Combating Consumerism and Capitalism: A Decade of No Logo

Critiques of global capitalism are hardly new. Since Marx's own analyses in the late-nineteenth century, each generation of left-wing intellectuals has produced devastating accounts of the operation of the capitalism system. The 1950s brought us Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy on monopoly power and John Kenneth Galbraith on advertising and affluence. In subsequent decades Latin American and European economists such as Raúl Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank exposed the unequal terms of trade between North and South. In the 1990s Thomas Frank and others assailed the commercialization of culture, and for almost this entire period, Noam Chomsky was writing on economics, politics, and culture. Yet when Naomi Klein's No Logo appeared in 2000, it was fresh and alive. The book became an overnight sensation, was translated into twenty-eight languages, was taught on countless college and university campuses, and turned Klein into a global superstar.

To some extent, No Logo's success was a result of fortuitous timing. While the book was in press, powerful protests rocked the Seattle World Trade Organization meetings. Seattle was the coming-out movement of the anti-corporate-globalization movement and within months it had its bible. Klein was not the only person writing on these events, but No Logo was special. It is brilliantly presented and lucidly written, and it pairs the journalist's firsthand reporting with a broader analysis. Its success in large part derives from its being a superlative book. But it also broke the mold in a particular way that I believe was key to its influence.

Marxism, and the Left more generally, had for most of its life span, suffered from a production-side bias. Marx himself paid scant attention to the consumer side of the economy, as is well known. Indeed, the few places in Capital where he talks about consumption, such as the section on the fetishism of commodities and the distinction between use and exchange value, are ritually invoked (and usually misinterpreted) in the literature on consumption. All the action in the economy, including the source of exploitation was on the labor side. By contrast, No Logo begins with brands and the story of their expansion over the previous two decades. Klein explains how Nike, Starbucks, McDonald's, the Gap, and many of the other global superbrands were expanding their advertising and marketing into new realms such as education and public space. Klein argued that the brand was no longer sponsoring culture, it aimed to be the culture. And that takeover of meaning-making was what led the activists and youth who figure large in her story to become enraged and take to the streets.

By tying the consumer side to the global sweatshop; the expansion of low-wage, temporary service sector jobs; and the political economy of capitalism, Klein offered a far more holistic, and more compelling, analysis than those of many of her predecessors. Baudrillard, who famously rejected Marxism in order to take consumer culture seriously, was never able to reintegrate the consumption and production sides. Critics of advertising and marketing rarely study conditions of production or flows of capital. By contrast, Klein developed a unique and distinctively real-time analysis of how the system was operating. She did the hard work of gathering first-hand knowledge from far-flung production sites and was able to identify the ways in which trends in consumer markets were driving production-side dynamics.

I do find at least one issue undertheorized in No Logo, which is the extent to which Klein's brand expansion has been motivated by strength or weakness. The text reads as if it is the former. But the work of Thomas Frank, Douglas Holt, and others suggests that contemporary branding strategy is a product of companies' declining ability to dictate meaning, or the loss of what Holt has called their "cultural authority." This began with the anticorporate backlash of the 1960s, which was in many ways a precursor to the activism Klein documents. To this recognition must be added the collapsing value of the advertisers' main asset: the television commercial.

In Holt's view...