As a teenager, Naomi Klein was a dedicated mall rat, fixated on designer labels. A decade later she is the author of a life- changing book on anti-corporatism. Katharine Viner meets the woman who is reinventing politics for a new generation >From the age of six, growing up in Canada, Naomi Klein was obsessed with brand names and what she could buy. She used to stitch fake alligators on to her T-shirts so they would look like Lacoste, had a Saturday job in Esprit (they had the best logo) and her biggest fights with her parents were over Barbie and the price of designer jeans. But now, aged 30, Klein has written a book, No Logo, which has been called “the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement”. The girl fixated on brand names has become a campaigner against an over- branded world, and a populariser of the kind of anti-corporate ideas that are fuelling protesters against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings in Prague. The book has been a word-of-mouth sensation, giving voice to a generation of people under 30 who have never related to politics until now. As a chronicler of what she calls “the next big political movement – and the first genuinely international people’s movement” – Klein writes that Nike paid Michael Jordan more in 1992 for endorsing its trainers ($20-million) than the company paid its entire 30 000-strong Indonesian workforce for making them; why, in her opinion, this makes people angry; and why that anger is expressed in rallies outside the Nike Town superstore rather than outside government buildings. She shows how globalisation has hit the poor, and how this new political movement is both historically informed and absolutely of the moment, like nothing that has gone before. Klein’s argument starts with what we all recognise. Logos, she says, are “the closest thing we have to an international language, by force of ubiquity”. Most of the world’s six billion people could identify the McDonald’s sign or the Coca- Cola symbol -we are united by what we are being sold. And the selling isn’t just in magazines or on billboards: Gordon’s gin fills British cinemas with the smell of juniper berries; in some Scandinavian countries you can get “free” long-distance calls if you consent to ads cutting into your telephone conversations. There’s no escape.
Furthermore, advertising today is not merely about selling products; it is about selling a brand, a dream. So Nike’s aim is not to sell trainers but to “enhance people’s lives through sports and fitness”. IBM doesn’t sell computers, it sells “solutions”. You sell the message of your brand, not your product and you can expand as widely as you like. As Richard Branson says, you “build brands not around products but around reputation” – and leap from record shops to cola to banking to trains. But it’s a fragile strategy. Look what happened to Nike – from being “the spirit of sports” in the early 1990s, the campaign against its use of sweatshops in developing countries led CEO Phil Knight to confess in 1998 that his shoes “have become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse”. When it’s no longer just about trainers, when the corporations have promised so much more – a way of life – they have very much more to lose. What’s more, says Klein, people start to resent the colonisation of their lives. Fine, they say, I’ll buy my shoes from you, but I don’t want you to take over my head. Young activists, says Klein, feel that their cultural and political space has been taken away and sold back to them, neatly- packaged, as “alternative” or “anti-sexist” or “anti-racist”. Take Nike ads saying, “I believe high heels are a conspiracy against women”, and signing up black stars such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and then adorning the walls of Nike Town with quotes from Woods saying: “There are still courses in the US where I am not allowed to play, because of the colour of my skin.” Next, the big brands effectively force out small businesses and take over as much space as possible. Starbucks coffee shops operate by “clustering”: an area becomes saturated with branches, local caf’s close down and the big brands take over. Meanwhile, McDonald’s wages a 26-year battle against a man called Ronald McDonald whose McDonald’s Family Restaurant in Illinois was founded in 1956. How dare he be born with the same name as a corporate giant?
And while the corporations are busy doing what they think is important – branding a way of life, putting the squeeze on independent shopkeepers, and the like – someone, somewhere, has to make the stuff. This may be a time of “degraded production in the age of the superbrand”, as Klein puts it, but corporations do tend to need a product somewhere along the line. The “death of manufacturing” is only a Western phenomenon – as we’re consuming more products than ever, someone must be making them. But it’s difficult to find out who. As Klein says, “the shift in attitude toward production is so profound that, where a previous era of consumer goods corporations displayed their logos on the facades of their factories, many of today’s brand-based multinationals maintain that the location of their production operations is a ‘trade secret’, to be guarded at all costs”. Very often, it seems, they are produced under terrible conditions in free- trade zones in Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere. The sweatshops Klein visited in Cavite, the largest free-trade zone in the Philippines, have rules against talking and smiling. There is forced overtime, but no job security – it’s “no work, no pay” when the orders don’t come in. Toilets are padlocked except during two 15-minute breaks a day – seamstresses sewing clothes for Western high-street chains told Klein that they have to urinate in plastic bags under their machines.
As Klein says, people are now demanding to know why, if the big brands have so much power and influence over price and marketing, they do not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical labour standards from suppliers. And don’t think that the developing world is the only place for exploitation by Western industry. Europe and North America have played host to the most extraordinary rise in impermanence at work over the past two decades. The “McJob” is a contemporary template: low-paid, no benefits, no union recognition and no guarantee of job security..
Microsoft has an extraordinary one-third of its workforce working as temps. As Klein says: “It was Microsoft, with its famous employee stock-option plan, that developed and fostered the mythology of Silicon Gold; but it is also Microsoft that has done the most to dismantle it.” So what happens when working conditions and modes of production fail to match up to a glorious, positive, right-on brand identity? People start to get angry. Anti- corporate activism is on the rise precisely because branding has worked so well, believes Klein, in a neat example of the Marxist idea that capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
“Multinationals such as Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sport, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become. When they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as the misdemeanours of another corporation trying to make a buck. This is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense, but shallow enough to turn on a dime.” Anti-brand activism is taking place on two fronts, says Klein. “On the one hand, it’s throwing bricks through McDonald’s windows in Seattle. On the other, it’s saying that we actually want the real thing, the real ‘third place’ [not home, not work] that Starbucks tries to sell to us, the real public space. People are saying: ‘I do want real community, this is a strong and powerful idea, and I resent the fact that this idea has been stolen from me.’ You’ve got these products that are held up on insane pedestals – all of the collective longings of our culture have been projected on to lattes or trainers. So there’s a process of actively denting the facade of the brand with the reality of the production.”
This deconstruction takes many forms. The activism includes “culture jamming”, whereby ads are subverted by “guerrilla artists” to send anti-corporate messages out to the public; jammers paint hollow skulls on the faces of Gap models, or change an Apple ad featuring the Dalai Lama and the slogan “Think Different” to “Think Disillusioned”.
Students in North America, meanwhile, have been active in anti-sweatshop campaigns. The tactics of many of these anti-sweatshop groups involve “head-on collisions between image and reality”, says Klein, whether it is filming an Indonesian Nike worker gasping as she learns that the trainers she made for $2 a day sell for $120 a pair in San Francisco Nike Town, or comparing the hourly salary of Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney ($9 783), with that of a Haitian worker who stitches Disney merchandise (28c).
Other brand tactics simply hit companies where it hurts most. Nike didn’t seem bothered about the campaign against it that took off so vehemently in the US in the mid-1990s, until a group of black 13-year- olds from the Bronx, the company’s target market and the one exploited by it to get a street-cool image, learned that the trainers they bought for $180 cost $5 to make, which led to a mass dumping of their old Nike trainers outside New York’s Nike Town.
The UK’s McLibel trial, which began in 1990, hurt McDonald’s so seriously – even though the firm eventually won the case – because it forced the company to be open about its business practices. After suing two British environmentalists for libel, the firm was forced to spend 313 days in court defending every detail of its business.
Some activists use the courtroom; others humiliate corporations on TV or gather wherever there is an international summit. And in the developing world, home to the main victims of the global economy, rural activists burn GM seeds (Karnataka state farmers in India), revolt against the privatisation of the water system (Bolivia), strike and take over the national university over a World Bank edict to raise student fees (Mexico). The protest in Seattle was so huge because it was diverse; the US union movement marched side by side with the head of the Filipino peasant movement. It is global, anarchic and chaotic, like the Internet it uses to organise; it is, says Klein, “the Internet come to life”.
Klein grew up with politics all around her. Her grandparents were American Marxists in the 1930s and 1940s; her grandfather was an animator at Disney who was fired and blacklisted for organising the company’s first strike. Her parents moved to Canada in protest at the Vietnam War. Her mother, Bonnie Klein, made the seminal anti- pornography film, This is Not a Love Story, in 1980. “My mother was really involved in the anti- pornography movement, and when I was at school I found it very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother.” This, she says, is part of the reason she wanted nothing to do with politics when she was growing up. “I think it’s why I embraced full-on consumerism. I was in constant conflict with my parents and I wanted them to leave me the hell alone.” So, after years of obsession with Barbie, Girl’s World and Disneyland, what brought about the change? “I know the only way that I escaped the mall – which is not to say that I don’t ever go, or enjoy it – the only way I got consumerism and vanity into a sane place in my life, though I don’t think we are ever rid of them, was just by becoming interested in other things. It’s that simple. Saying that you’re a bad person for buying this or wanting this only turns people off.” Klein became an outspoken feminist activist at university, campaigning on issues of media representation and gender visibility that constituted feminism at the end of the 1980s – she received rape threats as a result – and, rather than finish her degree, she dropped out to work as an intern on the Toronto Globe and Mail. She left to become editor of an alternative political magazine, This Magazine. “When I was there [in the early 1990s], I did not feel that we were part of a political movement in any way – in that there was not a left. We had to kind of invent it as we went along.” The left that did exist Klein found depressing. “The only thing leftwing voices were saying was stop the cuts, stop the world we want to get off. It was very negative and regressive, it wasn’t imaginative, it didn’t have its own sense of itself in any way.” It was around this time that advertising and branding started to co-opt alternative politics and culture. “On the one hand, there was this total paralysis of the left. But, at the same time, all these ideas that I had thought were the left – feminism and diversity and gay and lesbian rights – were suddenly very chic. So, on the one hand, you’re politically totally disempowered, and on the other all the imagery is pseudo- feminist, Benetton is an anti-racism organisation. I watched my own politics become commercialised.” This imagery was, she says, a “mask for capitalism. It was making it more difficult to see the power dynamics in society. Because this was a time when there was a growing income gap between rich and poor that was quite staggering all over the world – and yet everything looked way more equitable, in terms of the imagery of the culture.”
When Klein went back to university in 1995 to try to finish her degree, something had changed. “I met this new generation of young radicals who had grown up taking for granted the idea that corporations are more powerful than governments, that it doesn’t matter who you elect because they’ll all act the same. And they were, like, fine, we’ll go where the power is. We’ll adapt. It didn’t fill them with dread and depression.
“When I was at university before, we thought our only power was to ban something – but they were very hands-on, DIY, if you don’t like something change it, cut it, paste it, download it. Even though I don’t think culture jamming by itself is a powerful political tool, there’s something about that posture that’s impressive – it’s unintimidated hand-to-brand contact. The young activists I know have grounded their political activism in economic analysis and an understanding of how power works. They’re way more sophisticated than we were because they’ve had to be. Because capitalism is way more sophisticated now. “I think I’m lucky because I got to witness a significant shift, something that changed, and I wanted to document that shift. And it seemed clear to me that if there was going to be a future for the left it would have to be an anti-corporate movement.”
And so, Seattle in November last year – where 50 000 demonstrators prevented a major World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting from happening – did she expect it to be so big? “Oh no. Seattle surprised me with its militancy. It surprised the organisers. It surprised everyone. I mean, this was the States. There were all these underground networks of activism, and it just came to life. Right now, the movement is at the stage of grassroots ferment – and it’ll either degenerate into chaos or it’ll come together organically into something new.”
As for this week’s protests against the IMF and World Bank meetings in Prague, Klein is concerned that the media has already portrayed the demonstrators as mad terrorists crossing continents with the sole intention of kicking some Czech police.
“Months ago we were already seeing the most extreme attempts to criminalise protest. This is a protest about the IMF and the World Bank, and the effects they’re having on poorer countries. We must not let the reaction of the state and the police entirely define the message. I’m going to Prague because I believe it is a crucially important opportunity to show the world what this movement really is – the first genuinely international people’s movement.”
Some wonder whether the IMF and corporations are the right target. Isn’t it governments that we should be aiming at, since it is governments which gave the corporations such power in the first place? “I think these corporations are not really targets, they are metaphors. They’re being used by this generation of young activists as a popular education tool to understand the global economy. When I was at university we were intimidated and didn’t understand anything about globalisation. So we tuned out from that and turned in on ourselves and became more and more insular – which is the great irony of those years, because that was when all this accelerated globalisation was happening. We weren’t watching. And what I see happening with, say, the campaign against Nike is a tactic on the part of activists who’ve decided to turn these companies into metaphors for the global economy gone awry.” In other words, when the global economy is so huge, the corporations are an accessible way in. “When the WTO was created in Uruguay in 1995 there were no protesters outside. These trade bureaucrats created a world of incredibly complex institutions and arcane trade agreements written by policy wonks with no interest in popularising. So I believe that anti- corporate campaigns are the bridge: they’re the first baby step to developing an analysis of global capitalism.” So, is this a reinvention of left politics? After a decade in the wilderness, is anti- corporatism the post-Cold War new New Left? “I think it is,” says Klein, “but it’s only at the early stages of reinvention. Sometimes I think it’s moving towards creating a global new deal, and sometimes I think it’s way more radical than that. And it might be – I don’t know.” I mention the impact of the word “capitalism”, which was out of fashion until June 1999, when protesters staged an “anti-capitalist” demonstration in London. “The comeback of the word ‘capitalism’ is extraordinary,” says Klein. “Suddenly they’re talking about ‘capitalism’ on CNN … For a long time, the word has been invisible – it’s just the economy, the way the world works.” And that change has happened in little more than a year. “That’s why I feel optimistic, and I’m not impatient about the pace of change.” The trouble is, we’re used to thinking that something that is anti-capitalist must be socialist or communist, which is not the case with this movement. It is, instead, “an amalgam of environmentalism, anti- capitalism, anarchy and the kitchen sink”, says Klein – which leads us to the central criticism levelled at the anti-corporate protests. What do they stand for? “I think I have more patience for finding this out than most people,” says Klein. “I’ve been following this movement for five years, and I know where we were at five years ago and I know where we are now. We were nowhere. That a genuine political movement can begin to emerge in that timespan, on its own – it’s extraordinary. “
Even such diverse campaigns – from groups fighting against Nike, or agribusiness or world debt – “share a belief that the disparate problems with which they are wrestling all derive from global deregulation, an agenda that is concentrating power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands”. And the fragmentation of the campaigns, says Klein, is a “reasonable, even ingenious adaptation of changes in the broader culture”. The movement, with its hubs and spokes and hotlinks, its emphasis on information rather than ideology, reflects the tool it uses – it is the “Internet come to life”. When people say that the movement lacks vision, says Klein, what they really mean is that it is different from anything that’s gone before, that it is a completely new kind of movement – just as the Internet is a completely new kind of medium. “What critics are really saying is that the movement lacks an overarching revolutionary philosophy, such as Marxism, democratic socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy, on which they all agree.” But the movement should not, says Klein, be in a hurry to define itself. “Before they sign on to anyone’s 10-point plan, they deserve the chance to see if, out of the movement’s chaotic, decentralised, multi- headed webs, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge.” There’s a personal recollection in No Logo in which Klein talks about being 17 and wondering what to do with her life. She was frustrated, because if you wanted to be a traveller Lonely Planet had got there first; if you wanted to be an avant-garde artist, someone had done it all already, and put the image on a mug for you to take home. All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper,” she writes. “That was enough escape for them.” Now it feels as if there is “no open space anywhere”. It is as if this generation’s culture is being sold out as they are living it; there is nothing left to discover. Her thesis is about trying to find some space that hasn’t been bought up by anyone; trying to rediscover our identities as citizens, and not just consumers. It is about globalisation, and the power corporations have over our lives. But it is also about being 30, having spent your youth in a disaffected age. Her grandfather, the animator blacklisted by McCarthy, would be proud: Klein might just be helping reinvent politics for a new generation.
No Logo, by Naomi Klein, is published by HarperCollins