Naomi Klein, No Logo : Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, London: Flamingo
Introductory Remarks by Raj Patel
It remains sadly true that, in the words of Jean Zilbermann's wonderful 1994 film, Tout le Monde N'A Pas Eu la Chance d'Avoir les Parents Communistes. Not everyone has had the chance to have communist parents. Those of us without such good fortune have, it would seem, been turning in multitudes to Naomi Klein's widely feted and cited No Logo. For while it is a treatise on branding, an investigation of sweatshops, an examination of global restructuring in consumer capitalism and an indictment of the market, it is perhaps at its best in "mall-rat confessional" mode. Others have recorded in more detail and depth the shifts in US capitalism, the legacies of situationism, the systematic extraction of resources from South to North, and the exploitations of blacks and women in the culture and apparel industries. But Klein's braiding of these threads is part of an elegant meditation on her transition from a once overwhelming attraction to brand culture to a mature distaste for its operation. It is a journey from the mall to the streets. And it has proved to be both a resonant chronicle for a generation of young leftists, and a welcome echo for those who feared that they might not see again the anger and troublesome militancy of their youth in their lifetimes.
The symposium offers six very differently positioned perspectives on a central question in Naomi's book: how to extricate ourselves from a set of social relations that seem as total as they are oppressive? Linnie Rawlinson, who launched this symposium at the end of 2000, writes from the grassroots struggle in the UK, summarising Klein's argument magnificently, pointing to its lacunae, particularly in her coverage of resistance to globalisation, and despairing slightly of the possibilities of change. Andrew Reston is a little more upbeat, suggesting in examination of the dialectal and anti-dialectical relation between political aesthetics and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, that there is and must be hope. Jim Murphy suggests that resistance is futile, because unnecessary. He takes issue with Klein's exuberance, with the exaggerated crisis narrative that gives the book its breathless urgency, and with the silence over the middle classes whom, he argues, both benefit from and enjoy this particular brand of capitalism. John Venice, agreeing with Klein that all is not well in Mammon's house, scrutinizes the complicity of the middle classes, queer and otherwise, and sees No Logo as more a symptom than a cure. This complicity, suggests Paul Dundon, is a function of a political crisis, caused by the capture of democracy by capital. Finally, Palash Davé slots No Logo into a wider media world.
The editors wish to thank the Turtle's many and patient contributors for the delay in assembling this, the Turtle's Second Symposium.
Raj Patel, Harare 2001.
Note: We are not the only electronic
organ to sponsor discussion of No Logo. The book has its own website,
NoLogo.org , as well as reviews at Spike
Magazine, and Salon.com,
inter alia.
