by Naomi Klein
This is a village where some multinationals, far from leveling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet’s poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the village where Bill Gates lives, amassing a fortune of $55 billion while a third of his workforce is classified as temporary workers, and where competitors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made obsolete by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one I visited outside Jakarta. IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labor producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manila, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who assembles CD-ROM drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. “We make computers,” she told me, “but we don’t know how to operate computers.” Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all.
It would be naive to believe that Western consumers haven’t profited from these global divisions since the earliest days of colonialism. The Third World, as they say, has always existed for the comfort of the First. What is a relatively new development, however, is the amount of investigative interest there seems to be in the unbranded points of origin of brand-name goods. The travels of Nike sneakers have been traced back to the abusive sweatshops of Vietnam, Barbie’s little outfits back to the child laborers of Sumatra, Starbucks’ lattes to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala, and Shell’s oil back to the polluted and impoverished villages of the Niger Delta.
The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I’m told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple 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.
I must stress, however, that this is not a book of predictions, but of firsthand observation. It is an examination of a largely underground system of information, protest and planning, a system already coursing with activity and ideas crossing many national borders and several generations.
Four years ago, when I started to write this book, my hypothesis was mostly based on a hunch. I had been doing some research on university campuses and had begun to notice that many of the students I was meeting were preoccupied with the inroads private corporations were making into their public schools. They were angry that ads were creeping into cafeterias, common rooms, even washrooms; that their schools were diving into exclusive distribution deals with soft-drink companies and computer manufacturers, and that academic studies were starting to look more and more like market research.
They worried that their education was suffering, as institutional priority shifted to those programs most conducive to private-sector partnership. They also had serious ethical concerns about the practices of some of the corporations that their schools were becoming entangled with —not so much their on-campus activities, but their practices far away, in countries like Burma, Indonesia and Nigeria.
It had only been a few years since I left university myself, so I knew this was a rather sudden change in political focus; five years earlier, campus politics was all about issues of discrimination and identity —race, gender and sexuality, “the political correctness wars.” Now they were broadening out to include corporate power, labor rights, and a fairly developed analysis of the workings of the global economy. It’s true that these students do not make up the majority of their demographic group — in fact, this movement is coming, as all such movements do, from a minority, but it is an increasingly powerful minority. Simply put, anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and shit-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.
At around the same time, in my reporting for magazines and newspapers, I also started noticing similar ideas at the center of a wave of recent social and environmental campaigns. Like the campus activists I was meeting, the people leading these campaigns were focused on the effects of aggressive corporate sponsorships and retailing on public space and cultural life, both globally and locally. There were small-town wars being waged all over North America to keep out the “big-box” retailers like Wal-Mart. There was the McLibel Trial in London, a case of two British environmentalists who turned a libel suit McDonald’s launched against them into a global cyberplatform that put the ubiquitous food franchise on trial. There was an explosion of protest and activity targeting Shell Oil after the shocking hanging of Nigerian author and anti-Shell activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
There was also the morning when I woke up and every billboard on my street had been “jammed” with anticorporate slogans by midnight bandits. And the fact that the squeegee kids who slept in the lobby of my building all seemed to be wearing homemade patches on their clothing with a Nike “swoosh” logo and the word “Riot.”
There was a common element shared by all these scattered issues and campaigns: in each case, the focus of the attack was a brand-name corporation — Nike, Shell, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s (and others: Microsoft, Disney, Starbucks, Monsanto and so on). Before I began writing this book, I didn’t know if these pockets of anticorporate resistance had anything in common besides their name-brand focus, but I wanted to find out. This personal quest has taken me to a London courtroom for the handing down of the verdict in the McLibel Trial; to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s friends and family; to anti-sweatshop protests outside Nike Towns in New York and San Francisco; and to union meetings in the food courts of glitzy malls. It took me on the road with an “alternative” billboard salesman and on the prowl with “adbusters” out to “jam” the meaning of those billboards with their own messages. And it brought me, too, to several impromptu street parties whose organizers are determined to briefly liberate public space from its captivity by ads, cars and cops. It took me to clandestine encounters with computer hackers threatening to cripple the systems of American corporations found to be violating human rights in China.
Most memorably, it led me to factories and union squats in Southeast Asia, and to the outskirts of Manila where Filipino workers are making labor history by bringing the first unions to the export processing zones that produce the most recognizable brand-name consumer items on the planet.
Over the course of this journey, I came across an American student group that focuses on multinationals in Burma, pressuring them to pull out because of the regime’s violations of human rights. In their communiqués, the student activists identify themselves as “Spiders” and the image strikes me as a fitting one for this Web-age global activism. Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have to an international language, recognized and understood in many more places than English. Activists are now free to swing off this web of logos like spy/spiders — trading information about labor practices, chemical spills, animal cruelty and unethical marketing around the world.
I have become convinced that it is in these logo-forged global links that global citizens will eventually find sustainable solutions for this sold planet. I don’t claim that this book will articulate the full agenda of a global movement that is still in its infancy. My concern has been to track the early stages of resistance and to ask some basic questions. What conditions have set the stage for this backlash? Successful multinational corporations are increasingly finding themselves under attack, whether it’s a cream pie in Bill Gates’s face or the incessant parodying of the Nike s
woosh —what are the forces pushing more and more people to become suspicious of or even downright en raged at multinational corporations, the very engines of our global growth? Perhaps more pertinently, what is liberating so many people —particularly young people — to act on that rage and suspicion?
These questions may seem obvious, and certainly some obvious answers are kicking around. That corporations have grown so big they have superseded government. That unlike governments, they are accountable only to their shareholders; that we lack the mechanisms to make them answer to a broader public. There have been several exhaustive books chronicling the ascendancy of what has come to be called “corporate rule,” many of which have proved invaluable to my own understanding of global economics (see Reading List, page 479).
This book is not, however, another account of the power of the select group of corporate Goliaths that have gathered to form our de facto global government. Rather, the book is an attempt to analyze 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 market trends that are creating increasingly tenuous relationships to employment for many workers, including self-employment, 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.
Two faces of branded comfort. Top: Aunt Jemima from Quaker Oats’ early packaging, humanizes production for a population fearful of industrialization. Bottom: Martha Stewart, one of the new breed of branded humans.
CHAPTER ONE
NEW BRANDED WORLD
As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?
—David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, in Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1963
The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations over the last fifteen years can arguably be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.
Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering one’s brand name was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods. This idea was the very gospel of the machine age. An editorial that appeared in Fortune magazine in 1938, for instance, argued that the reason the American economy had yet to recover from the Depression was that America had lost sight of the importance of making things:
This is the proposition that the basic and irreversible function of an industrial economy is the making of things; that the more things it makes the bigger will be the income, whether dollar or real; and hence that the key to those lost recuperative powers lies … in the factory where the lathes and the drills and the fires and the hammers are. It is in the factory and on the land and under the land that purchasing power originates [italics theirs].1
And for the longest time, the making of things remained, at least in principle, the heart of all industrialized economies. But by the eighties, pushed along by that decade’s recession, some of the most powerful manufacturers in the world had begun to falter. A consensus emerged that corporations were bloated, oversized; they owned too much, employed too many people, and were weighed down with too many things. The very process of producing —running one’s own factories, being responsible for tens of thousands of full-time, permanent employees — began to look less like the route to success and more like a clunky liability.
At around this same time a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional all-American manufacturers for market share; these were the Nikes and Microsofts, and later, the Tommy Hilfigers and Intels. These pioneers made the bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that thanks to recent victories in trade liberalization and labor-law reform, they were able to have their products made for them by contractors, many of them overseas. What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing. This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race.
And so the wave of mergers in the corporate world over the last few years is a deceptive phenomenon: it only looks as if the giants, by joining forces, are getting bigger and bigger. The true key to understanding these shifts is to realize that in several crucial ways — not their profits, of course —these merged companies are actually shrinking. Their apparent bigness is simply the most effective route toward their real goal: divestment of the world of things.
Since many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images. Manufacturing products may require drills, furnaces, hammers and the like, but creating a brand calls for a completely different set of tools and materials. It requires an endless parade of brand extensions, continuously renewed imagery for marketing and, most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate the brand’s idea of itself. In this section of the book, I’ll look at how, in ways both insidious and overt, this corporate ob session with brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space: on public institutions such as schools, on youthful identities, on the concept of nationality and on the possibilities for unmarketed space.
The Beginning of the Brand
It’s helpful to go back briefly and look at where the idea of branding first began. Though the words are often used interchangeably, branding and advertising are not the same process. Advertising any given product is only one part of branding’s grand plan, as are sponsorship and logo licensing. Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation, and of the advertisement as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world.
The first mass-marketing campaigns, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, had more to do with advertising than with branding as we understand it today. Faced with a range of recently invented products —the radio, phonograph, car, light bulb and so on —advertisers had more pressing tasks than creating a brand identity for any given corporation; first, they had to change the way people lived their lives. Ads had to inform consumers about the existence of some new invention, then convince them that their lives would be better if they used, for example, cars instead of wagons, telephones instead of mail and electric light instead of oil lamps. Many of these new products bore brand names —some of which are still around today —but these were almost incidental. These products were themselves news; that was almost advertisement enough.
The first brand-based products appeared at around the same time as the invention-based ads, largely because of another relatively recent innovation: the factory. When goods began to be produced in factories, not only were entirely new products b
eing introduced but old products —even basic staples —were appearing in strikingly new forms. What made early branding efforts different from more straightforward salesmanship was that the market was now being flooded with uniform mass-produced products that were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age —within a context of manufactured sameness, image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product.
So the role of advertising changed from delivering product news bulletins to building an image around a particular brand-name version of a product. The first task of branding was to bestow proper names on generic goods such as sugar, flour, soap and cereal, which had previously been scooped out of barrels by local shopkeepers. In the 1880s, corporate logos were introduced to mass-produced products like Campbell’s Soup, H.J. Heinz pickles and Quaker Oats cereal. As design historians and theorists Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller note, logos were tailored to evoke familiarity and folksiness (see Aunt Jemima), in an effort to counteract the new and un settling anonymity of packaged goods. “Familiar personalities such as Dr. Brown, Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and Old Grand-Dad came to replace the shopkeeper, who was traditionally responsible for measuring bulk foods for customers and acting as an advocate for products … a nationwide vocabulary of brand names replaced the small local shopkeeper as the interface between consumer and product.”2 After the product names and characters had been established, advertising gave them a venue to speak directly to would-be consumers. The corporate “personality,” uniquely named, packaged and advertised, had arrived.