Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 13:19:09 +0400
From: Antti Rautiainen <antti.rautiainen-AT-kolumbus.fi>
Subject: AUT: No Logo: brilliant, flawed view of contemporary capitalism -  


I suppose neither Klein nor Bello is a revolutionary marxist, but 
expecially second part of this review includes a very interesting
analysis about the current overproduction crisis. 

Antti R. 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Olsen" <bobolsen-AT-mail.interlog.com>
To: <mai-not-AT-flora.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 10:44 PM
Subject: Walden Bello discusses Naomi Klein
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 10:32:21 -0700
From: Sid Shniad <shniad-AT-sfu.ca>
Subject: No Logo: brilliant, flawed view of contemporary capitalism -
  Walden Bello

April 2001

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, executive director of
       Focus on the Global South.

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: non-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 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 what 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 it 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 progressively 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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