Denne artikkelen anbefales meget sterkt. - Per
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NO LOGO: A BRILLIANT BUT FLAWED PORTRAIT OF
CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM
A review of No Logo, by Naomi Klein, HarperCollins/Flamingo, London,
2000. 490 pp by Walden Bello
When the young Canadian woman modestly handed me her book, with
the quiet dedication "to Walden, with respect and solidarity," little did I
know that I was receiving a stick of dynamite. Before our meeting at the
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, a few weeks ago, I had, of
course, heard of Naomi Klein and had read somewhere that her No
Logo was fast becoming the anthem of the anti-globalization movement.
But nothing had prepared me for the dizzying intellectual experience of
going through the book.
No Logo is compelling, but it is not an easy read. Reading Klein is like
serving alongside a skilled commander, who probes the enemy's many
defenses to expose them in order to better locate the principal point of
vulnerability. The probing is incessant, and just when the reader thinks
the author has identified the key to the defense, she reveals that this is
only one episode in unraveling the dynamics of contemporary
capitalism. She pushes on with the reconnaissance, but you can only
take so much in one sitting. This is deconstructive writing at its best, the
product of a first-rate, restless mind that is not satisfied with drawing a
solitary insight or two from her material but a train of them.
Klein's analysis is not without its flaws, and these are not insignificant.
But before pointing these out, one must first unpack the gems, for they
are priceless.
AGE OF THE BRAND
Klein's essential point is that capitalism in the age of globalization is the
age of the brand, the logo. Logos are everywhere, staring at you during
your most private operation in the john; invading once clearly marked
delineated public spaces like schools; becoming, like the Nike swoosh,
the centerpiece of athletic and cultural spectacles. We live in a
"branded world" where taste, cultural standards, and ultimately even
values are increasingly defined by mega-brands like Nike, whose
swoosh has come to represent the ultimate in athletic style and whose
slogan "Just Do It" identified it with the assertion of individuality.
The Age of the Brand witnesses the evolution of a new relationship
between the producer and its product. Whereas brands were originally
meant to assure the quality of the product, today the brand has
detached itself from the product to become instead the selling point.
Klein distills this insight in one gem of a paragraph that is worth quoting
in full:
Many brand-name multinationals are in the process of transcending the
need to identify with their earthbound products. They dream instead
about their brands' deep inner meanings-the way they capture the spirit
of individuality, athleticism, wilderness or community. In this context of
strut over stuff, marketing departments charged with the managing of
brand identities have begun to see their work as something that occurs
not in conjunction with factory production but in direct competition with it.
'Products are made in the factory,' says Walter Landor, president of the
Landor branding agency, 'but brands are made in the mind.' Peter
Schweitzer, president of the advertising giant J. Walter Thompson,
reiterates the same thought: 'The difference between products and
brands is fundamental. A product is something that is made in a factory;
a brand is something that is bought by a customer.' Savvy ad agencies
all have moved away from the idea that they are flogging a product
made by someone else, and have come to think of themselves instead
as brand factories, hammering out what is of true value: the idea, the
lifestyle, the attitude. Brand builders are the new primary producers in
our so-called knowledge economy.
Brand after brand is unsparingly deconstructed: Levi Strauss,
Starbucks, Pepsi, McDonalds, Wal Marts, MTV, Tommy Hilfiger, to
name just a few. It is, however, Nike that is the book's bete noire and
Nike CEO Phil Knight that emerges as its anti-hero.
NIKE: THE BRAND TAKES CENTRE STAGE
Nike began as a firm identified with a popular "high tech" sneaker, which
soared on America's jogging craze in the sixties and seventies. It was,
however, in the mid-eighties, when the jogging mania subsided and
Reebok cornered the market in trendy aerobic sneakers that Phil Knight
pushed the transition of Nike from being a sneaker producer to being
promoter of a lifestyle, to being the "essence of athleticism."
Nike signed on Michael Jordan to personify the Nike spirit, clambering
on Jordan's basketball skills to become a superbrand while
simultaneously turning Jordan into a global superstar with a stunning
advertising campaign. Then Nike went on to become a force in
professional sports, buying the Ben Hogan Golf Tour and renaming it
the Nike Tour, setting up a sports agency of its own to represent
athletes in contract negotiations not only with team owners but also other
would-be corporate sponsors, and even creating Africa's first Olympic
ski team for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. The third step was to
"brand like mad," meaning stamp the Nike swoosh on all clothing
connected with sports: track suits, T-shirts, bathing suits, socks. And the
aim of all this? "[B]y equating the company with athletes and athleticism
at such a primal level," asserts Klein, "Nike ceased to merely clothe the
game and started to play it. And once Nike was in the game with its
athletes, it could have fanatical sports fans instead of customers."
Having identified Nike with sports, Knight is moving to bring the swoosh
to new frontiers, like entertainment, where he is about to launch a
swooshed cruise ship. The latest marketing doctrine motivating Nike
and other successful brands is that profitability lies in creating
"synergy." Simply dominating an industry is no longer enough. The
brand must expand laterally into other dimensions of existence, from
sports to entertainment to school to culture. "[I]f music, why not food,
asks Puff Daddy. If clothes, why not retail, asks Tommy Hilfiger. If retail,
why not music, asks the Gap. If coffee houses, why not publishing, asks
Starbucks. If theme parks, why not towns, asks Disney."
It was not only size that motivated the mega-mergers of the 1990's, says
Klein. America Online's merger with Time, Viacom with CBS, Disney's
purchase of ABC-all this and more were driven by the desire to enclose
the consumer's waking life within the brand. With the brand moving from
denoting a product to denoting lifestyle, the aim has become no less
than to seduce the consumer into believing that "you can live your whole
life inside it." Thus the fiercest fights are no longer between warring
products but "between warring branded camps that are constantly
redrawing the borders around their enclaves, pushing the boundaries to
include more lifestyle packages...."
"HIJACKING COOL"
The flight from selling the product to selling a lifestyle associated with a
brand takes place in a market that is dominated by the "youth
demographic." Thus the importance of being associated with what is
"cool." And "cool," Nike and Tommy Hilfiger discovered, was to be
found in the black ghetto. The megabrands cloned ghetto wear,
testmarketed them among poor young blacks in America's inner cities,
then spun them off into the white middle class youth market. What the
admen saw as innovative marketing, Klein sees as an essentially
parasitic relationship. And what the brands did to cultural expressions
of youth alienation and revolt-punk, hip-hop, fetish, and retro-they also
did to feminism, gay liberation, and multiculturalism. That is, turn anti-
establishment themes into promotional hits for the brands, like Nike's
"Just do it." Not even the corporations' fiercest enemies were spared
from being potential advertising copy. Nike offered Ralph Nader
$25,000 to hold up an Air 120 sneaker while saying, "Another shameless
attempt by Nike to sell shoes." Nader refused.
FLEEING THE FACTORY
The flight from product marketing to brand marketing has relegated
manufacturing to a subordinate role in contemporary capitalism.
Contracting out production to nameless producers kept on a tight leash,
the mega-brand innovators found, could save money that could then be
plowed back to marketing the brand. "Traveling light" came into vogue,
meaning shedding your own factories, cutting your work force, and
passing the dirty task of production to fly-by-night Taiwanese or Korean
operators moving from one export processing zone to another in Asia.
Some of the book's most poignant pages are on the life of
globalization's paradigmatic labor force: unionized, horribly underpaid,
permanently "temporary" female workers in the export processing zone
of Rosario, Cavite, in the Philippines. Here the illusion of the benefits of
foreign investment for developing countries is dashed to pieces by the
reality of young lives wasting away in factories that are more like
prisons, of wages that are so low that most workers' pay is spent on
shared dorm rooms, transportation, and basic sustenance, of
government officials so scared of investors leaving for Vietnam or China
that they offer the footloose subcontractors all sorts of tax breaks and
dare not allow unionism.
As in other matters, Nike led the way. Shedding its factories in the North,
Nike transferred its production to subcontractors, who proceeded to do
the dirty work of squeezing wages, institutionalizing forced overtime, and
preventing union organizing. That the same subcontractor sometimes
churned out Nike sneakers along with Adidas and Reebok sneakers
was not unusual. When confronted with accusations of exploiting labor,
Nike, Adidas, and Reebok would wash their hands off responsibility,
saying that that was a matter between workers and the subcontractor.
What goes around comes around, and what Nike and the other
megabrands did to workers in the South, they also did to the young
workers selling their products in the North: eliminate permanent
employment, do away with benefits, pay them the minimum wage, keep
them part-time, and sever the last non-instrumental tie by contracting
them from temp agencies. Many functions that were once performed in-
house by permanent employees have now been contracted out
wholesale to temp agencies which "have become full service human
resource departments for all your no-commitment staffing needs,
including accounting, filing, manufacturing and computer services." The
new mantra for the street-smart CEO comes from Tom Peters: "You're a
damn fool if you own it." And the apotheosis of the age is the CEO for
hire, like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, an individual paid millions in salary and
stock options to put a corporation back in the black, whose first act in
office was almost invariably to slash the work force.
The result was corporate overreach. Any student of social movements
could have told the wonder boys of brand capitalism that the
combination of invasive advertising, cultural piracy, casualization of the
labor force, and desertion of communities would create resistance, and
that it would spur a backlash even among the very people that whose
taste, style, and values the megabrands had labored so hard to mold:
the young. In a series of well-publicized David-versus-Goliath
confrontations in the 1990's, public opinion tilted the balance towards the
Davids. Nike confronted the global anti-Nike campaign, and it blinked.
Shell and Greenpeace fought at close quarters over the Brent Spar in
the North Sea, and Shell retreated. McDonalds sued two
environmentalists in London for libel, and it ended up crying uncle. By
the late 1990's, these campaigns and others were merging into a real
global anti-corporate movement, one that was intensely political but,
unlike the old left, decentralized, pluralist, non-hierarchical, intensely
networked via the Internet--thanks to folks like AOL's Steve Case and
Bill Gates--and uncompromising. "When I started this book," writes
Klein, "I honestly did not know whether I was covering marginal
atomized scenes of resistance or the birth of a potentially broad-based
movement. But as time went on, what I clearly saw was a movement
forming before my eyes." Written before the Seattle Uprising that
brought down the WTO Ministerial in December 1999, No Logo was
prophetic.
BUT MANAFACTURING MATTERS
No Logo is brilliant but flawed. At every opportunity, Klein reminds us
that in today's capitalism, manufacturing has yielded the place of honor
to marketing. This is, however, a case of pushing an insight a bridge
too far. The decentering of manufacturing may well be the case in the
footwear and garment industries, in services, or in entertainment, where
technological input is low relative to other sectors of the economy. But it
is definitely not the case in those sectors that drive the rest of the
economy, like the electronics industry.
Intel, for instance, functions like an old fashioned brand. It does not
denote a distinctive lifestyle like the Nike swoosh does; it signals that
you are using state-of-the-art chips. Likewise, the Cisco Systems logo
denotes only one thing to the thousands of dot.com businesses that rely
on it for the key components of the hardware and software that make the
Internet possible: that its manufactured products are indispensable.
The Microsoft Windows brand may denote all sorts of things, but if the
firm's capabilities of its software and Internet products fall behind the
competition, not even the slickest brand campaign will be able to
protect Microsoft's bottom line. Marketing differentiates otherwise
similar products in the light industrial, retail, and service sectors.
Manufacturing matters once you get to the technology-intensive sector.
As in earlier eras of capitalism, the edge in production today is
provided by superior capital resources, monopoly over high
technology, and control over markets. Market dominance is not simply
a function of good marketing. It is dependent on generating the capital
resources that would give one a lock on cutting-edge technology that
can translate into a superior product. Of course, light industry, retail,
and entertainment dance are critical sectors of the economy, but they
dance to the tune of the revolutions in the techno-manufacturing sector.
Indeed, even in light industry, the focus on marketing instead of
production is actually a defensive move stemming from developments
at the level of production. The move from pushing the product to
flogging the brand came after Asian producers began to swamp the US
market with imports that were not only cheap but damn good.
Moving upmarket and leaving the lower end to the Asians and other
developing country producers provided only temporary relief since it
was only a matter of time before the Asians could match the Northern
firms in design and quality, as Hongkong-based producers like Bossini
and Giordano showed. Unlike the smaller garments and textile firms
that sought to save themselves by pushing their governments to limit
Asian imports via quotas, the mega-brands, seeing that this was dead-
end solution, chose an innovative defense: subcontract your production
to the brutally cost-effective Asian producers, while keeping them in line
by tightening up on "intellectual property rights," by securing the
passage of draconian international legislation protecting the brand.
THE USE OF TRIPs
Thus the importance of the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPs), which is the centerpiece of the landmark
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization
(GATT/WTO). The TRIPs section on the protection of trademarks
could easily have been drafted by Levi Strauss or Nike lawyers--and it
is surprising is that while she has scattered, sometimes insightful
comments on copyright laws, Klein fails to systematically examine the
relationship between the emerging needs of the mega-brands and the
US government's push for the incorporation of TRIPs into the WTO
agreement.
But it is not the section on trademarks that is the most critical part of
TRIPs. It is the section on patents, especially patents on process
technologies that are at the heart of high technology manufacturing. The
TRIPs regime provides a generalized minimum patent protection of 20
years. It radically increases the duration of protection for semi-
conductors or computer chips. It institutes draconian border regulations
against products judged to be violating intellectual property rights. And
it places the burden of proof on the presumed violator of process
patents-an interesting reversal of the legal principle of being regarded
innocent until proven guilty.
TRIPs was meant to protect the low-tech Nikes and Tommy Hilfigers,
but it was intended most of all for the Microsofts, the Pfizers, and the
Monsantos. These knowledge-intensive manufacturers are the drivers
of the US economy. Monopoly is their game, and the WTO's TRIPs
agreement is their medium. Innovation in the knowledge-intensive
manufacturing sector-in electronic software and hardware,
biotechnology, lasers, optoelectronics, liquid crystal technology, to
name but a few industries-has become the central determinant of
economic power in our time. And when any company in Asia and other
parts of the developing world wishes to innovate, say in chip design or
software, it necessarily has to integrate several patented designs and
processes, most of them from electronic hardware and software giants
like Microsoft, Intel, and Texas Instruments. As the Koreans have bitterly
learned, exorbitant multiple royalty payments to what has been called
the American "high tech mafia" keeps one's profit margins low while
reducing incentives for local innovation.
The likely upshot of all this is that Asian hi-tech manufacturers like
Samsung or even Acer will follow the lead of their low-tech brethren in
textiles and garments, and subcontract production from the Suns, the
Apples, and the Intels. TRIPs enables the technological leader, in this
case the United States, to greatly influence, if not determine, the pace of
technological and industrial development in rival industrialized
countries, the newly industrialized countries, and the developing world.
Manufacturing matters, and in this age of globalized production,
monopoly of technology provides the critical edge.
MISSING I: THE CRISIS OF OVERPRODUCTION
Klein's focus on marketing instead of manufacturing also leads to quasi-
metaphysical formulations like the assertion that it is the need "to
transcend the need to identify with their earthbound products" that is the
driving force of today's corporations. If marketing has become so fierce
and innovative, it is because of the exacerbation, owing to globalization,
of the old contradiction that marked capitalism from its birth: the crisis of
overproduction or underconsumption.
Capitalism is marked by cycles of expansion and contraction. In the
expansive phase, expectations of continuing profit cause firms to invest
in capacity. Overinvestment or overcapacity results, leading to a crunch
in profits. In the current cycle, profits stopped growing in 1997. With
tremendous capacity all around, firms tried to offset the plunge in
profitability by reducing competition. "Synergy" may have been a
motivation in some cases, as Klein claims, but it was the elimination of
competition that was the goal of the most important mega-mergers and
mega-"alliances" of the last few years --the Daimler Benz-Chrysler-
Mitsubishi union, the Renault takeover of Nissan, the Mobil-Exxon
merger, the BP-Amoco-Arco deal, and the blockbuster"Star Alliance" in
the airline industry.
The US computer industry's capacity is rising at 40 percent annually, far
above expected increases in demand. In the auto industry, worldwide
supply is expected to reach 80 million in the period 1998-2002, while
demand will rise to only 75 percent of the total. The consolidation of the
global car industry into less than 20 major players is essentially a drive
to reduce the capacity of an immensely productive industry. As
economist Gary Shilling puts it, there are "excessive supplies of almost
everything." Overproduction or underconsumption is a function of
consumer demand, and the more the corporations try to increase their
profits by limiting competition, the deeper grows the crisis since limiting
the competition translates into layoffs and the transformation of the work
force into part-time, temporary, free-lance, and home-based workers.
This means cutting the very consumer demand that is needed to
stimulate production.
Income distribution is another factor limiting demand and inducing
overcapacity. While the US economy was expansive in the 1990's,
there was a lot of news about how tight the labor market was and how
unemployment was down to record levels in the US. But was only
around 1997 that real wages registered a slight rise after years of
decline or stagnation. As Robert Brenner has pointed out, the massive
restructuring to regain profitability that marked the 16-year period 1979-
1995, forced the bottom 60 percent of the US labor force to work for
progressive lower wages, so that by the end of the period, their wages
were ten percent lower than they were in the beginning. The restructuring
that is supposed to have made the US economy super-competitive has
combined the development of tremendous capacity with the worst
distribution of income among the major advanced countries. This is
glaring contradiction, suppressed for a time by hyperactivity in the
financial sector, that has asserted itself in the spreading recession.
In addition to limiting competition, another mechanism used by the
corporations to relieve the crisis of overproduction and profitability is to
open up new markets. This drive has intensified in the last two
decades, which have seen trade and financial liberalization pushed on
Southern economies by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund,
and the World Trade Organization. Yet, while liberalization has enabled
transnational corporations to penetrate limited middle class and elite
markets, it has negated these gains by visiting greater impoverishment
and greater inequality on the mass market.
The gap between capitalism's tremendous productive capacity and the
limited purchasing power of most of the participants in this system is
even more stark at a global level. The number of people living below
poverty level globally increased from 1.1 billion in 1985 to 1.2 billion in
1998, and is expected to reach 1.3 billion this year. If you exclude China,
where statistics are not reliable, the proportion of the population of the
developing world classified as poor had remained broadly constant
since 1987, according to the United Nations University-World Institute for
Development Economics Research survey. Based on the proportion of
the population living in great poverty, there are now 48 countries
classified as least developed countries (LDC)-three more than a
decade ago.
If one moves from poverty to income inequality as an indicator of
purchasing power, the picture is even clearer. A study of 124 countries
representing 94 percent of the world's population shows that the top 20
percent of the world's population raised its share of total global income
from 69 to 83 percent. Tremendous wealth among the few at the top,
tremendous poverty among the billions at the bottom, and a middle
stratum whose incomes are eroding or are stagnant-this is the
contradiction that is responsible for the overproduction, over-capacity,
and under-consumption that is wracking the US-dominated global
economy.
The Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO that have played such a
critical role in this process of global impoverishment hardly figure in
Klein's rogue gallery. Yet, even more than individual corporations,
these institutions occupy a special place in the pantheon of targets of
the anti-globalization movement. They are seen as the enforcers of the
global rules that benefit the TNC's, and activists are right that
successfully delegitimizing them will translate into less predictability and
tremendous uncertainty for all TNC's operating in the South.
MISSING II: THE ROLE OF FINANCE
Klein's neglect of the dynamics of production in the era of global
capitalism is a blind spot that also leads her to neglect the centrality of
speculative capital in this era. Nowhere in the book does George
Soros, one of the two paradigmatic capitalists of our time (the other
being Bill Gates), make an appearance. Alan Greenspan, the Asian
financial crisis, the hedge fund Long Term Capital, the Citigroup merger,
Robert Rubin, the "Wall Street-Treasury Complex"--these actors and
events are either absent or mentioned in passing.
Yet, because of the crisis of overproduction and profitability in
manufacturing, the US economy and the global economy are
increasingly driven by finance, by speculative activity, as analysts like
Doug Henwood have pointed out. Diminishing returns to key industries
have led to capital increasingly being shifted from the real economy to
squeezing "value" out of already created value in the financial sector.
They have also driven the liberalization of financial markets to allow the
free flow of capital from one capital market to another in search of
increasingly paper-thin advantages. And in this regard, the role of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF)-another key global actor about which
Klein has little to say-has been central in eliminating the restrictions on
capital movements in the Asian economies and other developing
economies.
What resulted was essentially a game of global arbitrage, one played
mainly by US financial operators. Capital moved from one financial
market to another seeking to turn a profit from the exploitation of
imperfections of globalized markets via arbitrage between interest rate
differentials. Hedge funds did simultaneous transactions in several
markets, seeking to profit from the difference between nominal currency
values and "real" currency values. Fund managers entered a market to
engage in short-selling stocks, that is, borrowing shares to artificially
inflate share values, then selling and hightailing it like the proverbial
Natchez gambler. Attracted by high interest rates and fixed exchange
rates, speculative investors brought their billions to fuel real estate and
stock market bubbles that burst with the Asian financial debacle of 1997
and the Russian and Brazilian financial crises of 1998.
The interplay between speculative capital and high tech manufacturing
firms is another key dynamic of the era of finance-driven capitalism, and
one that Klein hardly addresses. Increasingly, the relationship between
Wall Street and the Silicon Valley/Seattle complex departed from the
dynamics of the real economy. As overproduction drove out profitability
in the so-called "Old Economy," the smart speculative set migrated to
high tech stocks, and here virtual capitalism took hold, one based on
the expectation of future profitability rather than on actual profitability, a
dynamic exemplified by the rapid rise in the stock values of Internet
firms like Amazon.com that still have to turn a profit. Once future
profitability rather than actual performance became the driving force of
investment decisions, then Wall Street operations became
indistinguishable from high-stakes gambling in Las Vegas.
The New Economy was essentially a speculative bubble that floated
away from the Real Economy, with almost all players knowing that the
bubble would burst at some point, but that somehow, unlike the rest of
the herd, one would escape it by pulling out, having made a killing, in
the nick of time. Not quite New Economy but not quite Old, the Nikes,
Starbucks, and Barnes and Nobles were also sucked into the casino
mentality, their direction being increasingly driven by mystical indicators
meant to give some scientific gloss to gambling behavior, like
"shareholder value" and "earnings per share."
The bubble finally burst in the last few months, wiping out $4.6 trillion in
investor wealth, a sum that, as Business Week points out, is half the US
GDP and four times the wealth wiped out in the 1987 crash. More
important, the financial sector's ability to absorb investment that could
not generate profits in the production sector has been shattered.
Averted by speculative activity for about four years, the contraction-a
deep one, it seems-has finally caught up with the global capitalist
economy.
Naomi Klein paints an unparalleled portrait of the culture of capitalism in
the age of globalization. She also provides us with the best analysis
yet of the rise of the anti-globalization movement. She has, moreover,
written a very insightful work on the dynamics of light manufacturing, the
service sector, entertainment, and retail, where marketing has eclipsed
manufacturing, where selling the product has given way to establishing
the hegemony of the brand in the consumer's total lifestyle.
But the portrait is incomplete and one-dimensional. Nike and Tommy
Hilfiger are not in the same class as Intel, Microsoft, Long-Term Capital,
Cisco Systems, and Citigroup, the high-tech and financial giants which
power the rest of the economy. Indeed, Nike and Adidas and Walt
Disney ultimately dance to the tune of the Wall Street-Silicon Valley
complex. In the total economy, it is not "synergy" or brand imperialism
that ultimately serves as the engine of change but the classical crisis of
overcapacity in production leading to the hegemony of finance capital.
In sum, this is a book that is as brilliant as it is flawed. But then what
great book isn't?
* Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South.
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