Ten years after it hit the shops, No Logo, Naomi Klein’s polemic against consumer capitalism, is being republished this week with a new introduction, but apparently without the subtitle “Taking aim at the brand bullies”. Maybe Ms Klein thought that sounded a bit childish now that she is turning 40.
Klein may not have grown more moderate with age, but her views have become more mainstream. No Logo has transmogrified from extremism to orthodoxy, with almost everybody echoing her criticisms of multinational corporations. Now there are almost as many anti-consumerist books to choose from as mobile-phone models. Defensive corporations seem to have taken her message to heart, with even the likes of Starbucks, Klein notes, launching logo-free products.
Despite its popularity, the past ten years have arguably proved No Logo wrong. Klein claimed the brand culture as a sign of corporate economic power. Yet it was surely more a symptom of the weakness and insecurity of finance capital, which found it easier to massage images than to make investments in productive innovations. That fragility was exposed as the economy behind the glitzy logos sank into recession.
And for all that No Logo helped to make anti-corporatism fashionable, where was the serious analysis of the crisis of capitalism? The global anti-corporate movement that claimed Klein’s book as its “bible” has all but disappeared along with the free marketeers. Small bands of activists have gone inside big events such as the Copenhagen climate summit, where Gordon Brown came out to applaud Klein and co. They have become the conscience of the elite, logo or no.
Indeed, the elitism of the No Logo lobby’s message has become clear. The attack on corporate consumerism these days slides easily into contempt for dumb consumers who are held responsible for the plight of the planet. On last year’s G20 protests in the City of London, a banner announced that “Consumers suck”. That’s you and me, not Nike.
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One overblown blurb on the republished No Logo claims it as “The Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement”. That claim looks about as reliable as corporate PR puff. Perhaps the one thing that Klein’s anti-shopping guide has in common with Marx’s anti-capitalist masterwork is that neither has been read by most of those who bang on about them being bibles.
The tenth anniversary edition of No Logo is published by Fourth Estate