Originally posted by Comrade
[email protected] 8 2006, 08:13 AM
Good for people new to politics and anti-capitalism in general. I'm sick of Naomi Klein though; she's a western chauvinist petty-bourgeois intellectual when it comes down to it.
Agreed,
Naoim Klein and this book are complete shite.
Her analysis of 'globalisation' is unoriginal, and the only slightly new thing she brings to the table is her focus on 'branding' - which is heavily overemphasised.
The basic argument of her book is kind of like Marxism ... minus the class analysis, and instead of asserting that resistance to capitalism is rooted in class oppression, she argues basically that its consumer culture - the commercialisation of 'western' social culture, encroachment of marketing ('branding') etc. on our everyday lives that will lead inevitably to 'resistance' (though i dont remember her actually using the word 'revolution' or class war, or asserting that capitalism will be overthrown or that it should be).
She basically avoids talking about class as much as possible, whilst positioning the 'new' anti-brand movement as the 'next wave' of anti-capitalist (or what she calls 'anti-corporate') resistance. That she provides little class analysis would have been slightly less problematic had she not largely encouraged the sections of the 'anti-globalisation'/'anti-corporate' mveoment that moves beyond her anti-brand hypothesis and 'first-world' moralism, i.e. the communist movement.
She asserts that the 'anti-corporate' movement is motivated and expanded on the basis of moral outrage, that resistance to capitalist hegemony is premised on how many 'first-world' people learn the 'secrets of the global logo web' :unsure:
This is an analysis that not only ignores class interest (i.e. working class resistance is a response to class oppression, not liberal moralism), but also clearly orientates Klein's approach in 'western' consciousness, he book is clearly written from a 'western' (and when i say 'western', it's really only North American) perspective and she is speaking directly to the 'western' so-called middle class, not to working class people of the global 'north' or 'south' - that is not to the people who are actually exploited in the process of capitalist reconfiguration ('globalisation') that she talks about.
She also has a very strong tendency to generalise her own limited N.American experiences to ALL 'western' countries, and ignore the role of the state in the creating the political-social-economic conditions for corporate control, and in general the way the state serves the interests of the ruling class.
And for a book that spends so much time critiquing ‘branding’, and describing the ‘new’ anti-corporate, anti-globalization resistance, it's pretty ironic, No Logo is published by one of Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins subsidiaries, perhaps this is symptomatic of what Klein’s calls ‘no choices’? The increasing dominance of a minority of capitalists/corporations :lol: