REVIEW BY NICK EVERETT
No Logo
By Naomi Klein
Harper-Collins, 2000
490pp., A$21.95
"A world united by Benetton slogans, Nike sweatshops and McDonald's jobs might not be anyone's utopian village", writes Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, "but its fibre-optic cables and shared cultural references are none the less laying the foundations for the first truly international peoples movement".
One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the capitalists furnish the working class with the weapons for fighting them. Following the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the "corporations' bill of rights", in April 1998, the London Financial Times noted that the anti-corporate movement's "decisive weapon is the internet (a Pentagon invention). Operating from around the world via web sites, they have condemned the proposed agreement as a secret conspiracy to ensure global domination by multinational companies, and mobilised an international movement of grassroots resistance".
Each time a new city adds its name to the list of mass anti-corporate demonstrations we need only blink before a film clip, with a sound bite attached, has been uploaded onto an activist web site.
Completed a few months before the November 1999 mass protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organisation, Klein's first book, No Logo, charts the rise of the new resistance since the mid-1990s. She cites campus-based anti-sweatshop campaigns, the international campaign against Shell's investment in Nigeria, the "McLibel" case in Britain and the emergence of the Reclaim the Streets movement as critical steps in a growing tide of anti-corporate activism.
Klein describes her book as "an attempt to analyse and document the forces opposing corporate rule" and points to three interconnected trends that have spurred on those forces.
The first is that in the last 10 years the most successful corporations, like Nike and Gap, have passed on the manufacturing of their products to sub-contractors (based increasingly in export processing zones in the Third World) and focused simply on marketing an image.
The result, Klein notes, is that "although the total assets of the world's one hundred largest corporations increased by 288 percent between 1990 and 1997 the number of people those corporations employed grew by less than 9 percent during that same period". In 1998 alone, 677,000 permanent jobs were eliminated by US corporations.
The second is the emergence of what Klein calls "McJob": "a low skill, low pay, high stress, exhausting and unstable job". The McJob, she argues, has increasingly become the norm in the casualised service and retail sector, almost the sole area of employment growth in North America and Europe in recent years (these sectors now account for 75% of total US employment).
And for temps, employment conditions continue getting worse. Between 1989 and 1994 real wages for temp workers actually declined by 14.7% in the US.
This casualisation has also come to plague the information technology industry too — "through extensive use of independent contractors, temps and 'full-service employment solutions' Microsoft is well on its way to engineering the perfect employee-less corporation, a jigsaw puzzle of outsourced divisions, contract factories and outsourced employees", says Klein.
It is, however, in the Third World where the worst effects of outsourcing and casualisation are to be found. In the export processing zones of China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere, workers are being paid as low as US$0.14 per hour to work 10-12 hour shifts six or seven days per week, with no overtime rates.
Klein gives a first hand account of how these factories operate in the Cavite Free Trade Zone in the Philippines, where pregnant women workers have been forced to work until 2am and then fired when they give birth. She notes that the logos of the big clothing manufacturers are absent in these zones, as the contracts negotiated between these transnationals and their sub-contractors are shrouded in secrecy.
The third trend, Klein argues, is that these corporations, now free from making anything and sucking in super-profits generated by Third World labour, are free to concentrate on marketing and branding their products, and, in the process, invading public space and making their presence felt where no brands had gone before — into the schools and campuses.
Klein argues that as a result of these factors major corporate retailers have been stung by what she calls "the brand boomerang" effect.
She states: "It is no exaggeration to say that the 'strongest' brands are the ones generating the worst jobs, whether in the export processing zones, in Silicon Valley or at the [shopping] mall. This abandonment [of jobs] by brand-name corporations is occurring at the very moment when youth culture is being sought out for more aggressive branding than ever before. But real live youth are being used around the world to pioneer a new kind of disposable workforce."
She describes how the corporations' determination to secure a youth market has led to the cooption of anything deemed "alternative".
This has forced a radical re-thinking for a generation of activists who, in the early 1990s, were more concerned with the politics of image than action. "For the many activists who had, at one point not long ago, believed that better media representation would make for a more just world, one thing had become abundantly clear: identity politics weren't fighting the system or even subverting it ... they were feeding it."
Klein argues that the rejection of identity politics, which she identifies as an "abandonment of the radical economic foundations of the women's [liberation] and civil-rights movements", is a critical step on the path to building a movement "that is as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert".
Indeed, her book is a significant contribution to an analysis of how this movement has broken out of the confines of local and national politics.
Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is the subject of a very interesting chapter of No Logo, in which Klein analyses how a protest against the demolition of London's Claremont Road to make way for a new freeway gave shape to two RTS-initiated "global carnivals against capital", coinciding with the summits of G8 leaders in June 1998 and 1999. The first of these saw 30 simultaneous events around the world, while in 1999, in 70 different cities around the world "parties and protests were held in financial districts, outside stock exchanges, superstores, banks and multinational headquarters".
RTS "may well be", according to Klein, "the most vibrant and fastest-growing political movement since Paris '68. It is precisely the absence of rigidity, that has helped RTS to capture the imagination of thousands of young people around the world."
While it is true that the diversity of the movement — the "culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organisers and Internet corporate watchdogs" — gives the movement enormous breadth, the spontaneity and lack of organisation praised by Klein is the movement's greatest weakness. The May-June '68 demonstrations are a testament to this: while a student and worker strike paralysed France, there was insufficient organisation to prevent the demobilisation of this movement by the French Communist Party-led trade unions.
At recent protests in Quebec City, residents and organised workers resisted calls to stay away from police barricades and stood side by side, showing the potential of this movement to draw ever growing number of workers into its ranks. Some protesters carried Cuban flags, expressing solidarity with the Americas' only socialist state. And here in Australia a still fledgling anti-corporate movement has already clocked up the successes of S11 and M1.
"Our dreams, their nightmare", was how French students expressed their struggle. Today the dreams of an increasingly international anti-corporate globalisation movement are proving a nightmare for corporate rule.