No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  That was certainly true, and had very real consequences. Obama’s election and the world’s corresponding love affair with his rebranded America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election, the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not just on the contagion of Wall Street’s bad bets but on the entire economic model of deregulation and privatization (called “neoliberalism” in most parts of the world) that had been preached from U.S.-dominated institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. If the United States were led by someone who didn’t happen to be a global superstar, U.S. prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously tax) speculative finance. Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009. Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama couple, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing International Monetary Fund — a chief culprit in this mess — with up to a trillion dollars in new financing. In short, Obama didn’t just rebrand America, he resuscitated the neoliberal economic project when it was at death’s door. No one but Obama, wrongly perceived as a new FDR, could have pulled it off.

  Yet re-reading No Logo after ten years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. Some overstretched. For others, their actual products began to feel rather disappointing next to the thrill of their marketing (a black woman breastfeeding a white child to sell… Benetton sweatersets? Really?). And sometimes it was precisely their claims of political enlightenment that tempted activists to contrast their marketing image with their labor practices, with disastrous results for the brands.

  The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realize that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street’s addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?

  The risk —and it is real —is that the response will be waves of bitter cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics. Most won’t switch parties, they’ll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay home, tune out. Another, more hopeful possibility is that Obamamania will end up being what the U.S. president’s advisors like to call “a teachable moment.” Obama is a gifted politician with a deep intelligence and a greater inclination toward social justice than any leader of his party in recent memory. If he cannot change the system in order to keep his election promises, it’s because the system itself is utterly broken.

  That was the conversation many of us were having in that brief period between the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 and the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. Perhaps it was a limitation, but for the movement the media insisted on calling “anti-globalization,” it mattered little which political party happened to be in power in our respective countries. We were focused squarely on the rules of game, and how they had been distorted to serve the narrow interests of corporations at every level of governance —from international free-trade agreements to local water privatization deals.

  Looking back on this period, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all. In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I had never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

  In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, that wave of resistance only spread and strengthened. In some countries, social movements grew strong enough to join with political parties, winning national elections and beginning to forge a new regional fair-trade regime. But elsewhere, September 11 pretty much blasted the movement out of existence. In the United States, progressive politics rallied around a single cause: “taking back” the White House (as if “we” ever had it in the first place), while outside the United States, the coalitions that had been focused on a global economic model now trained their attention on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a resurgent “U.S. empire” and on resisting increasingly aggressive attacks on immigrants. What we knew about the sophistication of global corporatism —that all the world’s injustice could not be blamed on one right-wing political party, or on one nation, no matter how powerful —seemed to disappear.

  If there was ever a time to remember the lessons we learned at the turn of the millennium, it is now. One benefit of the international failure to regulate the financial sector even after its catastrophic collapse is that the economic model that dominates around the world has revealed itself not as “free market” but “crony capitalist” —politicians handing over public wealth to private players in exchange for political support. What used to be politely hidden is all out in the open now. Correspondingly, public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point not just in my lifetime but in my parents’ lifetime as well. Many of the points supposedly marginal activists were making in the streets ten years ago are now the accepted wisdom of cable news talk shows and mainstream op-ed pages.

  And yet missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to emerge a decade ago: a movement that did not just respond to individual outrages but had a set of proactive demands for a more just and sustainable economic model. In the United States and many parts of Europe, it is far-right parties and even neofascism that are giving loudest voice to anti-corporatist rage.

  Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. Sure it was annoying, but after the apolitical eighties, when there was, according to Margaret Thatcher, “no such thing as society,” it also seemed like a good sign that these brands believed otherwise. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping — for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

  Perhaps Obama should be viewed in much the same way. Once again, the market research has been done for us. What the election and the global embrace of Obama’s brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change — that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themsel
ves.

  Those kinds of transformative goals are only ever achieved when independent social movements build the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by capitalizing on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build movements that are —to borrow an old Coke slogan —the real thing. As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”

  INTRODUCTION

  A WEB OF BRANDS

  If I squint, tilt my head, and shut my left eye, all I can see out the window is 1932, straight down to the lake. Brown warehouses, oatmeal-colored smokestacks, faded signs painted on brick walls advertising long-discontinued brands: “Lovely,” “Gaywear.” This is the old industrial Toronto of garment factories, furriers and wholesale wedding dresses. So far, no one has come up with a way to make a profit out of taking a wrecking ball to these boxes of brick, and in this little eight-or nine-block radius, the modern city has been layered haphazardly on top of the old.

  I wrote this book while living in Toronto’s ghost of a garment district in a ten-story warehouse. Many other buildings like it have long since been boarded up, glass panes shattered, smokestacks holding their breath; their only remaining capitalist function is to hoist large blinking billboards on their tar-coated roofs, reminding the gridlocked drivers on the lakeshore expressway of the existence of Molson’s beer, Hyundai cars and EZ Rock FM.

  In the twenties and thirties, Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. These days, old Portuguese men still push racks of dresses and coats down the sidewalk, and next door you can still buy a rhinestone bridal tiara if the need for such an item happens to arise (a Hallowe’en costume, or perhaps a school play …). The real action, however, is down the block amid the stacks of edible jewelry at Sugar Mountain, the retro candy mecca, open until 2 a.m. to service the late-night ironic cravings of the club kids. And a store downstairs continues to do a modest trade in bald naked mannequins, though more often than not it’s rented out as the surreal set for a film school project or the tragically hip backdrop of a television interview.

  The layering of decades on Spadina Avenue, like so many urban neighborhoods in a similar state of postindustrial limbo, has a wonderful accidental charm to it. The lofts and studios are full of people who know they are playing their part in a piece of urban performance art, but for the most part, they do their best not to draw attention to that fact. If anyone claims too much ownership over “the real Spadina,” then everyone else starts feeling like a two-bit prop, and the whole edifice crumbles.

  Which is why it was so unfortunate that City Hall saw fit to commission a series of public art installations to “celebrate” the history of Spadina Avenue. First came the steel figures perched atop the lampposts: women hunched over sewing machines and crowds of striking workers waving placards with indecipherable slogans. Then the worst happened: the giant brass thimble arrived —right at the corner of my block. There it was: eleven and a half feet high and eleven feet across. Two giant pastel buttons were plopped on the sidewalk next to it, with wimpy little saplings growing out of the holes. Thank goodness Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist and labor organizer who lived on this street in the late 1930s, wasn’t around to witness the transformation of the garment workers’ struggle into sweatshop kitsch.

  The thimble is only the most overt manifestation of a painful new self-consciousness on the grid. All around me, the old factory buildings are being rezoned and converted into “loft-living” complexes with names like “The Candy Factory.” The hand-me-downs of industrialization have already been mined for witty fashion ideas —discarded factory workers’ uniforms, Diesel’s Labor brand jeans and Caterpillar boots. So of course there is also a booming market for condos in secondhand sweatshops, luxuriously reno-ed, with soaking tubs, slate-lined showers, underground parking, skylit gymnasiums and twenty-four-hour concierges.

  So far my landlord, who made his fortune manufacturing and selling London Fog overcoats, has stubbornly refused to sell off our building as condominiums with exceptionally high ceilings. He’ll relent eventually, but for now he still has a handful of garment tenants left, whose businesses are too small to move to Asia or Central America and who for whatever reason are unwilling to follow the industry trend toward homeworkers paid by the piece. The rest of the building is rented out to yoga instructors, documentary film producers, graphic designers and writers and artists with live/work spaces. The shmata guys still selling coats in the office next door look terribly dismayed when they see the Marilyn Manson clones stomping down the hall in chains and thigh-high leather boots to the communal washroom, clutching tubes of toothpaste, but what can they do? We are all stuck together here for now, caught between the harsh realities of economic globalization and the all-enduring rock-video aesthetic.

  JAKARTA — “Ask her what she makes —what it says on the label. You know —label?” I said, reaching behind my head and twisting up the collar of my shirt. By now these Indonesian workers were used to people like me: foreigners who come to talk to them about the abysmal conditions in the factories where they cut, sew and glue for multinational companies like Nike, the Gap and Liz Claiborne. But these seamstresses looked nothing like the elderly garment workers I meet in the elevator back home. Here they were all young, some of them as young as fifteen; only a few were over twenty-one.

  On this particular day in August 1997, the abysmal conditions in question had led to a strike at the Kaho Indah Citra garment factory on the outskirts of Jakarta in the Kawasan Berikat Nusantar industrial zone. The issue for the Kaho workers, who earn the equivalent of US$2 per day, was that they were being forced to work long hours of overtime but weren’t being paid at the legal rate for their trouble. After a three-day walkout, management offered a compromise typical of a region with a markedly relaxed relationship to labor legislation: overtime would no longer be compulsory but the compensation would remain illegally low. The 2,000 workers returned to their sewing machines; all except 101 young women who —management decided —were the troublemakers behind the strike. “Until now our case is still not settled,” one of these workers told me, bursting with frustration and with no recourse in sight.

  I was sympathetic, of course, but, being the Western foreigner, I wanted to know what brand of garments they produced at the Kaho factory —if I was to bring their story home, I would have to have my journalistic hook. So here we were, ten of us, crowded into a concrete bunker only slightly bigger than a telephone booth, playing an enthusiastic round of labor charades.

  “This company produces long sleeves for cold seasons,” one worker offered.

  I guessed: “Sweaters?”

  “I think not sweaters. If you prepare to go out and you have a cold season you have a …”

  I got it: “Coat!”

  “But not heavy. Light.”

  “Jackets!”

  “Yes, like jackets, but not jackets —long.”

  You can understand the confusion: there isn’t much need for overcoats on the equator, not in the closet and not in the vocabulary. And yet increasingly, Canadians get through their cold winters not with clothing manufactured by the tenacious seamstresses still on Spadina Avenue but by young Asian women working in hot climates like this one. In 1997, Canada imported $11.7 million of anoraks and ski jackets from Indonesia, up from $4.7 million in 1993.1 That much I knew already. But I still didn’t know what brand of long coats the Kaho workers sewed before they lost their jobs.

  “Long, yes. And what’s on the label?” I asked again.

  There was a bit of hushed consultation, and then, finally, an answer: “London Fog.”

  A global coincidence, I suppose. I started to tell the Kaho workers that my apartment in Toronto used to be a London Fog coat factory but st
opped abruptly when it became clear from their facial expressions that the idea of anyone choosing to live in a garment building was nothing but alarming. In this part of the world, hundreds of workers every year burn to death because their dormitories are located upstairs from firetrap sweatshops.

  Sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the tiny dorm room, I thought of my neighbors back home: the Ashtanga yoga instructor on two, the commercial animators on four, the aromatherapy candle distributors on eight. It seems the young women in the export processing zone are our roommates of sorts, connected, as is so often the case, by a web of fabrics, shoelaces, franchises, teddy bears and brand names wrapped around the planet. Another logo we had in common was Esprit, also one of the brands manufactured in the zone. As a teenager I worked as a clerk in a store that sold Esprit clothes. And of course, McDonald’s: an outlet had just opened near Kaho, frustrating workers, because this so-called bargain food was squarely out of their price range.

  Usually, reports about this global web of logos and products are couched in the euphoric marketing rhetoric of the global village, an incredible place where tribespeople in remotest rain forests tap away on laptop computers, Sicilian grandmothers conduct E-business, and “global teens” share, to borrow a phrase from a Levi’s Web site, “a world-wide style culture.”2 Everyone from Coke to McDonald’s to Motorola has tailored their marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM’s long-running “Solutions for a Small Planet” campaign that most eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe.

  It hasn’t taken long for the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalization to wear thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high-gloss façade. More and more over the past four years, we in the West have been catching glimpses of another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing.