klein has to prove or lubriciously imply that, well, things just stink, don't they? As she puts it herself in the Introduction, she is here to "look for the dirt behind the shine". Her distaste for all that she will find is thus pre-ordained. Not a very persuasive, not a very intellectual premise, is it?

Round Two. No sensitive person, on any side of these arguments, can feel wholly comfortable with the encroachment of brand advertising and sponsorship into so many avenues of life. And we fully accept that many are morally troubled by the invitation to unhealthily excessive consumption that the heavy promotion of global mega-brands can imply. And, let's face it, some just hate the guts of big brands and are especially revolted by the attempts of their managers to "turn their lackluster products into transcendent meaning machines". (Naomi Klein). The specific accusation here is that : "For the past decade, multinationals like Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become all that is good and cherished in our culture : art, sport, community, connection, equality". The result is a spiritually decrepit culture where logos infiltrate and smother the pure and the personal.

But how much of this claim is actually, measurably true? We fully accept here that if you believe, as a working post-marxist hypothesis, that our culture will, inevitably, be slowly lobotomised by big companies and their big brands, then alternative non-ideological arguments will seem very puny. But we will argue that in the last decade or so, across the Western world, we have seen a general increase in consumer/citizen power relative to big brands and their owners. And no Great Cultural Enfeeblement along the way either.

Let's stack up the points. Incomes have risen for the mass of consumers; the rate of increase in prices is so low that in some consumer markets inflation does not exist; the ability of brand-owners thus to push through price increases without actually improving the quality of the service provided is heavily constrained. You do not have, in any politically partisan sense, to love the market to acknowledge the sheer dynamism of innovation that has inhabited consumer service in many sub-sectors - food, fashion, home delivery, sportswear, telecoms, television, computers - over the last ten years. For our part, we have to conclude that the objective quality of many brands has seriously improved and that in an age of income growth the conditions for an ever-sharpening appetite for brands are thus established.

And brands, ooh, dare we say it out loud, are part of the daily fun of many folks. It is a cold snobbery to complain about this. No Logo frequently spins into a long nostalgic whine about the fall and decline of the family store - in the middle of a po-faced whinge about the commercialisation of art. ('Bout two thousand years late with that one, Naomi). All that was once "good and cherished in our culture" is being threatened by the nasty post-modern brand-goths. This not so much culture-jamming as American Graffiti. Gee, Mister, it was all once so plain and so true; now it's all gone so doggone garish and phoney. Just so much beating about the Bush underneath it all, really… One part hippy, three parts homecoming queen. Oh, dear.

Our new times, moreover, have actually seen a re-configuration of the threats faced at market level by individual brands, large and small. The new politics and economics of globalisation have exposed all brands with world-wide aspirations to new forms of consumer resistance. Furthermore, the forces of free competition have in so many sectors helped to ensure that any brand's hegemonic positioning may be at best vulnerable and at worst temporary. The sheer volume of advertising spend - which Klein abominates so - can be read as a testimony to just how fast brands have to run to stay abreast of the competitive forces around them. The world is not nearly as over-balanced in brands' favour as she wants her readers to think.

We just do not see any evidence for the implicit claim that consumers are forming a new generation of cyber-plebs, culturally duped into accepting every claim and every incursion of the big bad brands. Indeed the marketing community complain precisely of the opposite : that a generation of marketing-literate consumers are now thick-skinned with cynicism or narcoleptic with indifference about brands and their posturing.

Now, finally, a single person can be right and a million people can be wrong. The numbers in support do not necessarily favour one point over another. But the following, with all the above arguments in place, struck us as odd.

To wit. Naomi Klein gives the continuous impression that the ranks of anti-brand discontent are swelling. "Anti-corporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers (sic)". But actually there is precious little evidence on offer as to whether anti-brand activism is really reaching new constituencies of support among the consuming public in any part of the West. No Logo is conspicuously free of facts and figures even about those who do actively support anti-brand campaigns. And yet all the research work done by, for example, by London's Future Foundation - a commercial think-tank not in the least unsympathetic to the essential humanism of much of Naomi Klein's feelings about brands - would confirm that a younger generation of consumers is less motivated by anti-brand activism than, wait for it, an older generation of consumers.

This quote is from the Foundation's Michael Willmott in his book Citizen Brands (2001). He is referring to openly available quantitative market research that he has commissioned.

"….the evidence, certainly from Britain, seems to go against Naomi Klein's supposition that it is young people who are leading the anti-capitalist crusade.

…for example, only just over half of 16-24 year olds think global corporations need to be controlled or stopped compared to nearly three-quarters of other adults.

….Age emerged as the most important factor in explaining difference - with the young being the least likely to hold anti-corporate views…..Twice as many 45-54 year olds agree that you cannot trust multinationals as do 16-24 year olds".

One possible conclusion has to be that big brands - especially the ones with a strong youth focus - are part now of the cultural soft furnishings of millions. They have succeeded in making connections with the young - culturally and ideologically - in ways that Naomi Klein's campaigns have not. Now there is a thought.

Similarly, the Adbusters / Buy Nothing Day campaigns in the US and elsewhere give the impression that a rising clamour of public support is behind them. And yet, for example, the Buy Nothing Day concept is actually looking ever more established, a fixture in our cultural calendar, like Valentine's Day or Mothering Sunday or the Cup Final - programmed to generate a short power-surge of media interest and then to be forgotten for another year. If we, for our part, thought the way Naomi Klein did, then it would be the strange absence of throbbing anti-corporate fervour that would detain us. But it's just so much more fun to, well, talk a good game, thump the drum. Renta-Vanguardism.

Round Three. The strongest part of the Klein thesis is that the rise of megalithic global brands has gravely distorted the flight-path of economic development in the Third World. The hub of the case relates to the amount of product manufacturing and assembly that now takes place in the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia….places chosen for cheap labour and pliant governments. The brand-addicted Western consumer needs a flow of new product; the brand owners need thick margins. Result : labour exploitation and cultural subservience in countries that should otherwise be following a more benign, much less mercantilist economic programme. So the argument runs.

Here we have more of a quarrel with what is not said and virtually none with what is. The working conditions of millions of Third World workers are, frequently if not invariably, a disgrace to civilisation. Many brave people struggle within the countries concerned to improve those conditions; and many morally focused people, especially in North America, campaign and lobby hard to force changes in the national and corporate policies which hold these bad conditions in place. It is right there should be outrage. There should be more of it.

But it is intellectually and morally impossible to evade the juxtaposition of the continued expansion of international trade and generally improved living conditions across much of the globe. Naomi Klein may pick her facts cleverly. She notes, for instance, that "even in countries where wages were already low, labor costs are getting a shrinking slice of corporate budgets". This may well be true. But this does not stop income levels from, in general terms / from all sources rising at the same time. According too the IMF, some 70% of the population in the developing world live in countries where income growth has "exceeded that in industrial countries" over the last thirty years. This is not for a second to argue that absolute poverty is being eliminated; it is to argue that living conditions are being ameliorated by the workings of international trade. We, for our part, do not know of many radical Third World leaders who are arguing for a programme of autochthonous growth for their societies. It is the process of integration with global markets which holds out the hope that the very substantial improvements in economic performance that have characterised most of the Third World since the oil shocks of the 1970's can be shared by even more people. The clamour has to be for more, more organised, more managed trade.

Have big brands seriously distorted a natural form of indigenous economic progress in the developing world? We think not. Are conditions good in the assembly plants that Naomi Klein describes? No. They suck. Would it help anyone if brand production was withdrawn from the countries concerned? We could not in all conscience recommend any such thing. Naomi Klein may sit cosily in her agit-prop banalities. That is her choice.

And, what's more, she does not give much space to the most salient feature of this whole vexed relationship between international trade and poverty elimination. It is the countries with the weakest ties to global markets, brand-product production and all, that have the poorest people. As we have said elsewhere before, for the citizens of Angola, Burkina Faso, Burundi…the very notion of economic progress will sound like a sarcasm and the glory of globalisation a sickening tease.

GNP per capita in Burkina Faso is around $240; in the Philippines, it is around $1,000. International trade, we have to summarily conclude, creates the basis for general improvements in living standards. Of course, distorted income distribution can shift money away from the poor and here political activism must intervene. But there are too many countries in the world where the clamour for better distribution would be meaningless - because the total volume of income and wealth is pitifully low. And in the middle of all this, what is more nauseating than the sight of Western intellectuals - Rousseau's bastard children - moaning the cultural disruption being suffered by indigenous "communities" at the hands of global trade, regretting the death of subsistence farming, deploring the processes of urbanisation……? We, for our part, have never had to grind our way out of poverty. But we are sure that, if we had to, the purist pipe-sucking of Western intellectuals would, if we were unfortunate enough to hear it, drive us to terrorism.

So, there you have it. A book with its heart in the right place and its brain stuck in a post-modernist Media Studies workshop taking place on a mid-west campus and moderated by someone who was at Woodstock and who thinks that a cheese sandwich is a "transcendent meaning machine".

Yes, No Logo has great verve and passion. And it is not for us to question the sincerity of it all. But, we are here to question its common sense. Naomi Klein, presumably favourably and presumably without irony, opens one chapter with a quote from one Ursula Franklin, "Emeritus Professor", no less, from the University of Toronto :-

"We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War Two, but this time by an army of marketeers. We have to reclaim our country from those who occupy it on behalf of their global masters".

Naomi should tell Ursula to get out more : and go with her.