BY KYLIE MOON
MELBOURNE — It was standing room only when Naomi Klein came to town on July 16, packing out both the Atheneum Theatre and the Trades Hall Council auditorium.
Hundreds crammed in to hear the Canadian activist and author speak about the power of the corporation, the branding of the world and the new movement rising against both — the subject matter of her hugely successful book No Logo.
Klein's research into branding has exposed its use by major companies, such as Nike and Starbucks, Disney and Pepsi, to dominate markets and corporatise culture.
Once a way to get consumers to identify with a product not made locally by someone they had a personal relationship with, brands now are far more, Klein argues.
"We're getting a lot more from branding than company logos", said Klein. "We're getting a type of packaging that has nothing to do with the product. We're getting entire lifestyle packaging."
"What's really changed is what is branding. The early brands branded products, now we're the ones who get branded. We brand ourselves, we brand our bodies — the Nike tattoo is now the most popular tattoo in North America I'm afraid to report."
End of advertising
Klein says branding is "not more advertising, it is actually the end of advertising".
"There is now an industry of very well-paid brand consultants. Part of their ritual is to go away on retreats, gather around the corporate campfire, try to channel the meaning of their brand: not what the brand means, but what it means to us."
The aim of this is to find new ways to attach social meaning to their products. "Polaroid is not a camera, it's a social lubricant. Starbucks is not a coffee company. Starbucks is about the idea of the third place ... a place where people gather which is not home or work, where citizens, members of their community talk about ideas and culture."
As for the Swedish build-it-yourself furniture company Ikea, it is about "the idea of democracy", one of its executives once told Klein, in all seriousness.
Corporations now spend large amounts of money on developing their brand identity. The winners are those companies which save costs in production so to then concentrate on "production of their brand".
"Intellectual property has become more important than actual property", she said, citing examples of dozens of corporations which "source" their manufacturing to companies, frequently sweatshops in the Third World, and concentrate instead on marketing.
Clothing giant Nike is "the model of the hollow company", she argued. "Nike does not own any of the factories where its goods are produced."
But it's not the only one. Its competitor, adidas, has followed the same path: during a debate with Klein, its chief told her, with a superior sneer, "we are not into manufacturing".
In an attempt to "rebrand", senior executives at computer company IBM issued an official memo in the mid-1990s that no computers were to be seen in any company advertisements for a time. Instead, the company has about "solutions", rather than anything as tangible as keyboards and mouse pads.
Adult Barbie-land
Branding seeks to construct "Barbie-land for grown-ups", Klein noted, "where, just like when you were a kid, you can buy all the accessories".
Companies like Virgin seek to envelop their consumers, so you're no longer buying the product, "you're buying the person": the person wearing Virgin clothes, talking on a Virgin mobile phone, using a Virgin credit card, shopping in Virgin stores.
The original brand master, Disney, has even built an entire town of its own, Celebration, Florida — where ironically no brands are allowed.
Disney claims that's because of its great respect for "public space". Klein argued more plausibly it's because when a company is so successful at branding as to produce a total "cocoon" in which you can "live the brand", the first thing it does is "slam the door shut behind you".
Klein believes that "the process of building spiritual, philosophical, pathological identities with corporations is not a process that can occur without taking its toll on the culture."
An example is the use of young people to sell to one another, particularly on the internet, through what's called "peer-on-peer marketing".
Says Klein, "you take this culture of swapping and sharing and basically the last unbranded frontier, which is talking to your friends, and you try to get them to talk to each other about the new Britney Spears CD. Plant the information, identify the peer leaders, and give them information which they can spread."
"Brands feed off meaning and feed off political ideas ... Branding is the meaning vacuum and it's once you have the brand identity set, you can realise it by projecting it onto the world, by telling your story over and over again. And to do this you have to find 'fresh state' ... so one of the most valuable commodities in the brand world is a culture beyond new ideas of any kind."
As a result, what we're seeing, she argued, is "a political war waged on the public sphere. The public institutions, like the library, arts festivals, have been discredited as inefficient ... The undermining of the public sphere has meant that there are all kinds of opportunities to find fresh state in brands."
This "assault on the commons" runs through everything, she argued, from "the privatisation of the self" which branding represents, to World Bank attempts to sell off water supplies, to the World Trade Organisation's GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which will open up new avenues for privatising education, health and other government services.
Opening doors
The branding of everything, however, has sparked a backlash, Klein argued. It has "opened doors" to a new understanding of the way the world works.
The brands want us to believe they are our friends, she said, to form a personal relationship with us. But then we "do the math", and figure out that shoes we bought for $120 are made for $2, we then ask "Where's the rest of the money going?".
So the close relationships they've sought to develop with us thus become powerful, personal reasons for rebellion against them. This is the basis for the new, rising movement against corporate power, Klein argues.
At Trades Hall, Klein said one of the most exciting things about this new movement was its strong internationalism, especially that it is developing in the US, "the most protectionist country on Earth, the least global country on earth, which foists globalisation on everybody else."
"What we are fighting for is not just protecting our own sovereign borders, our own selfish interests but fighting for something that transcends national borders and something which is absolutely universal — which is the demand for self-determination", she said.
She gives the example of the Mexican Zapatistas, who "say our fight is not against the Mexican state, although it takes that form right here. It's against a set of policies which is cutting back, privatising and deregulating, and mining absolutely every inch of the earth ... they said this is not a local dispute, this is not a so-called ethnic dispute, it's about a universal fight."
Klein believes the alternative to neo-liberalism is being created right now, in practical models of participatory democracy.
"People are building the alternatives already, they're building it in squatter movements in Sydney, they're building it in social centre networks in Italy, they're building it through landless peasants' movement in Brazil, they're building it when they reject the privatisation of the water systems everywhere, from Bolivia to Vancouver."
"Globalisation", said Klein, "is a crisis in representative democracy ... where power is delegated to points further and further away from where we live and where the effect of those decisions are felt."
"That's why I'm a little bit sceptical about those who want to organise all this decentralised organising into one giant big political party and we will have our one-size-fits-all plan to do battle with their one-size-fits-all plan. I don't think we should have a Burger King model to do battle with their McDonald's."
"I think what is driving people into the streets in this really chaotic and inspiring way, is that there wasn't just one protest in Melbourne, just as there wasn't one protest back in New York, there were hundreds of thousands of protests," she concluded. "All the institutions that used to organise us into neat little structures have failed."
"And we still want to be part of something larger than ourselves. What we want is to reject the mantle of spectatorship, and reject this 'end of history' nonsense that we grew up with, that told us to go limp and go shopping. We want participation and involvement and we're not going to delegate that away to our leaders who are going to make all the decisions for us."